[Culturechat] CNN: The News (About Iraq) We Kept to Ourselves (That can now be told)

[WesTexas@aol.com]

Full Article:  
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/11/opinion/11JORD.html?ex=1050638400&en=ea21e8c

88feae21c&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE

The News We Kept to Ourselves

By EASON JORDAN (CNN)

Excerpts follow:

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. 

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.