Indeed, they were at risk, especially with Special Forces teams sent to advise, support, and train Iraqi death squads, as Michael Hirsh and John Barry of Newsweek reported early last year. If the Pentagon targets journalists “as a matter of policy,” as head of CNN’s news division, Eason Jordan, told a panel at a World Economic Forum gathering in Davos, Switzerland, last year—a revelation that cost Jordan his job—what’s to say they don’t target peace activists, who are at least as bothersome? If Israeli soldiers shoot peace activists in the head—for instance, the Brit Thomas Hurndall—what’s to say American soldiers in Iraq, equally as brutal (as a recent video of yahoo soldiers shooting wounded Iraqis for fun demonstrates), and trained by Israelis in “Jenin-style urban warfare,” would not shoot peace activists in Iraq?

Fox, however, was not shot by U.S. soldiers—or not soldiers in uniform, anyway. More than likely, the non-violent Fox—working for an organization with a broad ecumenical base among many Christian denominations in partnership with Jewish, Muslim and secular peace organizations—was kidnapped and executed by members of a Pentagon-sanctioned black op team.

Last September, we caught a rare glimpse of such an operation when two British SAS men were unmasked in Basra, attempting to plant explosives during the Karbala Festival, marking the birth of Imam Mohammed al-Mahdi, and blame the terrorism on the Iraqi resistance. It took a Syrian correspondent in Baghdad, Ziyad al-Munajjid, to say what the American and British media wanted to sweep under the rug: “Many analysts and observers here had suspicions that the occupation was involved in some armed operations against civilians and places of worship and in the killing of scientists. But those were only suspicions that lacked proof. The proof came today through the arrest of the two British soldiers while they were planting explosives in one of the Basra streets.”

As noted earlier this week, the shadowy group allegedly responsible for Fox’s abduction and murder is called the Swords of Righteousness Brigades, linked to the Islamic Army in Iraq and supposedly “al-Qaeda.” IAI has members from the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization long ago penetrated and compromised by the CIA and MI6. In fact, according to Peter Goodgame, the Brotherhood was created by “the great names of British Middle East intelligence, T.E. Lawrence, E.G. Browne, Arnold Toynbee. St. John Philby and Bertrand Russell,” and that their mission was to “keep the Middle East backward so that its natural resource, oil, could continue to be looted.” In the current context, it may also be tasked with keeping pesky peace activists out of Iraq as well.

It is difficult to believe an Iraqi resistance group would abduct and then kill a member of an organization that worked with Iraqis detained by occupation forces and collected stories of detainee abuse. It should be noted that the Christian Peacemaker Teams released a report documenting routine abuse of Iraqi prisoners held at Abu Ghraib, well before photographs of abused prisoners were published by the corporate media. “We were the first to publicly denounce the torture of the Iraqi people held by occupation forces,” CPT co-director Doug Pritchard told the BBC. In short, the Christian Peacemaker Teams are a thorn in the side of the brutal occupation.

Cui bono once again comes into play—who benefits from the capture and murder of CPT members? Certainly not the Iraqi resistance.