Serious Question

Imagine this scenario. You are an award winning photography or videographer.

You get an anonymous phone call telling you to be downtown at 5:30 at building X looking west, you are guaranteed to get shots that you can sell.

You aren’t doing anything that day, you decide ok I’ll go down with my gear just in case it pans out.

An act of terrorism occurs. You end up getting shots worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

What is your responsibility here? I would think that after you sell the shots you go to the authorities and inform them of the tip off so that they can try and trace where the call came from. I also think you’d be responsible to inform the authorities of any calls you get in the future along the same vein.

But the difficulty in this is if you go to authorities, you’ll have a hard time convincing people coming to you with exclusive stories. This is one of the reasons shield laws exist for journalists.

In a case like this it’s clear cut the photographer has nothing to do with the attack, but terrorism becomes more effective the better the job the media do of covering it. If you lived in Montana on Sept. 11 and there were no media sources to tell you of the attack, you aren’t going to be up all night worrying about whether it could affect you or someone else you love.

Your chances of being killed by a terrorist are slimmer than being killed by lightning. Do you think that trillions of dollars should be spent on something that has less chance of affecting you than lightning? By this token should we not spend trillions of dollars on a giant lightning shield to cover the US?

But the reason I brought this up, is an article that I read today about an Iraqi photographer by the name of Bilal Hussein.

Mr. Hussein has been in jail for over a year and a half in Iraq. He has been charged with no crime but the US military assures everyone that the military has “convincing and irrefutable evidence that Bilal Hussein is a threat to stability and security in Iraq as a link to insurgent activity” and called Hussein “a terrorist operative who infiltrated the AP.”

My question is if they have such convincing evidence of this, why have they not charged him and put him on trial?

News reports from different news agencies, allege that Hussein had “bomb parts and insurgent propaganda were found in his house after the U.S. military asked to use it as an observation post during an operation.”

They also had suspicions about Mr. Hussein due to his arrival speed at various terrorist attacks.

I know for a fact that a satellite phone is considered a bomb part when military/law enforcement are trying to make a case against a bomber. I also think any self respecting journalist would most assuredly have insurgent propaganda if they were covering stories about the insurgency.

I know that if I were getting tips about covering attacks in a country as dangerous as Iraq, I’d have more than second thoughts about letting the authorities know about them like in my initial imaginary scenario.

So when is a journalist a terrorist? How long should you be able to be hold someone without charge on suspicion of terrorism? I think these are two really important fucking questions that you should be asking the people that you vote for in the next election.