Western civilians — a journalist (Daniel Pearl), a businessman (Nicholas Berg), a civil engineer (Kenneth Bigley), and an aid worker (Margaret Hassan) — have been captured, beheaded, and shot in Pakistan and Iraq. Western troops have also been captured, tortured, and barbarically slaughtered.
The mindset that American troops face is very different from our own. For example, if a Muslim jihadist wants to kill someone, he might stage an elaborate ruse and kill someone else entirely — all in order to have people say that his primary target was killed by accident. Or, he might kidnap a high value civilian as a bargaining chip in order to free other, imprisoned jihadists.
With this in mind, let’s try to understand what is now going on in Iraq in the matter of the captured American.
First, you can’t necessarily trust the mainstream media to get the facts exactly right.
For example, according to an AP dispatch in the Wall Street Journal, an “American contractor, Issa T. Salomi, went missing Jan 23 in Baghdad.” The New York Times also identifies him as a “contractor.”
However, Salomi is not a “contractor.” He “transitioned” out of that category as soon as he was sworn in to the Department of Defense as a civilian attached to the Army. Salomi is an Iraqi-American Human Terrain Team (HTT) member. And he is now definitely in captivity.
A video released on the internet this very weekend has identified his captors as the “League of the Righteous.” They are demanding the “release of militants and the prosecution of Blackwater security contractors accused of killing 17 Iraqis in 2007 in Baghdad.”
Issa Salomi spoke on video in Arabic-accented English. He spoke gravely, in a deep and monotonic voice. He seemed to be wearing an American Army uniform and he spoke from a prepared script. Salomi spoke for the “Islamic Resistance of Iraq” and, in their name, called for the withdrawal of all foreign troops and the punishment of those soldiers who killed 19 Iraqis in 2007. He also said:”I would like to express to all the members of my family, especially my wife, my children and my friends and to assure everybody that I’m being treated kindly and I’m in good health.”
According to the Washington Post, Salomi’s wife, Muna, 52, confirmed “that the man pictured in the video was her husband and she was distraught at the news. ‘I’m very sick. I cannot talk,’ she said.”
Who is Issa T. Salomi?
According to a source who cannot be identified, “it was known that (a man named Issa) put human terrain team members at risk outside the wire in Iraq.” In addition, according to another source, (a man named Issa) also continually disappeared, always alone, often for many days at a time, ostensibly to visit relatives. This is not the preferred practice. This last time, while visiting relatives, (this man named Issa) was kidnapped.
Are we talking about the same Issa? Can there be two 60 year-old Iraqi-American men named Issa active in Iraq? No, it is one and the same man. Issa T. Salomi lives in southern California. And, either Salomi was very sure of himself, very foolish, or very poorly trained. According to John Stanton at Cryptome.org:
“Steve Fondacaro and Montgomery Clough, senior program management of the US Army’s Human Terrain System (HTS), were warned as early as 2007 that Human Terrain Team members in Iraq and Afghanistan would become prey for insurgent groups. They were advised repeatedly that training must emphasize the dangerous environment HTS employees would be operating in. That training needed to focus on practices and procedures for handling life threatening situations to include kidnapping.
Issa Salomi, a 60-year-old HTT member operating in a combat zone, was taken in January 2010 by an Iraqi insurgent group, and a video of him was released on the Net in February 2010 by the same group. This tragic event drives home, once again, the core failings of the Human Terrain Team System: the inability to find qualified personnel, to train them properly and to, quite simply, take care of them. Some allege that many team leaders and HTS management itself have no clue where many of their teams are. “Some HTT members disappear for days and then return.”
* * *
Observers also indicate that those in charge of revising the HTS curriculum and training new batches of HTS students are not qualified to do so as their expertise is in private sector organizational behavior. Some have had no military or field experience and, what’s more, hardly understand the US military culture they are embedded in.
That’s Salomi and Salomi’s team that Stanton is talking about. (Parenthetically, yesterday, the Department of Defense finally listed Salomi as having an “excused absence” and noted that his “whereabouts are now unknown.”)
Has the League of the Righteous ever freed an American prisoner? If they have, they are different from the Palestinians. Israel has indeed offered to trade hundreds of prisoners with blood on their hands for Shalit. Hamas has said no, at least so far, and it seems that nothing will ever make them say yes. As I always say about Islamists, they are incorruptible. How could they ever let a human being go free? No matter how much they are offered, they will do what they think is right–fighting Israel with no goal and no purpose.
The most dangerous form of hatred is unmotivated hatred.
please do not forgert Steven Vincent, kidnapped and murdered in Basra in 2005
God rest the souls of the Jews Berg and Pearl and Irish Catholic Margaret Fitzsimons Hassan… In the Balkan wars of 1992– the number of Serb soldiers ritualistically beheaded (using a sawing technique) by Mujahedin in Bosnia amounts to 87 (eighty-seven). This number was ascertained by Dr Milan Bulajic (Belgrade), who was chronicler of the WW II Croatian genocide of Jews, Romas, and Serbs in Jasenovac, Europe’s cruelest death camp. Actually a complex of camps, it was built to a German plan. Croatian cruelty was so savage that even the German SS at times intervened to restrain their allies. Dr Bulajic was investigating the genocide of Serbs in the 1991-1999 war by old Nazi allies Croatia, Kosovo Albanians, and Muslim Bosnians. I was recently informed of his death by Dr Sasa (Sasha) Acic (phonetically Ah-chich, ca.), who is Roma (Gypsy): “The International Commission for the truth on Jasenovac with deep regret anounces the loss of its member Dr.Milan Bulajic who passeed away on the 29th November 2009 aged 81. Dr.Milan Bulajic was the first coordinator of the International Commission and also the author of 67 books on war crimes, genocide against Serbs, Jews and Roma and Croatian atrocities during WWII.– Respectfully, Sasa Acic, Commission Coordinator.” The number, to repeat, of decapitated Serb prisoners of war defending their own lands from Islam is 87. Anyone wishing to know their names can indicate so on this blog. I’ll supply the names from Dr Bulajic’s research. The numbers from German/Vaticn backed Croatia 1991-1995 and “independent” Kosovo are another category.
