By: Joe Strupp In reaction to the recent decision to charge detained Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein with a criminal complaint, organizers of an online petition urging his release from Iraqi detention have re-sent the petition to federal officials.
Claiming the pending criminal trial makes his release even more urgent, petition leaders sent the protest letter signed by some 1,850 journalists to several federal agencies on Tuesday.
The latest version comes just six weeks after the petition was initially sent to the White House, U.S. State Department, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, the Office of the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and the Department of Justice on Oct. 12. At that time, organizers said some 1,500 people had signed the protest.
"This week, the U.S. military informed The Associated Press that they plan to seek a criminal complaint against Bilal before an Iraqi court on Nov. 29," a release from the petition organizers stated. "Despite the fact that the U.S. Army had said to media outlets that they have 'irrefutable evidence' that Bilal is 'a terrorist media operative' who had 'infiltrated the AP' they won't say what the charges are or what evidence will be presented. We can only wonder why after holding Bilal for 19 months without charges they will not reveal to the AP defense lawyer the accusation or the evidence they feel so strongly about."
The petition itself states: "On April 12, 2006, Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein was detained by the US Forces in Iraq and has been held in prison ever since. (No formal charges have been presented yet against Bilal, who is behind bars for having the courage to photograph Iraqi insurgents. Bilal was part of an AP team that won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005 for its coverage of the Iraq war. Bilal's arrest and imprisonment are a serious affront to the press as a whole, as well as to democratic traditions.)
"We, colleagues from around the world, are seriously concerned for the life of Bilal Hussein, especially in view of the amount of time he has already been locked up and the prison conditions to which he is being subjected. (For these reasons we demand his immediate release.")
(Organizers of the group, named the Free Bilal Committee, claim that the signatores have included Pulitzer Prize winners Charles J. Hanley, Al Diaz, David Leeson, Judy Walgren, Anja Niedringhaus, Alexander Zemlianichenko, Oded Balilty, Lucian Perkins, John Moore. A full listing can be found at: www.freebilal.org.)
The committee is headed by Annika Engvall, Senior Photo Editor for World Picture Network based in New York; Tomas Munita, Chilean photographer based in Nepal; Mauricio Lima, Brazilian AFP photographer based in Sao Paulo; Gonzalo Martinez, Argentine Photo Editor of Pagina/12 newspaper and president of Argentina's Press Photographers Association; and Tomas Van Houtryve, Freelance Photojournalist based in Paris.
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