I can.
Jordan should have shut down the Baghdad Bureau of CNN and gotten out. He stayed while covering up for Hussein. He's complicit. He should never work in journalism again.
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.
Jordan should have shut down the Baghdad Bureau of CNN and gotten out. He stayed while covering up for Hussein. He's complicit. He should never work in journalism again.
Given that there are over 1400 responses in this thread as I post this, I doubt I'm the first one to point this out, but if so, it bears repeating. Has this moron stopped to think about WHY Uday felt comfortable telling CNN that he planned to assassinate a foreign head of state and murder two other men? If I were planning something like that, I wouldn't tell my Mom, much less someone who could disclose it to TV viewers all over the planet! Bottom line: For one reason or another, Uday saw CNN as a bunch of fellow travelers at best, and allies in the terrorist war against civilization at worst. One of the worst murderers on the planet thought Eason Jordan was his tool and/or good buddy, and he was right. Jordan did what a tool and/or good buddy would do: He covered Uday's butt.
That wasn't a decision for him alone to make unless he owned CNN. If you are going to blame Jordan, you should also blame other reporters from different news organization. He wasn't the only one who knew.
Obviously, other news organizations were in the same bind we were when it came to reporting on their own workers.He did alert King Hussein.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
Very true, CNN needs a wall-to-wall housecleaning. These people need to be publicly shamed and shunned.
Yes, that's true. However, I don't know how easy it is to find someone in hiding, even for CNN.
And exactly what kind of "eyes and ears" were these? You say everyone knew about what Saddam was up to and that there was no point in CNN talking about it. I ask you, what exactly was so newsworthy about showing government-approved clips of Saddam firing a rifle in the air to rally his thugs? What was so important about telling us stories about how Saddam was so loved by the Iraqi people that 100 percent of them "voted" for him in the last "election"? Especially when it turns out that these stories were nothing but a crock of shit, and especially when CNN was treating Saddam with more deference and respect than our own President Bush? What was so important - why, CNN's reputation of being the only news organization with "access" to Baghdad.
Sorry, but in my book, looking the other way while incredible atrocities are taking place, just so you can win a "mine's bigger than yours" argument with your rivals, is about as low as you can go. And this so-called self-serving "apology," dumped onto the op-ed pages of the premier left-wing propaganda sheet in the land on a Friday, doubtless as pre-emptive damage control and doubtless in the hopes that by the end of the weekend it will have disappeared down the memory hole, doesn't even begin to come close to making up for what CNN has done for the last 12 years of Saddam Hussein's rule.
...regardless of whether you like their style that was important for the world to have.
Let me tell you something - as much as I love Fox News, if they had behaved as selfishly and as unconcernedly for basic human decency as CNN has done here, I would be just as hard on them, and I sure as hell would no longer be watching them!
I'm not capable
So what .
Guess again . Better yet read a few books .
I read your previous post .
I see you disagree and add another disclaimer . You warm the cockles of me heart . Here we go again . Yes I think . I deal in the real world . Aggresively reporting .
No doubt you will read this and wonder . I think the same thing about you .
That is an incredible thought..I can't even contemplate the consequences if true.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.