Journalists detained in Iraq

The Wired Danger Room blog does a good job rounding up the number of journalists who have been detained by US forces in Iraq.

In late August, for example, Ali al-Mashhadani — a freelance cameraman working for Reuters, the BBC, and NPR — was released by the U.S. military in after 26 days in detention. It was his third stint in American custody. In June, Ahmed al-Majun, president of the local journalists’ union in Tikrit, was held for five days by American forces. Iraqi forces arrested freelance writer Kalchan Al-Bayati twice in two weeks during September, 2006. And in the best known case of a journalist’s arrest, U.S. troops detained Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Bilal Hussein for more than two years before being released in April. link

And as Noah Shachtman notes on the Danger Room blog, and we noted yesterday, no journalist has been successfully prosecuted on such charges.