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As a participant on the Iraq Peace Team in Feb. 2003, we brought as much medicine as possible to Iraq, visited with hundreds of local Iraqis to share on a person to person basis to let them know we opposed both the sanctions and an American Invasion of their country, and we came also to build support with American citizens to oppose an attack on Iraq.
One of our visits there was to an elementary school, the Baghdad School of the Arts, where hundreds of students had made 4 in. quilt squares to send back with us for American children. What they depicted with colored pencils was the things that they loved about their lives family meals, beautiful flowers and parks, playgrounds, mosques and churches and most of all music and musical instruments to which most of them had access. It was amazing at how positively they viewed their lives, in the midst of the most debilitating sanctions ever imposed by the UN on a civilian population.
One month later on March 20th , twelve million Iraqi children became the objects of Shock and Awe bombings and destruction by our country that continue even now five years later. The deaths and wounding of their family members, the destruction of their infrastructure, the contamination of their fertile crescent land with depleted uranium, the pollution of their life-giving Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, and on and on beyond description.
For what have we committed such grave crimes? Who among elected leadership is speaking out to stop it?
Our team's return and that of many others called us to a single-minded focus to use every energy of our beings to stop this illegal and criminal war, and to do that through public education and legislative actions.
For myself it meant working with dozens of Wisconsin groups: WI Network for Peace and Justice, Peace Action WI, Catholics for Peace and Justice, Racine Dominican Sisters and other religious communities. We relentlessly pursued emails, office visits, sit-ins, public demonstrations, and the costs of dozens of DC visits by hundreds of people. (One such visit to Senator Herb Kohl s office resulted in a several days live-in with never an arrest even suggested. I submit here a copy of one such Open Letter to Senator Kohl). Yet our duly elected Congress voted about 15 times to approve billions of dollars to continue a war that they knew was illegal.
When we witness wrongdoing of our government we have the duty to use our rights of public assembly and freedom of speech and expression to make these wrongs known. It was this right we exercised in the Capitol Crypt on Sept. 20 th 2007. Could there be a more appropriate setting than under the dome of the US Capitol, a symbol of democracy and protection of human rights. There was neither need nor right for security officers to arrest us. If they were concerned for citizen safety, they could have stood by and observed. Nothing about the group gave any indication of the likelihood of violence or disorderly behavior.
The goal was a lawful assembly to voice the wrongdoing of our executive branch and the complicity of our Congress in providing the funds to carry out war, torture and abuse of citizen rights. We could not be silent. We thank you for the opportunity of giving this testimony.