Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Alighieri who wrote (168288)	4/22/2003 6:00:53 PM
From: tejek	Respond to of 1576823

The first Murdoch would go to Rupert Murdoch himself, a media mogul who has single-handedly lowered the standards of journalism wherever he has gone. His New York Post and his Fox News Channel are blatantly political, hardly confining Murdoch's conservative political ideology to editorials or commentary but infusing it into the news coverage itself. It does this, of course, while insisting it does nothing of the sort. Oh, that explains what happened to the Post. I've never known it to be a great paper but now its just one step above a National Enquirer. Murdoch definitely has the touch. ted

To: Alighieri who wrote (168288)	4/22/2003 6:31:04 PM
From: steve harris	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1576823

Media Empire's Injustices cnn.com CNN was the best minister of information saddam had! Message 18834796 Secrets About Saddam that We Kept to Ourselves By Eason Jordan 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). 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: Alighieri who wrote (168288)	4/22/2003 10:52:52 PM
From: tejek	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1576823

Now they're going after Powell in earnest. What's amazing is they got Gingrich to do the dirty work. Gingrich? Isn't he a professor now? Some radical right guy on FOX was blaming Powell for not presenting the American case for invading well enough to Europe. In the meantime, Gingrich accused Powell of undermining Bush's foreign policy. Huh? These people do make good employers. This may be the beginning of the end for Powell. EDIT. Clearly, Gingrich wants Powell out and Syria invaded. ted _______________________________________________________ cbsnews.com Newt Gingrich Blasts State Department WASHINGTON, April 22, 2003 Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. (AP) (AP) Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich accused the State Department of undermining President Bush's foreign policy and denounced Secretary of State Colin Powell's plan to go to Syria as ludicrous. Gingrich, speaking at the American Enterprise Institute, directed much of his fire Tuesday at the department's Near East Bureau. The institute, a conservative think tank, has helped fill major spots in the Bush administration. "They have a constituency of Middle East governments deeply opposed to democracy in Iraq," Gingrich said. "Their instinct is to create a weakened Iraqi government that will not threaten its Syrian, Iranian, Saudi and other dictatorial neighbors." As for Powell's trip to Syria, the Republican former House leader said that to meet "with a terrorist-supporting, secret police-wielding dictator is ludicrous." By contrast, Gingrich said, the U.S. military has created an opportunity to apply genuine economic, diplomatic and political pressure against Syria. Instead, he said, "The State Department is back at work pursuing policies that will clearly throw away all the fruits of hard-won victory." Gingrich said "the current Syrian dictatorship" openly hosts seven terrorist offices in downtown Damascus, is developing chemical weapons of mass destruction and occupying Lebanon and transmitting weapons to Hezbollah guerrillas for attacks against Israel. "This is a time for America to demand changes in Damascus before a visit is even considered," he said. "The visit should be a reward for public change, not an appeal to a weak, economically depressed dictatorship." Gingrich, a fellow of the institute, made his speech among a spate of reports of feuding between the Pentagon and the State Department. The department spokesman, Richard Boucher, said he had had "a chance to skim the speech" and went on to defend the department as implementing administration policies, including an attempt to resolve differences with Syria. "The State Department is here to carry out the president's (foreign) policy," he said, and "we are doing that effectively; we are doing that loyally; we are doing that diligently." White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said Powell was carrying out Bush's wishes in planning a trip to Syria, "The United States has diplomatic relations with Syria, and we intend to use those diplomatic relations to good advantage," Fleischer said. Among Gingrich's accusations of sustained diplomatic failure were the focus on weapons inspections in prewar Iraq; approving Hans Blix as chief U.N. inspector, "even though he was clearly opposed to war and determined to buy time and find excuses for Saddam Hussein"; and accepting the United Nations, the European Union and Russia as partners in Middle East peacemaking. "Without bold, dramatic change at the State Department, the United States will soon find itself on the defensive everywhere except militarily," Gingrich said. "In the long run, that is a very dangerous position for the world's leading democracy to be in." The former speaker proposed that Bush appoint a small group to make proposals for "a transformation of the diplomatic, communications and assistance elements of the United States." Gingrich resigned as House speaker in 1998 and gave up the House seat he had held for 20 years representing a district in suburban Atlanta. He quit after Republicans lost five House seats in midterm elections that year and after apologizing for violating House rules on the use of tax-exempt funds. © MMIII The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.