Glenn Greenwald delineates for Salon readers (11/21/08, ad-viewing required) the implications of the Committee to Protect Journalists including a prisoner of U.S. forces on their list of “six journalists who have faced down persecution and grave danger in their line of work”:
So, to recap the award winners: We have a reporter persecuted by the Ugandan government; another imprisoned by the Castro regime; a journalist-defending lawyer who faced down the intimidation and threats of Robert Mugabe; two journalists who work at great risk of being attacked by the Taliban; and one who was arrested by the U.S. military and then imprisoned for two years without any charges or due process of any kind by the United States government. As happens so frequently now, that is the company we keep.
But don’t count on corporate reporters to take anything about Bilal Hussein‘s imprisonment to heart by, for instance, canning their them-not-us perspective on foreign oppression.
Listen to the FAIR radio show CounterSpin: “Dave Tomlin on Bilal Hussein” (11/30/07)
Can you explain to me when we *didn’t* keep that company?
I keep hearing from so-called “progressives” that the US needs to “restore its good name.”
As heinous as the last eight years have been, what went before was also vicious and venal … and what will come will be as well.
Them’s the facts … and we ignore them at our, and the rest of the world’s, peril.