quote:
The News We Kept to Ourselves
by EASON JORDAN Friday April 11, 2003 at 01:18 PM
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.
quote:
Mr. Eason Jordan, chief news executive at CNN, published in the New York Times a truly rare article last Friday: an op-ed capable of genuinely shocking even world-weary cynics in a jaded world. He announced that, 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
quote:I'm more interested in how the country, and region, will be in 2053 or 2103 than I am 2013.
Originally posted by ciaj:
The goals are monumentous, and while the initial ones have been reached, I don't think anyone can say for certain how the country will be in 2013.
quote:I don't believe CNN has every portrayed Iraq to be a paradise. Also, and this is the key fact, if I believed that doing such a story would endanger lives -- either that of CNN employees, or those the regime would suspect of giving information -- then those lives would most likely weigh heavily on my decision. I said it before: this isn't 1945 Germany, where very few segments of society were aware of the holocaust, Saddam's atrocities are pretty well known (in the general, if not in the specific).
You're being unusually dense about this subject. If YOU KNEW FOR A FACT that these kinds of things were happening... How would you portray the county of Iraq and/or Saddam Hussein? Would you gloss over the kinds of things you KNEW were happening in order to keep the Baghdad bureau open for 13 years? or would you do more to further the image of a homicidal lunatic running the country and risk loosing the Baghdad bureau?
quote:You'd have to pretty stupid not to know that stepping in front of a bus is most likely going to wind up in you = dead.
My first post on the subject and Nite's post go to this point which I don't think you've done much to address. Other than to say "You'd have to be pretty ****ing stupid not to know..." which does not qualify as a reason not to report state sanctioned and perpatrated murder. Or much else for that matter.
quote:Maybe I'm drawing the lines of common sense oddly. I don't need CNN to tell me that jumping in front of traffic could kill me -- that's just common sense. I don't need CNN to tell me what atrocities Saddam has committed, or that I can't trust him -- that's just common sense.
If you really believe in the "You'd have to be pretty ****ing stupid not to know..." test as to whether or not something is news worthy. You didn't address if we should have any war coverage or not. Since it is obvious that the US is going to (already has?) won the war. The outcome was never in doubt, so why diddoes it rate any reporting at all?
quote:You're being unusually dense about this subject. If YOU KNEW FOR A FACT that these kinds of things were happening... How would you portray the county of Iraq and/or Saddam Hussein? Would you gloss over the kinds of things you KNEW were happening in order to keep the Baghdad bureau open for 13 years? or would you do more to further the image of a homicidal lunatic running the country and risk loosing the Baghdad bureau?
Originally posted by ciaj:
quote:Also - the allegation isn't that CNN never reported about Saddam's atrocities. It's that CNN didn't report about SPECIFIC atrocities. I mean, CNN might have specific file info of some loser who jumped in front of a bus, but that doesn't mean their decision not to air it on "Talkback Live" is a cover-up of all cases of people who jump in front of buses.[/QB]
It sure as hell wasn't through non-reporting of the news.
quote:Well, for one thing (as I mentioned above), it strikes me that the reason this guy came out and mentioned that CNN had specific knowledge of these events was BECAUSE "the people they were worried about are dead."
So what you're saying then, is that even after the people they were worried about are dead they still shouldn't do the story.
quote:Also - the allegation isn't that CNN never reported about Saddam's atrocities. It's that CNN didn't report about SPECIFIC atrocities. I mean, CNN might have specific file info of some loser who jumped in front of a bus, but that doesn't mean their decision not to air it on "Talkback Live" is a cover-up of all cases of people who jump in front of buses.
It sure as hell wasn't through non-reporting of the news.
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