JEREMY SCAHILL: ...on September 7, when armed gunmen took them, a number of questions were raised by who would benefit from seizing these people. The way that it went down was about 5:00 in the afternoon. A convoy of five cars pulls up on the street. Their office is next to a hospital, only blocks away from the green zone which houses the U.S. occupation authority in the form of the U.S. Embassy, as well as the Iraqi Governing Council. Gunmen get out of the cars, some of them not wearing masks at all, clean-shaven, business suits. They stop traffic on both sides of the street very much like a law enforcement operation. And witnesses -- in fact, we had some of the reports, eyewitness reports translated from Arabic into English -- many of the eyewitness reports say that people thought this was a police operation because they were being stopped by men in uniforms. Several of the men were identified as having Iraqi National Guard uniforms on, which is significant. I'll talk about that in a second. But they block off the street. Two men approach the Bridge to Baghdad office and they have pistols with silencers and a stun gun. I have never seen a stun gun in Iraq. I have never seen a pistol with a silencer. I have never heard of those weapons being used by anyone within the Iraqi resistance. They say to the unarmed guards, really the doorman at A Bridge to Baghdad, that they're from the office of Prime Minister Iyad Allawi. They proceed then to force their way into the building. They don't just take the first people that they see. They are asking for Simona Torretta and Simona Pari by name. And when Mahnouz Bassam comes out to protest in the hallway, they grab her by her hejab, by her head scarf, and drag her from the building. This is an enormous religious transgression, for a woman to be grabbed by the head scarf that is on her head to cover her hair, and to drag her in front of witnesses into a car and throw her there. I was talking to a friend of mine last night, who is a Muslim, and I said, “If this were to happen in a marketplace somewhere, what would happen?” He said, “They would be beaten probably to death for doing it.” So they drag her out. They also take Raad Ali Abdul Azziz and the two Simonas, put them in their cars which included land cruisers, and they drive them off. 15 minutes later, a convoy of U.S. humvees comes whizzing by from the direction that they had fled in, so it was coming from the opposite direction. This was an incredibly bold operation. It was very well coordinated. It took place just blocks away from the green zone. So whoever pulled this off would have had to have had the confidence they were going to be able to abduct these people in a very precise manner, without a threat from the outside. And a number of questions are raised also by the fact that they identified themselves as representing the office of the unelected interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi. Iyad Allawi himself is a spook, a lifelong spook. He was a Ba'ath Party assassin for Saddam Hussein, bumping off enemies of the regime in Europe. He was a Muhabarat, one of the feared secret police in Iraq. After his break with Saddam, he went on to work with MI-6, the British intelligence, the Saudi intelligence and has connections to the Central Intelligence Agency. One of the key components of the iron-fisted Iraqi interim government regime right now is that they have taken so many of the thugs that worked for Saddam Hussein and put them on the Iraqi government payroll. The United States has done the same. They have hired people who were repressing, torturing, abusing Iraqis under Saddam Hussein, and they played the exact same role in the current Iraq. Many of the witnesses to this abduction said that it reminded them of the days of Saddam Hussein's Muhabarat. I heard when I was in Iraq, particularly in 2002, so many stories about people being snatched from their homes, taken away, disappeared, never to be heard from again. And this has a lot of similarities to that.
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According to an Iraqi journalist who witnessed the scene, happened to be in the area, the whole thing took less than five minutes. The abduction. Some say ten minutes. What's interesting is Newsweek and others reported -- they quoted eyewitnesses saying that there was one man that was in charge, a clean-shaven man in a gray suit who the others referred to as “Sir.” I think that we don't know who took these women, but the point is that there are people who know who have these women, and we cannot rule out the possibility that it was not an Iraqi resistance group. This hurts the Iraqi resistance tremendously, and you always have to ask who benefits in cases like this.
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/09/16/147249A blog devoted to this case (not updated since the report of the killings):
http://www.freeourfriends.blogspot.com/
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