The April issue of National Geographic describes the ordeals of journalist Paul Salopek, and to a lesser degree, his driver Idriss Anu and translator Daoud Hari. The three were "arrested"--if the term isn't farcical--by a troupe of gunmen, some of them simply armed children, when they crossed illegally from Chad into the Sudan. The three were separated, beaten, and eventually traded to the Sudanese army for a box of uniforms. Thereafter, they were ferried to a secret prison colloquially called a "ghost house," presumably a Sudanese version of Hotel California. Until the intervention of American officials, notably New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, Salopek was looking forward--I speak euphemistically of course--to a trial (also a euphemism) on charges of intentional and unintentional espionage (yet another euphemism). The real point? Salopek was a message to journalists, especially western ones. The Sudanese government apparently thought that jerking Salopek around would reduce interest in covering news of a renewed military offensive, or atrocities thereof. Who knows? They were probably right.

All told, Salopek was imprisoned for no doubt an extremely harrowing 34 days. I expect we will hear more about his ordeal, as the National Geographic story percolates and Salopek does the radio and TV circuit. To treat a journalist like that! To treat a westerner like that! We are all aghast. We should be.

Perhaps people will think to compare Salopek's nightmare to that of Alan Johnston, the BBC reporter kidnapped in Gaza City by the Army of Islam in March 2007. His detention lasted 114 days; at one point during that period, it was announced that he had been executed. In the end, however, Johnston was freed, apparently in no small part due to the intervention of Hamas, as well as to the worldwide petitions circulated on his behalf.

Another obvious comparison, of course, is to Terry Anderson, the AP correspondent taken hostage by Hezbollah in Lebanon in 1985 and held until December of 1991--that is to say, for 6 years and nine months. Salopek, it seems, got off easy.

Without in any way minimizing the sacrifices of these men or the horrors that they experienced, let me nonetheless offer the names of two others who even now are enduring similar fates, except in an obscurity--at least in the United States--that is our disgrace.

The first is Bilal Hussein, an AP photographer arrested by US Marines on April 12, 2006, and held in confinement ever since--for over two years now. On April 7, 2008, an Iraqi judicial panel ruled that Hussein's case fell under the provisions of an Iraqi amnesty law; as a result, they dismissed further terrorism proceedings against him. Although it was the US military that transferred Hussein's case into the Iraqi judicial system in the first place, American authorities have now decided not to release Hussein pending their own internal review of the Iraqi court's amnesty ruling. US officials have also already claimed that a UN Security Mandate gives them the right to continue to detain Hussein as a security threat, regardless of the Iraqi court's findings. Such is sovereignty in an occupied country; and such is the American government's respect for law and human rights.

The second person is Sami al-Hajj, a journalist for Al Jazeera. Sudanese by birth, his story parallels, at least to a degree, the events that overtook Paul Salopek in Darfur. In December of 2001, al-Hajj was detained by Pakistani authorities who eventually traded him to the US military. It is not known whether they received a box of uniforms for their trouble. al-Hajj was then transferred to Guantanamo Bay, where he remains to this day, happily looking forward to his annual "administrative review board hearing" and perhaps one day to the pomp of a show trial. One of the charges against him is that he snuck into Afghanistan illegally, just as Salopek did in the Sudan. Another is that he interviewed Osama bin Laden--an odd thing, no doubt, for a journalist to do. According to his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, while in American custody, al-Hajj has been beaten, sexually assaulted, and "harshly" interrogated--the latter of course being colloquial American for "tortured." His lawyer also claims that "interrogations" have been directed at getting al-Hajj to link Al Jazeera to Al-Qaeda--perhaps suggesting a political purpose to al-Hajj's captivity not unlike the presumptive motives underlying Sudan's detention of Salopek.

In January 2007--after over five years of captivity--al-Hajj began a hunger strike to protest his indefinite and illegal confinement. He lost at least 55 pounds. American officials intervened and force-fed him. Suicide, you might recall, is "an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us," in the words of former Guantanamo commander Rear Admiral Harry Harris. Yet, during this dastardly and belligerent operation, al-Hajj nonetheless found the compassion to call for Alan Johnston's release--a kindness that Alan Johnston has since reciprocated.

As for Salopek in the Sudan--he too went on a hunger strike, after being put in solitary confinement in a Sudanese ghost house. He ended it when, after eight days, guards told him that he would be force-fed with a rubber hose. "Like Guantanamo," Salopek quotes the guards as saying.

And one final irony. Last year, the Sudanese government--the same one responsible for Salopek's 34-day ordeal--officially condemned al-Hajj's arrest and confinement as illegal and contrary to human rights.

Sami al-Hajj has now been unlawfully imprisoned for almost as long as Terry Anderson was. I cannot imagine his despair, nor the despair of Bilal Hussein. As we hear more about Salopek over the next few weeks, remember al-Hajj; remember Hussein. Think also of all the others held in secret American prisons around the world and at Guantanamo. Their cases differ from Salopek's and Johnston's in the lack of attention given them in American media; and perhaps also in the callous disregard of the government holding them.