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Aid Workers Killed in Afghan Massacre Gave Years of Service (Taliban War Crimes)
AP ^ | August 8, 2010 | Kristen Wyatt and Robert H. Reid

Posted on 08/08/2010 6:33:00 PM PDT by DogByte6RER

Aid Workers Killed in Afghan Massacre Gave Years of Service

KABUL, Afghanistan (Aug. 8) -- One gave up a lucrative practice to give free dental care to children who had never seen a toothbrush. Others had devoted whole decades of their lives to helping the Afghan people through war and deprivation.

The years of service ended in a hail of bullets in a remote valley of a land that members of the medical team had learned to love.

The bodies of the 10 slain volunteers - six Americans, two Afghans, a German and a Briton - were flown Sunday back to Kabul by helicopter, even as friends and family bitterly rejected Taliban claims the group had tried to convert Afghans to Christianity.

Also flown to the capital was the lone survivor of the attack, an Afghan driver who said he was spared because he was a Muslim and recited Islamic holy verses as he begged for his life. The International Assistance Mission, which organized the trip, said the driver had been a trusted employee with four years of service.

Police said they don't know if he is a witness or an accomplice in the killings, claimed by the Taliban.

"We are heartbroken by the loss of these heroic, generous people," U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in Washington. She condemned the Taliban for the deaths and what she called a "transparent attempt to justify the unjustifiable by making false accusations about their activities."

The group had spent two weeks treating villagers in a remote valley in northern Afghanistan for eye diseases and other ailments before being ambushed by extremists on their way back to Kabul.

Neither the Afghan government nor foreign embassies formally released the victims' names Sunday. Family and friends, however, came forward with words of praise and sorrow.

Team leader Tom Little, an optometrist from Delmar, New York, had been working in Afghanistan for more than 30 years. He and his wife, Libby, reared three daughters in Kabul, sticking it out through the Soviet invasion of the 1980s, and the vicious civil war of the 1990s, when Afghan warlords rained rockets on the city.

They were briefly expelled with other Western aid workers in August 2001 but returned after the Taliban were ousted from power three months later. Little supervised a string of hospitals and clinics offering treatment for eye diseases.

"He was part and parcel of that culture," said David Evans of the Loudonville Community Church, New York, who had worked with him to deliver aid.

Dan Terry, 64, was another long Afghan veteran. A fluent Dari language speaker like his friend Little, Terry first came to Afghanistan in 1971 and returned to live here in 1980 with his wife, rearing three daughters while working with impoverished ethnic groups.

"He was a large, lumbering man - very simply a joyful man," said his longtime friend Michael Semple, a former European Union official in Kabul. "He had no pretensions, lots of humility."

In a Web posting, a friend, Kate Clark, recalled that in 2000, Terry was hauled off to jail by the Taliban for overstaying a visa.

"He went off good-naturedly, seeing it as a rare chance to have the time to learn Pashto," Clark wrote on a website. "He was released from prison after a couple of weeks and then re-arrested after the authorities decided he had not served enough days. He arrived back to the prison to cheers from his fellow inmates, who were now newly found friends."

Others had made financial sacrifices.

Dr. Thomas Grams, 51, quit his dental practice in Durango, Colorado, four years ago to work full-time giving poor children free dental care in Afghanistan and Nepal, said Katy Shaw of Global Dental Relief, a group based in Denver that sends teams of dentists around the globe.

Grams' twin brother, Tim, said his brother wasn't trying to spread religious views.

"He knew the laws, he knew the religion. He respected them. He was not trying to convert anybody," Tim Grams said, holding back tears in a telephone call from Anchorage, Alaska. "His goal was to provide dental care and help people."

Tim Grams said his brother started traveling with relief organizations to Afghanistan, Nepal, Guatemala and India in the early part of the decade. After he sold his practice, he started going several months at a time.

Khris Nedam, head of a charity called Kids 4 Afghan Kids that builds schools and wells, said Grams and the others were "serving the least for all the right reasons."

"The kids had never seen toothbrushes, and Tom brought thousands of them," Nedam said Sunday. "He trained them how to brush their teeth, and you should've seen the way they smiled after they learned to brush their teeth."

