Back Towards The Locus

Ibrahim Jassam, powerless and ignored, is now on a hunger strike, and his sister reports that “his health is deteriorating. We are very worried about him.“

To recap: Ibrahim Jassam Mohammed is an Iraqi photojournalist, who was detained by American forces last September. A month later, an Iraqi court ruled that there was no evidence against him, and ordered that he be released. The US responded with a great, big middle finger, and the media and international authorities shrugged and meekly shuffled along. So, now Jassam is lumped with a formless wait: his future dependent upon the idle will of his kidnappers.

The extent to which everybody’s turned away is interesting in itself. Ban Ki-Moon is “making personal efforts to…free two U.S. journalists imprisoned in North Korea” and “worked similarly behind the scenes to help win freedom for Roxana Saberi“, but has kept an aloof distance from Jassam’s messy case. The media, meanwhile, have only granted him a passing cough.

The detention embodies many elements of US foreign policy – imperial arrogance, disdain for the rule of law and a cavernous gulf between noble words and nasty deeds – as well as a simple image, luridly displayed throughout the world: a big thumb squeezing a little guy against a wall.