CNN Exec Admits Covering Up 'Maniac' Saddam's Atrocities
Back to the Government-Media Complex
Page
Back to the War on Saddam Hussein Page
NewsMax.com
Friday, April 11, 2003
Here's another fascinating item we'll dedicate to Jacques Chirac, Nancy Pelosi and the other humiliated appeasement activists: A CNN big is admitting his network covered up the atrocities of Saddam Hussein.
Eason Jordan, chief news executive at CNN, writes in today's New York Times:
"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. ...
"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. ...
"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. ...
"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."
The important thing, of course, is that by covering up for the "maniac" Saddam, CNN's lobbyist succeeded in keeping the "news" bureau in Baghdad open, even if it failed to report the news.
Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
Media Bias
Middle East
Saddam Hussein/Iraq
Editor's note:
Get the video of Chris Ruddy vs. Mike Wallace - Blows the lid off media cover-ups! Click Here Now!The News We Kept to Ourselves
April 11, 2003By 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.
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company
CNN's astounding admission
Jon Ham
April 11, 2003 3:17 pmIn an astounding confession on Friday, CNN’s top news executive admitted that the cable news network has been doing propaganda for Saddam Hussein for the past 12 years.
Eason Jordan, chief news executive of the cable network, wrote on the New York Times op-ed page on Friday that CNN for years has withheld important news about the Iraqi regime, ostensibly because reporting the truth would jeopardize CNN’s Iraqi employees. It might also have gotten CNN kicked out of the country, too, and that apparently was a price CNN was not willing to pay. They chose to shill for Saddam rather than be shown the border.
Over the years, Jordan wrote, “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.”
This is an astonishing admission. A network that influences public policy and public opinion world wide now says its editors and correspondents have been withholding the reporting of atrocities to the world, giving a false (meaning favorable) impression of what was happening in Saddam’s Iraq. Simply amazing.
Maybe all those people who have detected pro-Arab and pro-Saddam slants in the reporting of CNN correspondents Christiane Amanpour and Peter Arnett over the years were not just imagining things.
Think back on those 12 years of perfidy. How many foreign leaders, U.S. Senators, U.S. Representatives, soccer moms, peace protestors and media commentators were spurred to work against a war on Iraq because of CNN’s intimidated coverage of events in that benighted country? How many Iraqis were tortured, maimed, raped, beheaded and put in acid baths during the time CNN was soft-selling Saddam’s regime to the world?
More importantly, how many other news organizations knew what CNN’s executives knew and also did not report it? Did every news organization that has been operating in Iraq since 1991 make the same unholy alliance? Apparently there were others. “Obviously, other news organizations were in the same bind we were when it came to reporting on their own workers,” Jordan wrote.
He also writes of being told by an aide to Uday Hussein, Saddam’s maniac son, that he had no teeth because Uday’s thugs had pulled them out with pliers and told him not to wear dentures so he’d be forever reminded of the price to be paid for displeasing Uday. He writes of a woman arrested for the crime of talking to CNN who was beaten daily for two months in the presence of her father before finally being put out of her misery by having her skull crushed and her body “torn limb from limb.”
“I felt awful having these stories bottled up inside me,” wrote Jordan. “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.” Simply incredible.
One has to wonder by how many years those decades of torment could have been shortened if CNN had reported accurately what was happening in Iraq. Or, if they didn’t have the stomach for that, by leaving the country so as not to prop up the regime with cleansed reports designed to be acceptable to Saddam’s watchers and minders.
Maybe the French or the Germans would have become outraged if they had known what was truly happening. Maybe even Bill Clinton would have been spurred to do something. Not likely. The fact is, they all knew, just like CNN knew. They just didn’t do anything about it. And all this time we thought it was only al-Jazeera that was faking the news.
All the ivory tower journalists, pundits and professors who have been having conniptions because embedded reporters are showing the American military in its true light need to focus on Jordan’s astounding admission. They need to evaluate what irresponsible reporting of this magnitude did to prolong the agony of Iraq.
These pundits need to assess how much CNN’s non-reporting did to spur an ill-informed anti-war movement and to give political cover to the UN and Democrats in Congress who put obstacles in the way of the Bush administration as it sought to eliminate this horror.
They also need to ask what other atrocities are being covered up by CNN’s 30 international bureaus, especially those located in totalitarian capitals. What other despots are being propped up by “journalism”? Cuba? North Korea?
Jordan’s revelations give new meaning to his comments in an interview given in October of 2001 to National Public Radio: “CNN has to cover the world differently because our audience is not the United States only; our audience is the world.” And ruthless dictators that might hurt us, he might have added.
Simply amazing.
Jon Ham is Director of Digital Publishing for The Herald-Sun. He can be reached at 419-6682, jham@heraldsun.com, or at P.O. Box 2092, Durham, NC 27702.
URL for this article: http://www.heraldsun.com/opinion/columnists/ham/
© Copyright 2003. All rights reserved.CNN's Access of Evil
The network of record covered Saddam's repression with propaganda.
BY FRANKLIN FOER
Monday, April 14, 2003 12:01 a.m.
