Reminder: CNN Eason Jordan's non-truth telling re Iraq: Eason Jordan's statement (April 11, 2003)
addition to Kerry, Edwards, etc in the Senate cutting the CIA budget for Iraq, and elsewhere, so that we had NO feet on the ground in Iraq....we also found that CNN did not tell the truth about the conditions there, and hadn't for the previous 11 years!!! ]
Eason Jordan's statement
This statement appeared 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.
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.
88888888888888888888888888888
The Confessions Of Eason Jordan
By Vincent Fiore (04/24/03)
On Friday the 11th of April, the NY Times ran an op-ed piece from CNN's chief news executive Eason Jordan. Now, having read thousands of opinion pieces and many books ranging from the astute brilliance of George Will to the impractical denunciations of former President Carter, I have become accustomed to being dazzled or dismayed on a daily basis. Truly though, I was not prepared for the piece of Mr. Jordan. It left me in a sought of surrealistic seasickness, a kind of nightmare dream state, only I was all too awake and fully grasped the gravity of it. To be sure, I had to reread it three times; and if you have not yet read or heard of Mr. Jordan's barring of soul in the pages of the Times, seek it out. {WWW.nytimes.com/2003/04/11/opinion/11JORD}
After reading the piece, what struck me were the awful tales of human suffering, and Jordan's and henceforth, CNN, breathtakingly willful disregard for truth in reporting. Even the penning of this betrayal of news by CNN seemed almost cavalier in its empathetic outreach to all involved, or so it seemed to me. Only at the end of his work does Mr. Jordan inform the reader of how "awful I felt having these stories bottled up inside me". Totally self-serving, and totally unacceptable when put into the context of the political rollercoaster the world has been on these past 12 years regarding Iraq.
This revelation of Eason Jordan also left me with many poignant questions. Did CNN willfully and by design color their reporting in and of Iraq? Apparently, they did, if one reads the piece the way I did. Did Mr. Jordan, being the chief news executive, put substance over people in its efforts to maintain a CNN Baghdad bureau office? Again, so it seems. When you put reporters into a known hazard, as Jordan did, does this speak to the journalistic bravery, or integrity of the CNN media brass? When you report by omission over a 12 year time period regarding one of history's most brutal monsters, it does not. After all, can anybody now say what we have seen and heard from CNN in relation to Saddam Hussein is fact or fiction? The prudent viewer would have to say no.
What Mr. Jordan's article has done {unintended, though really, unavoidable} is lend foundation to all of the "right wing conspirators" among us who for years have lamented the liberal bias in the media. This confession of Jordan's can rightly be extended to how CNN has covered politics on the whole in this country since the very beginnings of Ted Turner's opus, and not just this war. What else have they failed to report? Has Peter Arnett always been sympathetic to Iraq and its regime? And was it a "staged" act that just went too far? Or Christian Amanpour, who has throughout her years said many a discouraging word regarding American foreign policy, and in particular President Bush's handling of the war on terrorism? These displays of bias have always been noticed by Conservatives and rightly attributed to Western elite media in the position of shaping opinion.
The gulf war in 1991 put CNN on the map as the first 24-hour news cycle in history. America watched over their dinner plates as the war unfolded in all its terrible majesty. CNN had become larger than life. Enthralled by the pictures from the battlefield, the millions watched at home and abroad. What has happened over the years to CNN, and its chief news executives, is a developed callousness to truth in journalism and a subjugation to tow the Liberal political line. At the very least, a watering down of the facts was adhered to as plainly and starkly evidenced by the Eason Jordan confession in the Times.
In an especially gripping paragraph, Jordan describes how a cameraman was kidnapped, beaten, and tortured for weeks. He {Jordan} choose to say nothing. Apparently, a little torture went a long way, as CNN remained active in Baghdad. To most of us who live in Normal, USA, it is a no brainer to get your people out of there and expose Saddam for who he is. To Eason Jordan, it was CNN news first, reporters lives second. And the additional sidebar to these sad events over the last 12 years was the protecting of the Iraqi regime. Could CNN have possibly saved lives by making their findings public and petitioning a then-friend in the White House, namely William Jefferson Clinton? Probably not, when looking back on Clinton's foreign policy escapades. But then again, do we really know?
