An Al-Jazeera cameraman has been in Guantánamo Bay Naval Base for nearly six years, but his case remains largely unknown.
Sami al-Hajj always wanted a career in journalism and got his big break when the pan-Arab news network, short a few cameramen, hired him in April 2000. Rather than propelling him to journalistic greatness, after taking an assignment covering American invasion of Afghanistan, the job turned out to be a ticket to one of the worst prisons on Earth.
The United States military has kept al-Hajj in custody for over six years without charge, most of it in Guantánamo Bay, the infamous naval base cum PoW camp in Cuba. His story has gone largely ignored in the North American media despite Amnesty International, Reporters Without Borders and the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) taking up his cause as a political prisoner.
How does a journalist become an “enemy combatant”? Does al-Hajj have skeletons in his closet that came back to haunt him, or is the United States guilty of restricting freedom of the press the same way dictatorships do?
From Out of Nowhere Into Nowhere
Little is known about Sami al-Hajj, the 38-year-old Sudanese cameraman. In the 1990s, he moved to the United Arab Emirates and in 2000 was hired by Al-Jazeera despite having virtually no experience in journalism other than a keen interest in media, and technical know-how with video cameras.
“Al-Jazeera has stood by Sami al-Hajj,” says Joel Campagna, the Middle East and North African senior program co-ordinator for CPJ, a New York-based organization that advocates for reporters’ rights and protection. Campagna has written perhaps the most comprehensive investigative article on al-Hajj’s case. “People I spoke to [at Al-Jazeera] knew him as a start-up journalist, relatively inexperienced, but he had seized at the opportunity to go cover the fighting in Afghanistan. He saw it as a great professional opportunity. He was a quiet person, very polite.”
Al-Hajj could not have been hired at a more newsworthy time in the Middle East. He volunteered to jump in the fire and go on assignment with reporter Yousseff al-Shouly in southern Afghanistan in October 2001. Al-Hajj and al-Shouly captured some of the first images of the American-Afghan war broadcast to the world. When the fighting became too intense, they retreated to Pakistan.
Once the Taliban regime was toppled, al-Hajj was reassigned to Afghanistan with correspondent Abdulhaq Sadah. In late December 2001, while attempting to cross into Afghanistan, Pakistani border guards detained al-Hajj, but not Sadah. They showed al-Hajj and Sadah a letter from Pakistani intelligence requesting al-Hajj’s arrest for suspected links to al-Qaida. His passport number listed in the letter was one he reported as lost to the Sudanese government two years earlier, not the one he carried. Needless to say, the Al-Jazeera duo were surprised, since they had valid visas and had recently crossed the border.
The Pakistani authorities held al-Hajj for three weeks before handing him over to the Americans, who took him to Baghram Airbase in Kabul, Afghanistan. He was held there for two weeks, allegedly beaten, transferred to Khandahar and deported in June 2002 to Guantánamo, soon to become infamous for its experimental interrogations, human rights abuses and anonymity.
All That Jazeera and More
“There are two fundamental issues that are striking in Sami’s story,” Andy Worthington says with emphasis. “The Americans requested or demanded the Pakistanis pick him up when he was returning to Afghanistan with the Al-Jazeera group, as he had done many times.”
Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files and the spokesman for Reprieve, a London-based organization that represents death row inmates and prisoners denied legal rights in the “war on terror.” Reprieve founder Clive Stafford-Smith has been al-Hajj’s lawyer since 2005. Stafford-Smith was informed of the Al-Jazeera cameraman’s imprisonment by one of the first British detainees released from Guantánamo.
“They wanted him because they thought, incorrectly, that he had filmed an interview with Osama bin Laden. Stafford-Smith is on record as saying, ‘Name me a journalist who would turn down an interview with Osama bin Laden.’ It’s a journalist’s dream. But he didn’t do it, anyway. It wasn’t him. They caught the wrong man.”
Al-Hajj claimed — as told to Stafford-Smith — he was repeatedly interrogated by U.S. soldiers at Baghram Airbase about a bin Laden interview. The questions about his career in journalism didn’t stop there. “Of all his time in Guantánamo, they’ve spent years, and over 100 interrogations, talking only about Al-Jazeera and trying to persuade him to become an informant against his employer.” Without mincing his words, Worthington continues, “It’s part of the Bush administration’s hatred and vilification of Al-Jazeera. That’s what we think.” He says Reprieve can’t find a way of demonstrating that this is the case, but al-Hajj has stated that his captors attempted to recruit him to spy for them at Al-Jazeera. He has also claimed that they asked him to confess that there is a direct link between Al-Jazeera and Osama bin Laden.
