On April 10, the US Marines kidnapped us. . . . We were students.

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December 21, 2003
The Two Troublemakers

Kathy Kelly
Voices in The Wilderness

excerpt:
Last evening, in Amman, we met with Fadi Elayyan and Jihad Tahboub, two Palestinian young men who were imprisoned for two months, without charge, by US Occupying forces who seized them, in Baghdad, on April 10, 2003

They are trying to help four of their companions who are still held by the US military, presumably in a prison compound at Umm Qasr, in southern Iraq.

"On April 10, the US Marines kidnapped us," Jihad began in a matter of fact tone. "We were students, and we stayed in Baghdad during the war because we did not want to give up our studies or leave our friends. The Marines wanted to occupy our building because it is high and gives a good view of the area. "

Some of the students had Palestinian passports. When they asked what they were guilty of, the soldiers said, "You are guilty of being Palestinian." The soldiers told them, "You are not studying education in Baghdad. You are studying terrorism."
more- http://vitw.us/weblog/archives/000463.html

I am concerned with the young men and women who have been rounded up in these recent Iraqi raids. No valid record of charges or suspicions. No accounting for these seizures whatsoever unless one manages to get visibility with some congressional appeal or a news story. Even then, thousands more are squandering in these Iraqi prisons; more added everyday without merit. There are some reports that even the officers favor releasing a good deal of these prisoners but don't have the authority.

This isn't America, but we are no less responsible for the just treatment of these people. Morally or otherwise.

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1. Lovely. If they weren't terrorists before.....

What a good argument we're making for conversion.

Jesus H. Christ. Do we have to be such creeps?

We have gone from the envy of the world to whatever they scrape off their shoes.

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2. America is swaggering like an oppressive bully

To believe, as President Bush does, that the Iraqi's hold no resentment of the U.S. and its agents, is self-delusion of the highest order.

"How say you, war or not?"
"Not war, if possible, O king," I said,"lest from the abuse of war,
The desecrated shrine, the trampled year,
The smoldering homestead, and the household flower
Torn from the lintel-all the common wrong-
And smoke go up thro' which I loom to her
Three times a monster: now she lightens scorn
At him that mars her plan, but then would hate
(And every voice she talk'd with ratify it,
And every face she look'd on justify it)
The general foe. More soluable is this knot,
By gentleness than war. I want her love.
What were I nigher this altho' we dash'd
Your cities into shards and catapults,
She would not love;- or brought her chain'd, a slave,
The lifting of whose eyelash is my lord,
Not ever would she love; but brooding turn
The book of scorn, till all my fitting chance
Were caught within the record of her wrongs,
And crush'd to death: and rather, Sire, than this
I would the old God of war himself were dead,
Forgotten, rustling on his iron hills,
Rotting on some wild shore with ribs of wreck,
Or like an old-world mammoth bulk'd in ice, Not to be molten out."

Excerpt from, "The Princess: A Medley" by, Alfred Tennyson