The awful news CNN had to keep to itself
 

ATLANTA Over the last dozen years I made 13 trips to Baghdad to keep government permission for CNN's Baghdad bureau and to arrange interviews with Iraqi leaders.
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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.
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For example, in the mid-1990s 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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We also had to worry that our reporting might endanger Iraqis not on our payroll. I knew that CNN could not report that Saddam'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.
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I was sure he would respond 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).
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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.
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I came to know several Iraqi officials well enough that they confided in me that Saddam 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.
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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.
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Last December, when I told Information Minister Mohammed Said Sahhaf that we intended to send reporters to Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq, he warned me they would "suffer the severest possible consequences."
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CNN went ahead, and in March, Kurdish officials presented us with evidence that they had thwarted an armed attack on our quarters in Arbil. 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 CIA 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.
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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" including speaking with CNN on the phone.
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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, ripped out her brains and put them in a jar, 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.
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I felt awful having these stories bottled up inside me. Now that Saddam'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.
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The writer is chief news executive at CNN. Iraqis' torment

http://www.iht.com/articles/92949.html

Stop, you are gonna make me cry.

I love it when, people find news articles and post them.

Care to paraphrase this conspiracy shit?

It's on the internet, it must be true.

Yeah I mean where is the validity of that article? Its unthinkable that the iraqi government would ever do such things. Gee, I wonder why the iraqi citizens were so happy after we took over baghdad.

idiots.

Well original piece was in the New York Times which is slightly more credible then half the places that are posted on here by most. Here is the Link

Post something that make real sense and no one believes it. Post that FDR knew about Pearl Harbor, America never landed on the Moon, or Bush knew about Sept. 11th and every moron under the sun thinks it's fact.

Go Figure.

So much for just posting a link to the story :)

BTW, I own the patent on posting novels on post boards. :helpme


Mogul
Mogul Networks Inc.

Let's clear some things up here. A lot of people are making statements as if Saddam Hussein's thug regime are the only barbarians out there.

The entire middle east is incredibly barbaric. Saudia Arabia, Egypt, Syria, Iran are all brutal against anyone who doesn't go with the flow. They chop hands off in Saudi Arabia if you steal something. Ask Palestinians what happens inside Israeli interrogation centers when they don't fess up. In Iran they stone women to death if they aren't faithful to their spouse. Russia, China, Singapore, North Korea all have cruel harsh systems and on and on. Its a brutal world. Saddam was certainly the number one sadist. But he's not alone.

90 Miles south of Miami Fidel Castro just sentenced a group of dissidents who he accused of working against the government to sentences up to almost 30 years. No crime. Just for acting in a way that was against Fidel. 3 cubans who commandered a ferry to get out of cuba and come to the US, were tried and executed by firing squad in only 7 days.

So the world is horrible when it comes to human rights. The USA has its share of horror stories as well. Research some of the stuff the CIA has done over the past 50 years.

Now go back in history a bit. Ya know the things the King of England used to do to people? How about the what the Nazi's did to the Jews? Its beyond most people's comprehension. The Puritans in the US used to burn women alive at the stake who they thought were unpure and witches.

So lets not kid ourselves. Everyone has blood on their hands. Its a nasty, cruel world. Never forget every day 1 Billion of us don't even get a fucking meal, the majority of that billion are little children. What the fuck, I say to that! If that isn't a crime against the humanity of the world what is?

The US has 2 Million of its citizens locked up in jail. That's one out of every 150 people. That is scary to me. A lot of those people's only crime was smoking a fucking plant. How absolutely absurd and injust.

This entire planet is fucked up. Its completely off kilter. I don't even know if its possible to fix. Bad people are the problem. How do we fix the bad people of the world? There are hundreds of millions of them out there. They make this planet an evil place.

:ak47:

good post.

> The US has 2 Million of its citizens locked up in jail. That's one out of every 150 people. That is scary to me. A lot of those people's only crime was smoking a fucking plant. How absolutely absurd and injust.

That's about the best way I've ever heard it summed up.

Excellent read.

:thumbsup

Excellent post KRL.
WG

At least they do it in under 12 years. It takes us years to execute someone. Save money damnit!

This is true!

? Prisoners executed in 2000 had served an average of 11 years and 5 months on death row before being put to death.

According to this source:
http://usgovinfo.about.com/library/weekly/aa122001.htm

The one fact that really made me wonder was:

? The youngest person now on death row at the end of 2000 was 18, the oldest was 85.

85 and they killed the guy. Now, I believe one of the primary criteria for a jury to decide before putting a man on death row in the first place is if it is reasonable to believe that person will pose an ongoing threat to others or society.

I wonder how long that old man was waiting on death row? I would think denying the man's daily dose of Geritol would be enough to nullify any threat he posed.

:winkwink: