Reporting from Baghdad
     The last of a nine-member peace delegation, including former University of Hawaiåi religion professor Jim Douglass, returned safely to Jordan on Tuesday, April 1, after spending a week in Baghdad while U.S. bombs rained down on parts of the city.
     ≥Our communications are deteriorating and freedom of movement has become more restricted,≤ Douglass wrote to his wife last Friday from Baghdad. The message was relayed by other members of the group who returned to Jordan over the weekend after being expelled from Iraq for taking photographs of bomb damage without a government ≥minder≤ being present.
     Douglass arrived in Baghdad on March 25 as part of a group organized by Christian Peacemaker Teams, a Chicago-based Christian pacifist organization. He and three others spent their nights in a tent at the Al Wathab Water Treatment Plant, a vital facility serving the city. A large banner hanging nearby said in both English and Arabic: ≥To bomb this site is a war crime. Geneva Convention, Article 54.≤
     ≥A mullah is chanting prayers over the loudspeaker of a mosque,≤ Douglass wrote from the camp on Friday. ≥As dusk falls, I can hear my governmentπs bombs marching to the drum of a Pentagon computer across the city. I saw some of the terrible consequences of yesterdayπs bombs. Who is under the bombs tonight? The prayers from the mosque continue, punctuated by explosions.≤
     Douglass wrote of visiting two civilian neighborhoods hit by U.S. bombs, including a second-floor apartment in the Altujjaar section, where a young family was hit while watching television.
     A member of the CPT group noticed hundreds of little holes in the apartment walls and dug out several tiny metal cubes. Douglass recognized the pieces as bits of fragmentation bombs ≥created to maim people in horrible ways.≤ Less deadly versions of these bombs were the focus of many protests during the Vietnam War.
     Douglass, a Catholic theologian, taught at UH from the late 1960s until the mid-1970s. He was one of the so-called ≥Hickam Three≤ who faced federal conspiracy charges after entering Hickam Air Force Base headquarters in 1972 and pouring blood on secret government files as a protest against the bombing of Vietnam.
     Also in the CPT group is Jerry Levin, former CNN bureau chief in Beirut who was taken hostage in 1984 by Muslim radicals and held for nearly a year, and Levinπs wife, Sis.
     The CPT group decided to leave Iraq after finding that they were unable to communicate their observations due to destruction of the telephone system. They felt they could tell their story better now from home, according to Douglassπ wife, Shelley. (For information go to www.prairienet.org/cpt.)
     —Ian Lind