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This article can be found on the web at<br>
<a href="http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040329&s=parenti" eudora="autourl">http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040329&s=parenti</a><br><br>
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Al Jazeera Goes to Jail<br>
by CHRISTIAN PARENTI<br><br>
[from the March 29, 2004 issue]<br><br>
Salah Hassan looks sad and very tired. The Al Jazeera cameraman, a<br>
33-year-old father of two, is recounting his tale of incarceration in a
soft<br>
and matter-of-fact tone. Sipping tea in the lobby of the hotel that
serves<br>
as Al Jazeera's Baghdad bureau, he explains how on November 3 of last
year<br>
he raced to the site of a roadside bomb attack on a US military convoy
in<br>
Dialah, near the eastern Iraqi city of Baquba. While he was
interviewing<br>
people at the scene, US troops who had previously taken photographs
of<br>
Hassan at other events arrested him, took him to a police station,<br>
interrogated him and repeatedly accused the cameraman of knowing in
advance<br>
about the bomb attack and of lying in wait to get footage. "I told
them to<br>
review my tapes, that it was clear I had arrived thirty or forty
minutes<br>
after the blast. They told me I was a liar," says Hassan.<br><br>
>From Baquba, Hassan says he was taken to the military base at
Baghdad<br>
International Airport, held in a bathroom for two days, then flown
hooded<br>
and bound to Tikrit. After two more days in another bathroom, he was
loaded<br>
onto a five-truck convoy of de-tainees and shipped south to Abu Ghraib,
a<br>
Saddam-built prison that now serves as the American military's main<br>
detention center and holds about 13,000 captives.<br><br>
Once inside the sprawling prison, Hassan says, he was greeted by US
soldiers<br>
who sang "Happy Birthday" to him through his tight plastic
hood, stripped<br>
him naked and addressed him only as "Al Jazeera,"
"boy" or "bitch." He was<br>
forced to stand hooded, bound and naked for eleven hours in the
bitter<br>
autumn night air; when he fell, soldiers kicked his legs to get him
up<br>
again. In the morning, Hassan says, he was made to wear a dirty red
jumpsuit<br>
that was covered with someone else's fresh vomit and interrogated by
two<br>
Americans in civilian clothes. They made the usual accusations that
Hassan<br>
and Al Jazeera were in cahoots with "terrorists."<br><br>
While most Abu Ghraib prisoners are held in large barracks-like tents
in<br>
open-air compounds surrounded by razor wire, Hassan says he was locked in
a<br>
high-security isolation unit of tiny cells. Down the tier from him was
an<br>
old woman who sobbed incessantly and a mentally deranged 13-year-old
girl<br>
who would scream and shriek until the American guards released her into
the<br>
hall, where she would run up and down; exhausted, she would
eventually<br>
return to her cell voluntarily. Hassan says that all other prisoners in
the<br>
unit, mostly men, were ordered to remain silent or risk being punished
with<br>
denial of food, water and light.<br><br>
Elsewhere in Abu Ghraib, Hassan's colleague Suheib Badr Darwish was also
in<br>
lockup. He had been arrested in Samarra on November 18 and, according to
a<br>
colleague of his at Al Jazeera, Darwish was badly beaten by US
troops.<br><br>
Meanwhile, on the outside, the network hired a top-flight lawyer named
Hider<br>
Nur Al Mulha to start working Hassan's case through Iraq's largely
wrecked<br>
court system. Eventually Hassan was brought before a panel of the
Iraqi<br>
Governing Council's freshly minted Federal Supreme Court, which was set
up<br>
alongside its war crimes tribunal for trying the likes of Saddam Hussein
and<br>
his henchmen. Salah Hassan, journalist, was the subject of the Court's
first<br>
hearing. He was released for lack of evidence. After three more days in
Abu<br>
Ghraib, this time in one of the prison's open-air camps, Hassan, still
in<br>
his vomit-stained red jumpsuit, was dumped on a street just outside
Baghdad<br>
on December 18. Darwish was released more than a month later, on January
25,<br>
again for lack of evidence.<br><br>
Military officials did not respond to my requests for a tour of Abu
Ghraib,<br>
nor were most of my numerous calls and e-mails about the cases of Hassan
and<br>
Darwish returned. The one military spokesperson who did address
relations<br>
with Al Jazeera on the record was Lieut. Col. Daniel Williams of
the<br>
Coalition Joint Task Force 7; his comment was, "Al Jazeera is a
welcome<br>
guest and professional news organization." As one source at the
