This doesn't look like a war on terrorism, but a war on our own values.

October 17, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist

Sami's Shame, and Ours
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

There is no public evidence that Sami al-Hajj committed any crime other than journalism for a television network the Bush administration doesn't like.

But the U.S. has been holding Mr. Hajj, a cameraman for Al Jazeera,
for nearly five years without trial, mostly at Guantánamo Bay. With the
jailing of Mr. Hajj and of four journalists in Iraq, the U.S. ranked
No. 6 in the world in the number of journalists it imprisoned last
year, just behind Uzbekistan and tied with Burma, according to the
Committee to Protect Journalists.

This week, President Bush is expected to sign the Military
Commissions Act concerning prisoners at Guantánamo, and he has hailed
the law as "a strong signal to the terrorists." But the closer you look
at Guantánamo the more you feel that it will be remembered mostly as a
national disgrace.

Mr. Hajj is the only journalist known to be there, and, of course,
it's possible that he does have terrorist connections. If so, he should
be tried, convicted and sentenced.

But so far, the evidence turned up by his lawyers and by the
Committee to Protect Journalists — which published an excellent report
on Mr. Hajj's case this month — suggests that the U.S. military may be
keeping him in hopes of forcing him to become a spy.

Mr. Hajj, 37, who attended university and speaks English, joined Al
Jazeera as a cameraman in April 2000 and covered the war in
Afghanistan. He was detained on Dec. 15, 2001, and taken to the
American military prison in Bagram, Afghanistan.

"They were the longest days of my life," Mr. Hajj's lawyers quoted
him as saying. He told them he was repeatedly beaten, kicked, starved,
left out in the freezing cold and subjected to anal cavity searches in
public "just to humiliate me."

In June 2002, Mr. Hajj was flown to Guantánamo, where he says the
beatings initially were brutal but have since subsided somewhat.

At first, interrogators said Mr. Hajj had shot video of Osama bin
Laden during an Al Jazeera interview, but it turned out that they had
mixed him up with another cameraman of a similar name. When that
assertion fell apart, the authorities offered accusations that he had
ferried a large sum of money to a suspicious Islamic charity, that he
had supported Chechen rebels, and that he had once given a car ride to
an Al Qaeda official.

One indication that even our government may not take those
accusations so seriously is that the interrogations barely touched on
them, Mr. Hajj's lawyers say.

"About 95 percent of the interrogations he went through were about
Al Jazeera," said one of the lawyers, Zachary Katznelson of London.
"Sami would say, 'What about me? Will you ask about me?' "

He added, "It really does seem that the focus of the inquiry is
about his employer, Al Jazeera, and not about him or any actions he may
have taken."

Mr. Katznelson also says that interrogators told Mr. Hajj they would
free him immediately if he would agree to go back to Al Jazeera and spy
on it. He once asked what would happen if he backed out of the deal
after he was free.

"You would not do that," Mr. Hajj quoted his interrogator as saying, "because it would endanger your child."

The Defense Department declined to comment on Mr. Hajj's case.

While Mr. Hajj is unknown in the U.S., his case has received wide
attention in the Arab world. The Bush administration is thus doing
long-term damage to American interests.

Mr. Hajj's lawyers say he has two torn ligaments in his knee from
abuse in his first weeks in custody, making it exceptionally painful
for him to use the squat toilet in his cell. The lawyers say he has
been offered treatment for his knee and a sitting toilet that would be
less painful to use — but only if he spills dirt on Al Jazeera. And he
says he has none to spill.

And while Defense Department documents indicate that he has been a
model inmate at Guantánamo, he protests that he has been called racial
epithets (he is black) and that he has seen guards desecrate the Koran.

When Sudan detained an American journalist, Paul Salopek, in August
in Darfur, journalists and human rights groups reacted with outrage
until he was freed a month later. We should be just as offended when it
is our own government that is sinking to Sudanese standards of justice.

This doesn't look like a war on terrorism, but a war on our own values.

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