Abuse photos spur Christian peace teams' return to Iraq

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/05/16/MNGV06MF781.DTL

Activists say they're willing to die for cause

Colin Freeman, Chronicle Foreign Service Sunday, May 16, 2004

Baghdad -- On the face of it, members of the Christian Peacemaker Teams, which have spent the past year investigating allegations of abuse of Iraqi prisoners by occupation forces, would seem to have little in common with members of the U.S. Army in Iraq.

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The U.S.-Canadian teams published their own portrait of abuse as long ago as January in a report detailing 72 cases in which Iraqis had allegedly suffered wrongful arrest or mistreatment in prison, said team member Cliff Kindy.

The brief, which was presented to Ambassador Richard Jones and an aide in the office of Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the top military commander in Iraq, included allegations of a man being shocked in the genitals with a cattle prod, prisoners having their toenails pried off and noisy mock executions staged in cells to frighten detainees held next door.

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In the words of their critics, they are either a "bunch of leftists parading about under the guise of being Christians" or "naive" activists who deserve to be "blown into a million pieces." And those are just the views aired in the letters page of their quarterly newsletters

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When I first started reading this, I thought this would be about some far right wing fanatical missionary group who believes that everyone who doesn't follow their specific guidelines are "evil".

I'm glad to see that there are 'good' Christians out there doing good things. They have a lot to make up for considering all the damage the right wingers do to their faith. It shocks me to no end that so many are ignorant about Christianity. If half the idiots who professed themselves to be Christian picked up the damn book they hold so dear to themselves, they'd find that their Messiah was more liberal than anyone on this board. He'd make the Green Party look like George Bush.

It is my deepest hope that the Christian faith turns out to be real. That way I can be sent to hell for being an Atheist, which in turn will be heaven because I will get to watch people like Bush burn and suffer for all eternity. Sure, I might suffer too but my pain will be some what soothed in the fact that so many people who were so self-righteous in life now burn along side me and I will laugh at them and add to their torment for all eternity, by constantly reminding them of how they were in life. ;)

It's Clif Kindy, not "Cliff" -- and as fine a man as this country has produced for many years. ON EDIT: I'm talking to SFGate.com, lest there be any confusion.

You can have your Tillmans, your Lynches, and all the rest. This man and his colleagues will be going into a war zone armed with nothing more than their faith and strong belief that non-violence and peace and the only way through this terrible situation. From the story:

In February, two Iraqis whom the group befriended suddenly produced a bomb and a gun during a meeting at the team's anonymous-looking headquarters on a shabby side street near the Tigris River.

"They said, 'If you will all please put down your tea cups, we were sent on a mission to kill you,' " Kindy recalls.

The Iraqis "tied us up and said they were from al Qaeda, and then they proceeded to rob some of our telephones, computers and money," said Vriesinga, 46, of Ontario, Canada. "Then they left us alone, saying a bomb would go off in 35 minutes. Luckily it didn't, and when we realized that they were really just robbers rather than terrorists and that we had just lost a few telephones, we decided to stay."

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The folks who write letters against the Christian Peacemaker Teams are invited to go along with them. It would be a real chance to show what you're made of, getting in the way with them.

Jesus was a leftist and he would HATE the Pharisees controlling "christianity" in his name these days.

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