Marking Al Jazeera’s 12th birthday, a new Public Liberties and and Human Rights Desk will be launched, headed by its cameraman Sami al-Haj who spent six years at the US detention centre in Guantanamo Bay.

• NYTimes.com: Interview with Guantanamo detainee and journalist Sami al-Hajj
• Al Jazeera cameraman Sami al-Hajj released
• BBC Radio 4: Sami al-Hajj on his return from Guantanamo
• Watch Al Jazeera’s Shooting the Messenger on YouTube
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We’re a little bit sad here at Journalism.co.uk towers that we didn’t get to go to either of this week’s major journalism conferences, the Global International Journalism Conference (GIJC) in Lillehammer, Norway and the Online News Association (ONA) in Washington DC.

But we got our web feelers out and collated these Twitters for your perusal.

Over at the ONA Twitter Search you can follow the Poynter Group, who are all twittering madly (you’ll need to create yourself an account to log in) and you can see the tweets from the first session of the morning here. The ONA has put together information about the Twitterers, discussion groups and podcasts here.

Or follow blogger supremo Pat Thornton, who was a little bit bored this afternoon…

Meanwhile over GIJC Twitterland we picked up this Tweet about Al Jazeera’s Sami al-Hajj –  imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay for six years.

We’ll be back with a better summary of the conferences’ outcomes next week, when we’ve spoken to a few more participants.

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Al Jazeera cameraman Sami al-Hajj has been released from Guantanamo bay, after six years at the US military prison.

Al-Hajj, who has been on hunger strike since January last year, was flown back to his family in Sudan last night, Al Jazeera reports.

The cameraman was detained by US authorities as an ‘enemy combatant’ in 2002, despite holding a working visa for employment with Al Jazeera’s Arabic channel in Afghanistan

“We are concerned about the way the Americans dealt with Sami, and we are concerned about the way they could deal with others as well. Sami will continue with Al Jazeera, he will continue as a professional person who has done great jobs during his work with Al Jazeera,” Wadah Khanfar, Al Jazeera’s director-general, told Al Jazeera.

• NYTimes.com: Interview with Guantanamo detainee and journalist Sami al-Hajj
• Watch Al Jazeera’s Shooting the Messenger on YouTube
• Al Jazeera Arabic joins Livestation
• BBC Radio 4: Sami al-Hajj on his return from Guantanamo
• ITN to provide archive video footage for Al Jazeera