Rummy must be thrilled these people are off the streets! Think he’ll send in Special Forces soldiers to rescue them? It’s great that the Special Forces soldiers in Ethiopia rescued the abused young cheetahs. I followed that story, and hope they make the same effort for this investigative group.
Update [2005-11-30 13:1:12 by susanhu]: MSNBC just reported that military and hawk bloggers are condemning this group. One of the kidnap victims, Tom Fox of Virginia, has a blog. His last entry, November 8, is about the terrible conditions in Fallujah: “‘The ongoing difficulties faced by Fallujans are so great that words fail to properly express it.’ Words from a cleric in Fallujah as he tried to explain the litany of ills that continue to afflict his city one year after the U.S.-led assault took place. …” Read all.
“The Christian Peacemaker Teams is a non-missionary organization that has been documenting the abuse of Iraqi detainees and working with the families of prisoners,” reports Amy Goodman for Democracy Now! this morning.
Four members of the team — whose work was documented by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker — have been kidnapped and are being accused of being ” undercover spies.” (Yahoo news, photos, and video)
The Christian Peacemaker Teams has confirmed that four peace activists working with the humanitarian group were kidnapped in Baghdad on Saturday. The aid workers have been identified as 54-year-old Tom Fox of Clearbrook Virginia, 41-year-old James Loney of Toronto, 32-year-old Harmeet Singh Sooden of Canada and 74-year-old Norman Kember of Britain.
On Tuesday the Arab television network al Jazeera broadcast a videotape of the four men sitting cross-legged against a wall with their hands behind their backs. The video bears the insignia of a group calling itself the Swords of Righteousness Brigade. In the tape, the men identified themselves on camera. (DN!)
Today, Amy Goodman interviews Seymour Hersh about the group. (Yesterday, Goodman interviewed Hersh on his latest New Yorker piece “Up In The Air,” discussed in “Seymour Hersh: ‘The world’s our playpen’” and in “Achoo! And Bless You, Jack Murtha,” which quotes Hersh’s observations of Murtha.)
On May 9, 2004, in “CHAIN OF COMMAND: How the Department of Defense mishandled the disaster at Abu Ghraib,” Seymour Hersh wrote for The New Yorker:
… There is at least one other report of violence involving American soldiers, an Army dog, and Iraqi citizens, but it was not in Abu Ghraib. Cliff Kindy, a member of the Christian Peacemaker Teams, a church-supported group that has been monitoring the situation in Iraq, told me that last November G.I.s unleashed a military dog on a group of civilians during a sweep in Ramadi, about thirty miles west of Fallujah. At first, Kindy told me, “the soldiers went house to house, and arrested thirty people.” (One of them was Saad al-Khashab, an attorney with the Organization for Human Rights in Iraq, who told Kindy about the incident.) While the thirty detainees were being handcuffed and laid on the ground, a firefight broke out nearby; when it ended, the Iraqis were shoved into a house. Khashab told Kindy that the American soldiers then “turned the dog loose inside the house, and several people were bitten.” (The Defense Department said that it was unable to comment about the incident before The New Yorker went to press.)
When I asked retired Major General Charles Hines, who was commandant of the Army’s military-police school during a twenty-eight-year career in military law enforcement, about these reports, he reacted with dismay. … Read all (Emphasis mine.)
Amy Goodman also interviews Greg Rollins, a member of Christian Peacemaker Teams, who is in Baghdad.
