Friday December 20, 2002

I didn't sleep much Monday night and woke up before my alarm excited
about the final leg of the journey. Our group of 12 Iraq Peace Team
members left Amman, Jordan and the Al Monsar Hotel at 5:30 a.m. We
made it across the border with no problems and in record time. We waited
for an hour and a half, maybe two hours. The authorities examined our
electronic equipment-computers and cameras then glanced around the
interiors of the three GMC Suburbans we were riding in. Then it was
back out on the highway through the desert.

The road from the Jordanian border to Baghdad is like the Autobahn;
four lanes, smooth, flat and straight. A secondary highway parallels the
one we drove on. It's for the tanker trucks taking oil to Jordan. Even
before the oil for food program, Jordan was guaranteed a supply of
Iraqi oil, probably as a concession to keep Jordan happy with the Western
allies.

Our friendly driver Ali kept the needle between 95 and 100 mph but
that didn't stop a UNDP vehicle from speeding around our caravan. The
desert is very barren near the border, no trees and very few shrubs or
grasses. A few tufts of weeds down in the dry wash.

Around dusk we crossed the Euphrates river and a while later arrived
at the freeway surrounding Baghdad. Cars had to slow down for some kind
of police checkpoint. "Hi!" yelled a police officer as we drove by. Only
a few of the officers we've seen so far has been armed. The overall
atmosphere on the streets is far less tense than Kathmandu or places
in Latin America where everybody is armed.

Our hotel here is fairly pleasant with a decent restaurant downstairs.
My room has a great view of the Tigris River and some large mosques
and other buildings on the skyline.

Robert Collier (sp?) came into Iraq with our group and works as a
foreign affairs reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle. You may want
to watch for his articles on the web in the next few days.

Damacio Lopez, who also entered Iraq with our group, is an expert in
Depleted Uranium and serves as the Executive Director of the
International DU Study Team. I'll try to take a look at a new report
that he distributed to our group and summarize the details for you
all.

Other cool people here in Baghdad right now include David Hilfiker
(co-founder of Christ House and Joseph House in DC), Father Roy
Bourgeois (Founder of SOA Watch, trying to shut down the US Army
School of the Americas), and of course Kathy Kelly (co-coordinator of Voices
in the Wilderness and long time peace activist).

Personally, I'm just starting to hit my stride here on my third day
here in Baghdad, figuring out where to get good food and learning a few key
phrases in Arabic. Today I took care of the compulsory HIV test that
all visitors to Iraq must undergo and also visited the Media Center in
Baghdad and met a few correspondents from CNN and NBC. I was handing
out press releases for a candle light vigil that we're having tonight at
an electrical plant here in Baghdad. Our presence at the power plant is
to remind America of the incredible suffering the Iraqi people
experienced during the Gulf War when the majority of the country's power
generating capabilities were destroyed by allied bombs. I'll include more
information about this later. Watch the news, you may see us holding
candles!