Friday, April 11, 2003
The News We Kept to Ourselves (Via Instapundit)
This story certainly brings to light a lot of issues surrounding the idea of doing any reporting under conditions like those that existed in Iraq. While for Solomonia readers and other canny folk, this will be a "duh" moment, adding simply more specific testimony to what we already know, to many, many people the news out of Baghdad was just an "alternative viewpoint" from that coming out of Washington. I actually had one person tell me they had seen a piece, maybe on BBC(?), where they had gone around Baghdad and found that Saddam was actually a well-liked man who was appreciated for keeping the religious fundamentalists out of Iraq. What they took from this was that it was doubtful that Saddam was as bad as we had been hearing. It should be kind of tough to take anything meaningful at all from reportage going on under the circumstances that existed there, but many did.
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.[...]
As Glenn Reynolds put it:
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.
Maybe, you know, it's not worth the moral compromises involved in reporting from a dictator's capital, if you're not able to tell the truth.
Indeed!
Update: As one might expect, this issue is exploding across the Blogosphere. Rightfully! The question of the conditions under which commentary and images have been forming our views of Baghdad for the past couple decades is huge. LGF has some updates with links to reactions. Follow the links.
