CNN What they said then -Eason Jordan 10/25/2002

What else are they holding back?

Typical female reporter touchy-feely question.

One can only hope that there is a very particular section of Hell for people like Mr. Jordan, and those who followed him.

By his own admission, he stood by and watched as people had their fingernails ripped out, or their teeth ripped from their heads for the 'crime' of not pleasing Saddam Hussein.

He stood by, silently, while Saddam Hussein and his merry band of murderers was handing out $25,000.00 checks to the families of people blowing themselves up in Israeli Pizza restaraunts.

And he never said a word. Not one f****** word about it. Not the rapes, not the murders, not the people dropped alive into industrial shredders feet first, not anything....

I fancy myself to be a bit of a writer CC, but mere words alone cannot begin to describe the contempt I hold Mr. Jordan in.

He has done the honorable thing by admitting what he has done. Not many people would have the cojones to admit they were personally responsible for a massive coverup. Now all that needs to happen is for him to go into a small room with a pistol and one round.

The blood of countless thousands of Iraqis is on Mr. Jordans hands, as well as the blood of American and British soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines.

Burke said that "All that is necessary for Evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing."

Well, Mr. Jordan witnessed Evil first hand and made a conscious decision to do nothing about it. No, that's not quite right. He didn't decide to do 'nothing', he decided to keep his mouth shut while monsters wearing human skin were ripping the fingernails from people who displeased Saddam.

And he admits he knew about it, while it was happening.

Now he gets to right an editorial for the NY Times....

Let him explain himself to the mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, sons, and daughters of those that Saddam murdered. I most sincerely hope Mr. Jordan runs into one of those people someday, I really do.

L

BOB GARFIELD: I'm sure you have seen Franklin Foer's article in The New Republic which charges that the Western press is appeasing the Iraqi regime in order to maintain its visas -- to be there reporting should a war ultimately break out. What's your take on that?

EASON JORDAN: 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.

____________

What a bunch of shite. Eason Jordan wrote an article detailing horrible things he covered up to maintain their visas. CNN are despot sychophants.

Actually I think that is why he wrote this piece (and some cya for CNN). These people think some tears ,hugs,and a twelve-step program will wash away the stain. Soon all the talk will be about how hard it was for Mr Jordan and the shameful truth will be forgotten.

...Thank you, Richard. Thank you, CNN.", and then he gave him a hug and a kiss on both cheeks...

Maybe it was like when Michael Corleone kissed Fredo.

Mort Kondracke on Fox News cited this quote and called it a "flat lie".

It's bad enough to be silent about the attrocities one sees, but it is considerably worse to deliberately interfere with people who are attempting a rescue. In my view, CNN did everything they could to obstruct the rescuers, short of throwing rocks at them.

Jordan could have taken people like Paul Begalla aside, told them what he knew, and requested that they knock it off with their disparaging remarks about Bush's Iraq policy on the grounds that it could be encouraging the torturers and discouraging a rescue. Either he didn't do that, or those he told didn't care.

Excerpts from Washington Times 4-12-03

In an interview with The Washington Times, Mr. Jordan stood by his decision yesterday, saying he felt "relieved" and was "absolutely sure I did the right thing holding these stories."

CNN coverage, he said, had already offered evidence of "the brutality in Iraq," and the move was not intended to "preserve CNN's presence in Iraq."

"We've already been thrown out of Iraq several times. And we are proud we've been thrown out," he said. CNN correspondents were expelled from Baghdad last month.

Some are baffled by it all.

"I was stunned by that op-ed," Fox News Channel and ABC radio host Sean Hannity told The Times yesterday. "Doesn't CNN have a journalistic obligation to report these kind of details, or to make their reporters aware of them? You can bet if CNN made discoveries about, say, a conservative administration, they would share them."

The editorial "sounds like a confession more than anything," Mr. Hannity said. "And I found it hypocritical."

Rich Noyes, director of research at the conservative Media Research Center, said that "Jordan now admits that CNN kept many of Saddam's secrets.

"Have other networks also censored their own tales of Saddam's evil?" he asked.

"If accurate reporting from Iraq was impossible, why was access to this dictatorship so important in the first place? And what truths about the thugs who run other totalitarian states — like North Korea, Cuba and Syria — are fearful and/or access-hungry reporters hiding from the American public?" Mr. Noyes said.

Tom Rosenstiel of the Project for Excellence in Journalism supports Mr. Jordan's decision, and described him as "obviously tortured" yesterday.

"He wrote an extraordinary and sensible essay," Mr. Rosenstiel said. "He was weighing out his journalistic responsibility and his human responsibility. It's a difficult task, but it comes with the territory of an editor who is responsible for his people — and the news."

Fox News media analyst Eric Burns said he "commended" Mr. Jordan, if he had indeed protected innocent people from harm.

"But why reveal all this now? Maybe CNN wants to cash in on the current pro-liberation sentiment," Mr. Burns said.

