Since 1996, Voices in the Wilderness has worked tirelessly to bring this message to the world community. While stories such as these do indeed contain something akin to the truth, they tell almost nothing about what is in fact true for Iraqis on the street. They rarely tell the stories of innocent children dying by the thousands from waterborne illnesses spread because of the destruction of sewage treatment plants at the outset of the 1991 Gulf War. Thirteen years later, the overwhelming majority of these facilities remain unrepaired due to the vice-like grip of US/UN imposed sanctions introduced to cataclysmic effect in August 1990 and only recently rescinded. Almost never do they relate the effects of the near-total destruction of Iraq’s electrical infrastructure by allied forces during the same war: electricity cut off 12 hours a day in Basra, southern Iraq, where summertime temperatures hover in the 130’s and which the Chicago Tribune, in an August 2000 story, called the most humid piece of land on the earth’s surface; hospitals losing electricity during operations, incubators and respirators unable to function, denying life-giving breath to both children and adults; unrefrigerated perishables rotting in the heat, while much of the population goes hungry. Which magazine recounted the story of the doctor telling a Voices delegate that he “hadn’t cured a cancer patient in three years?” Aside from the famous 60 Minutes piece that aired in 1966, how many television networks chose to show pictures of Iraqi hospitals without electrical power, without hope? Even this piece concluded with former Secretary of State Madelaine Albright telling Leslie Stahl that the price paid by innocent Iraqis, the price paid with their blood to fuel America’s relentless greed for oil, was “worth it.” Is it any wonder, then, that a group of concerned citizens gathered around a chipped kitchen table in 1996 and vowed to do all they could to stop the suffering? Looking back, the only question we ask ourselves today is, “Why didn’t we begin sooner?”

By now, you might be asking yourself who we are and how we are structured. In the beginning, Voices was the vision of the smallest handful of activists already committed, in their individual communities and abroad, to bringing an end to suffering wherever they found it. Several came from faith-based constituencies; others did not. Their one shared guide was a complete commitment to the nonviolent activism practiced by Mohandas Gandhi. That commitment remains today and continues to inform everything we do. While Voices has grown considerably over the years, we remain composed of that same loosely-formed group of volunteers - teachers, veterans, social workers, artists, tradespeople, and people of faith - who constituted our core seven years ago.

We work today as we did then, by sending small groups of women and men into Iraq to discover the answer to one question: What is happening in this land of twenty four million people that our government is so anxious for us not to know? It’s that simple. We return with information, stories, and photographs to share with others who also are “hungry for the truth.”

The search for the truth; that’s where we began, and that’s where we’ll end. The Office of Foreign Assets Control has charged Voices with “importing” medicines into Iraq. And that’s true… as far as it goes. Time and again, we willingly carried lifesaving medicines to a people continuously under attack by US planes patrolling arrogantly self-imposed “no-fly zones,” wounding and killing scores of innocent children - President Clinton’s “collateral damage.” As if the killing of even one woman’s child could be euphemized by such an innocuous term. We also brought medical journals, surgical scissors, gauze pads, aspirin, and even band-aids to a nation in desperate need of what were the most mundane of supplies. Feeling completely insignificant, we brought lollipops and smiles to dying children as their mothers cried. We “imported” hope to human beings like ourselves whose lives lay littered like shattered shards of glass on a landscape so surreal it could have been painted by Dali.

And we would do it again today.

Why, though, do we feel it necessary to willingly disobey the laws of our country to do what we know is right? Why don’t we write the President, our senators, and our congressional representatives? Why don’t we vigil at the sites where American weapons of mass destruction are produced? Why don’t we hold our signs in front of government offices, lobby congress, and write letters to the editor and fiery op-ed pieces?

Because we’ve already done that. And more. Voices members have fasted in front of the United Nations building in New York on three occasions, twice for twenty days and, two summers ago, for forty. We have met personally with Richard Butler, the head of UNSCOM, and asked him - begged him - to work to end the sanctions. We descended en masse upon Congress, imploring its members to learn the truth about the horror that American foreign policy is visiting on an innocent people. In short, as individuals and as a group, we have exhausted every legal means we know of to address the daily deaths of so many blameless human beings. And so, in the spirit of Gandhi, Thoreau, and Dr. King, we knowingly and willingly broke a law that has brought suffering to the innocent and prohibited our fellow citizens from learning about it.

How do we plead? Innocent.

We plead innocent to condoning the intentional bombing of Iraq’s civilian infrastructure, depriving the vast majority of Iraq’s citizens of the means of leading healthy, meaningful lives. We plead innocent to the willful imposition of suffering upon the Iraqi people, a suffering unto death for so many.

We also plead guilty. We plead guilty to our unwavering condemnation of the acts of war: destroying crops and land, seizing food supplies, destroying homes and villages, scattering families, contaminating water, imprisoning dissenters, and killing the living. We plead guilty to consoling children, hugging mothers, and comforting fathers as those same children lay in hospitals awaiting the angel of death. We plead guilty to bringing hope where there is no hope and love to a nation devastated by the deaths of so many blameless infants and children. We plead guilty to shouting from the highest mountain, “Not in our names!”

We, members of Voices in the Wilderness, ask you, Ms. Clash-Drexler, to follow your conscience. We ask that you thoroughly examine the misinformation deliberately and daily put forth about the people of Iraq and decline to “pray” the court for a civil judgment against Voices. We ask instead that you to join with us in imploring that same court to vacate in their entirety the fine and penalties levied against us. The truth demands nothing less.

Voices in the Wilderness