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.
He might be haunted by his silence that allowed this regime & this brutal mad man to continue for many years, but obviously to me, he didn't think his part in this would ever come to light.
A guilty conscience is a terrible thing to live with.
This man is condemned by his own mind, if he has any remnants of decency left--and I question that he does!!....
May God have mercy on him.......his fellow man will not.
Why is he confessing now?
...because he knows the truth will come out soon anyway.
He is a sorry excuse for a human being!
At the first sign that we were to be used as a propaganda tool, I would have had us pack our stuff up and leave. The choice between staying and telling the truth and staying and giving covered up, whitewashed views is a false choice. CNN did not have to stay.
Would some of those who had worked for us up to that point have suffered retribution? Possibly. But then, as it turns out, some of those who worked for CNN when they stayed ended up having their fingernails ripped out, being tortured, disappearing into the night and fog.
Journalistic ethics would have said "don't be part of a propaganda outlet". Humanity would have said "don't be an enabler for a criminal regime".
I, too, am seething. Besides the moral depravity of CNN in NOT doing anything, they compounded their utter crimes (yes, crimes) by giving face time to anti-war/Bush idiots. They ACTIVELY fought the efforts of the administration and Bush in particular to solve the problem of a murderous dictator.
This information cannot be permitted to fade away. CNN is now exposed to be even worse than we thought. Failure to report this news is morally reprehensible. Knowing what they knew and yet attacking our efforts to free Iraq from the horrors the people endured and suffered is even worse. A plague on them.
More likely this was not reported because doing so would have cost them a buck or two if they were thrown out of Iraq. This is despicable.
I'm speechless at the revelation. Speechless.
But think of the political implications. CNN didn't operate in a vacccum. CNN honchos were solid FOBs, personal friends of the Clintons who spent nights in the White House. Clinton had to know of CNN's decision not to report the truth of what was happening in Iraq.
This is a case of the media shaping history. This guy claims CNN was being blackmailed. This is no doubt true, but how convenient that the result was so convenient for Bill Clinton.
We've called CNN "The Clinton News Network" for years...we had no idea how true it was. CNN not reporting on Iraq allowed Clinton to get away with doing nothing on human abuses, but ask the next logical question: What other news on Iraq was CNN not reporting in order keep reporters there? Did CNN not report Oil for Food abuses? Did CNN not report illegal French and Russian imports?
Bump for thoughts and appropriate comments later.
First one is - WHAT ELSE ARE YOU HIDING, CNN, FOR YOUR OWN SELFISH PURPOSES?
For instance, I imagine, CNN knows tons more about the Clinton Regime's Crimes but refuses to disclose what they know because:
1) To do so would help Republicans, the group they consider the #1 enemy of this country.
2) To do so would mean HILLARY WOULD SHUT DOWN THEIR ACCESS TO THE BEST INSIDER SOURCES
3) To have done so during America's Stalinist regime from 1992 to 2000 would have likely RISKED THE LIVES OF SOME OF THEIR PRECIOUS CNN PEOPLE
4) CNN agrees with Stalinist Saddamite Clintonite brute thug force as long as it keeps THE AGENDA THEY SUPPORT IN FORCE!
And if anyone reading this does not understand that the Clintons used the same terrorist / murderous tactics to further its own power - they have some reading to do to come up to speed on America's own Saddamite wannabes. The only reason we did not have torture chambers and children's prisons is that our nation's ideals and traditions and foundations are, amazingly, still strong even after decades of assault by those seen as champions of revolutionary thought by the Criminal News Network officals!!!!
Guess words really didn't fail........
Before this is over, we will know fully WHO are the true axis of evil..........including CNN, France, Germany and Russia!!!!
They are in so deep.....and it's all coming to light!
And I think, sooner....rather than later.....much much sooner, it will be so obvious Clinton was one of the master puppets in this whole mess.
He thinks he's covered all his tracks.....
..but he WILL be exposed!!!
In other words, CNN merely provided them 'employment' which continued to put them at risk and did not give them any safety. They would have been no worse off had CNN left at the first sign of having to sacrifice journalistic integrity- as a matter of fact they would have been better off.
And the world would have been better off because Saddam's propaganda outfit would not have had as much success.
But I've outargued much more difficult foes in the courtroom then I've faced hereYou think you won your arguments on this thread?
If you insist, barrister.
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