(UPI)-- A group of American anti-war demonstrators who came to Iraq with Japanese human shield volunteers made it across the border today [story filed 21 March] with 14 hours of uncensored video, all shot without Iraqi government minders present. Kenneth Joseph, a young American pastor with the Assyrian Church of the East, told UPI the trip "had shocked me back to reality." Some of the Iraqis he interviewed on camera "told me they would commit suicide if American bombing didn't start. They were willing to see their homes demolished to gain their freedom from Saddam's bloody tyranny. They convinced me that Saddam was a monster the likes of which the world had not seen since Stalin and Hitler. He and his sons are sick sadists. Their tales of slow torture and killing made me ill, such as people put in a huge shredder for plastic products, feet first so they could hear their screams as bodies got chewed up from foot to head."
A young American photographer, Daniel Pepper, has a first-person piece in the Telegraph (23 March) about his experiences as a human shield. Headlined "I was a naive fool to be a human shield for Saddam", Pepper talks about his first experience with an anti-Saddam Iraqi, a taxi driver, who took him to task for opposing the war:
As he realised I was serious, he slowed down and started to speak in broken English about the evils of Saddam's regime. Until then I had only heard the President spoken of with respect, but now this guy was telling me how all of Iraq's oil money went into Saddam's pocket and that if you opposed him politically he would kill your whole family.
It scared the hell out of me. First I was thinking that maybe it was the secret police trying to trick me but later I got the impression that he wanted me to help him escape. I felt so bad. I told him: "Listen, I am just a schmuck from the United States, I am not with the UN, I'm not with the CIA - I just can't help you."
Of course I had read reports that Iraqis hated Saddam Hussein, but this was the real thing. Someone had explained it to me face to face. I told a few journalists who I knew. They said that this sort of thing often happened - spontaneous, emotional, and secretive outbursts imploring visitors to free them from Saddam's tyrannical Iraq.
http://www.nbr.co.nz/home/column_article.asp?id=5502&cid=12&cname=The+War+Against+Terrorism
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"This is the business we've chosen." - Hyman Roth
A young American photographer, Daniel Pepper, has a first-person piece in the Telegraph (23 March) about his experiences as a human shield. Headlined "I was a naive fool to be a human shield for Saddam", Pepper talks about his first experience with an anti-Saddam Iraqi, a taxi driver, who took him to task for opposing the war:
As he realised I was serious, he slowed down and started to speak in broken English about the evils of Saddam's regime. Until then I had only heard the President spoken of with respect, but now this guy was telling me how all of Iraq's oil money went into Saddam's pocket and that if you opposed him politically he would kill your whole family.
It scared the hell out of me. First I was thinking that maybe it was the secret police trying to trick me but later I got the impression that he wanted me to help him escape. I felt so bad. I told him: "Listen, I am just a schmuck from the United States, I am not with the UN, I'm not with the CIA - I just can't help you."
Of course I had read reports that Iraqis hated Saddam Hussein, but this was the real thing. Someone had explained it to me face to face. I told a few journalists who I knew. They said that this sort of thing often happened - spontaneous, emotional, and secretive outbursts imploring visitors to free them from Saddam's tyrannical Iraq.
http://www.nbr.co.nz/home/column_article.asp?id=5502&cid=12&cname=The+War+Against+Terrorism
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"This is the business we've chosen." - Hyman Roth
