Since there were no direct flights from Milwaukee, his hometown, to Baghdad, his destination, Ryan Clancy, a 26-year old anti-war activist, used his frequent flier miles to get to Milan, Italy, first. From there he hopped on a double-decker bus, filled with other opponents of the war, that took him to the Iraqi capital.

That was back in February, when he, along with roughly 20 other Americans, joined several hundred Europeans as “human shields” camped at oil refineries, water treatment plants, electrical grids, and other similar sites, that they feared would be the target of American bombing. Since their return home in the spring, these Americans have found themselves in deep trouble with the Treasury Department for “spending money” in Iraq, an offense that could lead to a maximum of 12 years in jail and fines of up to $275,000. Is the United States government in a bad mood, ferreting out obscure laws on the books in order to punish those among its citizens who disagree with its policies?

All of these 20-odd anti-war activists have now hired lawyers. Clancy has told the press that by protesting the war, he was merely exercising his constitutional right to free speech and free assembly, a right protected by the First Amendment. “I’m being prosecuted for dissenting,” he said, “and for wanting to meet the people we were supposedly going to liberate.”

Prosecutors are saying that the government is not taking these people to court for being dissenters, or for hurting the war effort, but for “financial transactions in Iraq,” that is, spending money there, an act proscribed for Americans then.

Yeah, right. Clancy had brought $1,500 with him, much of which he says he gave away to poor Iraqis. Another activist, Judith Karpova, a 58-year old writer from Hoboken, New Jersey, whose expenses had been paid for by her hosts, admits to having imported into Iraq “eight sets of coloring books and color markers which I left at the Children’s Hospital in Baghdad.” Yet another, Faith Fippinger, a retired 62-year old schoolteacher from Saratoga, Florida, wrote the Treasury Department that, yes, she had spent money while in Iraq — buying rice, eggs and dates.

Is all this an effort by the government to penalize people for following their convictions? At a time when neoconservatives, the dominant force in this administration’s foreign policy, have alienated much of the world against the US by their disdainful posture of, hey, we lead and you follow, and if you don’t, to heck with you, it is idealistic Americans like these folks — including others like them in the occupied territories today shielding Palestinian homes from Israeli bulldozers — who are the true heirs of the Founding Fathers’ vision of America, deflecting it, as it were, from becoming debased by big power arrogance.

Commitment, in literature as in life, is, or at least should be, a starting point to our human meaning and human worth. In the kind of compact, globalized world we inhabit today, no man is innocent. We are all complicit in what goes on around us, for by not taking an interest — an active, engaged interest — in politics, we give our approval to the prevailing order. Going on sixty-something, one doesn’t want to live badly any more than write badly. Those of us children of the sixties, unsteady of gait at this time in our lives and thus hardly suited to travel across oceans to be human shields — in order to make a statement and make a difference — often ask ourselves why we have to write, to contend for literacy, to impart ideas, if our work does not act as an impediment to injustice, to allowing political leaders to sustain positions at variance with most of their people. Let’s take our hats off to these folks who are being hounded by prosecutors for going on a putative spending spree in Iraq, thereby breaking the laws of the land.

Meanwhile, Ryan Clancy has confessed to the Treasury Department, according to the New York Times, that he had indeed “spent money” as he wandered the streets of the Iraqi capital during his short stay there: “I purchased an occasional glass of delicious, sweet tea at tea stalls, and tasty kababs at food stalls.”

His quandary? “I have no receipts,” he was quoted as saying, a touch mischievously.

- Arab News Opinion 21 August 2003