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Ogami's Most Excellent Source of Information
- Thread starter Kefka
- Start date
FBI parte due
Folces Weard
You can't trust those sheep, you know. Liars, traitors, and decievers, all of them.
Ogami
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The News We Kept to Ourselves
By Eason Jordan
The New York Times
April 11, 2003
ATLANTA — 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.
© 2003 The New York Times Company
By Eason Jordan
The New York Times
April 11, 2003
ATLANTA — 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.
© 2003 The New York Times Company
Ogami
New member
CBS ousts four for roles in Bush Guard story
Producer says she’s being made scapegoat for network
Associated Press
Updated: 8:42 p.m. ET Jan 10, 2005
CBS issued a damning independent review Monday of mistakes related to last fall’s “60 Minutes Wednesday” report on President Bush’s National Guard service and fired three news executives and a producer for their “myopic zeal” in rushing it on the air.
The review said CBS compounded the damage with a circle-the-wagons mentality once the report came under fire. The independent investigators added, however, that they found no evidence of a political bias against Bush.
CBS News President Andrew Heyward and Dan Rather, who announced in November he was stepping down as the anchor of “CBS Evening News,” escaped without any disciplinary action. But Rather, who narrated the Sept. 8 story and subsequent follow-ups, was criticized by CBS chief executive Leslie Moonves for “errors of credulity and overenthusiasm.”
“The system broke down on this one, for sure,” said Louis D. Boccardi, retired chief executive officer of The Associated Press, who conducted the investigation along with former Republican Attorney General Dick Thornburgh. They delivered their 224-page report to Moonves last week.
Fired were Mary Mapes, the story’s producer; Josh Howard, executive producer of “60 Minutes Wednesday”; Howard’s top deputy, Mary Murphy; and CBS News Senior Vice President Betsy West.
Dodgy documents
The “60 Minutes” story had questioned Bush’s Vietnam War-era commitment to service in the Texas Air National Guard. Mapes began reporting the story in 1999, but the report centered on documents obtained only weeks earlier, supposedly written by Bush’s commander, the late Lt. Col. Jerry Killian. The memos said that then-1st Lt. Bush did not take a mandatory medical exam and that Killian reportedly felt pressured to sugarcoat an evaluation of him.
Questions were quickly raised about the typed memos, with some document experts saying it appeared they contained a computer character inconsistent with typewriters at the time.
Boccardi and Thornburgh found that Mapes had said the documents were authenticated, when in fact she had found only one expert to vouch for only one signature in the memo. They said she also failed to look into the background of her source, retired Texas Army National Guard Lt. Col. Bill Burkett; to find Burkett’s source; or to find other corroboration of the charges.
“Her confidential source was not reliable and her authenticators were unable to authenticate the documents, and yet she maintained the opposite. ... This is truly disquieting,” Moonves said in a statement released with the report.
Producer charges scapegoating
Mapes said Monday she was “terribly disappointed” by the report’s conclusions. She said she believed the story was corroborated by others and consistent with previously known records, and that the panel was quick to condemn her based on statements from people who said different things to her.
“I am shocked by the vitriolic scapegoating in Les Moonves’ statement,” Mapes said in her own statement. “I am very concerned that his actions are motivated by corporate and political considerations — ratings rather than journalism.”
Mapes said the decision to air the story when it did was made by her superiors, including Heyward, and not by her.
“If there was a journalistic crime committed here, it was not by me,” she said.
When the Bush report aired, Mapes was a veteran, respected producer on a professional high: She had produced the “60 Minutes” report last spring that showed the first pictures of Americans mistreating Iraqis in Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison.
The review concluded that accomplishment essentially made her bulletproof despite the delicate, complicated nature of the Bush story, and that Howard, a CBS News veteran who had become chief of “60 Minutes Wednesday” in June, and Murphy failed to adequately question her.
Moonves said Howard “did little to assert his role as the producer ultimately responsible for the broadcast and everything in it. This mistake dealt a tremendous blow to the credibility of ‘60 Minutes Wednesday’ and to CBS News in general.”
Order to review report ignored
Two days after the report aired, Heyward ordered West to review the opinions of document examiners and confidential sources who had supported the story — but no such investigation took place, the investigators said.
If the review had been conducted promptly, Thornburgh and Boccardi said they did not believe CBS would have publicly and stridently defended the report for nearly two more weeks. The two men also criticized CBS for falsely saying the source of the documents was “unimpeachable” and that experts had vouched for their authenticity.
CBS aired subsequent stories designed to support the original installment — prepared by the same people — instead of providing a balanced look at the controversy, the investigators said.
They also said it was “inappropriate” for Mapes to have helped Burkett get in contact with Joe Lockhart, a political adviser to Democrat John Kerry, in the midst of the presidential campaign. But Boccardi said that to conclude CBS was guilty of anti-Bush bias would be to make the same mistake “60 Minutes Wednesday” made — drawing a conclusion without enough evidence.
