Friday, April 11, 2003

The News We Kept to Ourselves: A CNN executive shares the untold story of the Baghdad Bureau. (The New York Times, April 11, 2003)
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).


When so much emphasis is put on being objective in reporting, why even have a Baghdad Office if the information from that bureau is incomplete or erroneous. CNN let the Iraqi government censor their reports just to have a presence there. Why didn't CNN staff their office with internationals, if Iraqis were in danger? CNN did the world a real disservice by playing the Iraqi game. They gave their viewers the impression that the Iraqi government was like any other, when it was in fact more brutal than they would say. I’m sure this guy is happy to get this off his chest. But they would have been better to have left their Baghdad office post 911. Then they could have told the American people what they knew. It would have helped the American people understand why the Administration wanted to go to war. Their job is to inform and they left out the most important information they had. Why? So that they could have a camera in Baghdad when the shooting began. And think of the damage they did to innocent Iraqis by keeping quiet for so long.

Who is else is not telling us something right now to gain favor with some government? How many lives lie in the balance?

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