From my friend Mike, who was in Iraq earlier this year.

TOLEDO VETERAN TO PARTICIPATE IN D.C. NEWS CONFERENCE AND FEDERAL
COURT HEARING FOR TAKING MEDICAL AID TO IRAQ

Toledo veteran, peace activist and former City Councilman, Mike Ferner, will
leave for Washington D.C., Wednesday, to participate in a Federal Court
hearing and news conference Friday morning in Washington.

Voices in the Wilderness, (VITW) a national peace group that has sponsored
over 70 delegations to Iraq in the last six years, has been fined $20,000 by
the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control, for taking medical
supplies to Iraq in violation of U.S. sanctions against that country. Voices
has refused to pay the fine and has been summoned to U.S. District Court for
the District of Columbia, 9:30am, Friday morning, June 4.

Ferner took medical supplies, donated by people in Toledo, to Iraq on his
trip there in February, 2003, just prior to the U.S. invasion. VITW has asked
him, along with Detroit's Bishop Thomas Gumbleton and Sister Virgine Lawinger,
of Milwaukee, to be present at the federal court hearing and participate in a
news conference scheduled for immediately after the hearing.

"On my first trip to Iraq in 2003, and again in January of this year, I
delivered medical supplies donated by the people of Toledo. I was proud to do so.
I only wished I could have taken more," Ferner said. He added that, "the
Bush administration has lied repeatedly to its own citizens, committed a litany
of human rights abuses and caused untold suffering among the people of Iraq
and our own troops. Now it is prosecuting grandmothers, nuns, veterans and
clergy for taking medical supplies to Iraq? It staggers the imagination. One
would think this administration would be glad somebody is showing the world that
the American people are not monstrous like its government. Instead it
prosecutes them in federal court. People in Washington have indeed lost touch with
reality."