1)After two years of being held in U.S. military custody without trial, Pulitzer-winning AP photographer Bilal Hussein has been ordered freed by an Iraqi judicial committee that dismissed the charges against him.
The allegations amounted to little more than Hussein taking photos of terrorist activities which our occupying forces thought portrayed the insurgency in too good a light.
Unfortunately, the military is still holding Hussein in custody and says a U.N. mandate empowers the military to hold someone they consider a security risk, regardless of what the Iraqi courts say (after all, it’s not like Iraq is an independent government or anything, is it?).
2)Following a March memorandum by Secretary of Defense Gates on prosecuting military contractors, Alaa Mohammed Ali, a Canadian contractor, has been seized by the military, pending charges over his stabbing another contractor with a knife.
The memorandum appears to be Gates’ response to the Justice Department’s lack of interest in prosecuting contractors (there hasn’t been a single completed conviction against any contractor in Iraq over any violent crime). If I’m following what I’ve read correctly, it authorizes the military to deal with cases in a court-martial but only if Justice refuses to take action.
Assuming that Ali gets a fair trial, and isn’t simply detained indefinitely, I think this is good news. There have been multiple accounts of contractors walking through gaps between U.S. law, military law and Iraqi law with no-one to prosecute them (despite the fact we have no trouble holding people such as Hussein), and those gaps need to be plugged.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 10th, 2008 at 10:54 am and is filed under Injustice, War/military. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.