Editorial in the Intelligencer, Doylestown, PA, November 3, 2006

 

Let him go

U.S. military holds AP photographer without charge 

By now we're all familiar with how the U.S. military, with full support of the government, has been playing fast and loose with the constitutional rights afforded those accused of a crime. This is being done because we are a nation at war, so our leaders tell us, and such things as the writ of habeas corpus don't apply to suspected terrorists.

 

Estimates of those being held worldwide by the military but not formally charged run as high as 14,000, the vast majority in Iraq. Among them is Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein, who has been imprisoned since April because military people believe he is a security threat. Charges have never been filed, however, and Hussein has not been afforded a public hearing.

 

The facts in the case would strongly indicate that Hussein was taken into custody for just doing his job: showing in pictures exactly what is going on in Iraq as the United States tries desperately to establish a democratic government there. According to the Associated Press, a handful of Hussein's photographs were images of still-burning wreckage, suggesting to the military not that Hussein is a good photographer who arrives quickly on the scene of a news event but that he was somehow in collusion with the insurgents who confound U.S. efforts at every turn. Ignored, said the AP, was [the fact] that most of Hussein's pictures produced for AP clients around the world have shown the effects of the war on the people of Iraq, and that Hussein, until his imprisonment, continually exposed himself to danger to bring his story home.

 

Throwing people into prison for specious reasons and keeping them virtually incommunicado is what other governments do; it is the antithesis of what the United States supposedly stands for and is what we're fighting against, diplomatically if not militarily, not only in Iraq but in other world hot spots. The war on terror is being used as an excuse to chip away at American freedoms and suspend certain rights entirely. In addition, the seizure of a journalist by U.S. forces denies the people who rely on the Associated Press an expert witness to the carnage taking place daily in Iraq.

 

We know from experience that U.S. assumptions about the guilt or innocence of individuals is as often wrong as it is right. Without firm proof of Hussein's alleged ties to terrorism, the military is taking the easy way out. It's a case of "round up the usual suspects." But the United States isn't supposed to operate like that.

 

The presidents of the Associated Press Managing Editors, the American Society of Newspaper Editors and the Associated Press Photo Managers have sent a jointly signed letter to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld calling for the release of Bilal Hussein. We strongly concur. Unless and until the government can publicly show just cause for keeping Hussein locked up, his imprisonment is unwarranted, unjust and another example of how the threat of terrorism has turned the forces of freedom into a cowering goon squad for which intimidation and suspect legal practices have taken on the rule of law.