[Media-watch] Torture claims mark US media campaign in Iraq

[David Miller]

http://media.guardian.co.uk/iraqandthemedia/story/0,12823,1200851,00.html

Torture claims mark US media campaign in Iraq

This week the Guardian reported how a cameraman from Arab news channel
al-Jazeera, Salah Hassan, had allegedly been imprisoned and beaten by
American soldiers in Iraq. Here, Christian Parenti interviews Hassan and
examines the uncompromising, multimillion dollar campaign to influence
Middle East opinion being waged by the US administration

Friday April 23, 2004


 Salah Hassan looks sad and very tired. The al-Jazeera cameraman, a
33-year-old father of two, is recounting his tale of incarceration 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 30
or 40 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 11 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 emails 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.

Hearts and minds

Disturbingly, these two cases fit into a larger pattern of US government
hostility toward al-Jazeera, provoked by the network's tough reporting on
the Iraqi occupation. And this hostility is best viewed in the context of
the escalating, multimillion-dollar regional media war between al-Jazeera
and the US government.

Donald Rumsfeld has called al-Jazeera's coverage "outrageous" and
"inexcusably biased" and implied that he'd like to see the satellite channel
thrown out of Iraq. So far the American military has bombed the network's
offices in both Baghdad and Kabul, killing one employee; arrested and
briefly jailed 21 of al-Jazeera's reporters; and now has imprisoned and
allegedly abused and humiliated Hassan and Darwish in ways that the UN
convention on such matters would consider torture.

At the same time that the US military is harassing al-Jazeera reporters,
other parts of the US government, including the state department, are
attempting to answer al-Jazeera in its own language and format.

On February 14 the United States launched a nominally independent, US-funded
Arabic-language satellite channel called al-Hurra, which means "the free
one". The purpose of this effort is to address the lack of popular support
for the US occupation in Iraq, as well as the deepening crisis of American
legitimacy throughout the Arab world; polls from the region indicate that
more and more people hate the United States every day.

Unlike other US-funded forays into Arabic-language media, al-Hurra, with an
annual budget of $62m, could be quite sophisticated and possibly effective
in reshaping the beliefs of the politically important and demographically
dominant Arab youth scene. The new channel has a stable of proven Arab
journalists - one senior producer is a Palestinian who was poached from
al-Jazeera, while the channel's top managers are Lebanese Christians with
proven journalistic track records.

On the other hand, the channel is based in Virginia, includes Colin Powell
on its board of directors and its first broadcast was a pre-recorded
interview with George W Bush, none of which bode well for winning Arab
hearts and minds. 

Regardless of how well al-Hurra fares, al-Jazeera faces increasing obstacles
to its reporting in Iraq as its correspondents are harassed, arrested,
abused and killed by US troops.

So far, al-Jazeera's management has kept rather quiet about the cases of
Hassan and Darwish. When I interviewed Ceddah Abdelhak, the channel's
general manager in Baghdad, he insisted that the channel had publicized the
cases, and he was clearly upset about the bad treatment of his staff.

But other journalists in Baghdad say that al-Jazeera is under so much
pressure from the Americans that its owners in Qatar are afraid the channel
could be expelled from Iraq if they push too hard on any issue that upsets
the CPA. 

This is not an unfounded fear. According to sources that insisted on
anonymity, the coalition called the network's managers in Iraq to the
Republican Palace in Baghdad for a meeting in late January, at which the
CPA's head counsel threatened al-Jazeera with expulsion if the network did
not stop "destabilizing the occupation" with its tough reporting and intense
editorial criticism.

Allegedly, the CPA attorney explained that the coalition needed no legal
justification to expel al-Jazeera and implied that US authorities were even
pressuring the Emir of Qatar, Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, to rein in
al-Jazeera, which, though run independently, is owned by the government of
Qatar. 

