Last Thursday, March 23, combined American and British forces, acting on a prisoner tip Wednesday night, stormed a house in a turbulent West Baghdad neighborhood and found, bound but unguarded and (given the circumstances) relatively unharmed, three surviving Christian Peacemaker Team (CPT) members--74-year-old Brit Norman Kember and two 40ish Canadians, James Loney and Harmeet Singh--who had been in captivity 118 days.

It should have been one of those Jessica Lynch type moments, one of the rare instances in three years of war whereby military forces have been successful in rescuing kidnap victims. This was one of the few unequivocal triumphs lately for occupying US forces. But instead, it was one of those stories that in American media came and went, usually with little emphasis, in a 24-hour news cycle.

Perhaps that's because the biggest American connection to the story--Northern Virginia native Tom Fox, the fourth CPT abductee--had already been found slain, his body dumped in Baghdad on March 9. But even then, the coverage was spotty and misleading. Aside from the Washington Post, for which it was a local story, few US media outlets gave the discovery of Fox's body much play. And among those that did, most--including, repeatedly, the New York Times--followed the lead of Iraqi police and got it wrong.

Police announced that Fox had been tortured before being shot, and most media followed suit. But as CPTer Sheila Provencher writes, "Despite many rumors and several reports that Tom Fox was tortured before he died, the results of the medical examination and autopsy of Tom's body reveal that there was NO torture. Tom died by gunshots to the chest and one gunshot to the head."

In analyzing this discrepancy, it might help to know that Iraqi police, along with Iraq's Interior Ministry, are two of the most prominent Iraqi government branches largely controlled by the Badr Brigade, the independent militia of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). SCIRI is the most powerful of the fundamentalist Shiite political parties dominating Iraq's government, and it is sensitive to extensive evidence that it has been running death squads; literally thousands of bodies of bound, often tortured, and shot Sunni men have been discovered in Baghdad alone in recent months. Since it's largely Sunni groups that have been kidnapping foreigners, what better way to cast aspersions on the other side? Moreover, the US Embassy in Baghdad doubtless didn't mind at all that such news would sicken Fox's family, friends, and admirers, and perhaps even discourage future peaceniks from coming to Iraq. Major media should have known better than to trust such sources.

The original abduction on Nov. 26 wasn't much better: on that occasion, the New York Times didn't even run a story. One of the most basic problems with all of the CPT coverage over the months of the ordeal was that nobody usually relied upon as sources by major media--not military spokespeople, nor anyone at the American Embassy or State Department, nor any of the reporters or editors in the media outlets themselves--had any kind of clear idea of what CPT and similar groups do, and what sort of individuals are moved to join their efforts. Most news accounts used words like "pacifist" or "peace activists" and left it at that, creating an imagine of starry-eyed idealists plunging unwittingly into a dangerous war zone.

But the CPT activists were well aware of the risks. For years, Christian Peacemaker Teams has been sending long-term delegations to Palestine (and, more recently, to Colombia and other war zones), helping, by their privileged Western presence, to protect Palestinians from attack by settlers and the Israeli military, and helping with health care, humanitarian aid, and other aspects of ordinary Palestinians' struggle for survival. When the United States threatened to launch war in Iraq, sending teams to Baghdad was a natural extension of CPT's work.... Activists like Fox, Kember, Loney, and Singh know that they are working in a war zone. That's the point. The idea is to save lives, by putting their privileged bodies in the way of violence, whether the threat is from Shiite death squads, Sunni gunmen, or trigger-happy US troops.

Does it work? Iraqis must think so. Without support from host communities, groups like CPT wouldn't last a week. That support, and their own wits, are the only protection such activists have.

Even having lost a member, the survival rate of Christian Peacemaker Teams delegations is rather better than that of the US military; clearly, they know what they are doing, and in an environment where every American outside the Green Zone is in extreme danger, clearly their good work (usually) protects them. Now, Fox joins the International Solidarity Movement's Rachel Corrie, crushed to death in March 2003 by a bulldozer while trying to prevent Israeli Defense Forces from destroying Palestinian homes in the Gaza Strip, on the list of Americans who've given their lives while having nonviolently prevented the deaths of others in a war zone.

The story of Fox's death, the concern for the lives of the three remaining hostages, and their rescue two weeks later is enormously compelling--except that US media don't know how to tell it, because they don't understand a war zone story line that doesn't involve bullets, bombs, or official spokespeople. So, the cameras will wilt away, and CPT activists will go back, undissuaded, to their original work: savings the lives of civilians caught in a war zone not of their making. They should be heroes. If only we knew.