From a UPI story today, not just some human shields who were disguntled, but some who were “shocked back to reality.”
A group of American anti-war demonstrators who came to Iraq with Japanese human shield volunteers made it across the [Jordanian] border today 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.”
This is the sort of the stuff that was dismissed as CIA-fabricated propaganda, a few months (and years) ago.
(via Ghost of a Flea)
People need to listen to the interview of a former Iraqi soldier that was done here in San Diego yesterday morning. The truth about what’s happening in Iraq is mind-numbing and horrifying. I can’t even imagine.
(Interview can be found at http://www.histar.com/mornings)
It’s still worth noting that this invasion is not being done for humanitarian reasons (unlike, say, Yugoslavia), but it’s a huge collateral bennie.
Travel does broaden the mind, it looks like.