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---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Kathy Kelly <kkelly@igc.apc.org> Dear Friends, Rick McDowell, Chuck Quilty and I returned to Chicago yesterday evening. It was a smooth trip until a customs agent scanned my passport number into his computer. US Customs detained me for about an hour, questioned me about my travel and then confiscated my USA passport. The agents said the US State Department will probably contact me. Certainly we want to notify the State Department, the Treasury Department and the Clinton Administration that we appreciate the clarity of their warnings as regards travel to Iraq, but that we feel now, more than ever, the urgency to be governed by compassion rather than by the pitiless laws that have imposed so much agony on Iraqi people. Democracy is based on information. Those who travel to Iraq return able to voice the weary, frightened and bewildered pleas of innocent people battered by a seven year state of siege. It's an important time to assert our belief in the right to travel freely to an area where children are dying at the hands of US policy makers, where US resources, poured into the rathole of US military spending, are poised to destroy and terrify a whole population. US government intransigience, coupled with appalling indifference to civilian suffering, are a menace to peacemaking. Lets claim our right to speak freely and demand the religious right not to kill. We're very moved by the outpouring of war resistance that communities around the world are sustaining, on behalf of Iraqi children and families. With concerted efforts, we can expose the real crime, that of using sanctions as a weapon of mass destruction. Sincerely, Kathy Kelly Voices in the Wildernss A Campaign to End the US/UN Economic Sanctions Against the People of Iraq 1460 West Carmen Ave. Chicago, IL 60640 ph:773-784-8065; f: 773-784-8837 email: kkelly@igc.apc.org -- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- This is a discussion list run by Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq. To be removed/added, email soc-casi-discuss-request@lists.cam.ac.uk, NOT the whole list. Archived at http://linux.clare.cam.ac.uk/~saw27/casi/discuss.html