For many volunteers, the decision to join TJP was instantaneous. Six days after 52-year-old Gregg Kendrick heard about the shield movement, he flew from his home on a small island near Vancouver, Canada, to London in order to catch a flight to Amman. Twenty-six-year-old New Zealander Christiaan Briggs told the Sydney Morning Herald that after reading an article by O'Keefe, "I knew what I was going to do with my life -- I knew straight away I was going to Iraq."

The shields see themselves as the vanguard of a mass popular uprising against the madness of warmongers. On a videotape made of the convoy, O'Keefe says, "I think what you're witnessing right here could very well be the start of a global movement that will allow for the peaceful world that all sane people want ... We're going to stop this war in Iraq if we get the support that we need."

The plan is based on the assumption that American and British soldiers will be far more reluctant to bomb their fellow citizens than they would be to bomb Iraqi civilians. "The fact is that the world's most powerful nation would be stopped in its imperialist tracks if thousands of Westerners might be killed by its oil lust war," O'Keefe writes on the TJP Web site. His followers are making the same calculation. "It's not going to make terribly pretty television at home if a lot of Tony Blair's citizens are being killed by bombs, and his allies' citizens too," says Judith Empson, a 52-year-old from Shropshire, England, who flies to Amman on Friday.

The shields adamantly insist that they're not defending Saddam, yet it's clear most prefer him to Bush. O'Keefe certainly seems to. When he renounced his citizenship, he gave the U.S. Consulate a long, rambling document explaining why he was rejecting his country. "I, Kenneth Roy Nichols, have been subjected to highly injurious & involuntary human experiments conducted by the US Military," it said, followed by a laundry list of American mendacity and atrocity. It begins "Be it known," and includes the following charges:

"That the US Government has puppets and initiates serving elitist families and their agenda and that these elitists operate via secret societies;
That George W. Bush and his father are both members of one such society;
That 1% of US citizens control approximately 90% of US wealth;
That if I die or 'Disappear,' no matter what the circumstances, I hereby charge these same secretive elitist cowards with responsibility no matter what 'Patsy' is presented as guilty;
That the primary goal of these pathetic secret stooges via the UNITED STATES Military is the fulfillment of the New World Order;
That the goal of the New World Order is total global domination;
That despite the odds, I commit to resisting all forms of global domination, beyond mortal life."

The TJP Web site has a "Human Shield Action Iraq Pledge" that's a bit more balanced, attacking Saddam as well as Bush. "'We the People' acknowledge Saddam Hussein as a violent dictator who has the capacity to kill perhaps thousands. Meanwhile, a man who did not receive the majority of votes in being 'elected' president, George W. Bush, has the means to destroy our entire world thousands of times over. As thinking people we see the obvious, George W. Bush is far more of a threat to world peace than Saddam Hussein."

Such thinking has led some of them to discount reports of Saddam's atrocities -- the raping of children in front of their parents during interrogations, the mutilations of political prisoners, even the gassing of the Kurds -- as propaganda.

Empson, a former human shield in the Israeli-occupied territories who traveled to Iraq three years ago, says questions remain about Halabja, the town where Saddam's regime used chemical weapons to massacre thousands of Kurds in 1988. "I don't think one can necessarily say it was a thing deliberately carried out by Saddam Hussein," she says. She also insists that there is more freedom in Iraq than the Western media would have the world believe, saying of her trip to Baghdad, "I found there was freedom of speech. I was allowed to go anywhere I wanted on my own. I could walk through Baghdad at any time of the day or night without being hassled."

Because she doesn't believe Saddam is a monster, she doesn't worry about him forcing human shields to guard sites other than the ones they choose. "I don't think the Iraqi government would use us to that degree," she says. "I think they know goodwill gestures when they see them. I don't think they're that indecent."

Not surprisingly, the idea of staking one's life on Saddam's decency baffles and exasperates the human shields of 1990.

Paul Eliopoulos was a 38-year-old consultant for Arthur Andersen living in Kuwait during the buildup to the first Gulf War. On Aug. 4, 1990, when he was driving to Kuwait City, Iraqi soldiers kidnapped him at gunpoint; it was the beginning of an ordeal whose horror, he says, will be with him for the rest of his life. After being driven to Iraq and held hostage first in Basra and then at the El Rashid hotel, the Baghdad hotel where most journalists stay, he was taken along with 36 other American captives to a phosphate plant in Al-Qaim. Three days later he was moved to a hydroelectric power plant, and a week later he was transferred to a urea plant, where he was held in an abandoned laboratory for three months. He suffered from bleeding hemorrhoids, fungal infections, severe back pains and dysentery.

The good intentions of those who say they'll only guard civilian targets mean little, Eliopoulos says. "I was held in many places that had very benign names that were actually very sinister," he says. "I was held in chemical plants, refineries, fertilizer plants. I'm not a military analyst and I cannot tell you what most of these things are used for, but the amount of armed guards and army around them didn't suggest to me that they were just civilian industrial sites."

He also has little patience for the shields' altruistic bravado. "The ones who say, 'I know I may not come back,' they have no idea what that means," he says. "They don't know what it means to be hurt, they don't know it means to be next to a person with their head split open, they have no idea what it means to defecate in your pants because you have dysentery. Dying is not the worst thing that can happen to you."

Many voluntary shields seem not to have contemplated anything like Eliopoulos' nightmare. Rather, they've conjured a beautiful dream of self-sacrifice, one that, thanks to the Internet, has ricocheted around the world with astonishing speed, inspiring others to follow O'Keefe's lead. Liev Aleo, a 27-year-old former secretary from Santa Barbara, Calif., who has never been to the Middle East, recently quit her job to form Become the Change, a kind of California version of Truth Justice Peace Human Shield Action. So far, Aleo hasn't actually sent anyone to Iraq. While she gets her operation going, she's forwarding interested people to O'Keefe's group. Yet she's done her part to spread TJP's blissful vision of a world remade.

Recently, Aleo sent out a mass e-mail saying, "I'm also asking *you* to make the pledge to join the shield. Yes, it's potentially very dangerous, but it's also potentially the most astounding and fantastic thing you or pretty much anyone will ever have accomplished ... And I can tell you with what I'm guessing is a 90-95% certainty that, as long as enough of us say yes to this spontaneous global phenomenon -- this worldwide experiment in possibility -- the shield and the peace community will stop this war, effect nonviolent resolution, initiate and assist in Iraq's rebuilding program, and return home safe."

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