All Flesh is Grass

Advent always comes into a dark and dangerous world:

The Christian Peacemaker Teams has confirmed that four peace activists working with the humanitarian group were kidnapped in Baghdad on Saturday. The aid workers have been identified as 54-year-old Tom Fox of Clearbrook Virginia, 41-year-old James Loney of Toronto, 32-year-old Harmeet Singh Sooden of Canada and 74-year-old Norman Kember of Britain.

On Tuesday the Arab television network al Jazeera broadcast a videotape of the four men sitting cross-legged against a wall with their hands behind their backs. The video bears the insignia of a group calling itself the Swords of Righteousness Brigade. In the tape, the men identified themselves on camera.

In a statement that accompanied the video, the four men were accused of being undercover spies working as Christian peace activists.

The Christian Peacemaker Teams said in a statement "We are angry because what has happened to our teammates is the result of the actions of the U.S. and U.K. government due to the illegal attack on Iraq and the continuing occupation and oppression of its people."

The Christian Peacemaker Teams is a non-missionary organization that has been documenting the abuse of Iraqi detainees and working with the families of prisoners. They were the first people to publicly denounce the torture of Iraqi people at the hands of U.S. forces, long before the media revealed what was happening at Abu Ghraib. In fact, investigative reporter Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker who helped expose the Abu Ghraib scandal in 2004 cited the organization in his articles. We reached Seymour Hersh last night and asked him about the Christian Peacemaker Teams.

SEYMOUR HERSH: I ran across them when I was looking into the torture issue at Abu Ghraib, and I remember distinctly that they were on a cutting edge. I talked to people in the organization who had been active for years in total, you know, under the radar of all of us, because they didn't have photographs. They were very interested, for example, very early on in the unwarranted use of dogs in interrogations by American troops. And most of the things that I ended up writing about in Abu Ghraib, most of the general concepts, they knew a great deal about earlier, as did Human Rights Watch and Amnesty. So, these are people toiling, really for the good of Iraqi -- the Iraqi people, and often in -- as I say, in obscurity, in terms of the mainstream media.

A voice says: "Cry out!"
I answer, "What shall I cry out?"
"All humankind is grass,
and all their glory like the flower of the field.
The grass withers, the flower wilts,
when the breath of the Lord blows upon it.
Though the grass withers and the flower wilts,
the word of our God stands forever.

Isaiah 40:6-8