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.
There is another article on here somewhere that discusses the last day when the minders didn't show up; in that article it said that on the last day, the "bag guy" came around and collected everything that was on each news organizations "tab" -- and they guessed he left the hotel that day with over $200,000.
Did anybody else read that?
Agreed; Brit's always good, though.....yes, he cut to the most important parts, of both articles. This is enough to begin with.....there will be follow-up at some point; and though I can't listen to Rush during the day, I understand he pounded on this.....perhaps Sean might bring it up tonight, too.
They are nothing but a trash station; they've sunk to their own level: the sewer.
The odious stench of CNN's duplicity permeating from this editorial is hardly shocking considering we have been gagging on the foul odors of their Liberal Globalist agenda permeating through our television sets and into our homes from this 'news organization' these many years.
CNN is as objective and trustworthy as Pravda.
My lack of shock hardly lessens my outrage. Yellow journalism is too kind a description for CNN and other organizations like them. They are like France, Germany and Russia et al , pretending to be allies while prostituting themselves with those who would destroy us and our freedoms if given the opportunity. CNN is a propaganda tool sharing an agenda with the enemies of Liberty. The day CNN and other organizations like them die will be for America akin to the fall of the Berlin Wall.
That much of the 'educated class' unquestioningly feeds on CNN's lies as a baby fed at it's mother's breast has long left me wondering what kind of 'education' they received.
The possibility that there are Americans that will hear news of CNN's moral bankruptcy and continue to hold the views of CNN as their own is perhaps the most depressing of outcomes.
America! It's time to clean house!
Has CNN failed to report things which could have prevented 9/11? We will never know what would have happened if they had reported the truth years ago, and may never to know the things that they have failed to report.
Have we forgotten how CNN continually reported how bad the economy was during the '92 GWB1/Clinton election, when in fact the economy was in recovery?
CNN & their ilk have the power to shape the outcomes of elections and more, and therefore the future of our country. It is vile enough to align a 'news organization' with a political party/ agenda, but to carry the betrayal to the level of global politics is IMO on par with treason.
As a global news organization they have a tremendous responsibility and they have failed the cause of free people everywhere miserably and greatly assisted dictators of death.
How many people have died because of CNN?
NOT PEOPLE; just the slime, all the time, are surprised. : )
I'm sure they'll talk about the looting; but I'm just as sure they'll talk about WHAT CNN KNEW BUT WOULDN'T TELL.
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