February 17, 2005
Shooting the Messenger
by Jeremy Scahill

One of the most powerful executives in the cable news business, CNN's
Eason Jordan, was brought down after he spoke out of school during a
panel discussion at the World Economic Forum in January. In a rare
moment of candor, Jordan reportedly said that the US military had
targeted a dozen journalists who had been killed in Iraq. The comments
quickly ignited a firestorm on the Internet, fueled by right-wing
bloggers, that led to Jordan's recanting, apologizing and ultimately
resigning after twenty-three years at the network, "in an effort to
prevent CNN from being unfairly tarnished by the controversy."

But the real controversy here should not be over Jordan's comments. The
controversy ought to be over the unconscionable silence in the United
States about the military's repeated killing of journalists in Iraq.

Consider the events of April 8, 2003. Early that morning, Al Jazeera
correspondent Tareq Ayyoub was reporting from the network's Baghdad
bureau. He was providing an eyewitness account of a fierce battle
between US and Iraqi forces along the banks of the Tigris. As he stood
on the roof of the building, a US warplane swooped in and fired a
rocket at Al Jazeera's office. Ayyoub was killed instantly. US Central
Command released a statement claiming, "Coalition forces came under
significant enemy fire from the building where the Al-Jazeera
journalists were working." No evidence was ever produced to bolster
this claim. Al Jazeera, which gave the US military its coordinates
weeks before the invasion began, says it received assurances a day
before Ayyoub's death that the network would not be attacked.

At noon on April 8, a US Abrams tank fired at the Palestine Hotel, home
and office to more than 100 unembedded international journalists
operating in Baghdad at the time. The shell smashed into the
fifteenth-floor Reuters office, killing two cameramen, Reuters's Taras
Protsyuk and Jos=E9 Couso of Spain's Telecinco. The United States again
claimed that its forces had come under enemy fire and were acting in
self-defense. This claim was contradicted by scores of journalists who
were in the hotel and by a French TV crew that filmed the attack. In
its report on the incident, the Committee to Protect Journalists
asserted that "Pentagon officials, as well as commanders on the ground
in Baghdad, knew that the Palestine Hotel was full of international
journalists."

In a chilling statement at the end of that day in Iraq, then-Pentagon
spokesperson Victoria Clarke spelled out the Pentagon's policy on
journalists not embedded with US troops. She warned them that Baghdad
"is not a safe place. You should not be there."

Eason Jordan's comment was hardly a radical declaration. He was
expressing a common view among news organizations around the world. "We
have had three deaths, and they were all non-embedded, non-coalition
nationals and they were all at the hands of the US military, and the
reaction of the US authorities in each case was that they were somehow
justified," David Schlesinger, Reuters's global managing editor, said
in November. "What is the US's position on nonembeds? Are nonembedded
journalists fair game?" One of the BBC's top news anchors, Nik Gowing,
said recently that he was "speak[ing] for a large number of news
organizations, many of whom are not really talking publicly about this
at the moment," when he made this statement about the dangers facing
reporters in Iraq: "The trouble is that a lot of the
military--particularly the American...military--do not want us there.
And they make it very uncomfortable for us to work. And I think that
this...is leading to security forces in some instances feeling it is
legitimate to target us with deadly force and with impunity."

The US military has yet to discipline a single soldier for the killing
of a journalist in Iraq. While some incidents are classified as
"ongoing investigation[s]," most have been labeled self-defense or
mistakes. Some are even classified as "justified," like the killing of
Reuters cameraman Mazen Dana, shot near Abu Ghraib prison when his
camera was allegedly mistaken for a rocket-propelled grenade launcher.
Also "justified" was the killing of Al Arabiya TV's Mazen al-Tumeizi,
blown apart by a US missile as he reported on a burning US armored
vehicle on Baghdad's Haifa Street.

There have also been several questionable killings of journalists at US
military checkpoints, such as the March 2004 shooting deaths of Ali
Abdel-Aziz and Ali al-Khatib of Al Arabiya. The Pentagon said the
soldiers who shot the journalists acted within the "rules of
engagement." And Reuters freelancer Dhia Najim was killed by US fire
while filming resistance fighters in November 2004. "We did kill him,"
an unnamed military official told the New York Times. "He was out with
the bad guys. He was there with them, they attacked, and we fired back
and hit him."