"If he had knowledge he couldn't reveal, then I hope that it would at least be reflected in CNN's coverage."

Barbara Cochran of the Radio and TV News Directors Association said Mr. Jordan was right not to reveal information that could endanger lives, citing the association's code of ethics, "which addresses balancing the harm you do with the news you present."

Jim Glassman 4-11-03

"Sins of Omission"

I was shocked and disgusted by an op-ed piece I read today in the New York Times. No, it wasn't by Paul Krugman. It was far more serious: Eason Jordan, chief news executive at CNN, revealing what the headline called "The News We Kept to Ourselves."

The news concerned the atrocities committed by Saddam Hussein's regime. For example:

"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 [Saddam's son] 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."

And these were mild cases. In 13 trips to Baghdad, Jordan heard stories of electroshock torture, beatings and brutal murders. Almost certainly, other journalists, editors and news directors heard them, too. So why weren't these atrocities reported?

"Doing so," wrote Jordan, "would have jeopardized the lives of Iraqis, particularly those on our Baghdad staff."

That explanation just doesn't wash.

Clearly, there were ways to protect the identities of individual victims of the regime's brutality. And, clearly, by reporting the stories, CNN might finally have aroused the outrage of the world, which in turn would have brought Saddam's end closer - either through united, global pressure or through earlier military action.

It appears there is another, more troubling, reason Jordan decided not to report these hideous crimes until the regime was safely out of the way: CNN didn't want to lose its on-the-ground access to a big story.

Anyone who read Franklin Foer's excellent piece last October in The New Republic, would not have been shocked at Jordan's op-ed today. Foer uncovered Saddam's success at manipulating the U.S. media, especially CNN.

"Like their Soviet-bloc predecessors," he wrote, "the Iraqis have become masters of the Orwellian pantomime - the state-orchestrated anti-American rally, the state-led tours of alleged chemical weapons sites that turn out to be baby milk factories - that promotes their distorted reality. And the Iraqi regime has found an audience for these displays in an unlikely place: the U.S. media. It's not because American reporters have an ideological sympathy for Saddam Hussein; broadcasting his propaganda is simply the only way they can continue to work in Iraq."

As for CNN: Foer wrote six months ago that "nobody has schmoozed the [information] ministry harder than the head of CNN's News Group, Eason Jordan, who has traveled to Baghdad twelve times since the Gulf war. In part these trips…consist of network execs promising they will cover its propaganda."

The alternative is no access at all, writes Foer. Among the reporters banned by the regime at the time he wrote the article were Wolf Blitzer and Christiane Amanpour of CNN and Barbara Crossette of the New York Times. Crossette, now retired, had the temerity to file pieces in 1998 "belying Iraqi stories about the horrors of U.N. sanctions."

By contrast, Foer highlights Jane Arraf, CNN's Iraq correspondent for the past four years, "the dean of Western reporters" in the country. I had not read Foer's piece until today, but it goes a long way toward explaining why Arraf appeared, at least to me, to have leaned farthest to the Iraqi side of all U.S. journalists.

Foer wrote three months ago that "nobody better exemplifies [the] go-along-to-get-along reporting strategy…than Arraf. In a segment last month, answering viewer phone calls, Arraf rebutted the charge that Saddam's vanity construction projects have diverted money that could have been used to feed his starving people. Sanctions, she said, have 'tied his hands in some respects.' Later in the same segment, repeating Saddam's constant refrain, she told viewers, 'If there's been anything that's been essentially agreed over the last decade, it's been that the sanctions that are in place by the U.N. and U.S. haven't been working.'"

Foer's piece caused a small stir in journalistic circles, and shortly after it appeared, Bob Garfield interviewed Jordan on WNYC, a New York public-radio station. Garfield asked Jordan his response to the "charges that the Western press is appeasing the Iraqi regime in order to maintain its visas."

Jordan replied that Foer "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."

What if there is another war? Garfield asked. "Are there decisions you'll make on the margins to be as certain as you possibly can that you will have a presence there?"

Jordan said that he was prepared to deal with a certain amount of censorship, but "we are not going to make journalistic compromises…. We want to be there…and operate as a responsible news organization."

And now, we learn from Jordan's own hand, that he indeed made compromises - severe compromises.

On his 13 trips, Iraqi officials "confided in me that Saddam Hussein was a maniac who had to be removed." Wasn't that news?

He learned that Kurdish officials had thwarted a plan for an armed attack by Iraqis on CNN's headquarters in the northern part of the country. Wasn't that news?

He talked to Iraqis who "whispered tales of being hauled off and tortured in unimaginable ways." He discovered that "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)." Wasn't that news?

Perhaps Jordan and other journalists who suppressed the truth can take comfort that organizations like Human Rights Watch have reported tales of torture. And Jordan ends his Times piece with the story, previously reported, of a brave Kuwaiti woman named Asrar Qabandi, who was captured by Iraqi police just before the U.S. invasion 12 years ago. She was beaten daily for two months, with her father forced to watch. Then, "they smashed her skull and tore her body part limb by limb. A plastic bag containing her body parts was left on the doorstep of her family's home."

