Honor Bound to Defend Press Freedom

Sami al Hajj, the Al Jazeera journalist in Guantánamo  Bay

The signs in Guantánamo Bay carry the Base motto:  “Honor Bound to Defend Freedom”.  Soldiers smartly salute a superior, “Honor Bound, sir!”  The officer will salute in reply, “To defend freedom, soldier!”

When I first witnessed this, visiting my clients at the prison, I am afraid I was reminded of a Monty Python sketch.  But for Al Jazeera cameraman Sami Muhyideen al-Hajj, there is a darker meaning.  On December 15^th, 2005, Sami will celebrate his fourth year in U.S. custody, most of it spent in Guantánamo Bay. Few people have cared to defend his freedom, journalistic or otherwise. 

Sami’s first taste of American freedom was having his faced slammed into the tarmac at Bagram Airforce base. It is a tribute to the dishonesty of the Guantánamo experiment that the first ‘charge’ against him alleges that he was seized at the border trying to enter Afghanistan – with no mention of the fact that he was on assignment with an Al Jazeera crew, that he had a visa, or that he was headed to the house they shared with CNN in Kandahar.  In truth, he was originally seized because the U.S. thought he filmed a bin Laden interview.  As so often is the case, their intelligence was wrong. 

Three years later, in a Washington courtroom, the judge questioned whether the definition of ‘enemy combatant’ might include a “reporter, working in Afghanistan … knows the exact location of Osama bin Laden but does not reveal it to the United States government in order to protect [a] source?”  The government lawyer refused to rule such a journalist out.  Naturally:  Sami had already been ruled in. 

The ‘charges’ are barely relevant.  In over 100 interrogation sessions, all but five have been devoted to co-opting Sami as an informant against Al Jazeera, and correspondent Ahmed Mansour. “For more than 3 years, most of my interrogation has been focused on getting me to say that there is a relationship between Al Jazeera and Al Qaida.”  The U.S. wants him to say that Al Qaida paid his employers to conduct interviews with Usama bin Laden, as if any journalist in the world would turn down such an opportunity.  Sami refused to lie, and had to request that his interrogators question him about his ‘charges’ instead.

It is not just for Sami that the “War on Terror” has been a war on free speech.  The U.S. has opened up an entire front on Al Jazeera.  I met Tarek Ayoub’s widow – she has studied in Britain since her husband was killed by the U.S. while reporting in Bagdad.  Another bomb fell on Al Jazeera in Afghanistan.  Tayseer Alouni was recently convicted on dubious evidence in Spain.  Sami is in Guantánamo, and his evidence shows that the U.S. is bugging the Al Jazeera journalists’ telephones. 

It is well past time for the western media to stand up for Sami and his colleagues. So has the American campaign convinced British journalists that there is something of the night about Al Jazeera?   I hope not.  I went to their headquarters in Qatar, and met many of their senior staff who had previously worked for the BBC.  They have borrowed heavily from the BBC code of journalist ethics. Sir David Frost has seen fit to join Al Jazeera’s English language channel.

Sami’s wife had no news of him for 18 months, until she finally got a card from Guantánamo.  He left on assignment when his son was one year old.  Meanwhile, Sami has been on hunger strike. In the last declassified letter he wrote to me in August 2005, Sami told of how the U.S. military persuaded the prisoners to end the earlier strike by promising to abide by the Geneva Conventions. Ten days’ later, the military was back at it again, beating up three prisoners in one day:

“So we all had to go back on hunger-strike again.  It is not something I look forward to, but I must.  We have to stand together on this, more for the prisoners who are being mistreated in Camp V than for anything else.   I hope to survive it alive.”Sami is very loyal to his principles, no matter what the personal cost.  It is a quality I admire.   The NUJ should adopt a motto:  “Honour Bound to Defend Press Freedom.”  Sami al Hajj and Al Jazeera surely come within such an oath.