Nedam said the medical group had never talked of religion with Afghans.

"Their mission was humanitarian, and they went there to help people," said Nedam, a third-grade teacher from Livonia, Michigan.

Dr. Karen Woo, 36, the lone Briton among the dead, gave up her job with a private clinic in London to work in Afghanistan. She was planning to leave in a few weeks to get married, friends said.

"Her motivation was purely humanitarian. She was a humanist and had no religious or political agenda," her family said in a statement.

Another victim, Glen Lapp, 40, a trained nurse from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, had come to Afghanistan in 2008 for a limited assignment but decided to stay, serving as an executive assistant at IAM and manager of its provincial eye care program, according to the Mennonite Central Committee, a relief group based in Akron, Pennsylvania.

"Where I was, the main thing that expats can do is to be a presence in the country," Lapp wrote in a recent report to the Mennonite group. "... Treating people with respect and with love."

Another victim, Cheryl Beckett, the 32-year-old daughter of a Knoxville, Tennessee, pastor, had spent six years in Afghanistan and specialized in nutritional gardening and mother-child health, her family said. Beckett, who was her high school valedictorian at a Cincinnati-area high school and held a biology degree, had also spent time doing work in Honduras, Mexico, Kenya and Zimbabwe.

"Cheryl ... denied herself many freedoms in order to abide by Afghan law and custom," her family said.

The group's attackers, her family said, "should feel the utter shame and disgust that humanity feels for them."

Reid reported from Kabul and Wyatt from Denver. Associated Press writers Ron Todt in Philadelphia, Dylan Lovan in Louisville, Kentucky, Phuong Le in Seattle, Kathy Gannon in Islamabad and Deb Riechmann, Rahim Faiez and Heidi Vogt in Kabul contributed to this report


TOPICS: Crime/Corruption; Culture/Society; Foreign Affairs; News/Current Events; War on Terror
KEYWORDS: afghanistan; christianmartyrs; islam; muhammadsminions; religionofpeace; rop; taliban; warcrimes
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Mohammed ... Does not play well with others
1 posted on 08/08/2010 6:33:02 PM PDT by DogByte6RER
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To: DogByte6RER

Those who do not understand their enemies are destined to die by them.


2 posted on 08/08/2010 6:35:31 PM PDT by bill1952 (Choice is an illusion created between those with power - and those without)
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To: DogByte6RER

That picture says it all!


3 posted on 08/08/2010 6:36:31 PM PDT by savagesusie
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To: DogByte6RER

And the won was busy playing basketball today.

No time at all to condemn the actions of these barbarians.


4 posted on 08/08/2010 6:37:36 PM PDT by Carley (For those who fought for it, freedom has a flavor the protected will never know.)
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To: bill1952

God bless their holy souls. The Taliban had best remember that the blood of Christian martyrs feeds the expansion of the Faith.


5 posted on 08/08/2010 6:38:15 PM PDT by steve8714 (Our long national nightmare is over. We can resume our proper disdain for soccer.)
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To: DogByte6RER

Filthy (expletive) animals.


6 posted on 08/08/2010 6:39:10 PM PDT by KC_Conspirator
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To: DogByte6RER

The MoHamHeads are only emulating the “perfect man”, their “prophet”, Mohammed.

He performed innumerable and unspeakable cold-blooded acts of barbaric savagery throughtout his life.

Mohammed was a pirate, a pedophile, a polygamist, a murderer, an adulterer, a rapist, a thief, a plunderer, a torturer, an executioner, a slave trader, a slave owner, a Jew-hater, a liar, a truce-breaker, and all-around bloody, savage, genocidal lunatic.

And his most rabid followers are just like him.

I pray that SOMEBODY with the power to do so would grow a SPINE and eradicate this MANIACAL MALIGNANT MENACE from the face of the earth.

May the fate they wish upon the Jews descend upon their own heads without remedy.


7 posted on 08/08/2010 6:41:38 PM PDT by Westbrook (Having children does not divide your love, it multiplies it.)
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To: DogByte6RER
Hillary Rodham Clinton ... condemned ... what she called a "transparent attempt to justify the unjustifiable by making false accusations about their activities."

Hillary is hypocrisy incarnate.

