According to a tape just unearthed in Baghdad (HT: LGF), former Al-Jazeera CEO Mohammed Jassem al-Ali credited Saddam and his sons with the early success of the network he headed since its inception in 1996 (via Jerusalem Post):

[T]he tape of the March 13, 2000, meeting shows former Al-Jazeera manager Mohammed Jassem al-Ali telling Odai Saddam Hussein, “Al-Jazeera is your channel,” and Odai recalls that he proposed “some ideas” in previous meetings that led to “some changes” in political coverage, including the introduction of new hosts on Al-Jazeera programs….

“I am here to hear your viewpoints and take your remarks,” said al-Ali to Odai in the videotape, according to the report. “Had it not been for your cooperation and support for us, I would not have succeeded in my mission. My mission in Iraq played a big role in Al-Jazeera’s successes. Many (Iraqi) brothers, who always carried out your instructions, have always been a support for us.”

You will recall that CNN’s head, Eason Jordan, said much the same thing in the New York Times in April 2003, which we wrote about contemporaneously here, though he sounded less happy about the network’s overt collaboration with Saddam’s regime to suppress news for 12 years in Iraq:

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 and al-Ali performed the same function for Saddam Hussein, whatever their opinions of their actions.

I forget, is this a picture of Mohammed Jassem al-Ali or of Eason Jordan reading the “news”?

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 2nd, 2005 at 6:35 pm and is filed under General, MSM, New Media, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.