Kidnapped Peacenik Refuses To Testify Against His Iraqi Insurgent Captors

Does James Loney's refusal to take the stand mean Tom Fox's killers will go free?

On Nov. 26, 2005, I was kidnapped in Baghdad. My associates and I, all members of a Christian Peacemaker Teams' delegation, were held by Iraqi insurgents for four months. Tom Fox, a 54-year-old American, was found dead on the streets of Baghdad on March 9, 2006, of multiple gunshot wounds. Two weeks later, Harmeet Singh Sooden, 34, and myself, 42, both Canadians, were rescued along with Briton Norman Kember, 75, by British and American soldiers.

In November last year, we were told that an unspecified number of men alleged to be our kidnappers were in U.S. custody.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police and Scotland Yard want us to testify in a trial to be conducted in the Central Criminal Court of Iraq (CCCI). An RCMP officer told us, "The death penalty is on the table."

I cannot participate in a judicial process where the prospects of a fair trial are negligible, and more crucially, where the death penalty is a possibility.

The death penalty is the legalization of blood vengeance. It is a cruel, degrading and irrevocable judgment.

Take away the fancy legal rationale and the dignified court proceedings and what remains is an act of murder, plain and simple, no different than what was done to Tom Fox. Capital punishment is a manifestation of the very violence it claims to deter.

Those who kidnapped us and murdered Tom were swept into a vicious cycle of violence and retribution for violence that was put in motion in 2003 with the invasion of Iraq and its continuing occupation.

"What would you do," the captors asked me, "if the Americans invaded Canada? Would you not fight back, become a mujahideen?"