2003.04.10 Tools of the Tyrant
🔥 Only after the fall of Baghdad, on-air and in an Op-Ed titled, "The News We Kept to Ourselves", CNN's exec-in-charge admit (Eason Jordan) admitted to having suppressed from the public the truth about Saddam being a murderous tyrant, in order to keep CNN's access to Iraq. Isn't lying and working for the enemy of the U.S. and against American or the world's interests, what defines traitors? It certainly isn't journalism.
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Notice they waited until there were no more consequences to themselves (since Baghdad had fallen). Jordan's admissions:
- Saddam’s thugs harassed his staff
- Saddam’s thugs imprisoned Iraqi citizens who worked for CNN
- Saddam’s thugs hatched a plot to murder his reporters working in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq.
- “The secret police terrorized Iraqis working for international press services. 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.”
- “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”
- “An aide to Uday [Hussein, Saddam’s son] once told me why he had no front teeth: henchmen had ripped them out with pliars and told him never to wear dentures, so he would always remember the price to be paid for upsetting the boss. Again, we could not broadcast anything these men said to us.”
- “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.”
His excuse was that he felt CNN could not reveal any of this information without putting lives at risk. The facts are that he could have pulled CNN out, and revealed the whole truth, instead of being the mouthpiece for Saddam's reign of terror. Instead of being Journalists, CNN chose to be propagandists for profit: Baghdad Bob had always had a tacit or coerced ally in CNN. This act alone should have permanently destroyed their credibility as Journalists or a News Organization: they put profits ahead of the truth.
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