The military has faced almost no public outcry at home about these
killings. In fact, comments by Ann Cooper of the Committee to Protect
Journalists have been used to discredit Jordan's statement at Davos.
"From our standpoint," Cooper was widely quoted as saying, "journalists
are not being targeted by the US military in Iraq." But as CPJ's Joel
Campagna acknowledges, the Pentagon has not been cooperative in the
investigations of many of these journalist killings. The fact is that
CPJ doesn't know that the military has not targeted journalists, and
there are many facts that suggest that it has. These include not only
the events of April 8, 2003, but credible accounts of journalists being
tortured by the US military in Iraq, such as Salah Hassan and Suheib
Badr Darwish of Al Jazeera [see Christian Parenti, "Al Jazeera Goes to
Jail," March 29, 2004] and three Reuters staffers who say they were
brutalized by US forces for seventy-two hours after they filmed a
crashed US helicopter near Falluja in January 2004. According to news
reports, the journalists were blindfolded, forced to stand for hours
with their arms raised and threatened with sexual abuse. A family
member of one journalist said US interrogators stripped him naked and
forced a shoe into his mouth.

In many of these cases, there is a common thread: The journalists,
mostly Arabs, were reporting on places or incidents that the military
may not have wanted the world to see--military vehicles in flames,
helicopters shot down, fierce resistance against the "liberation"
forces, civilian deaths.

In his resignation letter, Jordan wrote, "I never meant to imply U.S.
forces acted with ill intent when U.S. forces accidentally killed
journalists." The families and colleagues of the slain journalists
believe otherwise. And it is up to all journalists, not just those in
Europe and the Middle East, to honor the victims by holding their
killers responsible. In Spain, the family of cameraman Jos=E9 Couso has
filed a lawsuit against the US soldiers who killed him, and they plan
to travel to the United States for the anniversary of his death this
spring. Will any network have the courage to put them on the air?

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i...07&s=3Dscahill


March 11, 2004
Al Jazeera Goes to Jail
by Christian Parenti


EDITOR'S NOTE: After this story about the abuse of Arab journalists by
the US military in Iraq went to press, there were several further
developments. On March 18, US troops in Baghdad killed two TV
journalists from the Al Arabiya network in what appears to have been an
overreaction at a checkpoint: Ali Khatib, 34, a reporter, and Ali Abdul
Aziz, 35, a cameraman. Two days later, some thirty Arab journalists
walked out in protest at a press conference with US Secretary of State
Colin Powell, who had made a surprise trip to Iraq. On March 29, the US
military acknowledged it was responsible for the killings but held that
the incident was "an accident" and that the soldiers had acted "within
the rules of engagement." Around the same time, six US soldiers were
criminally charged with abusing inmates at the US military's main
prison in Iraq, Abu Ghraib, where the Al Jazeera journalists profiled
below were held. Meanwhile, the Coalition Provisional Authority shut
down a newspaper run by supporters of militant Shiite cleric Muqtada
al-Sadr, drawing cries of protest and accusations of hypocrisy.

Salah Hassan looks sad and very tired. The Al Jazeera cameraman, a
33-year-old father of two, is recounting his tale of incarceration in a
soft and matter-of-fact tone. Sipping tea in the lobby of the hotel
that serves as Al Jazeera's Baghdad bureau, he explains how on November
3 of last year he raced to the site of a roadside bomb attack on a US
military convoy in Dialah, near the eastern Iraqi city of Baquba. While
he was interviewing people at the scene, US troops who had previously
taken photographs of Hassan at other events arrested him, took him to a
police station, interrogated him and repeatedly accused the cameraman
of knowing in advance about the bomb attack and of lying in wait to get
footage. "I told them to review my tapes, that it was clear I had
arrived thirty or forty minutes after the blast. They told me I was a
liar," says Hassan.

From Baquba, Hassan says he was taken to the military base at Baghdad
International Airport, held in a bathroom for two days, then flown
hooded and bound to Tikrit. After two more days in another bathroom, he
was loaded onto a five-truck convoy of de-tainees and shipped south to
Abu Ghraib, a Saddam-built prison that now serves as the American
military's main detention center and holds about 13,000 captives.

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Once inside the sprawling prison, Hassan says, he was greeted by US
soldiers who sang "Happy Birthday" to him through his tight plastic
hood, stripped him naked and addressed him only as "Al Jazeera," "boy"
or "bitch." He was forced to stand hooded, bound and naked for eleven
hours in the bitter autumn night air; when he fell, soldiers kicked his
legs to get him up again. In the morning, Hassan says, he was made to
wear a dirty red jumpsuit that was covered with someone else's fresh
vomit and interrogated by two Americans in civilian clothes. They made
the usual accusations that Hassan and Al Jazeera were in cahoots with
"terrorists."

