The U.S. War on Journalists
We need to remind the Bush administration: Don=92t shoot the
messenger.
Posted on May 7, 2008
By 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=92s bureau there, destroying it. An Al-Jazeera re****ter
covering the George Bush-Vladimir Putin summit in Crawford, Texas, in
the same month was detained by the FBI because his credit card was
=93linked to Afghanistan.=94 In spring 2003, the U.S. dropped four bombs
on the Sheraton hotel in Basra, Iraq, where Al-Jazeera correspondents=97
the only journalists re****ting from that city=97were 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=92t be said for Tareq Ayyoub, an Al-Jazeera
correspondent who was on the roof of the network=92s bureau in Baghdad
on April 8, 2003, when a U.S. warplane strafed it. He was killed. His
widow, Dima Tahboub, told me: =93Hate breeds hate. The United States
said they were doing this to rout out terrorism. Who is engaged in
terrorism now?=94
Then there is the story of Sami al-Haj. A cameraman for Al-Jazeera, he
was re****ting 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:
=93I=92m very happy to be in Sudan, but I=92m 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.=94 He described the desecration of the Quran as part of the
effort to break him: =93They 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 ***ual organs.=94 At least one
official in the Defense Department has denied the charges.
Asim al-Haj, Sami=92s brother, told me in an interview last January
about the 130 interrogations: =93During 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.=94
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 =93terrorist media operative who infiltrated
the AP.=94
The committee re****ts 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=92t shoot the messenger.
Amy Goodman is the host of =93Democracy Now!,=94 a daily international TV/
radio news hour airing on 650 stations in North America. Her third
book, =93Standing Up to the Madness: Ordinary Heroes in Extraordinary
Times,=94 was published in April.
=A9 2008 Amy Goodman
Distributed by King Features Syndicate
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