Victim of America?The winners of the International Press Freedom Award were recently announced. The award is given to journalists who stand up against government repression and are punished because of their reporting. The six winners were a journalist reporting in Uganda, another imprisoned in Cuba, another who has faced threats from the government of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, and two who report at great risk from the Taliban. The sixth? His name is Bilal Hussein and he was arrested by the United States.

Hussein is an AP photojournalist who was reporting on terrorist activites in Iraq, specifically in Ramadi. The US military arrested him in April, 2006 and refused to either release him or charge him with a crime. Requests for information from the AP were ignored on grounds of “imperative reasons of security.” Eighteen months after his arrest, the US government said that Hussein would be charged with criminal activites. One of the charges he supposedly faced was that he had assisted in the kindapping of two Arab journalists but the journalists said they had never been contacted by the US military for their testimony and that their only contact with Hussein was after they had been freed as he loaned them money and a vehicle. In April of 2008, the Iraqi government insisted on Hussein’s release and he was finally freed.

Uganda, Cuba, Zimbabwe, Afghanistan, and the United States. There is something exceedingly wrong with the United States being on a list of countries that attack the freedom of the press and prevent reporters from doing their jobs with threats of imprisonment.