From The Khaleej Times
By Aijaz Zaka Syed

My youngest one is as old as the young son of Sami Al Hajj, the Al Jazeera cameraman who was carried home to freedom on a stretcher this week, after seven years in the Guantanamo Bay.

Watching a shockingly emaciated Hajj shower kisses on his son at a Khartoum hospital, where he has been admitted after freedom from the high security prison in Cuba, I couldn’t help think about my own kids.

I put myself in Hajj’s shoes and wonder how I would fare if I ended up in Bush’s gulag. What would happen to my own children and loved ones? And what chance would I have at freedom, if I got picked up by America’s friends and allies and ended up in the Bay, just as Hajj had been?

You might think I don’t have to end up in the Bay. I am not a terrorist. And I haven’t done anything except hold a mirror to the US and other big powers once in a while. But then Hajj is not a terrorist either. He did not fly any planes into the symbols of America’s might. He did not try to blow himself up near the White House or Pentagon. The only crime he ever committed was work for Al Jazeera, the television channel the Americans seem to think is run by Osama Bin Laden.

Hajj was on his way to Afghanistan to report for Al Jazeera when he was picked up by the authorities in Pakistan in 2001 and handed over to the US. Despite holding a valid visa to work as a journalist in Afghanistan, he was bundled off as an ‘enemy combatant’ to Gitmo.

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