http://nytimes.com/2005/09/15/intern...pagewanted=all
Detention of Iraqi Employees Angers Western News Media
By ROBERT F. WORTH
Published: September 15, 2005
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Sept. 14 - On April 5, Abdul Ameer Younis Hussein, an Iraqi cameraman for CBS News, was struck in the thigh by an American sniper's bullet while filming the aftermath of a suicide bombing in Mosul. As he recovered in a military hospital, the Americans arrested him. They later said the film in his camera suggested he was working for insurgents.
More than five months later, Mr. Hussein is still in an American military prison. The Iraqi criminal authorities have reviewed his case and declined to prosecute him. Colleagues who were with him that day have produced affidavits supporting his innocence. The American military has not released any evidence against him, despite repeated requests for information by CBS producers, lawyers and even the network's president, Andrew Heyward.
Mr. Hussein's case exemplifies a quandary faced by Western news organizations here. Their own reporters are mostly confined to fortified compounds and military bases. As a result, they are forced to rely on Iraqis, who work in increasingly dangerous settings, where the line between observer and participant is not always clear.
Western bureau chiefs concede that they cannot be certain the people they hire do not have links with insurgents, though they do their best to weed out such people.
One thing is clear: dozens of Iraqis who carry out assignments for the news organizations have been detained while on the job, and sometimes released weeks or months later with no explanation. American forces have mistakenly killed a dozen others, including a soundman working for Reuters who was shot dead by a sniper on Aug. 28.
Some of those cases raise a broader question: how close can Iraqi reporters get to insurgents without being considered the enemy? American commanders often suggest that reporters who are tipped off about an attack are automatically implicated, but Iraqis often take a different view.
"Maybe some are working with insurgents, but many others just get a call from someone saying, 'There will be clashes,' " said Ibrahim Saraji, the director of the Iraqi Journalists' Rights Defense Organization, formed last year after the fatal shooting of two Arab journalists in Iraq. "It doesn't mean they are an insurgent."
Pentagon lawyers have told CBS that Mr. Hussein is being held on classified evidence, according to letters sent to the network that were provided to The New York Times. The military has released statements saying that Mr. Hussein tested positive for explosive residue, and citing accusations that he "had knowledge of future terrorist attacks." It is not clear who made the accusations, or whether the residue may have resulted from his proximity to the scene.
Mr. Hussein's friends and relatives - who have not been able to visit him in prison - say the military has not interviewed them or searched his home, standard procedure with people suspected of having ties to insurgents. CBS executives say the network has investigated the incident and has no reason to believe that its cameraman was working with insurgents.
Clearly, it is often difficult for American soldiers to tell a reporter from a combatant in Iraq's chaos, with no uniforms or clear battle lines. The fact that insurgents routinely film and distribute scenes of their attacks makes it even harder. The military cannot afford to give journalists special treatment under those circumstances, said Lt. Col. Steven A. Boylan, a military spokesman in Baghdad.
But Western bureau chiefs say the military often seems to arrest their Iraqi employees merely for getting too close to the action - in effect, for doing their jobs too well. When journalists are killed, the bureau chiefs say, the military often does little more than a cursory investigation.
"They seem to have moved to the view that everyone in a conflict area with a camera is a potential terrorist," said Alastair Macdonald, the Reuters bureau chief in Baghdad. "The burden of proof is on them to prove that they're not."
A number of Reuters Iraqi employees have been detained by the American military, including three who said after being released that they were abused by American interrogators while being detained in Falluja last year. Ali al-Mashadani, a Reuters cameraman, was detained in Ramadi on Aug. 8 and remains in American custody. Mr. Macdonald said he had seen no evidence against Mr. Mashadani or clear accusations, and had no reason to believe he had any insurgent connections.
Iraqi employees with many other companies, including CNN, Associated Press Television News and Agence France-Presse have been detained for long periods in the past year. But some companies declined to comment about the detentions, saying they feared that doing so might harm their relations with the military.
Iraqi reporters often point out that they routinely receive death threats from insurgents, who have killed more reporters than the United States military by far. But they also say the military's suspicion is making it almost impossible for them to work in some areas.
"The American military has intelligence sources, but they don't seem to understand that we have sources too," said Maher Hassan al-Thanoon, 36, who has carried out assignments for Reuters in Mosul for 18 months. "They may just be people who live in insurgent neighborhoods. It doesn't mean they support what the insurgents are doing."
Western bureau chiefs also say that after being detained by American forces, their Iraqi employees often disappear into a void, where nothing can be learned about the case against them and their legal status is unclear. Mr. Hussein, for instance, was initially scheduled for a hearing with the Combined Review and Release Board, a nine-member panel formed to review detention cases. It is made up of three American military officials and six Iraqi government officials from the Justice, Human Rights and Interior Ministries.
But before the board could hold a hearing his case was transferred to the authority of the Iraqi central criminal court. He remained in American custody, though. The Iraqi criminal authorities reviewed the case, though they had not been provided with the classified part of it, and declined to prosecute it.
Jurisdiction over Mr. Hussein was then transferred back to the combined board, which is scheduled to hear his case on Thursday.
His status seemed uncertain in other ways, too. When CBS officials first asked about his health after he was shot and detained, military officials declined to answer, citing American laws on medical privacy.
On Wednesday, Iraq's justice minister, Abdul Hussein Shandal, criticized the detentions of Iraqi journalists in an interview with Reuters, saying he wanted to change a United Nations resolution that gives American troops immunity from Iraqi law. He said journalists were not free to report on all sides of the conflict.
He also dismissed American claims that his ministry had an equal say in detentions, suggesting that the American military controlled the Combined Review and Release Board.
Military officials in Iraq contend that some Iraqi cameramen and photographers show up at attacks so promptly that they must have had advance notice. Colonel Boylan said he knew of two Iraqi journalists in detention whose film footage indicated that they had filmed several attacks on one day, from the start.
Mr. Macdonald and other Western bureau chiefs say they have seen no evidence of such cases. They also say the frequent repetition of that accusation is irresponsible because it makes soldiers more likely to be aggressive with Iraqi journalists at attack scenes.
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