The lurid confessions of Eason Jordan remind us of the power of the elite media. In its newsrooms and bureau's, they have the power through free thought and speech to make sinners into saints {examples: Bill Clinton, Fidel Castro, Mikhail Gorbachev} and winners into losers. {Newt Gingrich, Ken Starr, Robert Bork} Eason Jordan has, in this writer's opinion, betrayed a trust that is near sacrosanct in American life and indispensable as the great equalizer the founding fathers hoped it would be. The press and the media have a charge to keep with the peoples of the world, and through Eason Jordan's misguided motives, that charge was shelved for ratings.
Freedom of the press has never meant freedom of the facts. By not shining the light of truth about the brutal Iraqi regime, Jordan has possibly contributed to the many casualties of Saddam's rule that otherwise may have been avoided. Though I cannot say with any certainty that this is so, others cannot claim that it could not. The Media has, 2nd to the Presidential bully pulpit, the biggest stage of all. And even the President in needs must use the media as an echo chamber of sorts.
Think back to May 16 of 2002, when Hillary Clinton held up an edition of the NY Post in the Senate chamber that proclaimed "Bush Knew", the headline implying the president knew of the Sept. 11th bombings in August of 2001. Although it was complete rubbish, it caused many hearts to skip a beat and much gnashing of teeth on Capitol Hill. The country was now dividing over the Presidents assumed culpability. Literally thousands of stories were written and conspirator theorist came out of the woodwork to claim knowledge of something that never happened. All because of a headline. It is this power that the Eason Jordan's of CNN and the like can command with their words and reporting.
Freedom of the press is something worth fighting for. Freedom to obfuscate fact is not.
Eason Jordan owes the American people, and all interested parties, an apology, and another syndicated op-ed piece, titled "My resignation from CNN".
Politics came to Vincent in 1992, when he became intensely interested in the Presidential fall debates. Starting to put his thoughts down on paper in the fall of 2000, Vincent revels in the joy of writing opinion and commentary. "I think the most profound statement I ever heard was when Rush Limbaugh said, 'Words mean things." Simple, yes, but no less true for it." One of Ronald Reagan's "citizen politician's," Vincent seeks to illustrate today's political discourse with integrity, and a bit of levity when applicable. Seemingly born a Conservative, Vincent writes for a host of web sites as a featured and guest writer, including NEWSMAX.COM, GOPUSA.COM, OPINIONEDITORIAL.COM, WASHINGTONDISPATCH.COM, INTELLECTUALCONSERVATIVE.COM, AMERICANDAILY.COM, and is a staff writer for COMMONCONSERVATIVE.COM. He continues to market his brand of conservative thought through the World Wide Web as well as print media. Your comments, yea or nay, are always welcomed.
essaysfromexodus.scripting.com
This statement appeared 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.
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.
88888888888888888888888888888
The Confessions Of Eason Jordan
By Vincent Fiore (04/24/03)
On Friday the 11th of April, the NY Times ran an op-ed piece from CNN's chief news executive Eason Jordan. Now, having read thousands of opinion pieces and many books ranging from the astute brilliance of George Will to the impractical denunciations of former President Carter, I have become accustomed to being dazzled or dismayed on a daily basis. Truly though, I was not prepared for the piece of Mr. Jordan. It left me in a sought of surrealistic seasickness, a kind of nightmare dream state, only I was all too awake and fully grasped the gravity of it. To be sure, I had to reread it three times; and if you have not yet read or heard of Mr. Jordan's barring of soul in the pages of the Times, seek it out. {WWW.nytimes.com/2003/04/11/opinion/11JORD}
After reading the piece, what struck me were the awful tales of human suffering, and Jordan's and henceforth, CNN, breathtakingly willful disregard for truth in reporting. Even the penning of this betrayal of news by CNN seemed almost cavalier in its empathetic outreach to all involved, or so it seemed to me. Only at the end of his work does Mr. Jordan inform the reader of how "awful I felt having these stories bottled up inside me". Totally self-serving, and totally unacceptable when put into the context of the political rollercoaster the world has been on these past 12 years regarding Iraq.
This revelation of Eason Jordan also left me with many poignant questions. Did CNN willfully and by design color their reporting in and of Iraq? Apparently, they did, if one reads the piece the way I did. Did Mr. Jordan, being the chief news executive, put substance over people in its efforts to maintain a CNN Baghdad bureau office? Again, so it seems. When you put reporters into a known hazard, as Jordan did, does this speak to the journalistic bravery, or integrity of the CNN media brass? When you report by omission over a 12 year time period regarding one of history's most brutal monsters, it does not. After all, can anybody now say what we have seen and heard from CNN in relation to Saddam Hussein is fact or fiction? The prudent viewer would have to say no.
