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Glenn Greenwald (Salon.com): What media coverage omits about U.S. hikers released by Iran

ACW

By ACW
in The Tailgate

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ACW

ACW

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http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/09/26/iran

Fattal began by recounting the horrible conditions of the prison in which they were held, including being kept virtually all day in a tiny cell alone and hearing other prisoners being beaten; he explained that, of everything that was done to them, "solitary confinement was the worst experience of all of our lives." Bauer then noted that they were imprisoned due solely to what he called the "32 years of mutual hostility between America and Iran," and said: "the irony is that [we] oppose U.S. policies towards Iran which perpetuate this hostility." After complaining that the two court sessions they attended were "total shams" and that "we'd been held in almost total isolation - stripped of our rights and freedoms," he explained:

In prison, every time we complained about our conditions,
the guards would remind us of comparable conditions at Guantanamo Bay; they'd remind us of CIA prisons in other parts of the world; and conditions that Iranians and others experience in prisons in the U.S.

We do not believe that such human rights violation on the part of our government justify what has been done to us: not for a moment. However, we do believe that these actions on the part of the U.S. provide an excuse for other governments - including the government of Iran - to act in kind.

[indeed, as harrowing and unjust as their imprisonment was, Bauer and Fattal on some level are fortunate not to have ended up in the grips of the American War on Terror detention system, where detainees remain for many more years without even the pretense of due process -- still -- to say nothing of the torture regime to which hundreds (at least) were subjected.]

Fattal then expressed "great thanks to world leaders and individuals" who worked for their release, including Hugo Chavez, the governments of Turkey and Brazil, Sean Penn, Noam Chomsky, Mohammad Ali, Cindy Sheehan, Desmond Tutu, as well as Muslims from around the world and "elements within the Iranian government," as well as U.S. officials....

...

...

This is a repeat of what happened with the obsessive American media frenzy surrounding the arrest and imprisonment by Iran of Iranian-American journalist Roxana Saberi, convicted in a sham proceeding of espionage, sentenced to eight years in prison, but then ordered released by an Iranian appeals court after four months. Saberi's case became a true cause célèbre among American journalists, with large numbers of them flamboyantly denouncing Iran and demanding her release. But when their own government imprisoned numerous journalists for many years without any charges of any kind -- Al Jazeera's Sami al-Haj in Guantanamo, Associated Press' Bilal Hussein for more than two years in Iraq, Reuters' photographer Ibrahim Jassan even after an Iraqi court exonerated him, and literally dozens of other journalists without charge -- it was very difficult to find any mention of their cases in American media outlets.

What we find here yet again is that government-serving American establish media outlets relish the opportunity to report negatively on enemies and other adversaries of the U.S. government (that is the same mindset that accounts for the predicable, trite condescension by the New York Times toward the Wall Street protests, the same way they constantly downplayed Iraq War protests). But to exactly the same extent that they love depicting America's Enemies as Bad, they hate reporting facts that make the U.S. Government look the same.

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AsburySkinsFan

AsburySkinsFan

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This is why the Geneva Convention was put in place. Bush's personal attorney and lap dog Gonzales should be ashamed of himself....but I bet he isn't.

The argument will be that Iran would have done this anyways and they are only looking to use Gitmo and the secret CIA prisons (which I find wholly disgusting) as an excuse to legitimize their behavior.

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SnyderShrugged

SnyderShrugged

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What do GC and civilians have in common again?

The court system is for civilians.

How does the Us treat hikers?

We have 10s of millions of them.

Think you might have missed my point.

I dont give a rats arse about hikers dumb enough to hike near Iran's border.

I do, however feel great disdain for the President's lie that he would shut down gitmo. I believe Gitmo is serving little value beyond a nice recruiting tool to point to for AQ and other terrorist orgs ( Blowback)

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zoony

zoony

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Think you might have missed my point.

I dont give a rats arse about hikers dumb enough to hike near Iran's border.

Me either. I actually am resentful that the media has done everything they can to force us to care. They're Americans, so what? Lots of idiots who deserve to be in jail are Americans.

And now, we get to hear said idiots' views on our society. Yay, bonus!

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Dan T.

Dan T.

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Were they more than "hikers"? That's the question I have. (Admittedly, I have read much about them beyond mainstream news articles.) But the media has so relentlessly used the term "hikers" and no other term in referring to them that I get the sense there's an unspoken story about them.

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AsburySkinsFan

AsburySkinsFan

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That may be true, but we shouldn't be helping them.

Oh I TOTALLY agree, we are giving them all the fuel for their hate filled fires that they would ever need.

---------- Post added September-29th-2011 at 10:12 AM ----------

Well at least Obama corrected the Gitmo mistake....oh wait.....

At least he TRIED, remember it was the GOP and their endless fear mongering with their Wes Cravenesque visions of terrorists breaking out of jail and running free on Main Street Uhmerika where the real Uhmerikans live that pushed back against closing Gitmo....you know those Super Max Level 4 prisons have jail breaks all the time. Heck it makes one wonder why in the world we put serial killers in those things since they are so unsafe.

It's amazing to me that the Right which is full of people who want to put more and more people into America's prisons, that those same people are so untrusting of the system and our prisons.

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AsburySkinsFan

AsburySkinsFan

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Rebut that drivel?....the time would be better spent talking to myself.

Maybe you should spend some time listening rather than talking.

Two guys just released from an Iranian prison tell you that they were held in solitary confinement for long periods of time and the reason given to them for their mistreatment was Gitmo. Sure I don't buy that Iran wouldn't do it anyways, but it's like we've said all along, we are giving those crazyies more fuel for their hate filled fires. All they need to do in order to show people how bad we are is point to Gitmo, the 100,000+ dead civilians in Iraq, and Abu Ghraib. Seriously, we are hurting ourselves more than we are helping.

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twa

twa

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ASF...I take it you are gonna vote for Ron Paul then? :)

Is that 100,000 the one's that died from the sanctions or the war?

Listening to and accepting the justifications of radicals as truth is a waste of time,they always have a excuse for their excess....no different than other deranged idiots.

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SnyderShrugged

SnyderShrugged

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Oh I TOTALLY agree, we are giving them all the fuel for their hate filled fires that they would ever need.

---------- Post added September-29th-2011 at 10:12 AM ----------

At least he TRIED, remember it was the GOP and their endless fear mongering with their Wes Cravenesque visions of terrorists breaking out of jail and running free on Main Street Uhmerika where the real Uhmerikans live that pushed back against closing Gitmo....you know those Super Max Level 4 prisons have jail breaks all the time. Heck it makes one wonder why in the world we put serial killers in those things since they are so unsafe.

It's amazing to me that the Right which is full of people who want to put more and more people into America's prisons, that those same people are so untrusting of the system and our prisons.

I agree with you on your comments on the "right" and the GOP.

I disagree that Obama actually "tried". He could have easily changed the policy and shut GITMO down but he capitulated to pressure from various sources.

He chickened out on most of the good promises he made while campaigning regarding foreign policy. Sad

---------- Post added September-29th-2011 at 11:34 AM ----------

Or in other words, I can't

Oh, ASF, I suggest you Greenwald's stuff on Obama. He hasn't tried anything, he has embraced pretty everything Bush did.

Obama=Bush

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