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.
Think about it. These journalists were there commemorating freely a "US" atrocity, while they knew their colleagues had been tortured by Hussein. That is what is wrong with them being there.
If ya watch CNN or ABC, you think that the US are war criminals in how they treat journalists. Steam is coming out of my ears.
CNN... the most dishonest name in news...
Is your position that free speech gives CNN the right to lie the entire world?
WHAT CNN SAID [Kathryn Jean Lopez]
I just looked up that Jordanian border scene. Here’s CNN producer Ingrid Formanek talking to Paula Zahn, March 22:
I think you were asking about our negotiations to be able to stay, with everything possible, we pointed out it was in everybody's interest and CNN's interest and Iraq's interest and certainly the interest of the world and of the American people to see what was going on in Baghdad and it was very important to have set of independent eyes and ears to report this. That's a point that we've always made to the Iraqi authorities throughout the years that we have been in Baghdad. We certainly made that point last night. In all of the years we worked there, we pointed out we have reported fairly. We followed the rules and it was in their interests, as well as ours.
Now, of course, it was a request by the network for an interview with the president. Interestingly enough, the Iraqis have never, as far as we could tell, taken advantage of the foreign media in the sense that all of the world, for example, the Bush administration, they take advantage of the media, they speak every minute that they can get of air time they take to get their point across to the world. This is done all over the world. The Iraqis, I think, has never taken full advantage of this. And I think it's a great missed opportunity because the world can hear and see what's happening if organizations like CNN are allowed to remain in Baghdad. And a great missed opportunity for everybody.
So9
Agreed, Burns was soft-pendaling Jordan's complicity BUT he also stated that this story should have "gotten out somehow". IMHO this was the network's responsibility. I will never believe that CNN wasn't to some extent aware of what was going on.
"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."
Everyone - post 281 has food for your emails to CNN, to FOX, to everyone you are notifying about this huge "breaking news story". (If you aren't notifying anyone else, why not?)
Considering he didn't seem to change anybody's mind here, I'd have to question his abilities in the courtroom. At least when a master "parser" like Clinton does it, he is persuasive.
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