US Continues to Target Journalists for Reporting the Truth

As we now know, on December 17, 2009, President Obama ordered an air attack — using Tomahawk cruise missiles and cluster bombs — on the village of al Majala in Yemen’s southern Abyan province; the strike ended the lives of 14 women and 21 children. At the time, the Yemeni government outright lied about the attack, falsely claiming that it was Yemen’s air force which was responsible.

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There is one reason that the world knows the truth about what really happened in al Majala that day: because the Yemeni journalist, Abdulelah Haider Shaye, traveled there and, as Scahill writes, “photographed the missile parts, some of them bearing the label ‘Made in the USA,’ and distributed the photos to international media outlets.” He also documented the remnants of the Tomahawks and cluster bombs, neither of which is in Yemen’s arsenal. And he provided detailed accounts proving that scores of civilians, including those 21 children, had been killed in the attacks.

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Despite that important journalism — or, more accurately, because of it — Shaye is now in prison, thanks largely to President Obama himself. For the past two years, Shaye has been arrested, beaten, and held in solitary confinement by the security forces of Saleh, America’s obedient tyrant. In January, 2011, he was convicted in a Yemeni court of terrorism-related charges — alleging that he was not a reporter covering Al Qaeda but a mouthpiece for it — in a proceeding widely condemned by human rights groups around the world. “There are strong indications that the charges against [Shaye] are trumped up and that he has been jailed solely for daring to speak out about US collaboration in a cluster munitions attack which took place in Yemen,” Philip Luther, Amnesty International’s Deputy Director for the Middle East and North Africa, told Scahill. The Yemen expert, Johnsen, added: “There is no publicly available evidence to suggest that Abdulelah was anything other than a journalist attempting to do his job.”

That much of what we know about this horrific airstrike comes from two imprisoned individuals (Abdulelah Haider Shaye and, allegedly, Bradley Manning), along with a group the U.S. government clearly wants to indict (WikiLeaks), is telling indeed. As the NSA whistleblower whom the Obama administration unsuccessfully attempted to prosecute for “espionage,” Thomas Drake, wrote this week, the unprecedented Obama war on whistleblowers is, at its core, about punishing those whose expose the deceitful and improper acts of the U.S. Government and deterring those who might do so in the future.

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Shaye’s real crime is that he reported facts that the U.S. government and its Yemeni client regime wanted suppressed. But while the imprisonment of this journalist was ignored in the U.S, it became a significant controversy in Yemen. Numerous Yemeni tribal leaders, sheiks and activist groups agitated for his release, and in response, President Saleh, as the Yemeni press reported, had a pardon drawn up for him and was ready to sign it. That came to a halt when President Obama intervened. According to the White House’s own summary of Obama’s February 3, 2011, call with Saleh, “President Obama expressed concern over the release of Abd-Ilah al-Shai.”

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It is impossible to overstate how similar this case is to some of the worst abuses of the Bush presidency that involved the punitive imprisonment of journalists. Perhaps the most similar case was the arrest and two-year imprisonment by the U.S. military of Pulitzer-Prize-winning Iraqi journalist Bilal Hussein of the Associated Press, who committed the crime of reporting on Iraqi insurgents. Hussein was detained after right-wing blogs and activists in the U.S. repeatedly branded him as an anti-American Terrorist by virtue of his journalistic access to those insurgents: exactly the theory the Obama administration is invoking to brand Shaye a Terrorist and demand his imprisonment.

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The Obama administration’s key and direct participation in the imprisonment of Shaye demonstrates that — like torture, lawless detentions, and secret CIA prisons – these practices continue unabated, albeit through the use of proxy.

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It should be noted that the Obama administration, as it made clear in late January, is “deeply concerned by the alarming increase in the Iranian regime’s efforts to extinguish all forms of free expression and limit its citizens’ access to information.” In particular, the U.S. decries the arrest and threatened execution of two Iranian journalists, “both of whom were not accorded due process.”

  Glenn Greenwald

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.