And who are those two gentlemen, and why should they be mentioned in the same breath as the BBC's Alan Johnston, held captive in Gaza for nearly four months before being released? Read on.
The release of BBC reporter Alan Johnston earlier this month after 114 days in captivity in Gaza made headlines around the world and was hailed internationally as a victory for press freedom.
During Johnston’s nearly four months in captivity, calls for his release came from world leaders and human rights organizations alike. Over two hundred thousand people signed an online petition calling for him to be freed.
But perhaps the most poignant of Johnston’s supporters came from deep within the US prison camp at Guantanamo Bay. Sami al-Haj, an Al Jazeera cameraman who has been jailed without charge at Guantanamo for the past five and a half years, sent a letter via his lawyer calling for Johnston’s release. He wrote: While the United States has kidnapped me and held me for years on end, this is not a lesson that Muslims should copy.”
In comparison to journalist Alan Johnston, Sami al-Haj’s story of abduction has been largely ignored by the corporate media and kept out of the global spotlight. A Sudanese national, al-Haj was working as a cameraman for the Arabic TV network Al Jazeera when he was detained on December 15th, 2001 at a Pakistani town on the border with Afghanistan. After being transferred to US custody he was flown to Bagram Air Base. Six months later he was flown to Guantanamo Bay. He was been imprisoned there without charge ever since.
A new article detailing Sami al-Haj’s ordeal is the cover story of the latest issue of the Columbia Journalism Review. It’s called “Prisoner 345: What happened to Al Jazeera’s Sami al-Haj.” It’s written by Rachel Morris, an editor at the Washington Monthly. Rachel joins us from Washington, DC.
Here's more from Democracy Now! on Bilal Hussein:
Another journalist jailed by US forces without charge has also been largely kept outside of the spotlight. Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein was detained by US forces in the western Iraqi city of Ramadi on April 12, 2006. To this day, he is still being held at a prison camp in Iraq by U.S. military officials who have neither formally charged him with a crime nor made public any evidence of wrongdoing. The U.S. military claims it is justified in continuing to imprison him merely because it considers him a security threat. ...
JUAN GONZALEZ: What is the impact on the journalists who are in Iraq when you have situations like this of the military just grabbing people and holding them indefinitely without charges?
SCOTT HORTON (NY lawyer specializing in human rights law): Well, we have -- I mean, we need to start with the fact that we have more than 110 journalists at this point who have been killed in Iraq. That’s twice the number who were killed in World War II. The number of journalists who have been arrested is now into the thousands. Most of those arrests are simply for establishing identity, and they are resolved in a period of four to six hours, but many of them have gone on for weeks and indeed months, and it is -- you know, it creates continuous pressure on the journalists.
But the most disturbing thing here is a tendency on the part of the US military to view these journalists as, quote, “the enemy.” And back three months ago, we actually got to see some classified operational security briefing materials that were prepared by the Department of Defense, in which they labeled journalists in a category together with al-Qaeda and drug dealers as potential enemy, to be treated and viewed as such. That leads to people being killed, by the way.