This is the overriding problem. With all the secrecy surrounding his case and no trial in sight, it is al-Hajj’s word against the U.S. military’s unclassified word. Neither side can offer proof. One of the key battles of any war is over the control of information — the bigger PR department has the upper hand.
“It sounds like they wanted someone from Al-Jazeera,” concludes Worthington. “What’s interesting is the number of prisoners that were requested to become spies. So many people have spoken about it. British prisoners have spoken about it. Some of the other European prisoners have spoken about it. It seems probable….” (Abdul Rahman Khadr, older brother of Omar Khadr and black sheep of Canada’s most famous dysfunctional family, has spoken about this, too.)
Why would the Americans want someone from Al-Jazeera? The Qatar-based satellite news network started in 1996 and was formerly praised in western political and media circles for how well it pissed off virtually every government in the region for all manner of political reasons. At times it was banned in Algeria, Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and, most recently, Iran. This is generally taken as a sign that a media outlet is exercising its freedom of speech, something in short supply in the Middle East.
Then September 11, 2001 happened. The U.S. prepared to invade Afghanistan and Iraq. Since the end of the Vietnam War, the U.S. has been deeply concerned about media reportage of its wars, hence it has become a control freak on the matter. Al-Jazeera, largely staffed by Arabs, could go more places and establish connections more easily than western news agencies. It could report from the other side of the front lines. More importantly, it could broadcast a credible Arab perspective largely uninhibited by state censorship.
Since the Bush administration gave the go-ahead to invade, it has had a Rochester-sized hate-on towards the news station. Especially since Al-Jazeera dared to air Osama bin Laden’s PR videos first, ahead of other media sources. Former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell asked the emir of Qatar to shut down Al-Jazeera’s Kabul offices and accused it of inciting anti-Americanism.
Failing that, American forces bombed Al-Jazeera’s offices in Kabul in November 2001. They repeated the tactic in Baghdad on April 8, 2003, killing journalist Tareq Ayoub. The network had given the U.S. State Department its Baghdad office co-ordinates to avoid any mistakes such as this.
Tayysir Allouni, a Syrian-born reporter for Al-Jazeera, was sentenced to seven years in a Spanish prison in 2005 for allegedly collaborating with al-Qaida. Allouni, who is currently under house arrest in Spain, was the first to interview bin Laden after 9/11 and the prosecution emphasized this in its case, according to Reporters Without Borders. He was also stationed in Kabul when Al-Jazeera’s office was bombed.
In 2005, British newspaper the Daily Mirror reported on details of a leaked memo of a 2004 meeting between George W. Bush and Tony Blair, in which Bush allegedly remarked on his desire to bomb Al-Jazeera’s Doha head offices.
Enter Sami al-Hajj. The cameraman’s affiliation with Al-Jazeera combined with a suspicious past (on paper, at least) may have made him, guilty or not, a very desirable U.S. catch.
What The Intelligence Community Says (On the Record)
In 2005, the U.S. Department of Defence published the transcripts and summaries of the Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRT) and the Administrative Review Board (ARB) “parole style proceedings” for detainees to determine if they were “enemy combatants.” (The term “enemy combatants” is defined in the CSRT documents as “an individual who was part of or supporting the Taliban or al-Qaida forces, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners. This includes any person who committed a belligerent act or has directly supported hostilities in aid of enemy armed forces.” The overriding speculation among human rights organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch is that the term was devised to skirt around the Geneva Convention, a set of international treaties detailing the humanitarian concerns of war, including the treatment of prisoners.)
These were the first revelations of the accusations against prisoner 345, Sami Mohy El Din Muhammed al-Hajj. It was also the first official recognition of his detention in Guantánamo, as it was for the rest of the prisoners.
America’s case rests on his life before Al-Jazeera. Prior to becoming a cameraman, he lived in the United Arab Emirates and worked as an executive secretary for the Union Beverage Company (a soft drink company), and Romat International, an import-export firm. Both are owned by Muhammad Abdullah al-Umran. His son, Abdel Latif al-Umran, was al-Hajj’s boss at Union Beverage Company. American intelligence associated the Union Beverage Company with Chechen and Bosnian rebels.
