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Thursday, March 11, 2004Al Jazeera Goes
to Jail by Christian
Parenti SALAH Hassan looks sad and very
tired. The Al Jazeera cameraman, a
33-year-old father of two, is recounting his tale
of incarceration
[by the
American forces] 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 detainees 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. 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.
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