So I was originally planning on writing a post about whether or not the Roxana Saberi situation could happen here. It's not that hard to imagine: a foreign journalist, say for Al Jazeera, is detained, accused of espionage, declared an enemy combatant and imprisoned indefinitely in a military brig along the lines of Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri. Right-wing bloggers hail the reporter's imprisonment with a few pithy, triumphalist statements ("not content to simply give aid and comfort to the enemy, the press has decided to join them, heh, heh"); the issue becomes a rallying point for the liberal blogosphere; while the sensible intellectual center tells us not to believe our eyes, that we're a country of laws and that nothing the government is doing is objectionable or unnecessary. Liberal voices in the mainstream press raise some token objections, but no one wants to be seen as "sticking up for the enemy" so the general reaction is something along the lines of "suck on this." We're often content to tell ourselves we're a nation of laws without actually holding ourselves to that standard, so the story dies down fairly quickly. Eventually, some defiant military judge has enough and determines that the government has no reason to be holding this person, and they're eventually freed.
The thing is, I hadn't realized that this had already happened. Glenn Greenwald points out that we imprisoned Al Jazeera cameraman Sami al-Hajj for six years at Guantanamo Bay. We imprisoned AP photographer Bilal Hussein for two years in Iraq and never charged him with anything, although here, the proposed thought experiment is accurate: right-wing bloggers had convicted Hussein as a terrorist anyway (his name is Hussein). Ibrahim Jassam, a freelance photographer working for Reuters, continues to be imprisoned. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, at least 12 journalists have been detained by U.S. troops without charge.
Of these three situations, al-Hajj's circumstances most closely mirror those of Roxana Saberi. The military's authority to detain people it captures in an active zone of combat is well-established, so the circumstances of Hussein and Jassam are a bit different. But not so different that we shouldn't be concerned. What's most frightening is that the imprisonment of al-Hajj occurred without much media response. Most of the time, journalists feel compelled to express solidarity with reporters who are detained by countries under the pretense of national security. Not this time. Most reporters didn't even feel compelled to ask questions about it. My proposed thought experiment was optimistic, because it assumed that far more people would actually care.
There's a disturbing continuity between how Iran treated Saberi and how we treated al-Hajj. To argue that he was eventually freed is hardly a defense of the system that kept him imprisoned -- if one were to argue that point, someone else could simply point out that Saberi was freed fairly quickly in comparison. Are we ready to argue that the Iranian justice system "works" and that it's one that begs imitation? I'm certainly not.
-- A. Serwer