What Mr. Jordan's article has done {unintended, though really, unavoidable} is lend foundation to all of the "right wing conspirators" among us who for years have lamented the liberal bias in the media. This confession of Jordan's can rightly be extended to how CNN has covered politics on the whole in this country since the very beginnings of Ted Turner's opus, and not just this war. What else have they failed to report? Has Peter Arnett always been sympathetic to Iraq and its regime? And was it a "staged" act that just went too far? Or Christian Amanpour, who has throughout her years said many a discouraging word regarding American foreign policy, and in particular President Bush's handling of the war on terrorism? These displays of bias have always been noticed by Conservatives and rightly attributed to Western elite media in the position of shaping opinion.
The gulf war in 1991 put CNN on the map as the first 24-hour news cycle in history. America watched over their dinner plates as the war unfolded in all its terrible majesty. CNN had become larger than life. Enthralled by the pictures from the battlefield, the millions watched at home and abroad. What has happened over the years to CNN, and its chief news executives, is a developed callousness to truth in journalism and a subjugation to tow the Liberal political line. At the very least, a watering down of the facts was adhered to as plainly and starkly evidenced by the Eason Jordan confession in the Times.
In an especially gripping paragraph, Jordan describes how a cameraman was kidnapped, beaten, and tortured for weeks. He {Jordan} choose to say nothing. Apparently, a little torture went a long way, as CNN remained active in Baghdad. To most of us who live in Normal, USA, it is a no brainer to get your people out of there and expose Saddam for who he is. To Eason Jordan, it was CNN news first, reporters lives second. And the additional sidebar to these sad events over the last 12 years was the protecting of the Iraqi regime. Could CNN have possibly saved lives by making their findings public and petitioning a then-friend in the White House, namely William Jefferson Clinton? Probably not, when looking back on Clinton's foreign policy escapades. But then again, do we really know?
The lurid confessions of Eason Jordan remind us of the power of the elite media. In its newsrooms and bureau's, they have the power through free thought and speech to make sinners into saints {examples: Bill Clinton, Fidel Castro, Mikhail Gorbachev} and winners into losers. {Newt Gingrich, Ken Starr, Robert Bork} Eason Jordan has, in this writer's opinion, betrayed a trust that is near sacrosanct in American life and indispensable as the great equalizer the founding fathers hoped it would be. The press and the media have a charge to keep with the peoples of the world, and through Eason Jordan's misguided motives, that charge was shelved for ratings.
Freedom of the press has never meant freedom of the facts. By not shining the light of truth about the brutal Iraqi regime, Jordan has possibly contributed to the many casualties of Saddam's rule that otherwise may have been avoided. Though I cannot say with any certainty that this is so, others cannot claim that it could not. The Media has, 2nd to the Presidential bully pulpit, the biggest stage of all. And even the President in needs must use the media as an echo chamber of sorts.
Think back to May 16 of 2002, when Hillary Clinton held up an edition of the NY Post in the Senate chamber that proclaimed "Bush Knew", the headline implying the president knew of the Sept. 11th bombings in August of 2001. Although it was complete rubbish, it caused many hearts to skip a beat and much gnashing of teeth on Capitol Hill. The country was now dividing over the Presidents assumed culpability. Literally thousands of stories were written and conspirator theorist came out of the woodwork to claim knowledge of something that never happened. All because of a headline. It is this power that the Eason Jordan's of CNN and the like can command with their words and reporting.
Freedom of the press is something worth fighting for. Freedom to obfuscate fact is not.
Eason Jordan owes the American people, and all interested parties, an apology, and another syndicated op-ed piece, titled "My resignation from CNN".
Politics came to Vincent in 1992, when he became intensely interested in the Presidential fall debates. Starting to put his thoughts down on paper in the fall of 2000, Vincent revels in the joy of writing opinion and commentary. "I think the most profound statement I ever heard was when Rush Limbaugh said, 'Words mean things." Simple, yes, but no less true for it." One of Ronald Reagan's "citizen politician's," Vincent seeks to illustrate today's political discourse with integrity, and a bit of levity when applicable. Seemingly born a Conservative, Vincent writes for a host of web sites as a featured and guest writer, including NEWSMAX.COM, GOPUSA.COM, OPINIONEDITORIAL.COM, WASHINGTONDISPATCH.COM, INTELLECTUALCONSERVATIVE.COM, AMERICANDAILY.COM, and is a staff writer for COMMONCONSERVATIVE.COM. He continues to market his brand of conservative thought through the World Wide Web as well as print media. Your comments, yea or nay, are always welcomed.
essaysfromexodus.scripting.com |
