Free the Captives: Witness Against Illegal Detention and Torture

As Iraq lurches toward civil war with bombings and retaliation, there was one report today referring to the fate of Tom Fox and the other CPT peaceworkers held captive in Iraq.

from CBC: New Canadian Foreign Minister apologizes for raising hopes of [CPT] hostages' families

MacKay was criticized for speculating publicly about their welfare in a way that could raise the hopes of relatives of the hostages, and for making comments that might further endanger the hostages.

MacKay phoned the families of James Loney and Harmeet Singh Sooden to apologize, saying there were no new developments.

The Loney family says it has accepted the apology.

CPT's Iraq team has worked to build civility through serving others. Now menace and terror continue to erode those civil bonds. In the fury unleashed by the recent bombing of a Shi'ite shrine, Iraq's top Shi'ite cleric calls for calm:

Iraq's Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani [...] a key force for Shi'ite restraint in the face of Sunni insurgent attacks, called for protests and declared seven days of mourning.

He insisted in a statement, however, that there must be no violence and in particular no reprisals against Sunni mosques.

In the US, Human Rights First finds evidence of torture deaths

"These are detainees who were beaten, suffocated or otherwise died in circumstances that meet the definition of torture that is in the federal law that bans the practice," said Hina Shamsi, a lawyer for New York-based Human Rights First and author of the report.

Analyzing military documents and press accounts, Human Rights First examined 98 detainee deaths, and concluded that torture by U.S. military personnel caused eight deaths and may have been responsible for four others. [...]

"Critically, only half of the cases of detainees tortured to death have resulted in punishment; the steepest sentence for anyone implicated in a torture-related death has been five months in jail," the report stated. [...]

"People are dying in U.S. custody and no one's being held to account," said Deborah Pearlstein, who heads the Human Rights First U.S. law and security program.

The full report is available from Human Rights First.

New reports of military and civilian deaths in Iraq bring Reuter's tally of war casualties above 41,000 [noting that plausible estimates suggest that Iraqi civilian deaths may already exceed 100,000]