The other face of US respect for media

Aug.21, 2008

The other face of US respect for media


pv vivekanand

The case of Sami Al Hajj, a cameraman for Al Jazeera Television who is back at work after more than six years as a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay, is a classic example of the deep hostility that Washington harbours against any media outlet that does not agree with its policies and approaches.
Hajj, 39, was the longest-held journalist in US custody at the time of his release in May. And he was the only journalist held at Guantanamo Bay, which the US claimed was used to hold the "most dangerous terrorists."
US military authorities contented that Hajj was affiliated with Al Qaeda, held him for six years and then released him without charges. There was never any explanation why he was held and why he was freed in May and flown to Sudan but shackled to the floor of the aircraft.
One could bet anything and everything that had there been the slightest trace of any evidence that Hajj had any links with Al Qaeda, then the US authorities would have thrown the book at him.
As Hajj revealed after his release, US authorities wanted him to finger a number of well-known Al Jazeera journalists as being linked to "militant" groups in the Middle East, including Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood. Obviously, he refused and his captors did not know what to do with him. Perhaps that was one of the reasons for his prolonged detention.
Of course, the US government has denied pressuring Hajj to denounce Al Jazeera or offering to free him if he agreed to spy on the network and argued that it would have dealt with someone higher up than "a cameraman trainee" if it wanted to silence the channel. The use of the title is important because Hajj was not a "trainee' but a full-fledged cameraman when Pakistani authorities arrested him at the border in December 2001 and turned him over to US authorities in Afghanistan January 2002. He was transferred to the US base at Kandahar and flown to Guantanamo in June 2002.
In fact, the arrest and detention of Hajj was not about Hajj himself; it was all about Al Jazeera, which has come under bitter American fire since 2001, with Bush administration officials denouncing it as a platform for "terrorists" and an anti-US propaganda machine.
Al Jazeera incurred US wrath because it called a spade a spade and was critical of US policies and Washington's bias in favour of Israel and its lopsided approach to the Middle East, particularly after the Sept.11, 2001 attacks in New York and Washington.
The US hostility towards Al Jazeera grew in intensity when the channel carried videotaped messages from Osama Bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders as well as Saddam Hussein himself. Al Jazeera's in-depth coverage of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, including footage of dead and wounded civilians as well as US military casualties that is rarely shown in the United States, made matters worse.
In essence, Al Jazeera was a thorn on the side of those dealing with the core of US policies in Washington and that explains why then administration officials like Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton and Douglas Faith used every opportunity to vilify the channel and demand that it be shut down.
It was an open and shut case of the US trying to silence Al Jazeera when US forces destroyed its Kabul bureau in November 2001 and its Baghdad office in April 2003, killing correspondent Tareq Ayoub. Few accepted the US explanation that the attacks were accidents.
Robert Fisk of the Independent refuted the US account of the attack in Baghdad. He wrote shortly after the attack that Mohamed Jassem Al Ali, the managing director of Al Jazeera, had sent Victoria Clarke, the US assistant secretary of state of defence for public affairs in Washington, a letter in February 2003 giving the address and the map co-ordinates of the station's office in Baghdad, adding that civilian journalists would be working in the building.
"The Americans were outraged at Al Jazeera's coverage of the civilian victims of US bombing raids," Fisk wrote. "And on 8 April .... an American aircraft fired a single missile at the Al Jazeera office — at those precise map coordinates Mr Ali had sent to Ms Clarke — and killed the station's reporter Tareq Ayoub."
Fisk added that Ali "has the painful experience of knowing that he gave the Pentagon the map coordinates to kill his own reporter."
Since then, it has also emerged that Washington had even contemplated an attack that would have destroyed the Al Jazeera headquarters in Doha but held back because of the warm relationship between the US and Qatar.
The US is holding another journalist detained in Afghanistan. Jawed Ahmad (also known as Jojo Yazemi), 22 , an Afghan reporter working for Canadian CTV who was arrested by American troops and declared an unlawful enemy combatant, while working with the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation at Kandahar airport on Oct.26, 2007.
The native of Kandahar, who was accused of carrying phone numbers and videos of Taliban officials, was produced before a military tribunal, which ruled that there was "credible information" to support the charges and is held at Bagram airbase.
Another prominent case was that of Bilal Hussein, an Associated Press photojournalist in Iraq who had been detained by US forces, suspected of helpin insurgents in Iraq.
Hussein was in US military detention since April 2006 until April 2008 without publicly known charges or hearings, with his captors citing "imperative reasons of security" under United Nations resolutions.
However, it was reported Hussein's has in his possession a photograph that were part of a package of 20 Associated Press photographs that won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography. It was an image of four guerrillas in Fallujah firing a mortar and small arms during a US military assault on the city in November 2004. The US military alleged that Hussein took photographs synchronised with explosions, indicating he was at a location ahead of time.
The Associated Press countered that he was "simply the unlucky fellow who happened to be the photographer for the world's largest newsgathering organisation in a difficult province."
On April 14, 2008 the US military announced it would release Hussein from custody on April 16, 2008, saying only that "he no longer presents an imperative threat to security." The release came after an Iraqi judicial council found Hussein innocent of all of the charges and ordered his immediate release two years after he was "arrested" by the US military.
Indeed, the cases of Bilal Hussein and Jawed Ahmed are distinctly different from that of Hajj, but they all happen to be journalists who were arrested as they were doing their job and detained without charges. It is not that such detentions are a monopoly of the US. They occur in countries where regimes are scared of the media and want to silence them. However, the detention of journalists takes a different dimension when it involves the government of the US — a country which describes itself as absolutely committed to respecting and upholding media freedom.