CNN bowed to Saddam Hussein for 12 years, which it admitted only when U.S. tanks reached Baghdad.
We had a minor emergency at 4:30 AM—my wife’s blood-sugar was below the safe level. I fed her chocolate to bring the glucose level back up. While waiting to make sure my assistance was no longer necessary, I checked Twitter.
I found news.
Judge Timothy J. Kelly had ordered the president to give CNN, MS NOW and Politico the special privilege of White House access because DC judges believe they run the White House. I pushed the newsletter planned for Thursday back to Friday and began my research.
After that was done, I dashed off a piece in two minutes. Then I proofread. And edited. Repeating the process until I almost memorized it. Grok supplied a couple of cartoons. The cat dragged in a poll. I made the 7 AM deadline.
Then I went back to bed.
Woke up and realized I left something out: How these cowards at CNN had bowed to an actual tyrant named Saddam Hussein. CNN was silent about Hussein torturing Iraqis—including those who worked for CNN’s Baghdad Bureau.
CNN was complicit in Hussein’s crimes against humanity, portraying him not as the monster he was, but as a misunderstood leader who bravely stood up to American might.
Like Fidel Castro.
Like Ho Chi Minh.
Like Chairman Mao.
In the upside down world of lefty politics, America is always wrong. As the Gulf War began in 1991, CNN sent Bernard Shaw and Peter Arnett to the rooftop of a hotel in Baghdad to report the bombing—effectively working as human shields to keep the allies from bombing the hotel, which allowed the friends and family of Hussein to move into the hotel and be protected.
This was the opposite of Edward R. Murrow who reported the bombing of London, not Berlin.
CNN aided and abetted Hussein just so it could boast of having the only Western news bureau in Baghdad.
A dozen years later, as allied tanks prepared to take over Baghdad and the world would soon discover CNN’s treachery, Eason Jordan, the network’s Chief News Executive and President of Newsgathering and International Networks, wrote a confession the New York Times published on April 11, 2003: “The News We Kept To Ourselves.”
It was an admission that far from being an American news channel, it was a globalist glob interested in protecting and promoting a dictator.
The highlights:
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).
Eason Jordan is a sick man who refused to stop a madman and his sons.
Jordan decided the lives of two men were worth sacrificing just so CNN could boast about a news bureau. A real man would have shut down the operation before caving in to Hussein.
But Jordan and CNN shared something in common with Hussein and that was a lust for power at any cost, all while sneering at Fox News for being America First. This was years ago when Fox News was just starting out.
Only when the walls closed in on CNN’s landlord (the rent being paid in pro-Iraq propaganda) did Jordan own up to working for the enemy. The enemy trusted Jordan with its secrets knowing he would be silent in the face of evil.
He wrote, “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.”
Why couldn’t CNN report the news? Because Hussein’s staff wasn’t confiding in him; they were testing him to see if they could trust him. Lose the trust, lose the bureau.
As for the foreign nationals CNN hired, I am sure they spied on CNN and were loyal to Hussein. CNN’s bureau wasn’t a news organization. It was a propaganda machine.
How different CNN was to Republican presidents. In the middle of Trump’s visit to Japan in 2017, CNN made a big deal about Trump dumping food while feeding koi fish in a pond—acting as if Trump had insulted the Japanese people.
Maybe if Trump pulled a few fingernails, he would get the respect he deserves.
Jordan portrayed himself as a victim, writing, “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.”
CNN nonetheless had Arnett and Shaw in that hotel protecting Hussein’s family and friends from U.S. bombs.
Jordan ended his piece with a self-serving, “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.”
He felt awful.
Hussein’s victims felt torture and death.
They say the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
In this case, evil men did nothing.
Ban CNN from the White House.
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This article first appeared on Don Surber’s Substack. Reprinted here with permission.
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