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Chronicling the consequences

Thursday, November 29, 2007

The news was promised in a phone call this morning, 6.30 Baghdad time. But the Associated Press and its lawyers were not, as expected, told what charges its Iraqi photographer Bilal Hussein (far left) is finally – after more than 19 months in American military detention without trial –  to face in Iraq's Central Criminal Court.

At most, the AP learned what date (December 9) the military will be presenting such charges. More tortuous delay.

 

As the prospect of a trial was at last becoming imminent, the AP’s Chief Executive and President Tom Curley, its Associate General Counsel David Tomlin and its Director of Photography Santiago Lyon all went public this week to protest the US military’s treatment of their locally recruited employee, whose pictures helped the organization win a Pulitzer Prize for its war coverage in 2005, but whom US officers have continually, if not legally, accused of operating as an insurgent infiltrator.

 

An American soldier’s decision to take Hussein into custody after an April 2006 bomb explosion in Ramadi has resulted in a chain of confounding consequences.

 

The military has evidently had a year and a half now to prepare (and appears to have at times altered) whatever case it thinks it has against Hussein, but his defense team headed by Paul Gardephe, a former federal prosecutor from New York, will still have to rapidly scramble on December 9th to mount an answer in court. Not that they haven’t been trying all along to counter the characterization of their man as an enemy agent.

 

CEO Curley says: "In the 19 months since he was picked up, Bilal has not been charged with any crime, although the military has sent out a flurry of ever-changing claims. Every claim we've checked out has proved to be false, overblown or microscopic in significance."

 

These unsupported accusations against Hussein, usually in the form of press briefings, have included: allegedly offering to provide false identification to an insurgent gunman ... possessing bomb-making equipment ... and taking photographs that were deliberately synchronized with insurgent explosions. 

 

“We believe,” says Curley, “Bilal's crime was taking photographs the US government did not want its citizens to see”.

 

The AP generally treads a firm line in avoiding opinionated judgments, preferring to stick to its traditional “just the facts, ma’am” approach - stolidly so, indeed, as it endures waves of bloggomaniacs claiming that the "Associated" in its name means "associated with terrorists". But now its staff are bitterly angry at the military's crass assault on democratic principles of justice and the rule of law – fundamental notions that America is supposed to be establishing in Iraq.

 

 

 

**A PODCAST BASED ON THIS COLUMN CAN BE HEARD HERE - via Robin Hood Radio **

 

 

 

JAMES BLAKE MILLER IS NOT A FAMOUS NAME, BUT HIS UNSOUGHT NICKNAME, “Marlboro Marine”, may ring bells. Back in November 2004 during the fierce battle for Fallujah, Los Angeles Times cameraman Luis Sinco photographed Lance Corporal Miller, cigarette just lighted, leaning against a bombed but still-standing wall – and an emblematic image for the conflict was thus created (above center).

 

From the LA Times to the CBS Evening News and a gushy Dan Rather, to the New York Post, and in widely scattered arenas across all media, L-Cpl Miller was celebrated as an icon.  I too wrote about him in this column when it was still only in the printed pages of AM New York. Meaning nothing against the 20-year old himself, I said he had “inadvertently found himself the poster boy for Bush-era machismo”. For his part President George W Bush sent Miller cigars, candy and White House memorabilia.

 

Well, Miller was once again the talk of the town that first saw his image, when I was there earlier this month. For a story published appropriately enough on Veterans’ Day, photographer Sinco got to be an LA Times reporter for a change, chronicling Miller’s life as it unfolded after his brief period of fame.

 

 

WHAT SINCO DISCOVERED WILL PERHAPS COME AS LITTLE SURPRISE. Miller suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and was medically discharged from the Marines with the formal label of “personality disorder”. Back home in Kentucky (pictured above right), bedeviled by continuing battlefield flashbacks, he sank ever more deeply into alcohol abuse.

 

Things went predictably from bad to worse. His marriage to his high school sweetheart collapsed and he found himself planning suicide.

 

Sinco, for all his very mixed feelings about over-involvement as a professional, got personally quite entwined with his story – for instance deciding to drive a morose Miller from Kentucky to Connecticut to enroll him in a veterans’ rehabilitation program. It was meant to last six or twelve months, but Miller quit after two.

 

Now 23, Miller lives on disability payments and sees a psychiatrist “occasionally”, according to Sinco. In the words of the treatment counselor he walked away from: “He won't come in for help because a part of him is very macho. He really comes across as the Marlboro Man. My fear is that at some point, it's all going to come crashing down.”

 

It’s agonisingly unknowable for how many recent veterans like Miller it might all come crashing down. The Pentagon’s Press Office acknowledges that about 35 percent of Iraq veterans have sought treatment for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder within a year of coming home from deployment.