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.
I can't really fault Eason Jordan for not reporting these particular atrocities for fear of retaliation against these individuals' families and/or retaliation against CNN reporters stationed in Iraq. I however, blame CNN for still showing us biased reports and distorted views from Saddam's sympathizers such as Peter Arnett, Christiana Amanpour and others. Subsequently CNN had the responsibility to hire more objective reporters capable to present factual reports.
Because like most socialists, nothing is more important than their ideology. Not human life, or the loyalty to the greatest, free-est country on earth, without which, THERE WOULD BE NO FREAKING CNN!
In 1995, the "head" of our govt. was billy the pig....you REALLY think he'd have done anything?
They shouldn't have waited to get kicked out. Once they saw that Saddam's animals were going to make being a propaganda organ for the regime the price of keeping their Baghdad bureau open, they should have said "Thanks, but no thanks", and then bugged out.
The result.. all of this would go undocumented. Now i'm sure there are plenty of news organizations that will be able to place facts so that any living members of the regime responsible for these crimes will be put to justice.
Bulls**t. What do you suppose is happening now that the regime has crumbled away? The truth is coming out. And it's coming out in spite of the left wing media organs such as the New York Times, LA Times, Newsweek and CNN. And what use is ANYTHING that CNN's Baghdad staff might "document" when the bureau has surrendered any pretext of credibility it may have had by prostituting itself to Saddam Hussein?
How about the Iraqi's working for them as he mentioned?
This is the most compelling reason there is for CNN to have packed up shop in Baghdad once it became clear what the terms were going to be to stay! It would be very hard for the regime to kill them if CNN were no longer there and they weren't working (or at least it would be hard for the regime to kill them under this particular pretext - Saddam's monsters didn't seem to even need a reason to kill).
So instead, CNN prostrated themselves before Saddam and cheerfully pushed his propaganda on the rest of the world just so they could keep their "presence." Seems to me that CNN's Iraqi staffers were tortured and murdered pushing Saddam's propaganda. That has to be one of the vilest forms of irony I can imagine. AND CNN LET THIS HAPPEN FOR TWELVE YEARS!!!
And then on top of all that, knowing all of this, CNN has the unmitigated gall to send us all kinds of warm and fuzzy stories about Saddam's birthday celebration, about how Saddam got almost 100 percent of the "vote" in the last "election" and how this is proof that the Iraqis adored him.
Every time 50 smelly unwashed hippie maggots turned out to shit in the streets, throw trash at cops and wave their stupid "No blood for oil" signs, CNN breathlessly reported that tens of thousands of "mainstream Americans" were peacefully protesting this "illegal", "immoral" war (and CNN made no bones about their total agreement with the protestors on the war issue). CNN even went out of their way to clean up the coverage, showing only sweet grandmotherly types and cute little kids waving "No War" signs! And why not - they were giving us a whitewashed view of the goings-on in Baghdad from their precious bureau there, so why not spread some more lies?
Every time that POS perfumed prince Wesley Clark opened his piehole to deliver his latest steaming load with a grunt and a splash, CNN was right there, gleefully urging him on and repeating the Left's mantra-de-jour that the idiot selected President had led us into another Vietnam quagmire, that our soldiers were starving in the desert, that Rumsfeld was a blithering fool endangering our soldier's lives by trying to win the war on the cheap, and that Iraqi civilians were dropping like flies.
Get the point yet?
Do you think the result you are seeking could have been accomplished simply by aggressively reporting all of the atrocities that happened to Iraqis that had immigrated to this country and have them tell us what Saddam did, or did Jordan have to tell us his story, which could have got Iraqis killed?
CNN wouldn't report information it had first hand knowledge of; why would it bother to report second hand stoies from Iraqi immigrants?
Perhaps because they wouldn't play ball like CNN?
Again... what is the news benefit of reporting that Saddam Hussein's b-day was a huge celebration with a play about his life getting rave reviews... then not reporting what Uday was doing?
That is propaganda. Pure and simple. CNN could not function in Iraq as a journalism center, so they should not have pretended that they were. Jordan's response to the New Republic Article belies that CNN was lying to us, and to the world, when he claimed they would leave if they were being shut up. He lied. Period.
CNN also should be ashamed if it ever hired another Iraqi born worker, or put a reporter in there without fully briefing them on what could happen.
CNN also should not have had Christianne Amanpour on tv calling for a UN Geneva code investigation of the Palestine Hotel incident, when they knew far worse things going on. By holding this candle light vigil for journalists, demanding justice, CNN was distorting the truth.
The world viewers seeing this believe US targets journalists deliberately... Iraq doesn't, when quite the opposite is true.
This is just one small point that proves that keeping that office open... with desperate shuttle diplomacy, actually hurt their ability to tell the truth.
As James Glassman, I believe mentioned today... if ya want to know what is going on in Iraq... sit in Jordan and snatch each Iraqi who has fled... instead of discussing Saddam's birthday... how much the people love him by giving him 100% of the vote in shame elections...
That is the freaking stories that CNN was able to give us by staying in Baghdad, instead of interviewing torture victims and their family members who fled.
If you can't see this... I can't help you.
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