For those looking for information about Marla Ruzicka, I'd steer you to Medea Benjamin and Kevin Danaher piece at Global Exchange. I saw AP pieces Sunday (and many papers ran one in print on Monday) but I didn't see any point in linking to those. Nor did I see the point in running something from an article by a reporter who spoke of how Ruzicka implored him to do his job and make a difference when . . . he apparently never took the words to heart.
From Danaher and Benjamin's piece:
Just about every day we hear of bombs going off in Iraq, and perhaps we pause for a moment and think what a tragedy it is, and then we go back to our daily routine. But when someone close to you is killed by one of those bombs, the world stops spinning.
On Saturday April 16, our colleague and friend, 28-year-old Marla Ruzicka of Lakeport, California, was killed when a car bomb exploded on the streets of Baghdad. We still don't know the exact details of her death, which makes it all that much harder to deal with the utter shock of losing this bright, shining light whose work focused on trying to bring some compassion into the middle of a war zone.
Marla was working for a humanitarian organization she founded called CIVIC (Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict), which documents cases of innocent civilians hurt by war. Marla and numerous other volunteers would go door-to-door interviewing families who had lost loved ones or had their property destroyed by the fighting. She would then take this information back to Washington and lobby for reparations for these families.
Click the link to read more of "Remembering a friend killed in Iraq, Marla Ruzicka."
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