Yes, atrocities were reported. But not enough so as to have an effect on world opinion.

Those of us who did not live through the Nazi Holocaust find it hard to understand why so many who knew what was happening stayed silent for so long. They had many reasons.

In the case of Saddam - who tried his best to emulate Hitler and might have succeeded if a coalition of Americans, Brits, Australians and Poles had not put an end to his regime - some of the atrocities did come to light. But, again, not as many as were known.

The world most definitely was not outraged during the United Nations debates earlier this year. How would the public in France and Germany - people who certainly know the meaning of crimes against humanity - have reacted if CNN had reported courageously and completely the episodes that Jordan knew had occurred?

And so what if CNN had been thrown out of Iraq?

As Foer wrote, "There are alternatives to mindlessly reciting Baghdad's spin. Instead of desperately trying to keep their Baghdad offices open, the networks could scour Kurdistan and Jordan, where there are many recently arrived Iraqis who can talk freely. 'Amman is the place to find out what's really going on in Iraq,' says ex-CIA officer Robert Baer."

Foer also cites "Uncle Saddam," a documentary by Joel Soler, a sort of freedom-loving version of Michael Moore, director of "Roger and Me." Soler ingratiated himself with the Iraqi regime's inner circle and was allowed remarkable inside glimpses. The film, writes Foer, "shows Saddam to be a lunatic, devoid of morality or humanity." It includes a scene of Saddam's unique style of fishing: throwing grenades into a pond and sending aides to retrieve the kill. Soler didn't need a long-term relationship with Saddam.

But Jordan felt that CNN did. "There's an expectation that if anybody is in Iraq, it will be CNN," he told Foer.

That led Foer to conclude, "His answer reveals the fundamental attitude of most Western media: Access to Baghdad is an end in itself, regardless of the…moral caliber of the journalism such access produces."

The irony, of course, is that CNN did get kicked out Baghdad after the war began, but nevertheless acquitted itself well, using the resources of other media and reporting from surrounding nations. Perhaps if the network had been willing to lose access long before, a nation would have been liberated earlier and many, many lives would have been saved.

Link to the the Glassman article because those of you who don't read tech central station should

Sins of Omission

Oops. In post #29, "...it they could be encouraging"

Eason Jordan: Seppuku ... think about it. Tell your friends.

He contradicts himself in this interview. On the one hand he says they are in Iraq to upset Saddam's regime, then a few paragraphs later he says they aren't there for that reason but to just do their job. This in addition to all of the lies we now know he told in this interview. There are no words for how utterly contemptible this is.

What did Eason Jordan know and when did he know it!

You're right..I forgot that the end always justifies the means with liberals...

So far, this only seems to be playing in the conservative media. CNN and NYT are letting Jordan tell his story but with no criticism, letting him paint it as he wishes. The only outrage seems to come from folks on the right - the people already convinced that CNN's reporting was one-sided.

If you'll notice, CNN is not emphasizing the torture, they are emphasizing the foiled attempt to harm their own reporters. This was what I was responding to with my initial thread (4/10) that seemed to get mostly responses of laughter and disbelief.

After I saw the huge thread on the Times piece, I asked myself if I had somehow missed the "confession" angle. If you re-read the Brown transcript, it was easy to see that the attempt to harm their own reporters was the focus of that story, not the soul-searching over whether to report torture they knew about over the past dozen years.

It was no secret that Saddam was killing and torturing his own people. It was also no secret that the Iraqis had "minders" to try to control the press. This only puts them on the par with many other communist and rogue nations that much of the liberal media allows itself to kiss ass with seemingly no regret (Cuba, China, Vietnam, Angola).

They don't seem interested in reporting the torture, murders and attempts at censorship that go on in those countries while gleefully extolling these workers paradises so why should they be stricken with conscience over Iraq?

Charles Krauthammer on Fox News last night was right. This is a classic example of selling their soul for the story but they whore out there soul over and over again and their consciences are seemingly not seared by it in the least. Flaks like Nic Robertson, Cristiane Amanpour, Peter Arnett and Wolf Blitzer are essentially cheerleaders for totalitarian thugs whose human rights abuses would take more than JimRob's available bandwidth to list.

So the outrage is likely to stay on the right and may open the eyes of a few but I seriously don't expect this to be a seachange moment for CNN or the industry. The Faustian bargain they made with Saddam, they still happily do for Castro and other third-world tyrants without even noticing or acknowledging their culpability.

All it proves is that you aren't getting a full "fair and balanced" story at CNN. And we already knew that.

Excellent post, Lurker. Thanks.

CC

Good on Mort Kondrake. It is a flat lie, by Eason Jordan's own admission! CNN is a joke. Jordan should resign. If this were Japan he might even commit hari kari.