Blood on Her Hands

Published on Monday, October 29, 2007 by CommonDreams.org

Blood on Her Hands

by Ann Wright

On October 24, Codepink peace activist Desiree Fairooz held up her red paint stained hands to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and shouted “The blood of millions of Iraqis is on your hands!” As Capitol Hill police took her out of the hearing of the House of Representatives’ Committee on Foreign Affairs, Fairooz yelled over her shoulder “War criminal! Take her to the Hague!”

Unmoved by the close encounter with a peace activist, Rice seemed to take the red hands “in stride.” After Fairooz was taken out of the hearing room and arrested, Rice sat down and calmly began her testimony concerning US policies on Iraq, Iran and Israel-Palestine.

Fairooz, a former teacher and children’s librarian from Texas, does not take the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children “in stride.” She is passionate in the halls of Congress and in Congressional hearings on her concern for Iraqi women and children. When a recent Heritage Foundation panel on the war in Iraq did not acknowledge the plight of Iraqi women and children in their comments, Desiree climbed onto the stage and strongly reminded the panelists of the cost of war on women and children before she was roughly pushed off the stage and out of the auditorium.

Who should the Capitol police have arrested? Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who is among those in the Bush administration responsible for the deaths of 1.2 million Iraqis and the displacement of 4 million more Iraqis during this war, or peace activist Desiree Fairooz?

Who really has “blood on their hands”? Rice or Fairooz?

Ann Wright is a 29 year US Army veteran who retired as a Colonel and a former US diplomat who resigned in March, 2003 in opposition to the war on Iraq. She served in Nicaragua, Grenada, Somalia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Sierra Leone, Micronesia and Mongolia. In December, 2001 she was on the small team that reopened the US Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan. The US Department of State has delayed for over three months publication of her new book “Dissent: Voices of Conscience.” It will be published whenever the State Department finishes its search for classified materials.