Between 1996 and 2000, al-Hajj made a number of trips to Azerbaijan where he delivered money on behalf of Abdel Latif al-Umran to the Azeri offices of al-Haramain, a Saudi-based Islamic charity. The amounts gradually got larger. On one trip in 1999, he attempted to deliver $100,000 US to the Baku branch of al-Haramain and $120,000 US to a business partner of al-Umran. Al-Hajj, travelling with his Azeri wife Asma, was detained, and Azeri officials told him his employers intended the money to purchase arms for shipment to Chechen rebels. Al-Hajj says he knew nothing of this. (At the time, Chechnya, virtually next door to Azerbaijan, was engaged in a brutal war with the Russian army.)
While at Union Beverage, he met Mamdouh Mahmoud Salim Abu Hajir, purportedly bin Laden’s spiritual advisor and an al-Qaida co-founder who was extradited to the U.S. for his alleged role in the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.
Al-Hajj tried to start a business called Samico Services in Azerbaijan. In order to get his business application approved by the Azeri government, he falsified Romat documents to make it look like he was a company partner. Samico documents were “found during a raid of locations occupied by suspected extremists.” The CSRT and ARB summaries also note his Al-Jazeera interviews with senior Taliban officials and a member of al-Qaida during his time reporting in Afghanistan.
Was al-Hajj a naive and unwitting dupe for al-Umran at the Union Beverage Company? He claims he believed the money he transported was for charity, as his boss told him. Was his boss funding Chechen rebels through al-Haramain? Or, are the allegations trumped up? (In 2002, the U.S. State Department declared that al-Haramain was an organization that supplied funds to terrorist organizations. Many of its offices were disbanded in 2004 and it was outlawed by the UN Security Council Committee.)
The United States Department of Defence was contacted to further explain its position for this article. While a press officer at Western Hemisphere Affairs did reply, he declined to comment.
Allegations, Ok. What About Evidence? (or ALLEGATIONS AS EVIDENCE)
Detractors of the Guantánamo process, like Reprieve and CPJ, point out that all publicly available information about detainees is just summary accusations. Any actual evidence against al-Hajj is classified and has never been shown to al-Hajj nor his lawyers.
Worthington maintains that, in general, the CSRT and ARB transcripts are severely flawed. “The problem of these allegations is that when you look at them in detail, not only is there no way of knowing where they’re coming from, but when they are recurring, they refer to an informant identifying someone, or an identified al-Qaida lieutenant says that a detainee has something . So many are based on testimony without proof.”
He also cites how the allegations have changed in al-Hajj’s annual ARB hearings. In the initial 2005 round, al-Hajj was accused of arranging the shipment of stinger missiles to Chechnya and running a terrorist website. These accusations were subsequently dropped in the 2006 round.
Campagna claims he tried to interview the Union Beverage and Romat International owners, but was ignored. He summarizes CPJ’s defense of al-Hajj. “There’s this classified evidence held against him. We don’t know what that is. If he has committed a crime, then charge him. Give him a trial. If not, then release him.
“For me it comes down to laying out the facts and what we know. Here we have a case of someone clearly working for Al-Jazeera in a conflict area who has been held for years now without charge and without being able to rebut very serious accusations that have been levelled against him by the U.S military. We feel that six years is long enough to charge someone with an offence and give him a fair trial, but that hasn’t been the case. If there is no intention to charge him with anything, then he should be released.”
Hunger Strike: It’s A Guantánamo Thing, You Wouldn’t Understand
Darker still is the possibility al-Hajj may not survive Guantánamo and his story will remain a mystery forever.
Since January 2007, he has been on a hunger strike to protest his continued detainment, alleged abuse and denial of medical treatment. He hasn’t been successful at starving himself to death. Guantánamo hunger strikers are force-fed through tubes.
Al-Hajj drew several surreal cartoons depicting his force feedings, the best journalistic endeavour he could manage without a camera. Military censors prevented him from passing them on to his lawyer, so al-Hajj described them to her. Reprieve hired political cartoonist Lewis Peake to draw interpretations.
Reportedly, negotiations are underway between the Qatari and Sudanese governments and the U.S. for al-Hajj’s release. Two members of his family have issued statements in the last year saying his release was imminent. So far, it hasn’t transpired.
An Al-Jazeera documentary on Sami al-Hajj can be viewed at www.prisoner345.net. Lewis Peake’s al-Hajj cartoons can be viewed on Reprieve’s website. (www.reprieve.co.uk).
