Iraq today...

On BBC online today a developing news story caught my eye. Bilal Hussein, a Pulitzer Prize winning photographer from the Associated Press, was detained by U.S. troops under suspicion of helping Iraqi insurgents. He was originally arrested in April 2006 after sheltering strangers in his Falluja home following a nearby explosion.

The Pentagon claims that new evidence has come to life supporting the assumption that Hussein is a “terrorist media operative” who was infiltrated into AP. However, it is Iraqi judges who will decide Hussein’s fate.

Through their own investigation, lawyers with the Associated Press claim they have found no evidence suggesting that Hussein was anything other than an Iraqi journalist. What’s more, they claim they have been denied access to Hussein and the evidence against him, making it impossible to build a defense.

In the BBC article, AP's president and chief executive officer Tom Curley suggests that the US military just wants to keep Hussein in jail as long as possible. When he requests to see what the pentagon calls "convincing and irrefutable evidence that Bilal Hussein is a threat to security and stability as a link to insurgent activity," he claims to receive materials that are not convincing at all.

Though I am not very well informed on human rights in Iraq, this BBC article makes it sound like justice is not being served, and Hussein may be at a severe disadvantage in his trial.

Read more about the story here and tell me what you think.

Meanwhile, the Associated Press also covered a story today about a deadly U. S. helicopter crash Southeast of Baghdad today. Initial reports have not revealed the cause of the crash, but claim that it was not the result of hostile fire.
The story explained that while two people were killed as a result of the crash, their nationalities have not been specified.

This detail got me thinking, I understand why Americans relate better to the loss of their own than the loss of an Iraqi, but why is it that the media has disregarded most Iraqi causalities. Why don’t we car about the numbers of Iraqi civilians who have been killed since the start of the war? We focus so much on the death of U.S. soldiers but generally disregard the other deaths that have been caused by this war.
What do you think?

And because I know you’re wondering, according to the department of defense 3872 U.S. soldiers have been killed since March 2003 in Iraq.

And even though you’re probably not wondering, in February 2007 BBC estimated that 55,664 to 61,369 Iraqi civilians had been killed in the war to date.

For a full list of crashes in Iraq since the War started go here.