'NYT' Columnist Takes Up Cause of Jailed AP Staffer

By: E&P Staff Bob Herbert, the New York Times, joined calls Monday for an Associated Press photographer, held without charges in Iraq for more than five months, to be brought to trial or released.

The AP went public last week with this plea last week, and its CEO and president, Tom Curley, wrote an op ed for The Washington Post on Saturday repeating it. His column was coverd by E&P and picked up by some other papers.

The Iraqi photographer, Bilal Hussein, allegedly had close ties to insurgents, which the AP questions strongly. He was part of a team that won a Pulitzer for the AP.

Taking a quite different view, Jules Crittenden, city editor of the Boston Herald, wrote in a column Sunday, "The Associated Press, the reliable just-the-facts news agency you and I once knew, no longer exists. Amoral propagandists have taken over." He referred to Hussein as "AP photograher and al-Qaeda associate," and asked, "I?m wondering, who does The Associated Press want to win this war?"

Excerpts from Bob Herbert's column, available at www.nytimes.com via TimesSelect, follow.

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People who still think there is a place in this world for fairness, justice and due process are calling on the authorities to either charge him with a crime or release him....

Scott Horton, a prominent New York lawyer called in by The A.P. to work on the case, said: ?The administration always starts with a broad-brush tarring of these individuals. You?ll have officials saying: ?Oh, they?re bad dudes. They?re evil. We have evidence we can?t show you that would demonstrate just how terrible these people are.?

?Well, sometimes they do. But very frequently, alarmingly frequently, they don?t.?

Mr. Hussein?s case closely resembles that of Abdul Ameer Hussein, a cameraman hired by CBS News who was wounded while covering an attack on an American convoy in Mosul on April 5, 2005. He was shot by a U.S. soldier, a sniper who was more than 200 yards away.

Mr. Hussein was taken to a hospital. His camera and videotapes were seized. And despite his CBS press credentials, which were checked out and found to be legitimate, he was arrested by U.S. authorities and imprisoned. Much of his time over the course of the next year was spent in solitary confinement at the Abu Ghraib prison, where he was subjected to coercive interrogation and other indignities.

For what?

American officials were telling reporters, without offering any evidence, that Mr. Hussein had been collaborating with insurgents. He hadn?t been. It turned out he was completely innocent. In fact, he was a kind of timid guy who was less than thrilled about having a job that required him to shoot combat footage.

This is a spooky time in history. It?s one thing for tyrannical regimes like the old Soviet Union and Communist China to bulldoze the very idea of human rights and human decency by engaging in such atrocities as detention without trial, torture and other forms of state terror. It?s something else completely when the United States, the greatest symbol of liberty that the world has ever known, begins to head down that hellish road.

Abdul Ameer Hussein ultimately was able to escape the clutches of the authorities because of the persistent legal effort pushed by CBS News on his behalf. Scott Horton was part of that effort. A year after he was taken into custody, Mr. Hussein, manacled and wearing an orange jumpsuit, was walked into a Baghdad courtroom for a trial. It was quickly determined that the case against him was ludicrous.

?There was absolutely no evidence against this guy,? said Mr. Horton. ?Even the attorney general of Iraq said there was no basis for proceeding against him.?

The case was dismissed.

Several Iraqi journalists working for international news organizations have been held without charge by American and Iraqi forces. The absence of concrete evidence in so many of the cases is disturbing, to say the least.

?I am absolutely convinced,? said Mr. Horton, ?that the ton of bricks fell on these two guys ? Bilal Hussein and Abdul Ameer Hussein ? because they were working as professional journalists. They were the eyes of the world, covering things that the Pentagon doesn?t want people in America to see.?