"Mirror of Truth" Bus Tour to visit Mount

On Thursday, October 31, the “Mirror of Truth” Bus Tour, a project of Voices in the Wilderness and Pax Christi, will arrive at Mount Saint Mary’s to address the issues of terror and Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Members of the tour will speak in Knott Auditorium between 3:30 and 4:45 p.m.  The bus will be parked nearby (look for it).

Beginning at Ground Zero in New York City on September 11, the two-month-long Tour will visit over 100 sites down the East Coast of the US, including churches, mosques, universities and high schools.   The bus will also visit sites where the US government experiments with, manufactures, and prepares for sale or use, Weapons of Mass Destruction. The Tour will end in November at Ft. Benning, Georgia. There, delegates will participate at the annual School of the Americas protest organized by SOAWatch.  Activists, artists, religious leaders, and professors will join the tour at various sites to give presentations, concerts and to coordinate nonviolent actions.

During their presentations, members of Voices who have traveled to Iraq will describe the lethal effects of U.S.-led economic sanctions which have, according to the UN itself, killed more than one million Iraqi civilians. “During the Gulf War bombing,” recalls tour coordinator Michael J. Carley, “the US government destroyed Iraq’s water supply and sewage systems, and let loose all this cholera and typhus and e. coli.  Then for 12 years the sanctions have thwarted most of Iraq’s attempts to fight these diseases. So effectively, what you get is a massive unleashing of biological warfare on the people of Iraq.” Under the shadow of renewed U.S. war with Iraq over "weapons of mass destruction," the Mirror of Truth Tour  will attempt to bring light on the world’s largest stockpile of such weapons—those in the United States itself.

“The idea,” says Tour coordinator, Rev. G. Simon Harak, S. J., “is to get folks to realize that the ‘enemy’ is not Afghanistan, or Iraq, or the U.S.  The enemy is these terror weapons.  We all have to unite to oppose them, wherever they are – even in the U.S.”

Co-founded by 3-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee Kathy Kelly, Voices has brought nearly 50 delegations to Iraq in violation of federal law and U.S.-led economic sanctions.

The Mirror of Truth Tour calls for Americans to bear some accountability for the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and to create nonviolent alternatives to war.

The event is sponsored by the Theology Department at Mount Saint Mary’s, together with the Interfaith Center for Peace and Justice, Gettysburg.  For more information call 301-447-5370.