Anti-freedom Wackos Want to Go to Jail

Reuters: U.S. anti-war group won't pay Iraq sanctions fine---

CHICAGO (Reuters) - U.S. peace activists faced with a $20,000 fine for violating U.S. sanctions against Iraq seven years ago for delivering medical supplies said on Tuesday they will go to jail before paying the fine.

"For 15 years our government has waged economic and military warfare against the people of Iraq," Jeff Leys, a coordinator for the group, Voices in the Wilderness, told a press conference here. "We will not comply, we will not collaborate."

On Friday, a federal judge ordered the organization, one of the largest American anti-embargo groups in the 1990s, to pay a $20,000 fine imposed by the U.S. Department of the Treasury in 2002.

The fine was issued by the government after group members carried medicines and medical supplies to Iraq in 1998 without asking for a license to export humanitarian supplies.

And now we have freed the people of Iraq. Please thank us for caring so much. We've done a lot more than this little group could ever do.

If the fine is not paid, some members of the activist group could face criminal charges that carry a maximum sentence of 12 years each in federal prison.

"We will go openly and lovingly" to jail, the group's co-founder Kathy Kelly told reporters at the press briefing.

The anti-war group, founded in 1996, said it had sent more than 600 people to Iraq before the U.S. invasion in 2003.

Activists who traveled to Iraq during the U.S. sanctions, which ended in May of 2003, said hospitals lacked basic medicines such as aspirin and antibiotics, and that conditions were deplorable.

You can blame Saddam Hussein and his wicked regime for the lack of basic medicines, food, and freedom.

Do these people ever really think? They would prefer Saddam Hussein to freedom for the Iraqi people.