SADDAM AND CNN

The late Mike Kelly was one brilliant writer and reporter, probably my favorite columnist over the past couple of years. He was in Iraq during the Gulf War and died in Iraq during this year's war to liberate it from Saddam. In an interview shortly before his death, Kelly explained the corrupt relationship between Saddam and CNN:

[Interviewer]What we saw, video wise, pretty much came from your hotel. But we had no sense of the context or volume. What could we not understand from watching it on TV?

[Kelly]I don't know, because I don't really know what you saw.

You know what one sees on TV.

There are a lot of individual stories from that night that you can't see because they're not what TV shows—how people react to things. Some of that I wrote about, some of that I didn't. Some people had reactions to that night that I didn't want to write about. There were a lot of people there who were mad at CNN—you didn't see that on TV.

Because?

Well, because CNN had this special relationship with the Iraqi government that they had earned, in part, through what I thought was corrupt reporting.

Sort of the mouthpiece for Saddam

More than that. Specifically, they were allowed to fly on Iraqi planes to go into Kuwait City when it was occupied, and they were taken there by the Iraqi government for the specific purpose of shooting down the story that the Iraqi occupiers had killed babies in incubators. And they did shoot that story down for the government. As [Robert] Wiener, the producer for CNN, has written for his book, which has recently been made into a movie, they acquiesced to the Iraqi government's demand that they not tell the world the rest of the stuff they saw in Kuwait City. They did that to protect their special standing. Their special standing was not only access to interviews that nobody else could get, but they also had this land line that allowed them twenty-four-hour open telephone.

So in effect, they were enabling.

Well, I didn't blame them politically for that. But I thought the decision to suppress what they knew they had seen in Kuwait City was wholly corrupt and wrong and indefensible. That night, the people who were there—we all passed the same night. They passed it in glory on TV. But everybody was in the same hotel. In the morning—I was talking the other day to a guy I had spent a lot of time with that night, a reporter from a Sydney paper— and he reminded me that he and I had gone up to CNN's suite at dawn and knocked on the door. They had locked the door so nobody could get into their suite, because they had the only working phone line and they wanted to protect it, of course. I knocked on the door and slipped them a note asking them if they would, not file our stories for us, but if we could give them a list of phone numbers of wives and others that they would call and tell everybody we were okay. They pushed the note back under the door and said, "Haven't you ever heard of competition?" So a lot of people who were there have never forgiven them for that.

I realize this isn't news--CNN's own Eason Jordan said much the same thing a few months ago, and the New York Times' John Burns recently wrote that many other reporters did similar things. But this passage shows that Kelly really was one of the good guys, and that CNN actively helps our enemies if it maintains their "access."

They're probably still doing it, elsewhere. In Cuba, in China, throughout the Middle East, wherever CNN has a bureau and the local warlord or tyrant has an anti-American axe to grind, CNN is there to be their global megaphone.