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.
YaYa said it best in #492 above. Think of all who must have known this but played their deception, special pleading game on behalf of Saddam for over a decade.
It's reprehensible. It's straight-up lying propaganda.
If I could think of something to sue them for, I would.
This story, I will not let go. CNN would report on the Bush twins drinking, on even Clinton & Lewinsky. Ya think CNN would report on Saddam's mistresses? Or Uday's 12 year old rape victims?
These people knew that Uday was raping little girls, pulling the teeth of his own "friends" with pliers,... yet they kept their mouths sealed.
Worse, they had people like Christianne "war slut" Ammanpour denouncing the US military for the one friendly fire incident revolving around journalists... asking for a major investigation... while they knew Saddam had been electroshock torturing their own reporter.
My disgust is uncalcalatable. They weren't being objective.
CNN does not put on a member of the Flat Earth Society every time somebody mentions the circumfrence of the planet. CNN had proof that Iraq was as evil as we said it was, and they kept quiet. Bastards.
The writer clearly doesn't have a clear understanding of the realities on the ground because CNN has demonstrated again and again that it has a spine; that it's prepared to be forthright; is forthright in its reporting....The transcript does not indicate whether or not his pants were on fire.We're not reading Iraqi propaganda; we're reporting as an independent news organization....
Well absolutely. I mean we work very hard to report forthrightly, to report fairly and to report accurately and if we ever determine we cannot do that, then we would not want to be there; but we do think that some light is better than no light whatsoever....
We'd very much like to be there if there's a second war; but-- we are not going to make journalistic compromises in an effort to make that happen, being mindful that in wartime there is censorship on all sides, and we're prepared to deal with a certain amount of censorship as long as it's not-- extreme, ridiculous censorship where -- which we've actually seen a number of cases in previous conflicts -- not just with Iraq. But-- sure! We want to be there, but it's --we don't want to be there come hell or high water. We want to be there if we can be there and operate as a responsible news organization.
The war is not yet over. Americans are still glued to their TV sets, absorbed in the thrill of victory and the agony of the Soddamites' defeat.
By spinning its own complicity in nefarious acts right now, CNN is hoping ongoing fast-moving events the next few days plus the average American's short attention-span will give it cover.
It's similar to the times Klintoon released negative news of his administration to the press late on Fridays because he knew most people do other things on weekends, and by Monday, the edge was off and many of his misdeeds were diluted or forgotten.
Leni
Are they saying anything about it?
This seems like such a huge story.
hawk
Like a lot of other people, I almost at a loss for words after reading that article....ALMOST.
There are two things that I am sure of right now. The first thing that I'm sure of is that CNN and the people who made these decisions are complicit in murder and torture of many people.
The other thing that I am sure of is that when I get home tonight, I'm going to actually read the owner's manual to my TV (GASP!) and block out every single CNN channel that I current get from my cable provider. CNN, Headline News, CNN fn, CNN Sports...all of them. I don't even want to accidentally land on one of their channels again.
I think it's a virtual guarantee now that CNN won't be allowed to remain in Iraq one second after the Iraqi people take over the government again.
CNN is reprehensible.
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