Tuesday, December 12, 2006

This is tragic and horrible. An AP cameraman executed by insurgents in Iraq while doing his job.

Aswan Ahmed Lutfallah, father of two small children, died because he was doing something the insurgents didn't want him to do. He could have stayed in the garage, where he was getting his car fixed. He died running toward action, which is what good newsmen do. He died for a paycheck, and maybe, if he was lucky, for something he believed in.

This should not be confused with the AP's other problems in Iraq. Photographer Bilal Hussein, who operated with insurgents freely because he did what they wanted him to. Numerous other AP stringers and staffers who are complicit in reporting war crimes the U.S. military and Iraqi police say never happened, citing a source they say does not exist.

The Pentagon has brushed off a request from a journalist organization seeking more information and a decision on Bilal Hussein, an Associated Press photographer held for six months in Iraq without formal charges.

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman, in a letter to the Committee to Protect Journalists, did not provide details about why Iraqi photographer Bilal Hussein continues to be held without charges at a U.S.-run prison camp. He instead repeated the military's longstanding assertion that it detained Hussein under authority of U.N. resolutions and in accord with the Geneva Conventions.

[...]

Whitman, in his response, said Hussein has been notified and given an opportunity to provide information for consideration in at least two of three military reviews of his detention.

But an AP executive said that was true only for one of the three hearings — and the notice came after the hearing took place.

"Bilal Hussein was not aware that any of these took place," said Dave Tomlin, AP's associate general counsel. "So he obviously wasn't present for any of them, nor was he represented at any of them."

"We regard all these so-called due process events as legally meaningless, and in fact consider it laughable that the term 'due process' would even be applied to them," Tomlin said.

[...]

Hussein is one of an estimated 14,000 people detained as suspected security threats by the U.S. military worldwide; some 13,000 of them are in Iraq. Few are charged with a specific crime or given a chance before any court or tribunal to argue for their freedom.