Interest growing in plight of journalist held at Gitmo

Why have detainees been held at Guantánamo for six years without a mechanism to fairly determine whether they belong there?

From Prisoner 345: What happened to Al Jazeera’s Sami al-Haj in the July/August 2007 edition of the Columbia Journalism Review:

"Despite the novelty of [Sami] al-Haj’s status as the only journalist inside Guantánamo, it was a long time before he attracted much media attention. At first, even Al Jazeera was reluctant to cover his story. 'Up until around 2003, the air was very tense. You didn’t really want to investigate it too much,' said Ahmad Ibrahim, an Al Jazeera producer who has researched al-Haj’s case. 'At least to a lot of people around the world, holding people was probably justifiable due to the enormity of 9/11. And in the Arab world, the situation at Guantánamo was difficult to comprehend or believe, even that any kind of torture would be perpetrated by the U.S. A lot of people didn’t comprehend what Guantánamo stood for, and the legal arguments that were used to justify it.' In 2005, Ibrahim invited Stafford Smith to Al Jazeera’s headquarters in Doha. 'That’s when the big interest in Sami and his plight started.'

"Since then, al-Haj has become a cause célèbre in the Arab world. Ibrahim made a forty-five-minute documentary about him, Prisoner 345, and Al Jazeera regularly reports on his case. Al-Haj has also been featured in several stories in the British press. But despite repeated efforts by Ibrahim and Stafford Smith, there was until very recently almost no coverage of al-Haj in the U.S., apart from a New York Times column last October by Nicholas Kristof. Al Jazeera 'is still perceived in a very negative way' in the U.S., said Joel Campagna of the Committee to Protect Journalists. 'I think that has made people pause when looking at this case.'

"But while some journalists may distrust Al Jazeera, or may have believed Donald Rumsfeld’s discredited claim that the inmates represented the 'worst of the worst,' others may have avoided writing about detainees like al-Haj because of a more mundane bias: the simple difficulty of reporting about Guantánamo. It’s often been noted that the lopsided legal process fashioned by the Bush administration makes it virtually impossible for detainees to defend themselves. A lesser noticed consequence is that the withholding of evidence makes it impossible for journalists to write a conventionally 'balanced' story about individual detainees—and hence, they are less likely to write about them at all. While researching this piece, for instance, I’ve had plenty of access to al-Haj’s lawyer and to Al Jazeera, but none to the Department of Defense or al-Haj himself. This imbalance is uncomfortable, but to be deterred by it would be to miss the point. The central question underlying the case of al-Haj and the other detainees is not their guilt or innocence, but why they have been held at Guantánamo for six years without a mechanism to fairly determine whether they belong there."

The rest of the story: The Columbia Journalism Review