If Iran Freed Roxanna Saberi, Why Won't the US Release Journalist Ibrahim Jassam?

Last week, we reported
on how retired US Army Colonel Ralph Peters penned an essay for a
leading neocon group calling for future US military attacks on media
outlets and journalists. Writing for the journal of the the Jewish
Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), Col. Peters wrote,
"future wars may require censorship, news blackouts and, ultimately,
military attacks on the partisan media... a media establishment that has
forgotten any sense of sober patriotism may find that it has become
tomorrow's conventional wisdom. The point of all this is simple: Win. In warfare, nothing else matters. If you cannot win clean, win dirty. But win."

Of
course, what Col. Peters is advocating is not new, nor does he need to
propose it as a policy for "future wars." It is already a de facto US policy
to target journalists. The US has consistently attacked journalists and
media organizations in modern wars. In the 1999 US-led NATO bombing of
Yugoslavia, General Wesley Clark, then the Supreme Allied Commander of
NATO, ordered
an airstrike on Radio Television Serbia, killing 16 media workers,
including make-up artists and technical staff, an action Amnesty
International labeled a "war crime." Richard Holbrooke, who is
currently Obama's point man on Afghanistan and Pakistan, praised that bombing at the time.

The US bombed
Al Jazeera in the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, attacked it multiple
times in the 2003 Iraq invasion, and killed Jazeera correspondent Tarek
Ayoub. On April 8, 2003, 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 Jose Couso of Spain's Telecinco. 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."

Last week, a Spanish judge reinstated
charges against three US soldiers in Couso's killing, citing new
evidence, including eyewitness testimony contradicting official US
claims that soldiers were responding to enemy fire from the hotel. One
year ago, former Army Sergeant Adrienne Kinne told
Democracy Now! she saw the Palestine Hotel on a military target list
and said she frequently intercepted calls from journalists staying
there.

As I have reported
previously, Reuters cameraman Mazen Dana was shot by US forces near Abu
Ghraib prison when his camera was allegedly mistaken for a
rocket-propelled grenade launcher. The US listed as "justified" 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 in Iraq, 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
Obama administration has recently paid a lot of lip service to freedom
of the press, particularly around the case of Iranian-American
journalist Roxanna Saberi, who was released May 11 from an Iranian
prison. Yet, the US military continues to hold journalists as prisoners
without charges or rights in neighboring Iraq. Ibrahim Jassam, a
cameraman and photographer for Reuters has been a US prisoner in Iraq
since last September despite an Iraqi court's order last year that he
be freed.

As The Los Angeles Times reported:

His case represents the latest in a dozen detentions the
New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists has documented since
2001.

No formal accusations have been made against Jassam, and
an Iraqi court ordered in November that he be released for lack of
evidence. But the U.S. military continues to hold him, saying it has
intelligence that he is "a high security threat," according to Maj.
Neal Fisher, spokesman for detainee affairs.

The Obama
administration harshly criticized Iran for its imprisonment of Roxana
Saberi, the U.S.-Iranian journalist who was convicted of espionage and
sentenced to eight years in prison before being freed last week.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton criticized Iran's treatment
of Saberi as "non-transparent, unpredictable and arbitrary."

Washington also has called upon North Korea to expedite the trial of two U.S. journalists being held there on spying charges.

Yet
the United States has routinely used the arbitrary powers it assumed
after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorism attacks to hold without charge
journalists in Iraq, as well as Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Committee
to Protect Journalists points out.

None of the detained
journalists has been convicted of any charge, said Joel Simon,
executive director of the group, undermining the United States
reputation when it comes to criticizing other countries on issues of
press freedom.

"The U.S. has a record of holding journalists for
long periods of time without due process and without explanation," he
said. "Its standing would be improved if it addressed this issue."

Reuters has expressed disappointment at Jassam's detention and has said there is no evidence against him.

[...]

Jassam was detained without a warrant "as the result of his activity with a known insurgent organization," Fisher alleged.

No
evidence against Jassam was presented at his court hearing in November,
Fisher said, because the military intelligence against him had not yet
been verified.

Under the wartime rules in place at the time, he
said, "there was no requirement to link the military intelligence with
rule of law type of evidentiary procedures."

After the court
ordered Jassam's release, Fisher said, fresh evidence came to light
that suggested he was a "high security threat."

This reminds me of how the US held Al Jazeera journalist Sami al
Hajj at Guantanamo from December 2001 to May 2008. He alleges he was
tortured at Guantanamo and that he had been interrogated over 130 times
(as of 2005) with his interrogators insisting in 125 of those
interviews that he link al Jazeera to terrorism and Al Qaeda, which he
wouldn't. "He is completely innocent," his lawyer Clive Stafford Smith
said during al Hajj's imprisonment. "He is about as much of a terrorist
as my granddad. The only reason he has been treated like he has is
because he is an Al Jazeera journalist. The Americans have tried to
make him an informant with the goal of getting him to say that Al
Jazeera is linked to Al Qaida." Al Hajj was eventually released after
an international campaign and the tenacious work of his lawyers.

When you hold up Iran's handling of Roxanna Saberi against the US
handling of Jassam, the comparison is striking. So too is the level of
outcry from other journalists. Loud voices demanded Saberi's freedom. Websites were established. Some 400 people reportedly joined a hunger strike in solidarity with Saberi. The same is not true for Jassam, who has spent many months in US custody without charges.
It is time for journalists, particularly US journalists, to break their
silence and demand Jassam's release. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad released
Saberi pretty swiftly after her arrest on espionage charges (and
subsequent conviction and sentencing). Obama should follow Iran's
example and release Ibrahim Jassam. But, in the absence of outcry and
protest from other journalists, Obama has little to lose by ignoring
Jassam's case.