How the US targets photo-journalists
Hidden by the mainstream UK media, the past three weeks has brought wonderful news – the freeing of Sami al-Haj, al-Jazeera cameraman, from Guantanamo, and Bilal Hussein, award-winning AP cameraman, from Iraq. The Guardian and the Press Gazette appear to be the only UK national news outlet to have covered their release. The Guardian’s Richard Norton-Taylor wrote a brilliant cover story on Sami for the MediaGuardian: “The other Alan Johnston“. You can also watch Sami al-Haj’s remarkable speech from his hospital bed on the day of his release.
But why the deafening silence in the British media? The release of Bilal Hussein, a member of the AP team that won a Pulitzer Prize for photography in 2005, held without charge in Iraq for two years, went almost entirely unnoticed. When the British journalist Richard Butler was mercifully freed after in Iraq for two months, his rescue was given widespread coverage.
When the BBC’s Alan Johnston was held in Gaza last year, there were calls from throughout the international press and political community for his release. One of those appeals came from Sami Al-Haj, who imprisoned without charge in Guantánamo since June 2002 after being seized on his way to Afghanistan the previous December to work on an assignment.
Johnston responded to Al-Haj’s plight by writing an open letter in support of a fair trial; the ex-BBC documentary journalist Rageh Omaar also spoke out about him. However, unlike Johnston, this Sudanese-born journalist, received little sustained support or coverage from his colleagues in the media. This is despite the fact that he is the only journalist in Guantánamo and he was offered no opportunity to refute the US government’s charge of being an “enemy combatant”. Rageh Omaar, speaking to Guardian journalists in January 2008, said: “If you look at the response to the kidnapping of Alan Johnston in Gaza and compare it to the over-whelming, deafening silence in Sami’s case, it’s completely shaken my confidence in the notion of journalistic solidarity.”
From January 7, 2007, until his release al-Haj was on a hunger strike to secure his liberty or a free and fair trial. He was force-fed through tubes into his stomach, his weight plummeted and health deteriorated, with reports of poor sight, heart and kidney problems. Al-Haj’s supporters also claimed he suffered physical and mental abuse, including the withdrawal of medication.
The evidence against al-Haj has never been presented in public. Some see his imprisonment as part of a wider US campaign against al-Jazeera itself. His brother Asim al-Haj, speaking to Democracy Now in January 2008, said: “Sami al-Haj is a victim of a political operation against al-Jazeera, which Washington does not approve of. And as evidence of this is the fact that he was interrogated 130 times. And during these times, the interrogations were all about al-Jazeera and alleged relations between al-Jazeera and al-Qaeda.”
Al-Haj’s British lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, director of legal action charity Reprieve, also believed this to be the case and confirmed that virtually all Sami’s interrogations were an attempt to “prove” a link between al-Jazeera and al-Qaeda. He also said al-Haj told him he had been offered release if he was prepared to spy on his colleagues at al-Jazeera. On Sami’s release, his lawyer told the BBC: “We’ve disproved everything they threw at him.”
Reprieve also released two sketches by the political cartoonist Lewis Peake, based on drawings which al-Haj himself made of his experiences inside Guantánamo. The most recent showed a skeleton strapped to a gurney and indicates al-Haj’s own horrendous experience of the camp hospital.
Dozens of journalists – mostly Iraqis – have been detained by US troops over the last three years, according to the Committee for the Protection of Journalists. While most have been released after short periods, in at least eight cases documented by CPJ Iraqi journalists have been held by US forces for weeks or months without charge. Several of the detainees were photojournalists who initially drew the military’s attention because of what they had filmed or photographed.
Journalists continue to be targeted, by the US and by their puppet regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In February, Afghan journalism student Pervez Kambaksh was arrested for distributing a pamphlet about women’s rights, tried and sentenced to death without a defence lawyer, in a closed court. The Independent’s defence and diplomatic correspondent Kim Sengupta wrote to MWAW this week about his plight:
“Pervez has been transferred from Mazar to a prison in Kabul where, according to the authorities, he is being kept in solitary confinement for his own safety. As far as prison conditions are concerned, he was better off in Mazar where he could mix with other prisoners and had the protection of the fairly enlightened head of prisons for northern Afghanistan, Gen Taj Mohammed. There are still no definite dates for his appeal.”
Add your name to the Independents petition to free Pervez Kambaksh here:
www.independent.co.uk/pervez
Maddy Ryle