While most Abu Ghraib prisoners are held in large barracks-like tents
in open-air compounds surrounded by razor wire, Hassan says he was
locked in a high-security isolation unit of tiny cells. Down the tier
from him was an old woman who sobbed incessantly and a mentally
deranged 13-year-old girl who would scream and shriek until the
American guards released her into the hall, where she would run up and
down; exhausted, she would eventually return to her cell voluntarily.
Hassan says that all other prisoners in the unit, mostly men, were
ordered to remain silent or risk being punished with denial of food,
water and light.

Elsewhere in Abu Ghraib, Hassan's colleague Suheib Badr Darwish was
also in lockup. He had been arrested in Samarra on November 18 and,
according to a colleague of his at Al Jazeera, Darwish was badly beaten
by US troops.

Meanwhile, on the outside, the network hired a top-flight lawyer named
Hider Nur Al Mulha to start working Hassan's case through Iraq's
largely wrecked court system. Eventually Hassan was brought before a
panel of the Iraqi Governing Council's freshly minted Federal Supreme
Court, which was set up alongside its war crimes tribunal for trying
the likes of Saddam Hussein and his henchmen. Salah Hassan, journalist,
was the subject of the Court's first hearing. He was released for lack
of evidence. After three more days in Abu Ghraib, this time in one of
the prison's open-air camps, Hassan, still in his vomit-stained red
jumpsuit, was dumped on a street just outside Baghdad on December 18.
Darwish was released more than a month later, on January 25, again for
lack of evidence.

Military officials did not respond to my requests for a tour of Abu
Ghraib, nor were most of my numerous calls and e-mails about the cases
of Hassan and Darwish returned. The one military spokesperson who did
address relations with Al Jazeera on the record was Lieut. Col. Daniel
Williams of the Coalition Joint Task Force 7; his comment was, "Al
Jazeera is a welcome guest and professional news organization." As one
source at the civilian Coalition Provisional Authority explained,
"Anything about Al Jazeera is very sensitive, so any on-the-record
comment would have to come from pretty far up in the hierarchy. Only a
very senior person can deal with this." But repeated calls to the CPA's
senior spokesperson, Dan Senor, produced no response.

Disturbingly, these two cases fit into a larger pattern of US
government hostility toward Al Jazeera, provoked by the network's tough
reporting on the Iraqi occupation. And this hostility is best viewed in
the context of the escalating, multimillion-dollar regional media war
between Al Jazeera and the US government.

Donald Rumsfeld has called Al Jazeera's coverage "outrageous" and
"inexcusably biased" and implied that he'd like to see the satellite
channel thrown out of Iraq. So far the American military has bombed the
network's offices in both Baghdad and Kabul, killing one employee;
arrested and briefly jailed twenty-one of Al Jazeera's reporters; and
now has imprisoned and allegedly abused and humiliated Hassan and
Darwish in ways that the UN convention on such matters would consider
torture.

At the same time that the US military is harassing Al Jazeera
reporters, other parts of the US government, including the State
Department, are attempting to answer Al Jazeera in its own language and
format. On February 14 the United States launched a nominally
independent, US-funded Arabic-language satellite channel called Al
Hurra, which means "the free one." The purpose of this effort is to
address the lack of popular support for the US occupation in Iraq, as
well as the deepening crisis of American legitimacy throughout the Arab
world; polls from the region indicate that more and more people hate
the United States every day.

Unlike other US-funded forays into Arabic-language media, Al Hurra,
with an annual budget of $62 million, could be quite sophisticated and
possibly effective in reshaping the beliefs of the politically
important and demographically dominant Arab youth scene. The new
channel has a stable of proven Arab journalists--one senior producer is
a Palestinian who was poached from Al Jazeera, while the channel's top
managers are Lebanese Christians with proven journalistic track
records. On the other hand, the channel is based in Virginia, includes
Colin Powell on its board of directors and its first broadcast was a
pre-recorded interview with George W. Bush--none of which bode well for
winning Arab hearts and minds.

Regardless of how well Al Hurra fares, Al Jazeera faces increasing
obstacles to its reporting in Iraq as its correspondents are harassed,
arrested, abused and killed by US troops.

So far, Al Jazeera's management has kept rather quiet about the cases
of Hassan and Darwish. When I interviewed Ceddah Abdelhak, the
channel's general manager in Baghdad, he insisted that the channel had
publicized the cases, and he was clearly upset about the bad treatment
of his staff. But other journalists in Baghdad say that Al Jazeera is
under so much pressure from the Americans that its owners in Qatar are
afraid the channel could be expelled from Iraq if they push too hard on
any issue that upsets the CPA.

