>The News We Kept to Ourselves
>
>April 11, 2003
>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.
>
>http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/11/opinion/11JORD.html?ex=1051075583&ei=1&en=d1d3c8ac1994c8bf
>Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company
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