I thought I missed the boat on this one, but James Loney, one of the Christian Peacemaker Team (CPT) members kidnapped and then 'rescued' in Iraq, has just published an account of his ordeal. So now I get to take on all the right-wingers who've been hooting and hollering that the CPT are hypocrites. They're against the military, but they're happy to let the military rescue them. News that Loney is gay has simply stoked the righteous fires further. Loney was afraid to out himself, lest his kidnappers execute him right away. Isn't it funny how the tolerant forces of empire have to save the naive, bumbling peacenik?


Obviously just in Iraq on a whim - James Loney after his release

Actually, not very. The army's most elite forces, including Canada's JTF2, searched unsuccessfully for the hostages for months. When they got a tip-off from a detainee, they acted within a day. No long term successful planning there, then. The fact that none of the captors were home when the troops broke the doors down, led fellow captor Harmeet Singh Sooden to speculate the whole thing was due to a ransom:

"They kept telling us that 'if we wanted to kill you, you wouldn't have been given the treatment you have been given'," Reuters news agency reported.

He said it was highly unusual his captors had been absent when the three men were freed from a house west of Baghdad by multinational forces, adding that he disapproved of the payment of ransom to secure the release of hostages.

It was either a detainee with info, or a deal struck with the hostage-takers, that led to the CPTers' rescue. Either way, the military had precious little to do with it.


We'd be grateful if you left - Iraqi resistance women

But let's suppose for the moment they did - that the army's relentless anti-terrorist work led to the activists' rescue. Should the CPTers be grateful, as so many armchair generals have demanded?

It's the occupation, stupid

The CPTers weren't in Iraq to get kidnapped or rescued. They were there to highlight the injustices of the U.S. occupation. Since before the invasion, they've been exposing the U.S. massacre at Fallujah, the Iraqi citizens detained without charge, and the daily economic and social brutality that war has wrought. They actually were grateful to their rescuers - which is understandable, given the deprivation they suffered - but they never forgot the context: freed hostage "Dr Kember prefaced his unqualified tribute to the courage of those who freed him by saying that it remained his conviction that armed force cannot deliver a long-term solution in Iraq".


Oh yeah, there's a war on - U.S. soldier tortures Iraqis in Abu Ghraib

To put it more bluntly, if the U.S. and its allies hadn't been killing & maiming Iraqis in the first place, the CPT wouldn't have had to be there. That they risked & endured kidnapping is a sign of courage, not complicity. That it fell to various militaries to rescue them is one of the many paradoxes of war - though not too big a paradox, given the Occupation needs all the good press it can get about now. Killing brown people may not hit the front pages, but those numbers add up eventually, and it helps to rescue some white ones to offset the bad news.

As for Loney's homosexuality, the inference is that Loney is a hypocrite for defending people who hate what he is. But he wasn't in Iraq, kidnapped or rescued on the basis of it. He wasn't defending his captors or religious fundamentalism. He was defending the Iraqi people's right not to be invaded and shot at. Two simple questions for all those right-wingers who have suddenly discovered gay rights:

1) how friendly is fundamentalist Christianity to gay rights?
2) how much did invading Iraq do for gay rights?


I'm celebrating Gay Pride by killing some Iraqis!

By going to Iraq, Loney was showing Iraqis that some westerners take their side. He was undercutting the 'war of civilization' argument the fundamentalists rely on to advance their bigotry. (Read Gilbert Achar for more on this argument.) In short, whether 'out' or not, Loney was actually promoting gay rights, by fighting the politics of hatred the war has sparked. The biggest hypocrites here are the right-wingers themselves, who pick up and drop human rights discourse when it suits them. (Would it be a cheap shot to say he was rescued by militaries that deny the right of gays & lesbians to openly join? Yeah, it would.)

Loney has since bowed under the pressure from the right and said:

I am learning many things from my captivity, and have a universe of things to be grateful for. Among them is a new and deep appreciation for the women and men who wear the uniform of military service. I likely would not be writing this today if it were not for them. Thus, I am confronted with a great paradox. I, the Christian pacifist peacemaker, am alive, am free because of the very institutions I believe are contrary to Christian teaching.

He's wrong. He wouldn't be writing those words were it not for the war that he chose to risk his own life to oppose. The "institution... contrary to Christian teaching" may contain sincere soldiers, or may have paid a ransom for some good press - ultimately, the difference is irrelevant. The military is responsible for the deaths of over 100,000 Iraqis and counting. Loney may be guilty of naivete, for thinking pacifism is a proper response to war. But it is the war-makers, and their cowardly, hypocritical media & net lapdogs who have blood on their hands.