What, exactly, is an “Iraqi-American Human Terrain Team (HTT) member”?
3. john peter maher:
Wow, John, thanks for your clarity.
I have often ranted here about the injustice committed to the Serbs by the little, and dirty, Clinton war and the slanted media. I had also used the example of beheadings in Serbia by the Islamists, to qualify the Serbs’ actions and reactions, and at least twice referred to the Jasenovac camp in Croatia, as you mentioned, the cruelest in Europe during World War II.
Moreover, here, often people are ready to chide the Europeans at that time for cowardice and not helping the “right cause”, the US/Clinton war, for…who can argue against “etchnic cleansing”, right, a pet phrase of the left, including the so-called feminists? Besides the charge of cowardice (which the Germans deserve now in Afghanistan, by the way), the West Europeans at that time either knew the US was on the wrong side, or simply sympathized with Croatia (Catholic Croatia).
So, again, the Croatians, owe the Serbs big time (and then the Jews and the Roma and Sinti). As well, the low-class, cowards, Bosnian Muslims. Kosovo, where the Battle of Kosovo was fought, is central to Serbian identity and nationality.
As per Mr. Clinton, no comments.
Phyllis
It is a depressing phenomenon you describe but one we dismiss or trivialize at our peril. Our enemies–for what else are they?–are more than merely perfidious, engaging in deceit, trickery, duplicity, and a myriad of other ruses and lies.
One of the reasons they can get away with it so easily, as the confusion and fawning dhimmitude of the mainstream media makes evident, is that our intellectual classes have been trained in the post-modernism that does not believe in a master narrative (hence there is no history), cannot see truth for the positionality of the trees (there is no mechanism for making rational decisions), and stumbles over ambiguity and allusion (there is no rigour, discipline or reward for persistence).
So what can we do but regain control over our educational institututions, as well as our newspapers, television services, film industry and daily lives, and begin to teach, learn, and engage in critical thinking, the arts of interpretation, the skills of disambiguation. It won’t be easy. It won’t happen soon. But do we have a choice?
Norman
Human Terrain Team–what the heck does that military-generic sounding title mean?
To 4. Larsen E Whipsnade
A new fancy way of saying diplomats who really do something such as fixing leaky sinks…
They go out and point out things that are simple common sense issues to most ppl and then try to help the locals fix them.
Such as they goto a town and see their flesh water combines with their sewer tanks… they point out this is bad then help the locals fix it(normally trying to teach them its ok for them to fix it themselves).
They have hundreds of these groups under hundreds of different names assigned to all kinds of stuff so their no way to be sure exactly what he was doing but in simplest term he worked with the locals to do something.
Foolish man but very brave. I would kill myself before I let those apes take me.
I went online to find out exactly what the team is and what it is about.
Here is the link:
http://www.army.mil/professionalwriting/volumes/volume4/december_2006/12_06_2.html
To say this is another “feel good” attempt by the military is an understatement. I got that in the first page when I had to wade through all the Master Degree/PHD words and corporate buzz words and phrases. For example:
“To augment the brigade commander’s direct support, HTS will have reachback connectivity to a network of subject-matter experts now being assembled from throughout the department of defense, the interagency domain, and academia. This network will be managed by a centralized information-clearinghouse unit nested in FMSO. At the same time, to overcome the kinds of problems now typically encountered when in-place units attempt to transfer knowledge about their area of operations upon relief in place, HTS will provide for the complete transfer of HTT personnel together with the HTT database to the incoming commander upon transfer of authority. This will give the incoming commander and unit immediate “institutional memory” about the people and culture of its area of operations.”
You have got to be kidding me. Somebody’s brainstorming PHD’s paper was translated into a program that isn’t working all that well but manages to fill up reams of paper and get people hurt. Greaattt….
I spent twenty years in police works seeing exactly the same thing. Paper pushing bureaucrats inside the system putting out new and better plans after the last batch of “new and better plans” failed miserably. I hope the man makes it out, but who knows.
it is the silence from washington that is deafening. i did not like or vote for gw. he did, however, clearly caption the enemy, the axis of evil. so everybody knew who was what. with this dhimmi in the white house it is chaos, nothing will be accomplished, we will remain unprotected and vulnerable here and everywhere else in the world.
12. Don’t you mean “Take as many of those mohos with me as I can?”
Just another reason we ought not be in an endless occupation of iraq.
It’s Clinton’s fault. Clinton and Carter. And Millard Filmore. And Eve.
Salomi was not a contractor but a US DA civilian in a combat zone. We have lots of those. And there is no front or rear in this war. It is still an insurgency. People get killed and captured — combatants and non-combatants. That Salomi was a member of a Human Terrain Team means that he was on a mision with a particular brigade trying to help that brigade understand the population among which it operates. Since our brigades deploy for a year or so and there is little continuity in areas of deployment for brigades, HTT assists in passing on population knowledge the next brigade in the area during RIPTOA — military term for transition from one brigae to another in a given area. None of us know the circumstances of Salomi’s capture. We can only pray with his wife for his safe return or liberation.