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Pastimes : My House -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lazarus_Long who wrote (6954)	4/16/2003 4:06:29 AM
From: Original Mad Dog	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 7689

This one hit a few days ago, but I think it's worth some reflection and not just temporary status as news of the day. In journalism schools of the future, students of the history of journalism and journalistic ethics may be studying CNN's behavior in Baghdad for quite a long time. Students of prostitution may be entitled to receive advanced placement credit for the class. nytimes.com see also Message 18841360 The News We Kept to Ourselves By EASON JORDAN ATLANTA — 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.

To: Lazarus_Long who wrote (6954)	4/16/2003 4:16:54 AM
From: Original Mad Dog	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 7689

Rodney King still getting along with the law after all these years.... story.news.yahoo.com Rodney King Injured After Smashing Car Into House Tue Apr 15, 3:55 PM ET LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Rodney King, the black motorist whose videotaped beating led to four days of riots in 1992, was seriously injured after crashing his SUV into a house, a tree and a utility pole, police said on Tuesday. King, 39, suffered a broken pelvis in the high-speed collision on Sunday in the suburban town of Rialto, east of Los Angeles, after losing control of his vehicle in the latest in a series of brushes with the law. Rialto police said they were awaiting the results of blood tests for alcohol and other illegal substances before deciding whether to charge King. He was estimated to be driving at around 100 mph. "An officer saw King driving at a high rate of speed, weaving in and out of traffic. Before the officer had a chance to pursue, he struck a tree, took out a section of a power pole, went through a chain link fence and crashed into a house," said Rialto police Sgt. Paul Wing. "We didn't know who he was for a while. Initially we thought it was a fatal collision," Wing said. No-one else was injured in the collision, which left a small hole in the side of a house not far from King's own home. King's condition was listed as fair by the local hospital where he was treated. King has been in an out of court since his arrest in 1991 after a police chase through suburban Los Angeles that ended with his beating at the hands of four white officers. The acquittal of the officers a year later sparked riots which killed 55 people and injured more than 2,000. King was convicted of spousal abuse in 1999 and was twice arrested in 2001 for being under the influence of the drug PCP, for which he was sent to a drug rehab center.

To: Lazarus_Long who wrote (6954)	4/16/2003 5:37:22 AM
From: Original Mad Dog	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 7689

April 16, 2003 REVIEW & OUTLOOK Pessimistic Liberalism With the Pentagon declaring the end of "major combat" in Iraq, most Americans are responding with relief and pride. Our troops have performed with skill, courage and even honorable restraint in deposing a dictator half a world away in less than a month. The puzzle is why some Americans, especially media and liberal elites, continue to wallow in pessimism about this liberation. Two weeks ago these elites were predicting a long war with horrific casualties and global damage. Then at the sight of Iraqis cheering U.S. troops in Baghdad, they quickly moved on to fret about "looting" and "anarchy." Now that those are subsiding, our pessimists have rushed to worry that Iraqi democracy and reconstruction will be all but impossible. What is it that liberals find so dismaying about the prospect of American success? In discounting these gloomy new predictions, it helps to consider their track record. Among the anticipated disasters that haven't come true: a "nationalist" uprising against U.S. troops, à la Vietnam; the "Arab street" enraged against us; tens of thousands of civilian casualties and a refugee and humanitarian crisis; bloody house-to-house urban combat; Iraq's oil fields aflame, lifting oil prices and sending the economy into recession; North Korea ("the greater threat") using the war as an excuse to attack; the Turks intervening in northern Iraq and at war with the Kurds; and all of course leading to world-wide mayhem. We could attach famous names or institutions to all of these positions, but (space limitations aside) our question today is less who than why? America's liberals weren't always so dour about their country's purposes. As recently as the 1960s, their favorite son (JFK) offered to "bear any burden" to extend the promise of freedom. Why are they so afraid of freedom's expansion now? One answer is simple partisanship. The Iraq war would never have happened without President Bush's determination, and many liberals can't bear to admit he was right all along. The American left has developed a special antipathy for Mr. Bush, more than for any President since Nixon. Experts in moral ambiguity, they especially detest his certitude, which is rooted in religious faith. Perhaps they have come to loathe him so much that they can't even bring themselves to relish this broader American triumph. Another answer is the continuing legacy of Vietnam. That failure remains the defining event in the lives of the men and women who now run most of our idea-forming institutions and media. Vietnam has made them forever suspicious of the use of force on behalf of American national interest. They shelved those doubts for a time under Bill Clinton, albeit only when the cause wasn't "tainted" by national interest (Haiti, Kosovo) or when it was constrained by the "international community" (the U.N.). But they simply don't trust that, left to their own devices, the American government and military will act in a moral way that leaves the world better off. Our former editor Robert Bartley offered a third, and more philosophical, explanation in his column1 on Monday. Citing Thomas Sowell, he noted that today's left has become a self-insulated elite convinced of its own virtue. In this view, these members of "the anointed" operate in an echo chamber that listens to and rewards one another to the point that they refuse to admit contrary evidence. If you repeat often enough that Iraqis couldn't possibly welcome Americans as "liberators," you can't process those TV images in Baghdad. Instead of freedom, you see only "anarchy" and American troops that somehow "allowed" looting. We aren't saying that all liberals have succumbed to this pessimism about American purpose. Many have seen Iraq's evil squarely for what it is and have supported the Bush Administration's attempts to remove it. They include the Washington Post editorial page, Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, Democrats Joe Lieberman and Dick Gephardt, such writers as Christopher Hitchens and Bill Keller, and above all Tony Blair. But the majority of the American left, and especially its leading media voices, remain flummoxed if not embarrassed by America's Iraq victory. These include most Democrats in Congress, the editors (though not all reporters) of the New York Times and its acolytes at CNN and the major networks, and of course most academic experts. They can barely bring themselves to celebrate the downfall of a tyrant before predicting the awful challenges to come. They now find themselves in league with those on the pessimistic and isolationist right who also opposed this war. The difference is that Pat Buchanan and his allies think the U.S. is too good for the world and will be corrupted by it. The liberal pessimists think the U.S. isn't good enough. We don't write this in any spirit of gloating, because in fact this union of American left and far right may pose a long-term problem for liberated Iraq. Nation-building will require both patience and political consensus to succeed. Looking for vindication, these voices may too quickly look for reasons to call every mistake or difficulty a disaster -- and demand a U.S. retreat. As optimists ourselves, we'll hold out hope that the sight of free Iraqis will cause at least some of them to revive their faith in American principles. URL for this article: online.wsj.com