Are Christian Hostages in Iraq Being Held by a US-Trained Death Squad?

A recent article in the Salt Lake Tribune carried an interview with a former roommate of Tom Fox's who just returned from Iraq. According to the article:

"Christian Peacemaker members, including some of those who have been taken captive, had been investigating abuses at the hands of special police and military groups months before the Nov. 15 discovery of 173 detainees in the basement of an Interior Ministry building. American soldiers who liberated the prisoners said some appeared to have been tortured by their Iraqi government captors."
[http://www.sltrib.com/utah/ci_3267590]

That's putting it mildly. The BBC story about this was gruesome [http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4718999.stm]

The "special police and military groups" they are referring to are really death squads. I realize in Iraq everyone is a death squad. But these are good old-fashioned CIA trained "paramilitary" groups, straight out of the Casey playbook.

In the past year, the U.S. military has helped build up the commandos under guidance from James Steele, a former Army Special Forces officer who led U.S. counterinsurgency efforts in El Salvador in the 1980s. Salvadoran paramilitary units trained by Steele's team were accused of a pattern of atrocities.

Apparently, there is nothing "para" about these newly minted death squads. These are fully equipped commando units. The most widely known is called the "Wolf Brigade," although there are others called ""Lion",Scorpion", "Snake", etc. Some Iraqis accuse the Wolf Brigade of targeting Palestinian refugees in Iraq, using torture to extract confessions from prisoners, and slaying at least six Sunni clerics.

The CPT members were traveling with Palestinians and meeting with Sunni clerics to discuss these matters when they were kidnapped. This raises the possibility the CPT members are being held by people trying to cover up death squad activities.

Unfortunately, that is exactly the same topic that Yasser Salihee was working on for Knight Ridder when he was killed by an American sniper at a newly erected checkpoint near his home in Baghdad. His final story was published posthumously a couple of days later. [http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/business/12000431.htm]

The fact that people are openly talking about the "Salvador Option" [http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6802629/site/newsweek/] as a way to handle this insurgency only increases the likelihood of this scenario. In retrospect, this is not surprising considering what happened last time the US military confronted an insurgency when John Negroponte was in charge. Suffice to say, it was no coincidence that Honduras left the "coalition of the willing" the same day he arrived in Baghdad.

Since this hostage ordeal began, everyone's efforts have been focused on publicizing Muslim appeals for the release of the hostages because everyone assumed they were being held by Islamic jihadists. It seems that may have been a head fake. If the kidnappers really are related to death squads, then people in the Green Zone have more control over them than all the Sunni clerics in the world. Hopefully, the more coverage this gets, the more likely the hostages will survive past Thursday.



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