civilian<br>
Coalition Provisional Authority explained, "Anything about Al
Jazeera is<br>
very sensitive, so any on-the-record comment would have to come from
pretty<br>
far up in the hierarchy. Only a very senior person can deal with
this." But<br>
repeated calls to the CPA's senior spokesperson, Dan Senor, produced
no<br>
response.<br><br>
Disturbingly, these two cases fit into a larger pattern of US
government<br>
hostility toward Al Jazeera, provoked by the network's tough reporting
on<br>
the Iraqi occupation. And this hostility is best viewed in the context
of<br>
the escalating, multimillion-dollar regional media war between Al
Jazeera<br>
and the US government.<br><br>
Donald Rumsfeld has called Al Jazeera's coverage "outrageous"
and<br>
"inexcusably biased" and implied that he'd like to see the
satellite channel<br>
thrown out of Iraq. So far the American military has bombed the
network's<br>
offices in both Baghdad and Kabul, killing one employee; arrested
and<br>
briefly jailed twenty-one of Al Jazeera's reporters; and now has
imprisoned<br>
and allegedly abused and humiliated Hassan and Darwish in ways that the
UN<br>
convention on such matters would consider torture.<br><br>
At the same time that the US military is harassing Al Jazeera
reporters,<br>
other parts of the US government, including the State Department,
are<br>
attempting to answer Al Jazeera in its own language and format. On
February<br>
14 the United States launched a nominally independent, US-funded<br>
Arabic-language satellite channel called Al Hurra, which means "the
free<br>
one." The purpose of this effort is to address the lack of popular
support<br>
for the US occupation in Iraq, as well as the deepening crisis of
American<br>
legitimacy throughout the Arab world; polls from the region indicate
that<br>
more and more people hate the United States every day.<br><br>
Unlike other US-funded forays into Arabic-language media, Al Hurra, with
an<br>
annual budget of $62 million, could be quite sophisticated and
possibly<br>
effective in reshaping the beliefs of the politically important and<br>
demographically dominant Arab youth scene. The new channel has a stable
of<br>
proven Arab journalists--one senior producer is a Palestinian who
was<br>
poached from Al Jazeera, while the channel's top managers are
Lebanese<br>
Christians with proven journalistic track records. On the other hand,
the<br>
channel is based in Virginia, includes Colin Powell on its board of<br>
directors and its first broadcast was a pre-recorded interview with
George<br>
W. Bush--none of which bode well for winning Arab hearts and
minds.<br><br>
Regardless of how well Al Hurra fares, Al Jazeera faces increasing
obstacles<br>
to its reporting in Iraq as its correspondents are harassed,
arrested,<br>
abused and killed by US troops.<br><br>
So far, Al Jazeera's management has kept rather quiet about the cases
of<br>
Hassan and Darwish. When I interviewed Ceddah Abdelhak, the
channel's<br>
general manager in Baghdad, he insisted that the channel had publicized
the<br>
cases, and he was clearly upset about the bad treatment of his staff.
But<br>
other journalists in Baghdad say that Al Jazeera is under so much
pressure<br>
from the Americans that its owners in Qatar are afraid the channel could
be<br>
expelled from Iraq if they push too hard on any issue that upsets the
CPA.<br><br>
This is not an unfounded fear. According to sources that insisted
on<br>
anonymity, the coalition called the network's managers in Iraq to
the<br>
Republican Palace in Baghdad for a meeting in late January, at which
the<br>
CPA's head counsel threatened Al Jazeera with expulsion if the network
did<br>
not stop "destabilizing the occupation" with its tough
reporting and intense<br>
editorial criticism. Allegedly, the CPA attorney explained that the<br>
coalition needed no legal justification to expel Al Jazeera and implied
that<br>
US authorities were even pressuring the Emir of Qatar, Hamad bin
Khalifa<br>
Al-Thani, to rein in Al Jazeera, which, though run independently, is
owned<br>
by the government of Qatar.<br><br>
Another Al Jazeera adversary is the US-appointed Iraqi Governing
Council,<br>
which recently barred the network from covering its sparsely
attended<br>
meetings. The IGC was much more aggressive with the next most
prominent<br>
Arabic-language network, Al Arabiya, which it threw out of Iraq for
two<br>
months beginning in late December of last year. During that suspension,
Al<br>
Arabiya's equipment was seized and its journalists faced $1,000 fines
or<br>
possibly a year in prison if they violated the sanction. The
network's<br>
