MNpublius.com

I missed it due to my Thanksgiving travels, but Congressman Keith Ellison won praise from the Star Tribune’s Editorial Board last week for his advocacy for a detainee at Guantanamo Bay:

There’s nothing especially unusual about Sami al-Haj — unfortunately. He’s just one of the hundreds of detainees being held at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. There’s no known evidence of his guilt. He has not been charged with any crime. He has no rights, only limited access to his lawyer and no reasonable hope of release anytime soon. Again: nothing too unusual.

But he does have one distinction: a defender in the U.S. Congress. Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., has taken notice of al-Haj’s case and has helped draw attention to it. That the sole Muslim member of Congress would speak up for a Guantanamo detainee might seem to play into the hands of critics like CNN’s Glenn Beck, who challenged Ellison to “prove to me that you are not working with our enemies.”

The editorial notes one of the more compelling arguments for closing Gitmo (aside from the fact that it contradicts many of the core principals upon which our nation was founded): its a recruiting tool for terrorists.

Ellison, though, thinks those enemies are drawing strength from U.S. practices at Guantanamo. “I really am concerned about how killers across the water use this stuff” to recruit suicide bombers, he said recently. “One of the best defenses America has is the good will of the people of the world. … Guantanamo is a stain on America.”

Perhaps the most insidious aspect of the al-Haj case is the suggestion that he was detained because he was a journalist working for Al Jazeera.

Another al-Haj advocate, lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, charges that nearly all of al-Haj’s interrogation sessions have focused on his work as a journalist. He told Columbia Journalism Review that his client “is clearly in Guantanamo for one reason only, and that’s because he’s an employee of Al Jazeera.”

Al-Haj, who has a wife and young son at home, seems to share that perception. He reportedly told interrogators, “I am not sure I can ever go back to journalism. It is too dangerous, and I want to be with my family.”

In other words, if al-Haj’s detention really is meant to deter journalists, it’s working.

You don’t have to like what Al Jazeera puts on the air, and their record of accuracy is sometimes suspect, but it is deplorable to detain someone simply because of their association with a news network. In fact, its downright un-American.