"Individuals have international duties which transcend the national obligations of obedience. Therefore [individual citizens] have the duty to violate domestic laws to prevent crimes against peace and humanity from occurring" -- Nuremberg War Crime Tribunal, 1950

Two days before Whitewash Wednesday (also known as the Hutton Report) three times Nobel Peace prize nominee, Kathy Kelly, founder of Chicago based Voices in the Wilderness, in a little noted trial, was sentenced to three months in prison, for silent, and as always, non violent, informed protest outside the notorious School of the Americas, at Fort Benning, Georgia. Ironies abound. The peacemaker jailed, those at Fort Benning which has trained some of the world's most ruthless dictators, military thugs and torturers free to continue to sponsor reigns of terror.

Kelly, a theology graduate is a serial offender for peace. She spent a year in a U.S. prison for planting corn seeds at a missile silo. She has born peaceful witness and drawn attention to the world's worst trouble spots, She has a quiet, towering courage. She witnessed the worst American backed Contras could subject the populations of Central America to in the 1980's. In Nicaragua , in San Juan de Limay, where the Contras had slaughtered and kidnapped twenty five from the small community, she stayed in solidarity and later, fasted with the Foreign Minister, Miguel D'Escoto, himself a Maryknoll Priest, who was urging non violence in the face of US sponsored violence. They were joined by thousands of the same persuasion. 'Diplomacy would have worked', says Kelly. It was not, of course, to be.

In 1990, she joined hundreds from numerous countries, who camped on the border between Iraq and Saudia Arabia in a desperate bid to halt war. When the carpet bombing started, she remembers the terrified howling of the dogs, their incessant, helpless,spine chilling terror, eclipsing her own fear. (An abiding memory of another camp member is both of the dogs and that at daylight, it was her turn to go and get the day's water supply from a tap outside the nearby Iraq army base. As she was filling the large containers, a soldier came running towards her, clutching a Kalashnikov ; 'This is it', she recalls thinking, our countries bomb, we take the consequences.' 'Madam, please, let me carry them, they are far too heavy for you', he said.

The Iraqi authorities arrived with buses and drove the camp members to the Jordan border and safety, risking their lives twice, to and from, on a nearly seven hundred kilometer road on flat, moonscape terrain where there is literally no place to hide. Kelly promptly made medical and transport contacts in Jordan and spent the forty two day war driving up and down the Amman-Baghdad highway, with the bombs dropping, delivering medical aid.

Just after Baghdad's Ameriyah shelter was bombed, incinerating all but eight inside, the indomitable Kelly stood outside the building crying. The area had become, in a night, a valley of widowers, since the men stayed outside to rescue survivors of bombings and to leave the maximum room for women and the young. Suddenly a small child appeared and put her hand in Kelly's. Her mother was standing nearby. 'I am American and I am sorry', was all she could muster. 'La, La,' (No, no) said the woman: "It is not you, you are not your government." Thus the idea for Voices was formed.

Three days before the Shelter bombing, Dick Cheney, now Vice President and Colin Powell (designated 'dove' in a hawks' nest Administration) now Secretary of State, visited the US AIr base at Khamis Mushat (slogan: 'bombs are us' and 'we live so others may die') After a pep talk to troops, they both signed two thousand pound bombs: 'To Saddam with fond regards', wrote Cheney.

After the bombing, frantic calls were made from the Pentagon to confirm the bombs dropped were not those inscribed. Cheney's was allegedly dropped by a Major Wes Wyrich in northern Iraq. The whereabouts of Powell's is not recorded. ('The General's War' - General Bernard Traynor and Michael Gordon, Little Brown 1995, p 324.) When this writer asked a US General whether it was coincidental that Ameriyah was bombed on the anniversary of the fire bombing of Dresden, the great Muslim Feast of Eid Al Fitr and only hours before St St Valentine's Day, he responded: 'Kinda neat, eh?'

From 1996, when Iraqi beaurocracy finally unbent, convinced of Voices sincerity, Kelly has led or initiated fifty delegations to Iraq, taken in numerous consignments of medicines, toys, sweets - and members who entertained sick and dying children and sick at heart themselves seeing the results of their government's actions in being instrumental imposing the most draconian embargo the United Nations has ever administered - somehow had the strength to bring brief laughter and normality. 'A pitiless siege' is how Kelly described sanctions. A generation grew knowing only terrors of ongoing, illegal US and UK bombings and the grinding misery of embargoed life. 'I would rather die of bombing, than sanctions', remarked nine year old Fatima on one visit. A four year old asked: "Are they going to kill me?" But she had a worse worry: "Will they kill my little sister?'"

