Are we becoming what we were told we went to Iraq to destroy?

Are you horrified when you hear that insurgents have kidnapped American journalist Jill Carroll, and will only release her if female Iraqi prisoners are first released?

You should be. But you should also be horrified to know that the U.S. Army is using the same tactic. No, they haven't threatened to kill the female hostages they've taken -- but they don't have to, do they? There is an implicit threat in taking hostages. Otherwise, the hostage-taking would be ineffective. Iraqis know as well as the rest of us that prisoners sometimes are tortured and sometimes killed while detained in U.S. run Iraqi prisons.

So now, under court order to release documents to the ACLU in its Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, we learn that the U.S. Army has at least twice taken the wives of suspected insurgents into its custody in order to coerce the insurgents into surrendering. While both an Iraqi minister and a U.S. Army spokesperson deny that Americans are taking hostages (and the Iraqi official pointed out that this was a tactic of Saddam Hussein, not the Americans), the documents apparently make liars out of them both.

http://tinyurl.com/ck9ms

>>In one case, a secretive task force locked up the young mother of a nursing baby, a U.S. intelligence officer reported. In the case of a second detainee, one American colonel suggested to another that they catch her husband by tacking a note to the family's door telling him "to come get his wife."<<

The nursing mother and her baby were released only after a a civilian Pentagon intelligence officer who had taken part in the raid filed a formal complaint. In the second incident, an unspecified number of women were taken into custody in 2004. The paper trail does not indicate whether they are still in custody or were released.