This is not an unfounded fear. According to sources that insisted on
anonymity, the coalition called the network's managers in Iraq to the
Republican Palace in Baghdad for a meeting in late January, at which
the CPA's head counsel threatened Al Jazeera with expulsion if the
network did not stop "destabilizing the occupation" with its tough
reporting and intense editorial criticism. Allegedly, the CPA attorney
explained that the coalition needed no legal justification to expel Al
Jazeera and implied that US authorities were even pressuring the Emir
of Qatar, Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, to rein in Al Jazeera, which,
though run independently, is owned by the government of Qatar.

Another Al Jazeera adversary is the US-appointed Iraqi Governing
Council, which recently barred the network from covering its sparsely
attended meetings. The IGC was much more aggressive with the next most
prominent Arabic-language network, Al Arabiya, which it threw out of
Iraq for two months beginning in late December of last year. During
that suspension, Al Arabiya's equipment was seized and its journalists
faced $1,000 fines or possibly a year in prison if they violated the
sanction. The network's offense had been "incitement to murder" by
playing a taped message from Saddam Hussein, who was then in hiding.

Arabs working for other media outlets have also been harassed by US
troops. Mazen Dana of Reuters was shot and killed by an American
soldier outside Abu Ghraib prison in August. Then, in January, elements
of the 82nd Airborne Division stationed in Falluja jailed and allegedly
beat a three-man Arab-language crew, also from Reuters. The news agency
immediately lodged a formal complaint with the US military, charging
that its journalists had been abused while in detention. A Reuters
freelancer told me that one of the journalists was later hospitalized.

Travel the roads of the so-called Sunni Triangle looking for action,
and one can get plenty of comment about Al Jazeera from US troops who
are lower down in the ranks. More than once I have met soldiers in the
field who respond to requests for interviews or permission to enter
their area of operations with, "As long as you're not Al Jazeera." One
officer with the 82nd Airborne in Falluja claims that Al Jazeera filmed
an attack on his unit in which one of his sergeants was impaled with
debris from a bomb and then burned to death in the ensuing fire.

"We knew something was wrong when we saw people with cameras,"
explained the young lieutenant with a controlled bitterness. "Later my
guys said they saw footage of it on Al Jazeera." When I pushed the
lieutenant and his soldiers on this point, it was unclear whether the
men had actually seen footage of the attack or just of the aftermath,
and whether it was even on Al Jazeera.

A few events like this and the hatred for Al Jazeera builds into a
slow-burning passion among the grunts. Stories of Al Jazeera's perfidy
now circulate among the troops with the tenacity of urban myths. And
while Al Jazeera programming includes Western-style fashion shows and
mainstream business news, it also gives ample time to the views of
anti-American Arab nationalists and political Islamists who hate and
excoriate the occupation. Yet as several well-placed sources explained,
while the fixers and reporters of Al Jazeera are connected enough and
numerous enough that some of them could probably work with the
resistance to film attacks as they happen, they do not, both because
they fear expulsion and because of explicit orders from the network's
highest echelons. Indeed, the coalition has not documented a single
instance of an Al Jazeera journalist conspiring in an attack on the
occupation.

The pressure on Al Jazeera may be having the desired effect. Average
Iraqis increasingly dismiss its news as soft on the occupation. Al
Jazeera's general manager himself says the network's coverage is now
"more balanced" than it once was, because it gives increased airtime to
US claims of steadily increasing peace, progress and prosperity. Al
Jazeera's main spokesperson, Jihad Ballout, was more circumspect in his
comments on relations with the Americans in Iraq. "This war has been
very hard for all of the press to cover. This is to some extent due to
the security concern of the US, the UK and the Iraqis, but it seems
that Al Jazeera has gotten more than its fair share of attention. While
we understand the security concerns, we believe the media should have
the space to do its mandated job."

Today Hassan is back at work, as is Darwish. Al Jazeera is still in
action, and Al Hurra is the public face of America's ideological
offensive in the Middle East. Viewed from outside, the media
environment in Iraq looks open and fair. But the continual abuse of
Arab journalists is the more accurate core sample. Reading this
political sediment one sees that the American project in Iraq is made
of imperial ambition, not liberty and democracy. More broadly, the
intimidation and mistreatment of Al Jazeera by the world's most
powerful army should be seen as a threat to press freedom everywhere.


http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i...29&s=3Dparenti