Competition, not politics
Still, Thornburgh said he doubted the review would deflect the political criticism of CBS.
“A lot of different news organizations were pursuing the same story,” Thornburgh said. “Were they all politically motivated? I doubt it. What we did take notice of was the insensitivity of the people involved to appearances.”
Scott McClellan, Bush’s press secretary, said he hoped CBS would take steps to “prevent something like this from happening again.”
“We felt all along that it was important for CBS to get to the bottom of this,” McClellan said. “CBS has taken steps to hold people accountable, and we appreciate those steps.”
The independent panelists even faulted CBS’s eventual apology for the story, saying the network placed too much blame on Burkett and not enough on itself.
No punishment for Rather
Rather was portrayed as an overworked anchor who had just finished coverage of the Republican convention and Hurricane Frances in Florida. As a result, he did little to help prepare the original report, and did not even appear to have seen it before it aired, the panel said.
“He asked the right questions initially, but then made the same errors of credulity and overenthusiasm that beset many of his colleagues,” Moonves said.
In light of Rather’s announcement that he will step down as anchor in March — a move the anchor insisted had nothing to do with the investigation — Moonves said he concluded no disciplinary sanctions against his anchor were necessary.
An aide to Rather said Monday that he would have no immediate comment on the report, since he had just returned from covering the tsunami in Thailand and had not yet read it. Bob Schieffer subbed for Rather on Monday’s “CBS Evening News.”
As for Heyward, the panel said that he had urged extreme caution in preparing the story, an order that apparently wasn’t heeded. But Thornburgh and Boccardi did note that Heyward attended a screening of the story the night before it aired — an unusual step for the top news executive — and apparently saw nothing to stop it.
“Andrew’s sin was in trusting his lieutenants too much,” Moonves said in an interview with the AP.
Journalistic missteps and scandal
CBS is the third major news organization to sustain a black eye recently: Top editors at both The New York Times and USA Today left in the wake of plagiarism and fraud scandals involving correspondents Jayson Blair and Jack Kelley.
For television news organizations, the incident rivals CNN’s retraction of a June 1998 report that the U.S. military used sarin nerve gas in Laos during the Vietnam War, which led to correspondent Peter Arnett’s departure. Former NBC News President Michael Gartner resigned under pressure in 1992 after “Dateline NBC” rigged crashes of General Motors pickup trucks to show alleged fire dangers.
As a result of Monday’s report, CBS News said it had appointed one of its executives, Linda Mason, to a newly created job of senior vice president of standards and special projects, charged with thoroughly reviewing investigative stories before they air.
Both Moonves and the panel said it hoped the report did not have a “chilling effect” on CBS’ commitment to investigative journalism.
© 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Producer says she’s being made scapegoat for network
Associated Press
Updated: 8:42 p.m. ET Jan 10, 2005
CBS issued a damning independent review Monday of mistakes related to last fall’s “60 Minutes Wednesday” report on President Bush’s National Guard service and fired three news executives and a producer for their “myopic zeal” in rushing it on the air.
The review said CBS compounded the damage with a circle-the-wagons mentality once the report came under fire. The independent investigators added, however, that they found no evidence of a political bias against Bush.
CBS News President Andrew Heyward and Dan Rather, who announced in November he was stepping down as the anchor of “CBS Evening News,” escaped without any disciplinary action. But Rather, who narrated the Sept. 8 story and subsequent follow-ups, was criticized by CBS chief executive Leslie Moonves for “errors of credulity and overenthusiasm.”
“The system broke down on this one, for sure,” said Louis D. Boccardi, retired chief executive officer of The Associated Press, who conducted the investigation along with former Republican Attorney General Dick Thornburgh. They delivered their 224-page report to Moonves last week.
Fired were Mary Mapes, the story’s producer; Josh Howard, executive producer of “60 Minutes Wednesday”; Howard’s top deputy, Mary Murphy; and CBS News Senior Vice President Betsy West.
Dodgy documents
The “60 Minutes” story had questioned Bush’s Vietnam War-era commitment to service in the Texas Air National Guard. Mapes began reporting the story in 1999, but the report centered on documents obtained only weeks earlier, supposedly written by Bush’s commander, the late Lt. Col. Jerry Killian. The memos said that then-1st Lt. Bush did not take a mandatory medical exam and that Killian reportedly felt pressured to sugarcoat an evaluation of him.
Questions were quickly raised about the typed memos, with some document experts saying it appeared they contained a computer character inconsistent with typewriters at the time.
Boccardi and Thornburgh found that Mapes had said the documents were authenticated, when in fact she had found only one expert to vouch for only one signature in the memo. They said she also failed to look into the background of her source, retired Texas Army National Guard Lt. Col. Bill Burkett; to find Burkett’s source; or to find other corroboration of the charges.