'Incitement to murder'

Another al-Jazeera adversary is the US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council,
which recently barred the network from covering its sparsely attended
meetings. The IGC was much more aggressive with the next most prominent
Arabic-language network, al-Arabiya, which it threw out of Iraq for two
months beginning in late December of last year.

During that suspension, al-Arabiya's equipment was seized and its
journalists faced $1,000 fines or possibly a year in prison if they violated
the sanction. The network's offense had been "incitement to murder" by
playing a taped message from Saddam Hussein, who was then in hiding.

Arabs working for other media outlets have also been harassed by US troops.
Mazen Dana of Reuters was shot and killed by an American soldier outside Abu
Ghraib prison in August. Then, in January, elements of the 82nd Airborne
Division stationed in Falluja jailed and allegedly beat a three-man
Arab-language crew, also from Reuters.

The news agency immediately lodged a formal complaint with the US military,
charging that its journalists had been abused while in detention. A Reuters
freelancer told me that one of the journalists was later hospitalized.

Travel the roads of the so-called Sunni Triangle looking for action, and one
can get plenty of comment about al-Jazeera from US troops who are lower down
in the ranks. More than once I have met soldiers in the field who respond to
requests for interviews or permission to enter their area of operations
with, "As long as you're not al-Jazeera." One officer with the 82nd Airborne
in Falluja claims that al-Jazeera filmed an attack on his unit in which one
of his sergeants was impaled with debris from a bomb and then burned to
death in the ensuing fire.

"We knew something was wrong when we saw people with cameras," explained the
young lieutenant with a controlled bitterness. "Later my guys said they saw
footage of it on al-Jazeera." When I pushed the lieutenant and his soldiers
on this point, it was unclear whether the men had actually seen footage of
the attack or just of the aftermath, and whether it was even on al-Jazeera.

A few events like this and the hatred for al-Jazeera builds into a
slow-burning passion among the grunts. Stories of al-Jazeera's perfidy now
circulate among the troops with the tenacity of urban myths. And while
al-Jazeera programming includes western-style fashion shows and mainstream
business news, it also gives ample time to the views of anti-American Arab
nationalists and political Islamists who hate and excoriate the occupation.

Yet as several well-placed sources explained, while the fixers and reporters
of al-Jazeera are connected enough and numerous enough that some of them
could probably work with the resistance to film attacks as they happen, they
do not, both because they fear expulsion and because of explicit orders from
the network's highest echelons. Indeed, the coalition has not documented a
single instance of an al-Jazeera journalist conspiring in an attack on the
occupation. 

The pressure on al-Jazeera may be having the desired effect. Average Iraqis
increasingly dismiss its news as soft on the occupation. Al-Jazeera's
general manager himself says the network's coverage is now "more balanced"
than it once was, because it gives increased airtime to US claims of
steadily increasing peace, progress and prosperity.

Al-Jazeera's main spokesperson, Jihad Ballout, was more circumspect in his
comments on relations with the Americans in Iraq: "This war has been very
hard for all of the press to cover. This is to some extent due to the
security concern of the US, the UK and the Iraqis, but it seems that
al-Jazeera has gotten more than its fair share of attention. While we
understand the security concerns, we believe the media should have the space
to do its mandated job."

Today Hassan is back at work, as is Darwish. Al-Jazeera is still in action,
and al-Hurra is the public face of America's ideological offensive in the
Middle East. Viewed from outside, the media environment in Iraq looks open
and fair. But the continual abuse of Arab journalists is the more accurate
core sample.

Reading this political sediment one sees that the American project in Iraq
is made of imperial ambition, not liberty and democracy. More broadly, the
intimidation and mistreatment of al-Jazeera by the world's most powerful
army should be seen as a threat to press freedom everywhere.

· This article first appeared in the US publication, The Nation

Useful link: www.thenation.com

· To contact the MediaGuardian newsdesk email editor at mediaguardian.co.uk or
phone 020 7239 9857

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