8 posted on 08/08/2010 6:41:42 PM PDT by Talisker (When you find a turtle on top of a fence post, you can be damn sure it didn't get there on it's own.)
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To: savagesusie

Definately. I need to make some new stickers for those COEXIST dolts to consider. Whenever I see one of those stupid stickers on a car in traffic, I manage to find a way to get beside them at a traffic light and ask them to roll down the window.

I tell them that I am interested in their sticker and then ask them; Just how do you propose to coexist with a group of people who beleive it is their divine destiny to saw your head off?

Most of the time the single finger salute appears along with scowls and verbal niceties and I just flash them the back of my hand with all five extended and just smile and wave goodbye.


9 posted on 08/08/2010 6:43:48 PM PDT by mazda77 (Rubio for US Senate - West FL22nd - Hayworth for US Senate - Scott for FL Gov.)
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To: DogByte6RER
Also flown to the capital was the lone survivor of the attack, an Afghan driver who said he was spared because he was a Muslim and recited Islamic holy verses as he begged for his life.

Islam revealed -- an intolerant, hate-cult.

10 posted on 08/08/2010 6:44:57 PM PDT by The Truth Will Make You Free
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To: DogByte6RER

Islam in a nutshell.


11 posted on 08/08/2010 6:48:29 PM PDT by stinkerpot65 (Global warming is a Marxist lie.)
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To: mazda77
Definately. I need to make some new stickers for those COEXIST dolts to consider. Whenever I see one of those stupid stickers on a car in traffic, I manage to find a way to get beside them at a traffic light and ask them to roll down the window.

Too bad we can't have animated bumper stickers.

Photobucket

12 posted on 08/08/2010 6:51:52 PM PDT by freedumb2003 (The frog who accepts a ride from a scorpion should expect a sting and the phrase "it is my nature.")
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To: savagesusie
The Islamic mind is at variants with Western Civilization and culture. If you would like to read more indepth study of this phenomenon, there is a great article written from an interview with a Danish psychologist who worked with criminal youths in detention. He has made startling discoveries regarding the fundamental difference in youthful Islamic criminals and youthful non-muslim criminals. [ Among Criminal Muslims-Danish jail psychologist gives a harrowing warning to the west Frontpage Magazine/ 5-5-10/ Jamie Glazov ]
13 posted on 08/08/2010 6:53:26 PM PDT by MHGinTN (Dem voters, believing they cannot be deceived, it is impossible to convince them when deceived.)
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To: freedumb2003

That’s perfect!


14 posted on 08/08/2010 6:54:42 PM PDT by dfwgator
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To: freedumb2003

Absolutely perfect.


15 posted on 08/08/2010 7:16:36 PM PDT by mazda77 (Rubio for US Senate - West FL22nd - Hayworth for US Senate - Scott for FL Gov.)
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To: DogByte6RER

The obvious is these people do not deserve any help.


16 posted on 08/08/2010 7:19:45 PM PDT by Cheetahcat (Zero the Wright kind of Racist! We are in a state of War with Democrats)
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To: Cheetahcat

We’re not there to help the Afghan people, we are there to avoid another 9/11.


17 posted on 08/08/2010 7:21:55 PM PDT by dfwgator
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To: dfwgator

“We’re not there to help the Afghan people, we are there to avoid another 9/11.”

I was referring to the Aid workers that Savages murdered there.


18 posted on 08/08/2010 7:29:34 PM PDT by Cheetahcat (Zero the Wright kind of Racist! We are in a state of War with Democrats)
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To: freedumb2003

That’s a classic!!!


19 posted on 08/08/2010 7:36:38 PM PDT by Left2Right ("Starve the Beast!")
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To: Carley

Hillary did the speaking for him.

She said it was hearthbreaking.

Gee lil lite in words Hill.

She shoulda dropped the F bomb on those rotten murderers.

They don’t have the cajones to battle with our troops in the field but they kill Christians who are giving medical care.

Really ticks me off.
I’d like to put Obama’s basketball where the sun don’t shine in on him.


20 posted on 08/08/2010 7:46:06 PM PDT by Global2010 (Congratulations to Dware for the FR Mussel Eating Fundraiser.)
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