Tuesday, January 17, 2006

Reaction times


/ iraq / journalists / credentials /
The intelligence abilities of the occupation forces in Iraq are breathtaking:

Two journalists working for Reuters in Iraq have been freed by the US military after being held without charge for several months.

Ali al-Mashhadani, a television cameraman who was arrested in August 2005, and Majed Hameed, a correspondent for Reuters and broadcaster al-Arabiya who was detained in September 2005, were released from Baghdad's notorious Abu Ghraib prison yesterday. Some 500 other detainees were released at the same time...
... In an interview with al-Arabiya, Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt of the US military's central command, said of the detentions: "We have to make sure whether this person is really a journalist and whether he is a threat to Iraqi security or not."


Well it took them, what, 4-5 months to figure out that these guys were really journalists when, within days of their capture, Reuters and the Al Arabiya, among others, were protesting their capture, which means that news travels very slowly in the occupation forces or that they don't read the news, I guess.

I note in passing that Al-Jazeera cameraman Sami Al-Hall is still in Guantanamo, despite Amnesty International's appeals, being tortured and abused by the monsters serving at the US concentration camp. A horrifying glimpse at what transpires in Guantanamo and american torture camps can be seen in Jumah al-Dossari's testimony, a long and depressing account of the horrors of Gitmo - a monument to the total and blatant dismissal of basic human rights and civility as a concern for the US government in the early 21st century.

1 comment:

Frank Partisan said...

Again a powerful post on your blog.

If Bush was going to bomb Al Jazeera headquarters in Qatar, an ally country, holding a reporter makes sense.