"We are greatly saddened by the tragic events which took place on Tuesday, September 11th, in New York and Washington DC," the first paragraph of the statement reads. "We cannot yet fathom the magnitude of what has happened, and yet we feel impelled to speak in light of what we fear may be an escalation of violence in response."

The statement was written at least eight days ago, when the US and its allies were still issuing demands to Afghanistan's ruling party, the Taliban, and its guest, terror mastermind Osama bin Laden. On October 8, four of the eight laureates gathered at the UN Church Centre for a press briefing before their meeting with the Secretary General.

The eight laureates were: 1976 Nobel Prize winner Mairead Corrigan Maguire, 1976 Nobel Prize winner Betty Williams, 1980 Nobel Prize winner Adolfo Perez Esquivel, 1984 Nobel Prize winner Desmond Mpilo Tutu, 1989 Nobel Prize winner Tenzin Gyatso -- the 14th Dalai Lama, 1992 Nobel Prize winner Rigoberta Menchu Tum, 1995 Nobel Prize winner Joseph Rotblat and 1997 Nobel Prize winner Jody Williams.

Rigoberta Menchu Tum, Guatemalan Nobel Peace Prize winner in 1992, said she is asking for solutions other than war. "We are here to ask the UN to promote peace," Tum said through a translator.

She made a reference to Guatemala -- where a 36 year guerilla war killed 100,000 people and created more than 1 million refugees -- and said she wouldn't know where to start to get justice for the victims of terrorism in Guatemala. Warfare, she said, is not the answer and she appealed for international law instead.

"We come to demand the International Criminal Court," Tum said, claiming she lobbied for the creation of the ICC to deal with terrorism for years.

Tum said the world should not be sucked into a major war and she disagreed with President Bush's line in the sand approach to the conflict. "Now you hear two voices," she said, slapping the stand. "There needs to be another voice that says, 'We are not for terrorism, but we are not for war either.' "

Mairead Corrigan Maguire, Irish Nobel Peace Prize winner in 1976, called America's retaliation "sad." Her voice crackling and her hands trembling, Maguire said her heart was "heavy" about the bombing and America's subsequent food drops.

"The double approach to bombing and dropping food is unacceptable," she said. "It'll be winter soon there and pretty soon it'll be impossible to get food to the refugees and then they will die. And the West won't see them dying."

Maguire called it ironic that the US government, which had tried to make peace between England and Ireland, is now in the midst of a war itself and is bringing the rest of the world in its conflict.

"We went through a cold war and we cannot go through another cold war because of the greed and arrogance of the American government," Maguire said. "The UN is the best organization will have, God help us. They speak for the human family, not the US government."

The World Council of Churches, who sponsored the event, released a statement attributable to its Acting Secretary General in Geneva, Georges Lemopoulos.

"The initiation of bombings and missile attacks against Afghanistan last night, while not unexpected, is nevertheless of profound concern to the World Council of Churches," the statement reads. "We abhor war. The first WCC Assembly in 1948 called it a sin against God and humanity. We do not believe that war, particularly in today's highly technologized world, can ever be regarded as an effective response to the equally abhorrent sin of terrorism."

The letter goes on to say that the Council will "pray for those who live under the bombs and missiles, hoping against hope that they will be spared" and that all the nations "turn away from the temptation of the sword" and strive for justice.

The common theme at the gathering was that there are root causes of terrorism which need to be understood and worked out. War, the common theme goes, is never the proper response.

"One thing is clear," Esmeralda V. Brown of the United Methodist Office for the UN, told the Earth Times, " is that when you start bombing people, it's not going to resolve a situation."

Brown said she enjoyed the panel because it contained Nobel Prize winners from Guatemala and Ireland, countries that have suffered terrorism. Brown said that because she's from Panama, she also knows what it feels like to have bombs reigning down on her country. In a case as extreme as the World Trade Center attack, Brown said, America should still show restraint because they don't know who the enemy really is.

"So let's look into the root causes of the problem and see how this can be resolved so that it is never repeated again, not here in the United States, not in any other country."

When asked if people who hate America as much as to send commercial planes into skyscrapers could be reasoned with, Brown again called that example "extreme" and said she strongly believes that the world should unite not only against those type of people but also the governments of those countries who view terrorism as legitimate policies to terrorize their own citizens.

She stopped short of advocating war however. "I would hope that out of this experience that we do not select what's terrorism or not terrorism based on our friendship with certain governments."