Sweet, sweet in yer face wingers. They've been beating the Bilal Hussein drum for quite a while now.
Speaking by video link from the Middle East, AP photographer Bilal Hussein thanked the committee and others who pressed for his release during his two years and four days under U.S. military detention in which he was held without formal charges. He vowed to "forge ahead" with his work.
"I will not hesitate to put out the truth," he told more than 500 people attending the awards dinner.
In a separate video clip made for the ceremony, Hussein described the pressures of chronicling both sides of the conflict during some of the fiercest street battles of the Iraq war — images that were part of the AP's Pulitzer Prize-winning photo package in 2005.
"A journalist does not take sides," he said. "That's why he is the enemy of all."
Hussein was taken into U.S. military custody in April 2006 in the western city of Ramadi. He was released shortly after his second anniversary in U.S. hands after two Iraqi judicial amnesty committees ruled that there would be no trial on any of the accusations raised again Hussein.
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