The News We (CNN) Kept To Ourselves [must read]

The New York Times ^ | 04/11/03 | EASON JORDAN

[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.

[nina0113]

I think you're thinking about "TailHOOK". "TailWIND" was the (thoroughly debunked) accusation that the US used sarin gas on Laotian (or Cambodian?) villages that sheltered American deserters during the Vietnam war. CNN had to retract the whole report & a couple of people got fired.

[MeekOneGOP]

Another reason I'm glad I switched from CNN to FOX News Channel 3 years ago. Thanks !

[Howlin]

Are you joking?

[Vets_Husband_and_Wife]

COOL.. thanks!!

FRegards, "Annoying" (at least when I'm visiting those sites) :o)

(Is it case senstive? Like all caps, all small case or Capital "A"?) Thanks

[goodnesswins]

LOL...YOU are correct.....HIDING face.....how stupid....oh, well...thanks for the correction.....LOL.

[GOPrincess]

You know, something occurs to me. Rush wondered if Rick Kaplan knew this, and if Kaplan told Clinton. (Which would mean Clinton knew all this and didn't act on it.)

But another question is, if Clinton and our government knew that CNN was in Iraq and complicit in covering this up, was there nothing our government could say or do, or is "Freedom of the Press" sacred? Could/should someone in the U.S. government have gone public and said what was happening in Iraq (surely we also had an idea from our intelligence sources) and that CNN was covering this up? Maybe I'm a little over the top here but it's an interesting thought. It seems to me that CNN and the Clinton Administration walked hand in hand through the '90s on this. It only came to an end due to George W. Bush.

So much for Clinton "feeling people's pain."

[salmon76]

CNN = Censored News Network

[Interesting Times]

CNN = Compromised News Network

[PoisedWoman]

CNN is definitely not the only guilty party.

The minute I heard Rush read this NYT report this morning, I remembered seeing Jim Avila on NBC reporting from Havana in 2000. He was standing on the same street corner I'd stood on six months before crying my eyes out about what a mess the place was and the dreadful conditions the Cubans had to endure. But Avila saw it another way; he was standing there saying how great life was, how much the people liked Castro. I wrote him an email pronto telling him that I KNEW he was flat-out lying.

Avila got an award from media watchdog group mediaresearch.org for the lies he spun in Cuba after Elian was snatched by the Clintonistas and sent back:

Semper Fidel Award (for Jim Avila’s Admiration of Fidel Castro)

"What is deprogramming? What is reeducation? The young man [Elian] will go back into the, into the school system in Cuba. The school system in Cuba teaches that communism is the way to succeed in life and it is the best system. Is that deprogramming or is that national heritage? That’s certainly what he’ll be learning. He’ll also be living in a different kind of society, a society that many people here in Cuba like. The CIA, in fact, says that if the borders were open that most, 90 percent of the population here in Cuba would stay in Cuba because they like it."
-- NBC News reporter Jim Avila from Cuba on CNBC’s Upfront Tonight, June 27 " (from http://www.mediaresearch.org/notablequotables/bestof/2000/best13-15.asp

Media corruption runs wide and deep like an open sewer whose stench you cannot escape. It's time to clean it up.

[goodnesswins]

I still like the one someone earlier came up with

CNN = CRIMINAL News Network

[Piranha]

I hope I was wrong. I hope that this will become a big story in the regular media. At least, it looks like people will pay attention to this corruption scandal in the news media for more than a day.

[Lucas1]

Quote "It only came to an end due to George W. Bush. "

LET THIS BE A REMINDER PEOPLE

"All it takes for Evil to prevail in this world is for enough good men to do nothing."

[Howlin]

Remember back a few weeks ago when I kept saying that with any luck perhaps the media would be a "casualty" of this war, too?

Today's my birthday. This is a good present.......LOL.

[goodnesswins]

I have a feeling the internet is changing a lot of this!!!

[Lucas1]

And I repeat

"ALL IT TAKES FOR EVIL TO PREVAIL IN THIS WORLD IS FOR ENOUGH GOOD MEN TO DO NOTHING."

[manatee]

It seems to me that CNN did as much to cover for Clinton as they did to cover for Saddam's regime.

[ken5050]

See my #919.....

[Vets_Husband_and_Wife]

I think there is a reason for protection of reporters from not having to report sources or to be a tool for a government (ie; spy).

But this story just goes beyond any ethical arguement for justification.

[salmon76]

CNN = Crummy News Network

[Travis McGee]

I sent versions of this email to all of the links posted at #881:

******************************************************************************

Dear Mr. Case,

You should hang your head in shame at the revelations of Mr. Eason today. CNN has been complicit in propping up Saddam's bloody regime for at least the last ten years, all from your greedy desire to keep a bureau running in Baghdad.

This is no different than keeping a bureau open in Berlin in 1940 by spiking all news of death camps in order to toady up to Hitler and Goebbels.

SHAME!!!!

I will NEVER tune into CNN again, not for ONE SECOND!

PS: I are well aware that CNN is doing the same "dictator's dance" in Cuba. Disgusting!

Travis McGee

San Diego