Jeremy Scahill's piece at the Nation website ("Why Is President Obama Keeping a Journalist in Prison in Yemen?," 3/13/12) about imprisoned Yemeni journalist Abdulelah Haider Shaye is riveting and deeply reported. But to Mother Jones blogger Kevin Drum, the story doesn't quite add up…because Barack Obama seems like a decent guy. As Scahill reports, Shaye has "risked his life to travel to areas controlled by Al-Qaeda and to interview its leaders." He argues that this reporting has not exactly won him friends in the U.S. or Yemeni governments: His collision course with the U.S. government appears to have been set [...]
Apr
25
2011
Why Hold a Journalist at Guantanamo?
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Today's New York Times report (4/25/11) on the WikiLeaks Guantánamo files provides an answer: The documents show that a major reason a Sudanese cameraman for Al Jazeera, Sami al-Hajj, was held at Guantánamo for six years was for questioning about the television networkâ┚¬Ã¢”ž¢s "training program, telecommunications equipment and newsgathering operations in Chechnya, Kosovo and Afghanistan," including contacts with terrorist groups. The Times' piece is definitely worth reading, though I wish they didn't feel the need to add this type of equivocation: The Guantánamo assessments seem unlikely to end the long-running debate about America's most controversial prison. The documents can be [...]
