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Posted on 04/13/2003 9:07:29 PM PDT by LocalT
Fellow Freepers, I suggest Jim Robinson add a new "Topic" category to this website: "undercovered scandal" or "crimes unpunished". This CNN story should not be forgotten. We have to keep this alive in some way. A special congressional hearing should be requested and the highest ranking members of CNN should have to answer questions. If ENRON was a scandal, what is this? CNN has real blood on their hands. There is no other way to put it. Mr. Jordan only went with the story because he knew it would come out very soon. He is trying to get pity, he should be grilled. There is an obvious lack of proportion and fairness in coverage, the media was far tougher on John Rocker and Trent Lott. CNN's license should be revoked. This has been going on for far too long. Clinton's sexual assaults allegations were thinly covered and only one was coverd after the impeachment vote. Remember, NBC waited until after the vote to run the Brodderick interview. Citizens have to be tough on CNN and other media outlets that put politics before the truth.
The News We Kept to Ourselves By EASON JORDAN
TLANTA — 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
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FreeRepublic , LLC PO BOX 9771 FRESNO, CA 93794
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Local, let us spread the news then (smiles) I already put your suggestion in another post. It would be a very popular topic considering how much news the Left loves to cover-up ;)
Aye, Yes, Si, Tak,Okey Dokey!!!
To what effect? CNN broke no laws.
A gross breach of professional ethics? Yes.
An egregious abdication of Constitutional responsibility? Yes.
A pathetic exercise in gutless appeasement? Yes.
But CNN isn't licensed by or responsible to Congress. They exist at the pleasure of the market. Let the market punish them.
Severely!
Remember the black Clinton "love child"? Remember the "Chelsea is Webb Hubbell's spawn" story?
All I'm saying is, if we take every nut case story as fact because it fits someone's agenda, this ping category will be nothing more than an amusing collection of tinfoil stuff before long.
Jordan's story is a little different because he's the media and he admits the story (however self-serving) but we also know it's not above the media to lie their asses off in order to sell magazines or books. So whom do we trust and, once we decide that, what constitutes a media cover-up?
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