CNN’s anti-sanctions reporting in Iraq — fruit of a poisoned tree
When Saddam intimidated and co-opted Eason Jordan, he bought silence about matters like these (from Jordan’s confession of April 11, 2003):
[I]n 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.
But that’s not all, folks. On Dogpile, the search string “sanctions Iraq children cnn” yields 69 pages of results; on Google, 209,000 citations. Here’s a sample of the good PR for ending sanctions that Saddam Hussein bought from Eason Jordan; this from October 19, 1997. Be sure to savor the last line by Ben Wederman (and pardon me if I think “future Iraqi leaders” did not include common Iraqi, but the Udays and Qusays and their toadies):
In a sweltering, crowded hospital south of Baghdad, dozens of children line the beds, their stick-like limbs reflecting a severe lack of food. A mother’s wail pierces the room: One of her children has already died and two others are suffering from malnutrition and diarrhea. Such conditions are prevalent throughout the Arab nation, where aid agencies have issued numerous reports documenting the deteriorating health of Iraqi children since the United Nations imposed sanctions seven years ago. One in four Iraqi children are malnourished, according to UNICEF. Many of those who survive will suffer permanent brain damage or stunted growth.
“It is clear that it’s the children who are suffering most from the current situation,” U.N. spokesman Eric Falt said. The U.N. sanctions were imposed when Iraqi troops invaded neighboring Kuwait in 1990. The sanctions restrict flights in and out of the country and prevent Iraq from marketing its oil except under a special oil-for-food program.
The U.N. Security Council has said the sanctions will not be lifted until Iraq complies with Gulf War resolutions demanding the elimination of all the country’s weapons of mass destruction. The U.N. Special Commission, charged with monitoring the sanctions, says Iraq is still withholding information about its chemical and biological weapons programs.
Iraq, however, says it has come clean and that the sanctions must be lifted to help the nation recover from the devastating 1991 Gulf War. The government accuses the United States and its allies of maintaining the sanctions in the hope that the resulting hardship will spark a revolt against President Saddam Hussein.
And children, Iraq’s future leaders, have become the focal point of a political dispute that began before most were born.
Cue violins, but not for CNN’s abducted cameraman — he’s not one of Iraq’s “future leaders,” in whose interests sanctions should be lifted. (Hat tips, Roger Simon and Austin Bay.)
Questions for CNN
(1) What Iraqi minders brought you to the sweltering hospital south of Baghdad? (2) were these Shi’ites or Sunnis who were “stick-like” and suffering? (3) which hospitals did government functionaries use for their children, and did they have of these problems? Now that could have been an interesting report.