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.
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.
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