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.

[KingKongCobra]

I suggest that you take a break and do some soul searching. It's a difficult thing to do while you are wrapped up in the storm. CNN is supposed to be a news organization. They refused to report the news in Iraq for purely monetary reasons. They helped Sadam murder his people for a few dollars. Their staff was never really safe, they were just playing Russian roullete with them. They didn't have the integrity or backbone to try to get out of their predicament. They were nothing but whores and enablers. Like the wife who lets her husband beat the kids, they never even tried to get help.

They should have got out and taken everyone with them. then, they should have reported the truth about what that country was like and gone on the offensive to have that Dictator outed. It might have cost a few lives but it might have saved 100,000 others. This couldn't be any simpler. They made a deal Satan.

[diamond6]

One question, and then I'm retiring for the night: Do you think the result your seeking could have been accomplished simply by aggressively reporting what 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?

[MS.BEHAVIN]

With all due respect to you both..

Please stop it..

This is not about either one of you, and what possible difference will your squabbling make?

This reporter is an ass, and is hoping for exactly what you are giving to him, this "infighting" about who is right or wrong, instead of what HE did.

Don't give him the satisfaction.

Please...

Neither of you are the villians here, yet!
Don't make it so.

It is HE who should be punished, let's focus on that..

We can speculate forever about what WE would have done..it doesn't matter, the damage by him has been done..

We must not let it damage us!

Ms.B

[Mustang]

Be careful now, Dane. You don't want to confuse this diamond dude with facts, reality and common sense. After all, as his profile states, she/he is a left coast lawyer. :-))

Me thinks this NYT/CNN "item" will be around mucho-longer than the average 24 hour news cycle. Its got more legs than Radio City Hall's Rockette dancers.

Mustang sends from "Malpaso" News.

[Mustang]

Forgot to put "Music" in there someplace.

[diamond6]

I'm waiting.

[diamond6]

Good night. Flame away. Have fun. But I've outargued much more difficult foes in the courtroom then I've faced here. Facts and objectivity have always been my greatest assets. You might try it sometime.

[maryz]

The thing about it is that the author still works for CNN,

Someone on the thread asked why the story would break in the NYT and not on CNN -- maybe he doesn't expect to be working for them much longer.

[RWG]

Won't reveal information to help our side because of a journalist's ethics. Pathetic excuse for anything.

[MS.BEHAVIN]

Can this jerk be tried or not?

That is the question!

[Argh]

Thank you, Miss Slip. Bump.

[Argh]

Ping, in case you haven't been yet.

[Dane]

Looks like diamond dude, has declared victory a victory in his own head and left. I agree with you that CNN's complicity with saddam will get out to a much larger audience, Rush will probably lead with it today.

[maryz]

but how many major news organizations didn't have people inside Iraq? Even Fox did. What if they're all compromised this way?

The others may be compromised to some extent, CNN was in there years before anyone else -- so much the more "embedded," so to speak.

And maybe someone can refresh my memory: I think I saw something on one of the live war threads, early on: when Iraqi TV was knocked off (all too briefly), it was reported that Ted Turner offered CNN's resources to help.

[BreitbartSentMe]

I am disgusted by this report. How many other innocent Iraqi people were killed by Saddam's regime, because people at CNN who KNEW what was going on, and could prove it, were too COWARDLY to stand up and expose it. Forget the risk to the people who worked for CNN in Badgad, if they really wanted to, they could have worked out a plan with State or the military to spirit those people out of the country in exchange for documentation and evidence on human rights violations by this regime.

As for this author, sorry that this has eaten at you for so long, but having to live with knowing you were too much of a coward to stop atrocities like this tends to do that.......

[kcvl]

CNN SHOULD PAY FOR THIS!!!

[kcvl]

Eason Jordan

[KingKongCobra]

Hopefully, they will. How many of their other offices are witholding news? I hope they have to start answering that question very soon.

[kcvl]

Eason Jordan: Iraq ready for war
September 8, 2002 Posted: 2:10 PM EDT (1810 GMT)


Eason Jordan, CNN's chief news executive who recently returned from Iraq, talked Sunday with CNN's Miles O'Brien and Catherine Callaway about the situation and the complexities that could arise if the United States takes military action.



O'BRIEN: I've got to ask you -- just on a personal level, day-to-day level -- I know you met with the high and mighty while you were there, but you had an opportunity, I know, to talk to just everyday Iraqis. What is their view of the U.S., and did you ever get any even sort of whispered comments that would indicate to you one way or another how they really feel about Saddam Hussein?

JORDAN: Well, the Iraqi people are scared to speak freely, and when someone like me is in Iraq, I'm in the company, for the most part, of Iraqi officials at all times, even low-level minders, so to speak. And so it's tough to find people who will speak up and talk to you honestly about these things.

The reality is most of the people in Iraq are not Sunni Muslims, the sect that Saddam Hussein is part of, but they're Shi'a, and they're Kurds. And collectively, the Shi'a and the Kurds actually make up the vast majority of the people in Iraq, and they are natural enemies of Saddam Hussein with a few exceptions.

As far as the average person on the street is concerned, they're fed up. Unemployment is absolutely awful. Probably the majority of the Iraqi people who could be employed are not employed, and the people have gone through 20 years of war. They're exhausted, and the standard of living is a disaster. I mean, if you have a job, you're lucky to make $1 a week, and so people really struggle to get by.

[kcvl]

Jordan is the recipient of three Emmy awards, three Peabody awards, four CableACE awards, the New York Film and TV Festival Award, the National Headliner Award, the duPont Award, the World Hunger Media Award, the Livingston Award and the Vanguard Award for Young Leadership from the National Cable Television Association.