Posted on 04/10/2003 9:16:06 PM PDT by Pokey78
ATLANTA — Over the last dozen years I made 13 trips to Baghdad to lobby the government to keep CNN's Baghdad bureau open and to arrange interviews with Iraqi leaders. Each time I visited, I became more distressed by what I saw and heard — awful things that could not be reported because doing so would have jeopardized the lives of Iraqis, particularly those on our Baghdad staff.
For example, in the mid-1990's one of our Iraqi cameramen was abducted. For weeks he was beaten and subjected to electroshock torture in the basement of a secret police headquarters because he refused to confirm the government's ludicrous suspicion that I was the Central Intelligence Agency's Iraq station chief. CNN had been in Baghdad long enough to know that telling the world about the torture of one of its employees would almost certainly have gotten him killed and put his family and co-workers at grave risk.
Working for a foreign news organization provided Iraqi citizens no protection. The secret police terrorized Iraqis working for international press services who were courageous enough to try to provide accurate reporting. Some vanished, never to be heard from again. Others disappeared and then surfaced later with whispered tales of being hauled off and tortured in unimaginable ways. Obviously, other news organizations were in the same bind we were when it came to reporting on their own workers.
We also had to worry that our reporting might endanger Iraqis not on our payroll. I knew that CNN could not report that Saddam Hussein's eldest son, Uday, told me in 1995 that he intended to assassinate two of his brothers-in-law who had defected and also the man giving them asylum, King Hussein of Jordan. If we had gone with the story, I was sure he would have responded by killing the Iraqi translator who was the only other participant in the meeting. After all, secret police thugs brutalized even senior officials of the Information Ministry, just to keep them in line (one such official has long been missing all his fingernails).
Still, I felt I had a moral obligation to warn Jordan's monarch, and I did so the next day. King Hussein dismissed the threat as a madman's rant. A few months later Uday lured the brothers-in-law back to Baghdad; they were soon killed.
I came to know several Iraqi officials well enough that they confided in me that Saddam Hussein was a maniac who had to be removed. One Foreign Ministry officer told me of a colleague who, finding out his brother had been executed by the regime, was forced, as a test of loyalty, to write a letter of congratulations on the act to Saddam Hussein. An aide to Uday once told me why he had no front teeth: henchmen had ripped them out with pliers and told him never to wear dentures, so he would always remember the price to be paid for upsetting his boss. Again, we could not broadcast anything these men said to us.
Last December, when I told Information Minister Muhammad Said al-Sahhaf that we intended to send reporters to Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq, he warned me they would "suffer the severest possible consequences." CNN went ahead, and in March, Kurdish officials presented us with evidence that they had thwarted an armed attack on our quarters in Erbil. This included videotaped confessions of two men identifying themselves as Iraqi intelligence agents who said their bosses in Baghdad told them the hotel actually housed C.I.A. and Israeli agents. The Kurds offered to let us interview the suspects on camera, but we refused, for fear of endangering our staff in Baghdad.
Then there were the events that were not unreported but that nonetheless still haunt me. A 31-year-old Kuwaiti woman, Asrar Qabandi, was captured by Iraqi secret police occupying her country in 1990 for "crimes," one of which included speaking with CNN on the phone. They beat her daily for two months, forcing her father to watch. In January 1991, on the eve of the American-led offensive, they smashed her skull and tore her body apart limb by limb. A plastic bag containing her body parts was left on the doorstep of her family's home.
I felt awful having these stories bottled up inside me. Now that Saddam Hussein's regime is gone, I suspect we will hear many, many more gut-wrenching tales from Iraqis about the decades of torment. At last, these stories can be told freely.
Eason Jordan is chief news executive at CNN.
And the left wonders why we call them the "hate America first" crowd and why we say that the media leans left in its bias...
Not until he admits that he was morally and professionally wrong to spend thirteen years "lobby[ing] the government to keep CNN's Baghdad bureau open"; that he should have pulled all CNN people out of Baghdad the moment it became clear that their presence was actually preventing CNN from reporting the truth. At that point, I'll be willing to give him some credit. Until then, he seems to want sympathy because he feels so bad about all the deaths he caused, and all the Ba'athist coverups in which he was complicit without admitting that he shouldn't have done it.
What CNN and others did in Iraq was to deny their reason for existence in order to have a seat at Saddam's table.
They sucked up!
They abused the purpose of freedom of the press!
They became part of the regime!
They are traitors to the profession and to the United states of America and the entire world!
They disgust me in ways that I cannot even find words to express!
Tell me you are kidding. Please?
It is not like we could not have put the heat on Iraq any time between say, 1991 and 2003, like any time in the Regime of Bill and Hillary. But CNN was so busy covering over their misdeeds, that covering over a few more misdeeds was ok. I mean in 1995 one might have dispared that the leadership of the country was such that nothing could be done. But surely, if you are CNN, you can devote your resources to ensuring that there is stronger leadership starting say, in 1996, not mind you that Viagra Bob is my idea of strong leadership, but CNN might have done something about that too. I mean it is not as though Ted Turner needed to work a second shift to feed his family.
But surely you see this, I hope, because after reading this article I have plenty of invective stored up and have some to spare for you.
Yes we will.
Just wait until the Iraqi people open up fully.
Then all we will need is the scumbag liberal anti-Bush network newsrooms to report it.
I sure wouldn't count on Perky Katie to report on the Saddam atrocities.
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