Free the Captives: Witness Against Illegal Detention and Torture

News reports say the curfew in Baghdad on Friday march 3 brought considerable calm to the troubled streets there, but it loosed a barrage of empty cliches from media and pundits.

US Commander in Iraq general George Casey told reporters, "The crisis has passed." Casey added, to fill out the daily quota of platitudes, that "Anything can happen."

There were also more rumblings from Washington about uncertainty over the impact of recent unrest on US troop levels. One unnamed DOD official told the AP, in a comment as unrevealing as it was inane, that policymakers were "waiting to see" what develops before making decisions. Military analyst Anthony Cordesman kept up the pace by declaring, "I think it's too early to tell" whether there will be an outright civil war. Is everything clear now?

Meanwhile, by dusk the bloodshed had resumed, with 19 Shi'ites killed by Sunni insurgents in a town near Baghdad.

And by late Friday US time, there was still no news of the fate of Tom Fox and the other three CPT peaceworkers held captive there since late November. We also found no new reports on the condition of US reporter Jill Carroll, taken captive in January.