Christians Arrested Outside the White House

Christians in an anti-war procession from the National Cathedral to the White House. Thousands of people were expected to converge on the center of the US capital Saturday and march on the Pentagon as part of a series of demonstrations marking the fourth anniversary of the increasingly unpopular Iraq war, organizers said(AFP/Nicholas Kamm)
This is the kind of freedom the current president is spreading around the world.

Dozens of demonstrators, many of them Christian peace activists, were arrested outside the White House late last night and early this morning as part of a protest against the war in Iraq.

About 11:30 p.m., police began handcuffing the first of about 100 protesters who had assembled on the White House sidewalk to pray in a planned act of civil disobedience.

Participants, whom the cathedral staff numbered at 2,825, heard speakers including Celeste Zappala of Philadelphia, whose son was killed in Iraq in 2004.

"I am here tonight as a witness to the true cost of war," she said, "the betrayal and madness that is the war in Iraq."

"We lay before God the sorrow that lives in all of us because of the war," she said.