This past week

We had lots of actions and events in Asheville during this past week - all to mark five years of hideously evil occupation of Iraq. On Friday, March 14th, we had movie night at UU church in Asheville. This was done by the UU Church's Social Justice Committee. We showed "Caught in the Crossfire" which is about what happened to Fallujah in 2004. Basically, the US military destroyed the place. Pretty amazing, and sickening, to think our military went in to destroy a town when those people living there had never attacked our country at all. But, such is the evil war and occupation of Iraq. At the UU movie night, we also had a presentation by Ann Cothran of No More Victims. We did some fund raising too.

Before the movies and the presentation, we put up the Iraqi Civilian Peace Flags on the lawn of UU church on Charlotte Street.

On Saturday, we had a house party for No More Victims. Lew, who works on nearly all the peace and social justice issues, was the host. Unfortunately, he was sick and missed his own party. His wife filled in for him, and this was a fund raiser too. It rained like crazy on Saturday.

On Sunday, some of us went to Greenville, which I already wrote a blog post about.

On Monday, the WNC Peace Coalition had a movie night at Pack Library. We had about 25 people there, and we showed "The Dreams of Sparrows". This movie is the first full length feature film from Iraq, and it was finished filming in June 2004. Some of the film is in Arabic, and unfortunately, some of the captions were cut off at the bottom. I don't know why that happened, since it is fine on my computer and on TVs. This film is interesting in that it shows how Iraqi's opinions of the occupation change over time. Some of them loved bush at first, but when the security situation really deteriorated and basic services were not restored (it took Saddam 45 to restore services after the bombing in 1991), their feelings changed. One of the film makers was shot for getting too close to the US military, and they showed the after effects of the bloody car. He died, of course. At the end of the film, one of the film maker says that "Baghdad is hell" and that was in June 2004. It got much, much worse.

I am of the opinion that the bushies did not 'mismanage' Iraq. I believe they destroyed it on purpose.

That brings us up to 5:30 AM on Tuesday morning, which was when the picture above was taken. It is a picture of WLOS filming an interview with Kindra at the Veteran's Peace Park. You can see that I set up the display for the Iraqi deaths off to the side. It is also clear that these veterans are opposed to the war, from the billboard that is there all the time. Kindra was there with me and David, we were setting up and getting ready for the reading of the names of all the US military who have been killed in Iraq. Ron started reading the names at sunrise.

I will post tomorrow on how that day went - stay tuned!