Free the Captives: Witness Against Illegal Detention and Torture

There was no news on Monday January 23 about Tom Fox and the other CPT captives in Iraq. But there was another appeal for the release of one captive:

from Ekklesia: New appeal for Norman Kember highlights health concerns

Pat Kember, wife of the 74-year-old peace campaigner Norman Kember, who has been held hostage in Iraq for two months, appealed again for the release of her ailing husband in a televised message aired by the al-Jazeera network.

"Please show compassion and mercy. Please release [Norman] and his friends soon," said Mrs Kember, who lives in north London. "They are good people and they will resume work to make Iraq safer and more peaceful."

She added: "I am extremely worried because his condition might be deteriorating. He suffers from high blood pressure and from aneurysm (swelling of an artery)."

In other Iraq-related news, a US army officer, convicted of "negligent homicide" in the torture-suffication death of an Iraqi general, will serve no prison time. Instead, Aljazeera reports, Chief Warrant Officer Lewis Welshofer Jr. was reprimanded, and "also was ordered on Monday to forfeit $6,000 salary and was restricted to his place of work, worship and barracks for 60 days."

Welshofer, 43, had originally been charged with murder, but instead he was convicted on Saturday of negligent homicide and negligent dereliction of duty and faced up to three years and three months in prison, a dishonourable discharge, loss of his pension and other penalties.

After hearing the sentence, Welshofer hugged his wife and soldiers in the gallery watching the trial, many who had worked with Welshofer and who testified as character witnesses, broke into applause.

from Reuters: US says Insurgent attacks in Iraq jumped in 2005

Insurgents in Iraq mounted more than 34,000 attacks last year on U.S. and other foreign troops, Iraqi security forces and Iraqi civilians, a nearly 30 percent jump from 2004, the U.S. military said on Monday.

U.S. officials cautioned that the figure should not be seen as evidence that insurgents are gaining ground because the effectiveness of their attacks declined and the Iraqis achieved numerous political milestones despite the ongoing violence.

"We are succeeding, and the Iraqis are succeeding," said Marine Corps Maj. Tim Keefe, a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad.

But defense analyst Daniel Goure of the Lexington Institute think tank said, "It's a little hard on the face of it to claim we are being successful when the number of attacks increases by 30 percent.

Group presses U.S. military on jailed journalists

The Committee to Protect Journalists on Monday called for the U.S. military to free two journalists, one held without charge in Iraq and the other, the media rights group said, detained at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The New York-based group also demanded an explanation from the U.S. military for holding a Reuters TV cameraman for eight months without charges until his release on Sunday.

"The military owes an explanation for this open-ended and unsubstantiated detention," she said. "U.S. officials should also credibly explain the basis for the other detentions or release those journalists immediately," [CPJ Executive Director ann] Cooper said.

Reuters reports that a US soldier was killed in Baghdad Monday. This brings the Reuters-estimated US death toll to 2228.

However, the Asoociated Press put the total at 2231, and said this was six less than the Pentagon's updated tally, which would be 2237. Reuters also estimates civilian iraqi casualties at between 28,088 and 31,676. [Other plausible estimates put the figure over 100,000.]

According to the International Federation of Journalists, "a record number of media workers died last year while doing their job, amid a growing trend towards the targeted killing of journalists."

At least 89 journalists were murdered because of their professional work, the IFJ said, out of a total of 150 media deaths in 2005.

"It was an unprecedented year ... the IFJ has counted 89 who were killed in the line of duty, singled out for their professional work. In 2005 the trend towards targeted assassination of editorial staff has intensified."

The largest number of deliberate killings, 38, was recorded in the Middle East, all but three of them in Iraq, making the region "by far the world's most deadly beat for reporters in the field," the report said.

"Most of those who died were local, many of them working for international media outlets in Iraq where the streets are too dangerous for foreigners to tread."

On top of the 35 targeted killings in Iraq, the report noted that another five journalists were killed there by U.S. troops, including Reuters soundman Waleed Khaled, shot in the face and chest by U.S. military forces on Aug. 28.