Writes Eason Jordan, chief news executive at CNN, in today’s New York Times in an article titled, “The News We Kept to Ourselves“:
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.
Jordan goes on to recount some of the horrid stories that he “could not be reported” and then concludes:
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.
The truth is these stories could have always been reported, but CNN chose not to do so. CNN could have chosen to close down their Iraqi office. They did not. Was this “not an option,” because CNN was more concerned with “media access” than the truth? (For the record CNN follows this same policy today in Cuba by failing to objectively report on the torture imposed by the Castro Regime).
If CNN could not report honestly on Iraq, why spend all the time, money, and effort to support the pretense that it was doing so? Such actions merely sanctioned the Hussein Regime in Iraq and mislead millions of people who think they are receiving the facts. By CNN’s near decade long of dishonesty by lying by omission they morally propped up the Saddam regime (as they still do Castro’s regime), thus allowing it to enslave, torture, and kill even more people then if they had only told the truth. CNN has no moral right to call itself a news agency–they are merely “useful idiots” running an PR agency for the thugs and savages of the world.