offense had been "incitement to murder" by playing a taped
message from<br>
Saddam Hussein, who was then in hiding.<br><br>
Arabs working for other media outlets have also been harassed by US
troops.<br>
Mazen Dana of Reuters was shot and killed by an American soldier outside
Abu<br>
Ghraib prison in August. Then, in January, elements of the 82nd
Airborne<br>
Division stationed in Falluja jailed and allegedly beat a three-man<br>
Arab-language crew, also from Reuters. The news agency immediately lodged
a<br>
formal complaint with the US military, charging that its journalists
had<br>
been abused while in detention. A Reuters freelancer told me that one of
the<br>
journalists was later hospitalized.<br><br>
Travel the roads of the so-called Sunni Triangle looking for action, and
one<br>
can get plenty of comment about Al Jazeera from US troops who are lower
down<br>
in the ranks. More than once I have met soldiers in the field who respond
to<br>
requests for interviews or permission to enter their area of
operations<br>
with, "As long as you're not Al Jazeera." One officer with the
82nd Airborne<br>
in Falluja claims that Al Jazeera filmed an attack on his unit in which
one<br>
of his sergeants was impaled with debris from a bomb and then burned
to<br>
death in the ensuing fire.<br><br>
"We knew something was wrong when we saw people with cameras,"
explained the<br>
young lieutenant with a controlled bitterness. "Later my guys said
they saw<br>
footage of it on Al Jazeera." When I pushed the lieutenant and his
soldiers<br>
on this point, it was unclear whether the men had actually seen footage
of<br>
the attack or just of the aftermath, and whether it was even on Al
Jazeera.<br><br>
A few events like this and the hatred for Al Jazeera builds into a<br>
slow-burning passion among the grunts. Stories of Al Jazeera's perfidy
now<br>
circulate among the troops with the tenacity of urban myths. And while
Al<br>
Jazeera programming includes Western-style fashion shows and
mainstream<br>
business news, it also gives ample time to the views of anti-American
Arab<br>
nationalists and political Islamists who hate and excoriate the
occupation.<br>
Yet as several well-placed sources explained, while the fixers and
reporters<br>
of Al Jazeera are connected enough and numerous enough that some of
them<br>
could probably work with the resistance to film attacks as they happen,
they<br>
do not, both because they fear expulsion and because of explicit orders
from<br>
the network's highest echelons. Indeed, the coalition has not documented
a<br>
single instance of an Al Jazeera journalist conspiring in an attack on
the<br>
occupation.<br><br>
The pressure on Al Jazeera may be having the desired effect. Average
Iraqis<br>
increasingly dismiss its news as soft on the occupation. Al
Jazeera's<br>
general manager himself says the network's coverage is now "more
balanced"<br>
than it once was, because it gives increased airtime to US claims
of<br>
steadily increasing peace, progress and prosperity. Al Jazeera's
main<br>
spokesperson, Jihad Ballout, was more circumspect in his comments
on<br>
relations with the Americans in Iraq. "This war has been very hard
for all<br>
of the press to cover. This is to some extent due to the security concern
of<br>
the US, the UK and the Iraqis, but it seems that Al Jazeera has gotten
more<br>
than its fair share of attention. While we understand the security
concerns,<br>
we believe the media should have the space to do its mandated
job."<br><br>
Today Hassan is back at work, as is Darwish. Al Jazeera is still in
action,<br>
and Al Hurra is the public face of America's ideological offensive in
the<br>
Middle East. Viewed from outside, the media environment in Iraq looks
open<br>
and fair. But the continual abuse of Arab journalists is the more
accurate<br>
core sample. Reading this political sediment one sees that the
American<br>
project in Iraq is made of imperial ambition, not liberty and
democracy.<br>
More broadly, the intimidation and mistreatment of Al Jazeera by the
world's<br>
most powerful army should be seen as a threat to press freedom
everywhere.<br><br>
<br>
about<br>
Christian Parenti<br>
Christian Parenti is the author, most recently, of The Soft
Cage:<br>
Surveillance in America From Slavery to the War on Terror (Basic) and
a<br>
fellow at City University of New York's Center for Place, Culture,
and<br>
Politics.Christian Parenti is a visiting fellow at CUNY's Center for
Place,<br>
Culture, and Politics. His book The Freedom: Shadows and Hallucinations
in<br>
Occupied Iraq is due out from the New Press this fall.<br><br>
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