 This is Matt of Liger. I'm an organizer with United for Peace and Justice. My story kind of begins with United for Peace and Justice and then comes back. Before the war in Iraq, I was a student at University of Central Florida in Orlando, Florida, and moved up from South Florida and did not know what a conservative area had moved to until the news started coming out that the President George W. Bush wanted to invade Iraq. And I thought, you know, that's ridiculous. Of course, no one's going to go for this. And then I quickly realized that there were not a lot of people on my campus resisting. I thought there was no way that this could happen in my lifetime. With all we've learned from past wars, the lies that are told in wars, the death counts, the people who are hurt innocently. And to me, the most important thing is that there would be children that would be killed and they would have their lives ruined because of the war. There was really no good justification for it. Nothing seemed to add up. There was information out there from the international community. Research, experts, inspectors, none of it seemed to point in the direction that George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, and a lot of them wanted to go in. It was haunting to me that there weren't a lot of people nearby standing up. I did notice, however, there was a group of students, a small group of students, gathered in front of the student union with an American flag and a megaphone. There were maybe ten of them. And I asked them who they were and what they were doing. And they told me that there were a new group forming called Campus Peace Action. They were going to New York for February 15, 2003. And they asked me if I wanted to come. And I said, I have to go to my speech class right now. I'm supposed to deliver a speech against the Patriot Act, which was another terrible thing to come out of the Bush years that still exists. But I went and spoke to my teacher and I said, there's this thing going on, I have to go to it. She said, yeah, you need to go. And for one or two days I tried calling the person who was the lead and I was sure I got on that bus and sure enough, the day before, we left from Orlando, Florida, 50 students on a bus. The bus didn't really have much heating on it. In fact, I had no heating. It kept going out. We had ice growing on the windows. I got to know people on the bus quickly. And when we got up there, it was just incredible what we saw. We went directly into the march. Of course, there were so many people on the street and police. We're not handling the situation properly by putting us into cages by block. At one point, I saw an older woman trying to get out. And it was pretty outraged that a cop was putting his hands on the woman and telling her that she could not leave from the gate. And I had an impulse to put my hand up and grab the cop's arm and quickly I became the target of his anger, not her. And he asked me if I wanted to go to jail. I said no, I didn't, but I didn't think it was right for him to put his hands on her. Later that day, I saw police riding into American citizens that were protesting with horses. Some people had said it done sit-ins and the police were riding in horses with blue helmets on, shields. And I thought, you know, this is the first time I'm really actively getting up and resisting in a national protest using my First Amendment rights. This is how we're being treated in our country. And pretty much from that moment forward, I have not stepped back from organizing against the war in Iraq. Thank you to everyone who's doing the Iraq War Tribunal. Your work is tremendously important. Thank you for getting me to take the time to think about what we're doing. Peace.