Voices have been threatened with ten years in jail, a million dollar fine and two hundred and fifty thousand dollars for each breach of the travel ban imposed on Americans before the invasion and for taking medicines, toys, 'tootsie pops' and for making children laugh. They have already had a ten thousand dollar fine imposed on them.

In the searing summer of 1999, Kelly and a group spent three months living in homes in the beautiful, relentlessly bombed southern city of Basra: "to share embargoed life, - the power cuts, the hunger". They demonstrated the other America to an increasingly isolated young, who know only the suffering America brought, heralding almost inevitable enmity and further conflict in maturity. One of the group stayed in what had become known as 'Missile Street' where just a year earlier, US or UK bombs had destroyed or damaged thirty four homes, killed six (including three little girls under seven, from one family) and injuring sixty four. Having charged there were tanks and military hardware hidden in this poorest of poor quarters, the US military grudgingly admitted it was: 'a mistake.'

In another hot summer, in New York, in August 2001 Kelly with others, including three priests, was arrested for fasting outside the United Nations and inviting those in the UN Mission to share their one daily (evening) meal with them, having brought water from the East River: to ' ..remind ourselves of how vulnerable Iraqi civilians are to water borne diseases.'

During last year's attack and invasion Kelly stayed in Baghdad : "All of us learned to adopt a poker face, hoping not to frighten the children, whenever there were ear-splitting blasts and gut wrenching thuds. During every day and night of the bombing, I would hold little Miladhah and Zainab in my arms. That's how I learned of their fear: they were grinding their teeth, morning, noon and night. But they were far more fortunate than the children who were survivors of direct hits, children whose brothers and sisters and parents were maimed and killed."

When Baghdad fell, a new kind of desperation set in, "cataclysmic collapse of electricity, medical services, water and sewage systems, of the food distribution on which seventy percent of the population were entirely dependent. Cholera, typhoid and encephalitis rampant in Basra and the military apparently helpless to repair." Kelly went to the US Military¹s Civil Military Operation Center to outline the extent of the catastrophe and explained there were people in UNDP and the Red Cross, plus numerous talented Iraqi experts who had been cobbling together Iraq's crumbling systems for thirteen years and could have all at a tolerable, if not perfect, level within weeks. She was told never to attempt to speak to a Member of the CMOC again and never to attempt to return to the Palestine Hotel. For all the ongoing official assurances, services are now nearly a year more collapsed.

Kelly now awaits the Bureau of prisons summons to tell her which prison to 'self report' to. Former UN Assistant Secretary General and UN Coordinator in Iraq and himself a Nobel nominee is appalled. He commented:

"To learn that Kathy Kelly has been sentenced to three months imprisonment for her stand against the criminal training provided by the School of the Americas is an outrage. Such aggressive action in respect of US citizens who care, who are truly patriotic - demonstrates that so called American values and what passes for US democracy adds up to little more that fascism. For a citizen, and Noble Peace Prize nominee to be hogtied, abused and then jailed is astounding, but not surprising under the current rightist regime in Washington. Kathy is the most courageous person I know - Kathy, along with millions I salute you. "

Kelly concluded in her statement to the Judge on sentencing:

"... In Iraq, during the US bombing in March and April of 2003, I saw how children suffer when nations decide to put their resources into weapons and warfare rather than meeting human needs. Judge Faircloth, we have experienced and seen the deadly effect of US military policy on mothers and children, on families. We have held the children and tried to comfort them under bombs.

"Sometimes I think we face a wilderness of compassion in this country. But when I think of the many voices that have tried, in this court, to clamor for the works of mercy rather than the works of war, I feel at home, I feel grateful, and I feel a deep urge to be silent and listen to the cries of those most afflicted, -- their cries are often hard to hear -- but when we hear them, we're called, all of us, to be like voices in the wilderness, raising their laments and finding ourselves motivated to build a better world."

Meanwhile, two countries lie in ruins, Iraqis are being shot, disappeared, their homes demolished by a US military, unaccountable - and uncounting: 'We don't do Iraqi body counts.' Others are trying and some estimate as high a thousand children a month injured. Six hundred and sixty people are "disappeared" in Gulag Guantanamo. But the peacemaker is jailed - and President George Bush and Prime Minister Blair have been nominated for this year's Nobel Peace Prize. The ghost of Machiavelli is walking tall by the Potomac.

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