The U.S. War on Journalists

....the U.S. is the bad guy...and has been for decades...

The U.S. War on Journalists
   May 7, 2008
   Amy Goodman

Sami al-Haj is a free man today, after having been imprisoned by the U.S.
military for more than six years. His crime: journalism.

Targeting journalists, the Bush administration has engaged in direct
assault, intimidation, imprisonment and information blackouts to limit
the ability of journalists to do their jobs. The principal target these
past seven years has been Al-Jazeera, the Arabic television network based
in Doha, Qatar.

In November 2001, despite the fact that Al-Jazeera had given the U.S.
military the coordinates of its office in Kabul, U.S. warplanes bombed
Al-Jazeera’s bureau there, destroying it. An Al-Jazeera reporter covering
the George Bush-Vladimir Putin summit in Crawford, Texas, in the same
month was detained by the FBI because his credit card was “linked to
Afghanistan.” In spring 2003, the U.S. dropped four bombs on the Sheraton
hotel in Basra, Iraq, where Al-Jazeera correspondents—the only
journalists reporting from that city—were the lone guests. Another
Al-Jazeera staffer showed his ID to a U.S. Marine at a Baghdad
checkpoint, only to have his car fired upon by the Marines. He was
unhurt. That can’t be said for Tareq Ayyoub, an Al-Jazeera correspondent
who was on the roof of the network’s bureau in Baghdad on April 8, 2003,
when a U.S. warplane strafed it. He was killed. His widow, Dima Tahboub,
told me: “Hate breeds hate. The United States said they were doing this
to rout out terrorism. Who is engaged in terrorism now?”

Then there is the story of Sami al-Haj. A cameraman for Al-Jazeera, he
was reporting on the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. On Dec. 15, 2001,
while in a Pakistani town near the Afghanistan border, Haj was arrested,
then imprisoned in Afghanistan. Six months later, shackled and gagged, he
was flown to the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay. Haj was held there for
close to six years, repeatedly interrogated and never charged with any
crime, never tried in a court. He engaged in a hunger strike for more
than a year, but was force-fed by his jailers with a feeding tube sent
into his stomach through his nose. Haj was abruptly released this week.
The U.S. government announced that he was being transferred to the
custody of Sudan, his home nation, but the government of Sudan took no
action against him. He was rushed to an emergency room, and soon was seen
on his old network, Al-Jazeera:

“I’m very happy to be in Sudan, but I’m very sad because of the situation
of our brothers who remain in Guantanamo. Conditions in Guantanamo are
very, very bad, and they get worse by the day. Our human condition, our
human dignity was violated, and the American administration went beyond
all human values, all moral values, all religious values. In Guantanamo,
you have animals that are called iguanas, rats that are treated with more
humanity. But we have people from more than 50 countries that are
completely deprived of all rights and privileges, and they will not give
them the rights that they give to animals.” He described the desecration
of the Quran as part of the effort to break him: “They hold the Quran in
contempt, destroyed it several times and put their dirty feet on it. They
also sat on the Quran while trying to get us angry. They repeatedly
committed violations against our dignity and our sexual organs.” At least
one official in the Defense Department has denied the charges.

Asim al-Haj, Sami’s brother, told me in an interview last January about
the 130 interrogations: “During these times, the interrogations were all
about Al-Jazeera and alleged relations between Al-Jazeera and al-Qaida.
They tried to induce him to spy on his colleagues at Al-Jazeera.”

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 10 journalists have
been held for extended periods by the U.S. military and then released
without charge. Just weeks ago in Iraq, the U.S. military released
Pulitzer Prize-winning Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein after
holding him without charge for two years. The military had once accused
Hussein of being a “terrorist media operative who infiltrated the AP.”

The committee reports that 127 journalists and an additional 50 media
workers have been killed in Iraq since 2003, well more than twice the
number killed in World War II. We need to remind the Bush administration:
Don’t shoot the messenger.

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Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international
TV/radio news hour airing on 650 stations in North America. Her third
book, “Standing Up to the Madness: Ordinary Heroes in Extraordinary
Times,” was published in April.

© 2008 Amy Goodman
http://www.democracynow.org/