In an understated but staggering article, Reuters reports that the US military has promised to moderate their policy of arresting and imprisoning journalists.
This policy left three Reuters reporters in custody for up to 8 months last year, and one of their cameramen was beaten senseless.
A CBS cameraman is still in custody since last April.
One journalist reported that an interrogator identified himself, against policy, as a fellow journalist, and told the Reuters staffer that he would be detained in Abu Ghraib prison for thirty years.
The US has 14,000 in detention in Iraq with no access to due process.
Four Reuters cameramen are dead in Iraq, three killed by US soldiers. As of this third anniversary, 67 journalists have died in Iraq.
This story gets my vote as most under-reported outrage on this sad anniversary. Only Reuters itself, and Pakistan News have published the story on the web.
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Comments: 5
Reminds me of the time, back in the mid-1960s, when the Amherst police, for some reason, picked up a couple of students, held them overnight, and accused them of public intoxication. The cops tried to get them to plead guilty, but they refused. One of them was editor of the UMass newspaper. Boy, did the paper cover that story. It eventually was picked up by the town newspaper.
The publicity resulted in a witness coming forward. Seems at a football game, a cop was trying to come on to this girl by bragging about having arrested a couple of people for drunkenness who weren't really drunk. She was the perfect kind of witness: a young, innocent Townie. Jury verdict not guilty.
It has always been said that you can't argue with someone who buys ink by the barrel. I understand Reuters wanting to get this story out, but what's the matter with everyone else? Do they think that only Reuters journalists are subject to this?
Could it be, perhaps, because unlike AP or the Christian Science Monitor, Reuters is not a US company, and tends to have journalists on their payroll from the 91 countries that they serve, rather than all brits?
All the names of detained journalists are regional in language origin. They were not Europeans by ethnicity, I would bet. This is to say, they weren't white boys. Or girls.
I bet if they had been white women from Boston thrown in Abu Ghraib there would have been more press coverage. I'm sorry, but I am truly afraid that is true.