1115.org

Bilal Hussein is an AP photographer, who worked in Iraq, covering the war.

In April 2006, the honored guests of the sovereign republic of Iraq — that would be us — clapped him (an Iraqi citizen) in irons for “imperative reasons of security”. He was considered a security threat because of his “strong ties to known insurgents.”

Once you play the insurgent-associate card, you don’t need to bother with formalities like conducting an investigation, or bringing charges, or holding a trial or any of that time-and-money wasting stuff that only ass**les would care about. So we didn’t. We just held him (as we are wont to do in TWAT). And held him and held him. Despite strenuous efforts by AP. And let’s be clear about this: AP wasn’t demanding that he be released, they were only demanding that he be charged and tried. We didn’t need to, of course. We knew he was guilty as not-charged. The proof of his guilt? That we had arrested him. Here’s Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman laying it out in easy-to-understand terms:

“All indications that I have received are that Hussein’s detainment indicates that he has strong ties to known insurgents, and that he was doing things, involved in activities that were well outside the scope of what you would expect a journalist to be doing in that country,” he said.

The fact of his detainment indicates all that. So why would you need a trial?

As time passed, AP continued to fight. And continued to get nowhere.

Then, suddenly, on April 9, an Iraqi judicial committee dismissed terrorism-related allegations against Bilal Hussein, granted him amnesty, and ordered him to be released. Nothing happened, of course. He wasn’t held in or by the Iraqi judicial system, he was detained by good old us. And in the supremely sovereign republic of Iraq, nobody tells us what to do, certainly not the Iraqis.

A decision by a four-judge panel said Hussein’s case falls under a new amnesty law. It ordered Iraqi courts to “cease legal proceedings” and ruled that Hussein should be “immediately” released unless other accusations are pending.
[...]
U.S. military authorities have said a UN Security Council mandate allows them to retain custody of a detainee they believe is a security risk even if an Iraqi judicial body has ordered that prisoner freed. The UN mandate is due to expire at the end of this year.

AP pressed for Hussein’s immediate release:

AP President Tom Curley hailed the committee’s decision and demanded that the U.S. military “finally do the right thing” and free Hussein.
[...]
“The Amnesty Committee took only a few days to determine what we have been saying for two years. Bilal Hussein must be freed immediately,” said Curley, the AP’s president.

“The U.S. military has said the Iraqi process should be allowed to work. It has, and the military must finally do the right thing by ending its detention of a journalist who did nothing more than his job. Bilal’s imprisonment stands as a sad black mark on American values of justice and fairness,” Curley added.

(Did I mention that “Hussein, 36, was a member of an AP team that won a Pulitzer Prize for photography in 2005″?)

The U.S. military chewed it over for almost a week. And then on the 15th, they decided that we really shouldn’t continue to hold it against Bilal that he happened to have “strong ties to known insurgents”. Or that he was a major security threat. In a brave act of extraordinary generosity, they set him free (when they could oh-so-easily have held him for the rest of his natural life or the duration of the Iraq war, whichever comes to an end first):

The United States military said Monday that it would release an Associated Press photographer who has been jailed in Iraq without trial for two years on accusations of terrorism and kidnapping.

The announcement came after two rulings over the previous week by panels of Iraqi judges, who said that the photographer, Bilal Hussein, was covered by an amnesty law and should be released. But such decisions are not binding on the coalition forces in Iraq, and it was not clear at first whether the military would continue to hold him.

Here’s the funny part: the U.S. military announced on Tuesday that they would release Bilal on Wednesday. And they did. (Or maybe the really funny part is that that’s funny?)