“Her confidential source was not reliable and her authenticators were unable to authenticate the documents, and yet she maintained the opposite. ... This is truly disquieting,” Moonves said in a statement released with the report.
Producer charges scapegoating
Mapes said Monday she was “terribly disappointed” by the report’s conclusions. She said she believed the story was corroborated by others and consistent with previously known records, and that the panel was quick to condemn her based on statements from people who said different things to her.
“I am shocked by the vitriolic scapegoating in Les Moonves’ statement,” Mapes said in her own statement. “I am very concerned that his actions are motivated by corporate and political considerations — ratings rather than journalism.”
Mapes said the decision to air the story when it did was made by her superiors, including Heyward, and not by her.
“If there was a journalistic crime committed here, it was not by me,” she said.
When the Bush report aired, Mapes was a veteran, respected producer on a professional high: She had produced the “60 Minutes” report last spring that showed the first pictures of Americans mistreating Iraqis in Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison.
The review concluded that accomplishment essentially made her bulletproof despite the delicate, complicated nature of the Bush story, and that Howard, a CBS News veteran who had become chief of “60 Minutes Wednesday” in June, and Murphy failed to adequately question her.
Moonves said Howard “did little to assert his role as the producer ultimately responsible for the broadcast and everything in it. This mistake dealt a tremendous blow to the credibility of ‘60 Minutes Wednesday’ and to CBS News in general.”
Order to review report ignored
Two days after the report aired, Heyward ordered West to review the opinions of document examiners and confidential sources who had supported the story — but no such investigation took place, the investigators said.
If the review had been conducted promptly, Thornburgh and Boccardi said they did not believe CBS would have publicly and stridently defended the report for nearly two more weeks. The two men also criticized CBS for falsely saying the source of the documents was “unimpeachable” and that experts had vouched for their authenticity.
CBS aired subsequent stories designed to support the original installment — prepared by the same people — instead of providing a balanced look at the controversy, the investigators said.
They also said it was “inappropriate” for Mapes to have helped Burkett get in contact with Joe Lockhart, a political adviser to Democrat John Kerry, in the midst of the presidential campaign. But Boccardi said that to conclude CBS was guilty of anti-Bush bias would be to make the same mistake “60 Minutes Wednesday” made — drawing a conclusion without enough evidence.
Competition, not politics
Still, Thornburgh said he doubted the review would deflect the political criticism of CBS.
“A lot of different news organizations were pursuing the same story,” Thornburgh said. “Were they all politically motivated? I doubt it. What we did take notice of was the insensitivity of the people involved to appearances.”
Scott McClellan, Bush’s press secretary, said he hoped CBS would take steps to “prevent something like this from happening again.”
“We felt all along that it was important for CBS to get to the bottom of this,” McClellan said. “CBS has taken steps to hold people accountable, and we appreciate those steps.”
The independent panelists even faulted CBS’s eventual apology for the story, saying the network placed too much blame on Burkett and not enough on itself.
No punishment for Rather
Rather was portrayed as an overworked anchor who had just finished coverage of the Republican convention and Hurricane Frances in Florida. As a result, he did little to help prepare the original report, and did not even appear to have seen it before it aired, the panel said.
“He asked the right questions initially, but then made the same errors of credulity and overenthusiasm that beset many of his colleagues,” Moonves said.
In light of Rather’s announcement that he will step down as anchor in March — a move the anchor insisted had nothing to do with the investigation — Moonves said he concluded no disciplinary sanctions against his anchor were necessary.
An aide to Rather said Monday that he would have no immediate comment on the report, since he had just returned from covering the tsunami in Thailand and had not yet read it. Bob Schieffer subbed for Rather on Monday’s “CBS Evening News.”
As for Heyward, the panel said that he had urged extreme caution in preparing the story, an order that apparently wasn’t heeded. But Thornburgh and Boccardi did note that Heyward attended a screening of the story the night before it aired — an unusual step for the top news executive — and apparently saw nothing to stop it.
“Andrew’s sin was in trusting his lieutenants too much,” Moonves said in an interview with the AP.
Journalistic missteps and scandal
CBS is the third major news organization to sustain a black eye recently: Top editors at both The New York Times and USA Today left in the wake of plagiarism and fraud scandals involving correspondents Jayson Blair and Jack Kelley.
For television news organizations, the incident rivals CNN’s retraction of a June 1998 report that the U.S. military used sarin nerve gas in Laos during the Vietnam War, which led to correspondent Peter Arnett’s departure. Former NBC News President Michael Gartner resigned under pressure in 1992 after “Dateline NBC” rigged crashes of General Motors pickup trucks to show alleged fire dangers.
As a result of Monday’s report, CBS News said it had appointed one of its executives, Linda Mason, to a newly created job of senior vice president of standards and special projects, charged with thoroughly reviewing investigative stories before they air.
Both Moonves and the panel said it hoped the report did not have a “chilling effect” on CBS’ commitment to investigative journalism.
© 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.