De Oorlog (36) - Noordelijk front rukt op

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April 11, 2003
The News We Kept to Ourselves
By EASON JORDAN

TLANTA 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.

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).

Still, I felt I had a moral obligation to warn Jordan's monarch, and I did so the next day. King Hussein dismissed the threat as a madman's rant. A few months later Uday lured the brothers-in-law back to Baghdad; they were soon killed.

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.

Last December, when I told Information Minister Muhammad Said al-Sahhaf that we intended to send reporters to Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq, he warned me they would "suffer the severest possible consequences." CNN went ahead, and in March, Kurdish officials presented us with evidence that they had thwarted an armed attack on our quarters in Erbil. This included videotaped confessions of two men identifying themselves as Iraqi intelligence agents who said their bosses in Baghdad told them the hotel actually housed C.I.A. and Israeli agents. The Kurds offered to let us interview the suspects on camera, but we refused, for fear of endangering our staff in Baghdad.

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.

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.

Eason Jordan is chief news executive at CNN.

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"Situatie in ziekenhuizen catastrofaal"
De situatie in een van de grootste ziekenhuizen in Bagdad is "chaotisch en catastrofaal". Dat heeft een woordvoerder van het Internationale Comité van het Rode Kruis vrijdag gezegd na een bezoek aan het eerste ziekenhuis van Bagdad. Het al-Kindi ziekenhuis is geplunderd en het personeel en de meeste patiënten hebben het gebouw verlaten. Twee artsen zijn achtergebleven om eerste hulp te verlenen aan mensen die gewond naar het ziekenhuis komen. Volgens een correspondent van het Franse persbureau AFP heeft een onbekende groep sjiieten uit Najaf zich in al-Kindi geïnstalleerd. De groep wordt aangevoerd door een religieuze leider, sjeik Abbas al-Zubaidi.

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Op vrijdag 11 april 2003 15:29 schreef schatje het volgende:

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bron

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TEHRAN, Iran About 200 Iraqis stormed their embassy in the Iranian capital Friday morning, smashing photographs of Saddam Hussein and shouting against both the missing Iraqi leader and the possibility the United States would run the government that replaces him.

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Op vrijdag 11 april 2003 16:17 schreef yavanna het volgende:

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Er zijn nog meer irakezen blij dat Saddam weg is

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Op vrijdag 11 april 2003 16:45 schreef Sheepcidus het volgende:
Trouwens als je wil weten of het Britse of Amerikaanse soldaten zijn moet je de huidskleur bekijken. Al die Britten natuurlijk zo rood als een kreeft.

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Op vrijdag 11 april 2003 17:18 schreef Re het volgende:

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jah, vooral die negers

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Op vrijdag 11 april 2003 17:56 schreef toxi het volgende:
Slechts 1200 doden? waar zijn die tienduizenden en honderduizenden burgerslachtoffers dan volgens jullie anti-oorlogsdemonstranten?

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Op vrijdag 11 april 2003 16:45 schreef Sheepcidus het volgende:
Trouwens als je wil weten of het Britse of Amerikaanse soldaten zijn moet je de huidskleur bekijken. Al die Britten natuurlijk zo rood als een kreeft.

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Op vrijdag 11 april 2003 16:45 schreef Sheepcidus het volgende:
Trouwens als je wil weten of het Britse of Amerikaanse soldaten zijn moet je de huidskleur bekijken. Al die Britten natuurlijk zo rood als een kreeft.

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Weapons Cache for Saddam's Son Odai Found

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- U.S. soldiers stumbled Friday upon the personal weapons cache of President Saddam Hussein's son Odai, finding boxes of assault rifles and dozens of ceremonial firearms in an abandoned house.

The infantry company was searching through a Baath Party enclave when they made the discovery of Odai Hussein's collection inside the home. Many of the weapons were apparently already looted; there were hundreds of Beretta 9mm pistol boxes, but no pistols.

But not everything was gone. There were dozens of gold- and silver-plated military weapons, apparently presented as gifts to Odai. None of those were taken by looters.

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The Red Cross (ICRC) has announced that it is unable to get access to seven American prisoners-of-war in Iraq.
While the ICRC has visited a camp of Iraqi prisoners captured by the US-led coalition, there has been no contact whatsoever with the US soldiers officially listed as POWs.

With Iraqi forces in disarray and no government functioning in Baghdad, the ICRC said it had no idea where the American prisoners might be or who was holding them.

"We simply don't know who may be holding them. We don't know where they may be," ICRC spokesman Florian Westphal told BBC News Online.

The organisation is appealing to all parties in the Iraq conflict to fulfil their international obligations towards POWs under the Geneva Convention.

Mr Westphal pointed out that the Convention stipulates that captors remain fully responsible for the well-being of their prisoners.

The ICRC statement comes a day after the US military said it was "very concerned" about its missing personnel and working hard to establish their whereabouts.

BBC

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Op vrijdag 11 april 2003 16:45 schreef Sheepcidus het volgende:
Trouwens als je wil weten of het Britse of Amerikaanse soldaten zijn moet je de huidskleur bekijken. Al die Britten natuurlijk zo rood als een kreeft.

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http://www.welovetheiraqiinformationminister.com

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The site was so popular that 4000 visitors per second showed up from around the world and overwhelmed this shared server for over 8 hours until we turned it off in self defense. It basically put a 100 other businesses out of business for a day. If we had known it was going to be this popular we would have put it on it's own server from the beginning.

What started out as a private joke to be shared by a small group of friends has turned into a hit. Check back in 24 hours or so while the internet routers figure out where the new web server is that replaces this old one. The site consists of lots of bandwidth hogging pictures and animations that you'll love once you see it on its new home server.

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Op vrijdag 11 april 2003 22:09 schreef Roel_Jewel het volgende:
voor de fans

http://www.welovetheiraqiinformationminister.com
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Ben benieuwd wat er op stond

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Op vrijdag 11 april 2003 20:32 schreef schatje het volgende:
Inwoners van Mosul zijn aan het plunderen geslagen nadat de stad in een complete chaos is veranderd. De anarchie ontstond nadat de Iraakse troepen die de stad moesten verdedigen zich overgaven aan Amerikaanse en Koerdische troepen. _bron

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Rumsfeld on looting in Iraq: 'Stuff happens'

Doesn't expect to find weapons of mass destruction

(CNN) -- Declaring that freedom is "untidy," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Friday the looting in Iraq was a result of "pent-up feelings" of oppression and that it would subside as Iraqis adjusted to life without Saddam Hussein.

He also asserted the looting was not as bad as some television and newspaper reports have indicated and said there was no major crisis in Baghdad, the capital city, which lacks a central governing authority. The looting, he suggested, was "part of the price" for what the United States and Britain have called the liberation of Iraq.

"We are never going to find them in my view, just as I never believed the inspectors would by running around and seeing if they can open a door," he said.

Looting, he added, was not uncommon for countries that experience significant social upheaval. "Stuff happens," Rumsfeld said.

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Op vrijdag 11 april 2003 22:14 schreef El_Catalan het volgende:

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Ik las dat er niemand meer aanwezig is in Mosul geen Koerden meer in iedergeval.

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Op vrijdag 11 april 2003 22:18 schreef yavanna het volgende:

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Er is weinig nieuws vandaag, vindt ik.

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