Friday, August 22, 2008

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.

Oil and gas options not in short supply

Aug.22, 2008



Oil and gas options not in short supply

We could easily guess who is targeted in the ongoing focus on Iraq's oil industry, with American advisers warning that political gridlocks more than security risks are blocking the rehabilitation of the country's hydrocarbon sector.
Definitely, it is a message to the Iraqi parliament that it should move quickly to adopt a US-drafted law on the country's oil industry and grant concessions to major international players in the oil and gas sectors.
Obviously, at stake are the interests of the half a dozen or so American and European oil companies which were rubbing their knuckles in glee in anticipation of lucrative oil deals. They were hoping for open-ended deals on their terms under the draft oil law. But when it became clear that the draft bill has little chance of being adopted by the Iraqi parliament, the American advisers of the Iraqi Oil Ministry came up with a stopgap measure: Short-term technical contracts that would allow the oil companies to take their first solid step into the Iraqi oil industry.
However, the resurgent Iraqi government, mindful of the pitfalls of writing away their country's hydrocarbon wealth to the West, delayed the signing of the short-term oil service contracts with oil majors due to disagreements over payment terms and their duration. And it has also become clear that Iraq would not give companies that signed short-term contracts preferential treatment for the more sought-after long-term deals.
Now the American advisers of the Iraqi Oil Ministry, are trying to tell the Iraqi government that it is not the way to do things by issuing warnings.
But the call would not find many takers in Iraq. Politicians and community leaders in the chaotic country have become acutely aware of the Western objective of tapping their country's oil wealth while giving little to the people of Iraq.
Iraq's electricity minister, Karim Waheed, placed his finger on the pulse when he charged this week that international oil companies are trying to overcharge the war-torn country instead of helping develop its oil and gas sector.
According to Waheed, foreign oil companies had counted on Iraq's ignorance of the markets in trying to overcharge the country in a time of need.
"Some companies in those cases demanded sky-high prices for their services, thinking Iraq does not have a grasp of international financial markets. They were unpleasantly surprised when they found out we fully understand global commodity markets and global stock markets," he said.
Well, Waheed and his colleagues in the Iraqi cabinet do not need to look too far for alternatives. They could turn to the oil companies from the eastern part of the world, including China, India, Malaysia and others, which were bluntly denied the short-term contracts, and develop a healthy and mutually beneficial working relationship with them.
That approach would also fit in with the newfound independence and confidence that the Iraqi government had been asserting while dealing with the American military occupiers of the country.