Way to go, Nicmarlo ! GREAT Condemnation Letter to CNN !
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.
No doubt because Bill O' has been on them mercilessly the past couple of weeks, deservedly so. I know he's read some letters from people saying they've cancelled their subscriptions with the LA Times.
My thoughts also.
We need to do more than just personally boycotting CNN. We need to tell every hotel that we want Fox News Channel in the room, not CNN. And other public places that offer a variety of stations but provide only CNN for straight news (like my YMCA). We need to speak up and tell them why.
< snip >
Part of CNN's success is that it realizes that when it comes to covering wars, it's not just good journalism that pulls an audience. It is star power. Which is why their Diva of Disaster, Christiane Amanpour, has been gliding through the halls of the Marriott in recent days.
From the day she arrived, Amanpour has lived up to her reputation as star war correspondent.
In her first news conference, from the lawn outside the Taliban embassy, she showed up in a dry-cleaned war jacket, penny loafers and what looked like a new pair of Gucci sunglasses. (That set her apart from another network anchor, who dressed for her first day of war correspondence in an outfit she could have picked up on New York's Fifth Avenue. Her producers told her to dress down in khaki for the next satellite feed.)
Amanpour lost no time letting the media pack know that she intended to be the alpha dog. Growing frustrated when the men in turbans at the Taliban embassy ignored a question of hers, she began shouting at the top of her lungs. "Who's making the final decision, who's making the final decision?" she literally screamed, as she tried to get an answer about who in Afghanistan would decide whether or not to release accused terrorist Osama bin Laden.
"Oh, so impolite, so impolite," tut-tutted a Lebanese journalist. "She will get nothing with this approach."
In fact, she did get her answer. It would be Afghanistan's mullah-in-chief, Mohammed Omar, who would make the decision.
From the start, Amanpour was airlifted into Islamabad to go head to head with the BBC and the American networks for the "Big Get," the first interview with Pakistan's leader, General Pervez Musharraf.
"When Christiane comes to an event, she's going for the ratings grabber, the interview that shows that CNN still gets the big fish before anyone else can get the hook in the water," said the CNN producer. "It's a lot of pressure. She's the closer. So she's aggressive, but that's what it takes to get to the top of CNN."
The manoeuvring between the BBC and CNN went on behind the scenes for days. And for days, Amanpour seemed to grow increasingly irritated as she moved from her room to the roof of the Marriott, where she broadcast live to the world but got to see almost nothing of Pakistan.
"It's just too loud, it's just too loud," Amanpour complained one morning, as she sat in the hotel's restaurant, where the TV was turned to the BBC. "Do you mind if I turn it down?" She got up and turned it off, while the rest of the journalists in the room watched wonderingly.
But her mood seemed to lighten soon after that. She had gotten the "Get," beating out the BBC for the first interview with the General. CNN trumpeted its exclusive. Every journalist in Islamabad watched the TV and took notes.
And a CNN gopher booked Amanpour a ticket out of Islamabad for London, business class.
(Apparently this was originally in the Globe and Mail. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/)
You must have an iron stomach. *g*
I'm sure much of their previous coverage will look damning after this little revelation.
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.
It's not clear in the article what exactly he said to King Hussein.
Probably he was afraid of or figured someone else would tell the truth about C**p "News" Network and he thought it would look better if he "came clean" first. I've seen it with people - if they so-called apologize first, with less, then when more bad stuff comes out they don't look so bad.
Way to go, Nicmarlo ! GREAT Condemnation Letter to CNN !
Whatever his reason for unburdening his soulless soul, it smells like Classic Clinton to me.
With Fox News Channel all over Baghdad he had to move fast.
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