Brian Stelter profiles Sami al-Hajj, the Al Jazeera cameraman who was held for six years at the terrorism detention centre Guantanamo Bay, and looks at how Al Hajj’s experience has shaped his reporting: “The captive has become the correspondent.”
BBC Radio 4 has produced a programme featuring Al Jazeera journalist Sami al-Hajj who was arrested on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan in 2001. It’s available on iPlayer for another six days and repeated on Radio 4 on Sunday (25/10).
“For more than six years he was held in the infamous Guantanamo Bay detention centre until, in 2008, he was suddenly released. In an exclusive interview, he talks to Gavin Esler about what happened to him, and why.”
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.
Al Jazeera has posted its series on the intimidation and killing of journalists in conflict zones to YouTube.
Shooting the Messenger – a four-part documentary of 11-minute clips – focuses on how international correspondents, both reporters and cameramen, have become targets in the field with the recent death in Gaza of Reuters cameraman Fadel Shana’a and the release of Al Jazeera cameraman Sami al-Hajj bringing the issue into sharp focus.
Watch the first part of the series, which was originally broadcast on June 14, below:
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gOpp-zcFUA]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.