As Baghdad fell last week, CNN announced that it too had been liberated. On the New York Times' op-ed page on Friday, Eason Jordan, the network's news chief, admitted that his organization had learned some "awful things" about the Baathist regime--murders, tortures, assassination plots--that it simply could not broadcast earlier. Reporting these stories, Mr. Jordan wrote, "would have jeopardized the lives of Iraqis, particularly those on our Baghdad staff."Of course, Mr. Jordan may feel he deserves a pinch of credit for coming clean like this. But this admission shouldn't get him any ethical journalism trophies. For a long time, CNN denied that its coverage skimped on truth. While I researched a story on CNN's Iraq coverage for the New Republic last October, Mr. Jordan told me flatly that his network gave "a full picture of the regime." In our conversation, he challenged me to find instances of CNN neglecting stories about Saddam's horrors. If only I'd had his Times op-ed!
Would that this were an outbreak of honesty, however belated. But it isn't. If it were, Mr. Jordan wouldn't be portraying CNN as Saddam's victim. He'd be apologizing for its cooperation with Iraq's erstwhile information ministry--and admitting that CNN policy hinders truthful coverage of dictatorships. For CNN, the highest prize is "access," to score live camera feeds from a story's epicenter. Dictatorships understand this hunger, and also that it provides blackmail opportunities. In exchange for CNN bureaus, dictatorships require adherence to their own rules of reportage. They create conditions where CNN--and other U.S. media--can do little more than toe the regime's line.
The Iraq example is the telling one. Information Minister Mohammad Said al-Sahhaf has turned into an international joke, but the operation of his ministry was a model of totalitarian efficiency. The ministry compiled dossiers on U.S. journalists. It refused to issue visas to anyone potentially hostile--which meant that it didn't issue visas to reporters who strayed from al-Sahhaf's talking points. CNN correspondents Wolf Blitzer, Christiane Amanpour and Richard Roth, to name a few, were banned for critical reporting. It didn't take much to get on this list. A reporter who referred to "Saddam" (not "President Saddam Hussein") was shut out for "disrespect." If you didn't cover agitprop, like Saddam's 100% victory in October's referendum, the ministry made it clear that you were out.
Leaving, however, might have been preferable to staying under these conditions. Upon arrival in Iraq, journalists contended with constant surveillance. Minders obstructed their every move, dictated camera angles, and prevented unauthorized interviews. When the regime worried that it had lost control of a journalist, it resorted to more heavy-handed methods. Information ministry officials would wake journalists in the dead of night, drive them to government buildings, and denounce them as CIA plants. The French documentary filmmaker Joel Soler described to me how his minder took him to a hospital to ostensibly examine the effects of sanctions, but then called in a nurse with a long needle "for a series of blood tests." Only Mr. Soler's screaming prevented an uninvited jab.
With so little prospect for reporting the truth, you'd think that CNN and other networks would have stopped sending correspondents into Iraq. But the opposite occurred. Each time the regime threatened to pull the plug, network execs set out to assiduously reassure them. Mr. Jordan made 13 of these trips.
To be fair, CNN was not the only organization to play this game. But as the network of record, soi-disant, they have a longer trail than most. It makes rich reading to return to transcripts and compare the CNN version of Iraq with the reality that has emerged. For nearly a decade, the network gave credulous treatment to orchestrated anti-U.S. protests. When Saddam won his most recent "election," CNN's Baghdad reporter Jane Arraf treated the event as meaningful: "The point is that this really is a huge show of support" and "a vote of defiance against the United States." After Saddam granted amnesty to prisoners in October, she reported, this "really does diffuse one of the strongest criticisms over the past decades of Iraq's human-rights records."
For long stretches, Ms. Arraf was American TV's only Baghdad correspondent. Her work was often filled with such parrotings of the Baathist line. On the Gulf War's 10th anniversary, she told viewers, "At 63, [Saddam] mocks rumors he is ill. Not just standing tall but building up. As soon as the dust settled from the Gulf War, and the bodies were buried, Iraq began rebuilding." She said little about human-rights violations, violent oppression, or festering resentment towards Saddam. Scouring her oeuvre, it is nearly impossible to find anything on these defining features of the Baathist epoch.
Reading Mr. Jordan now, you get the impression that CNN had no ethical option other than to soft-pedal. But there were alternatives. CNN could have abandoned Baghdad. Not only would they have stopped recycling lies, they could have focused more intently on obtaining the truth about Saddam. They could have diverted resources to Kurdistan and Jordan (the country), where recently arrived Iraqis could speak without fear of death. They could have exploited exile groups with underground contacts.
There's another reason why Mr. Jordan doesn't deserve applause. He says nothing about the lessons of Baghdad. After all, the network still sends correspondents to such countries as Cuba, Burma and Syria, ruled by dictators who impose media "guidelines." Even if CNN ignores the moral costs of working with such regimes, it should at least pay attention to the practical costs. These governments only cooperate with CNN because it suits their short-term interests. They don't reward loyalty. It wasn't surprising, then, that the Information Ministry booted CNN from Baghdad in the war's first days. In a way CNN's absence at this pivotal moment provides a small measure of justice: The network couldn't use its own cameras to cover the fall of a regime that it had treated with such astonishing respect.
Mr. Foer, an associate editor of The New Republic, is the author of "Soccer Explains the World," to be published soon by HarperCollins.Copyright © 2003 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
