The "Childrens crusade" reprised; what with the holier than thou nature of the mission. Wonder whether it will meet with the same degree of success(?)!!!

Note: while typing the above, I accidentally omitted the first 'h' in the word whether, making the word - 'wether', yes it is a word, and maybe somewhat appropriate under the circumstances, as the OED defines it as ..."a male sheep castrated before maturity".

Correction to above, the definition for 'wether' came from Webster's and not OED; splitting hairs maybe, but the OED makes no mention of sheep, how remiss!

Forgive me for stating the obvious, but it's not like America and Britain's military will care if these people are making themselves into human shields in Iraq. America and Britain have shown in the past that they are quite protective of their citizens who fall into trouble abroad through no egregious fault of their own. But if these "human shields" are hoping to use that to their advantage, then they have miscalculated. In fact, the concept of "human shield" is quite dated. It was perhaps effective hundreds of years ago, when an army laying seige to a fortress would march captured civilians in front of them to disuade the defenders from raining arrows and boiling oil on them. But that was involuntary, and the defenders actually had to watch their arrows and oil impaling and burning their own compatriots. These days, a few hair-brained civilians attempting to stand in the way of long-range electronic death while relying on ephemeral media coverage for protection in their effort to guilt their own government into recanting should more correctly be referred to as "collateral damage" than "human shield".

As long as they are going anyway, could we get them to carry these little transponders?

Maybe we could get ALL of the peaceniks to go over. Imagine a world without them....

I think Darwin said all that needs to be said about this.

Kevin

An effective shield should be thick and dense.

Think of it as evolution in action.

These people should be treated the same way as 'peace activists' who went to key Nazi facilities in Germany in 1943 to act as 'human shields' would have been treated.

By actively and voluntarily choosing to be in the line of fire, these people give up any rights they had. They are between the civilized world and the threat to it. If they die in the line of fire, that is their chosen fault. The civilized world is not obligated to choose the lives of these people over its own.