 I'm Thea Paneth from Arlington, Massachusetts. I'm a founding member of a local peace group, Arlington United for Justice with Peace. We formed our group in March of 2002 and we're part of a regional network in Eastern Massachusetts. I also serve on the administrative committee of United for Peace and Justice in National Anti-War Network. During these many years of anti-war work, it came to pass that a child from Iraq, a land of burning children, walked through my front door. Here's the story. On January 9th, 2006, US soldiers shot at a car that a three-year-old boy named Omar was in with his parents, his brother and another relative. Omar's mother and the relative, I think a woman, died when the car exploded, they must have hit the gas tank. Omar's father was shot four times by soldiers who ordered him not to pull his children from the burning vehicle. He disobeyed the soldiers to save his children and he has permanent medical problems from the bullet injuries. Omar suffered severe burns on one side of his head. He lost his ear and his hands were badly injured. He also lost a thumb, but thankfully the other son, the brother, was not hurt. So a humanitarian aid organization called No More Victims learned of their injuries and arranged for Omar and his father to come to the Boston area for treatment. Veterans for Peace became involved in helping them and through our peace network, my group heard about the situation and we decided to do what we could to help. I guess it was, in a sense, a kind of atonement for the injuries inflicted by our military. It turned out that there were no children for Omar to play with when he was healing from one surgery and waiting for the next round. And I told a friend of mine about the situation and she asked her son, a wonderful, wonderful boy and now a wonderful young man, if he would be okay playing with a child who had been hurt and he said, yes. And a play date was arranged at my house. My child took one look at the injuries and disappeared, she went to her neighbors. So that's the story of how the war on Iraq came to my living room in the presence of such a badly injured child and it's an incredibly painful story to me. We protested by the millions around the world to prevent the war. I got up myself and it was a freezing cold morning in the dark and I made my way to the center of my town on February 15th, 2003. I was a bus captain. We left at 7 a.m. from Town Hall to go to New York. For the world says no to war protest and our millions of voices, our fears, our concerns were dismissed, unheeded by political leaders, by pillars of society, by great institutions, a willful blindness set in, a blindness to the reality of an unconstitutional, illegal, immoral war rooted completely in my eyes. When my group undertook the small humanitarian relief effort as part of our anti-war work, we learned that most people had no idea that children were being injured in the war on Iraq. I wondered then and wonder still, how can that be? Do people really think that bombs are dropped but somehow don't land on people? Does an engineer who designs a missile or a laborer who puts it together ever find out that their work has sheared the legs off a nine-year-old girl who was playing hopscotch? That's the story of another child aided by the group No More Victims. It's a willful blindness and the agony continues to this very moment for the people of Iraq. I think very often of Father Daniel Berrigan's words during the trial of the Catonsville Nine, a trial for burning draft files in 1968 when he said, our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children, the angering of the orderlies in the front parlor of the charnel house. We could not so help us God do otherwise for we are sick at heart. Our hearts give us no rest for thinking of the land of burning children. I'm grateful to Code Pink for organizing the tribunal. It is clear that we are headed for very rocky times in our country and among our many and great responsibilities in the struggles ahead as to at last, at long last, hold the war criminals accountable for these lands of burning children.