The guard immediately found the first videotape stuffed in my pocket and took it out. I could see the expression of terror on the driver as he stifled a scream.
The guard shook his head as he reached into my pocket and took out another tape and then from pocket after pocket began to take out tape after tape, cellular telephone, computer camera — all the wrong things.
We all stood there in sheer terror, for a brief moment experiencing the feeling that every Iraqi feels, not for a moment but day and night, 365 days a year. The terrible feeling that your life is not yours that its fate rests in someone else’s hands.
Suddenly he laid the last videotape down and looked up. His face is frozen in my memory, but it was to me the look of sadness, anger and then a final look of quiet satisfaction as he clinically shook his head and quietly without a word handed all the precious videotape — which contained on it the cries of those without a voice — back to me.
He didn’t have to say a word. I had learned the language of the imprisoned Iraqi. Forbidden to speak by sheer terror, they used the one language they had left — human kindness.
As his hands slowly moved to give the tape over he said in his own way what my uncle had said, what the taxi driver had said, what the broken old man had said, what the man in the restaurant had said, what the army man had said, what the man working for the police had said, what the old woman had said, what the young girl had said — he said it for them in the one last message I heard as I crossed the border from tyranny to freedom.
“Please take these tapes and show them to the world. Please help us .. . . and please hurry!”
