You need to sign up to read the NY Times online, but there's a great op/ed piece written by Eason Jordan, a CNN news executive, which was published today (4/11/2003). The piece is titled The News We Kept to Ourselves, and in it Jordan talks about the atrocities of the Iraqi regime that CNN never reported.

Some choice bits.
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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.

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).

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.
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Such lovely people the Iraqi regime, something I'm sure the sign painter from Berkeley who wrote "We love you Saddam" would say. Well at least the Berkeley sign painter won't have to worry about finding a loved one's body parts in a plastic bag on their doorstep, since the person had no beef with Saddam.

When some of the anti-war protestors talk about how horrible America is, I think they need to remember that in places like Iraq things were much worse. Had these anti-war people protested against Saddam, I'm sure they would be missing what? fingernails, teeth, their children, their lives?

A strange match. John Cusak and Meg Ryan. I don't know. It sounds odd.

Wow, I'm on Blogshares whatever that is. I found it in my sitemeter report.

I've been spending the last two days playing with my company laptop. The Company finally gave me an IBM Thinkpad R31. What a pain in the butt the machine has been. I only got it because a salesman quit, so they had an extra one around. At least it's new. My coworkers got older ones.

I think I would preferred an older one, because mine didn't come with a docking station or port replication. Now we're trying to figure out how to connect a keyboard and a mouse, and it's a pain. The USB to PS2 connectors don't work, so now the solution is to buy a USB keyboard and mouse. Stupid IBM! They don't have a keyboard and mouse port on the back of the laptop. IBM is known for manufacturing their machines so you can only use IBM products. I hope this isn't the case, but I wouldn't surprised.

Then I spent the whole morning trying to figure out how to connect to the company VPN. That was another picnic. After two hours, I think we finally fixed it but I won't know till I take it home this weekend and test it out. I should have tested it here again, but I didn't. I've just about had enough of my laptop.

I asked my boss if I should just stick with a desktop, and he said to no. He had a hard time with the company IT department when he got his laptop, and he said just to stick it out and make the IT people fix it. I just have no patience for this kind of stuff, and I used to have to work at an IT Helpdesk. It's just so frustrating for me. I don't understand why things can't just work, or why the IT people don't test the machines they hand out.

The last two days at work have been so horrid for me that I haven't been able to work. I'm sure my bosses love that. I emailed our VP about all the laptop problems I was having, thinking maybe he would say something to the IT department. I doubt it though. He's probably thinking "didn't I tell her she could only have a desktop?" He works from a laptop, so maybe he knew the process would be this painful.

I woke up this morning, turned on the TV to get the traffic and weather report and watched in amazement as the Iraqis were trying to bring a statue of Hussein down. Very surreal!

I agree with the prez. I think it's too early to declare a victory yet, but it was nice to see the Iraqi people happy with us being there for once. On CNN, even Al Jazeera was being apologetic. Funny, how the appearance of a victory changes one's attitudes suddenly.

What's frightening is the stories of the Iraqi regime put children in jail because they wouldn't join the youth party. What about those scary torture chambers and torture tools. Some man on the radio said there were earlier videos of the Iraqi resistance shooting people especially women in the back for running up to the Coalition soldiers. He was so angry.

I wonder if there will still be anti-war demonstrations now. I don't think the war will be over until most of our troops come home, and they find the missing ones.

Someone should document all the media spin about the war. Didn't some journalist say early on that the coalition forces were in a "quagmire"? It's a reflection of our society that the journalist wanted an instant war with instant results. War used to take years not weeks, so how can can you call state of the war on just a few days of battles. Don't journalists take history courses where they talk about all the wars that have gone through the years?

It was fun for me being a "pro-war" person to be on the cruise. I thought for sure the cruise would be full of anti-war people because it was mostly full of California people. Suprisingly, most people were "pro-war".

As soon as I told people I was from San Francisco, I think they expected me to go on sam anti-war rant. When I told them my views, people seemed to open and up and relax and we could talk about how worried we were for our soldiers, how biased and anti-american the media was, and how bad Hussein is.

We did run into a few anti-war people from the Bay Area, but they had the same opinion of the anti-war protests that I did. The anti-war protests were mostly being run by anti-american socialists groups, they were violent, and they were focused on a city that's mostly anti-war. These people refused to attend the anti-war protests and they were very anti-war.

One woman was a former Vietnam war protestor who found out through her father, who used to work for the government, that the FBI kept files on all the Vietnam war protestors. Her father found out she was protesting the Vietnam war because the FBI told him about it, and showed him her file. Her father had no idea what she was doing. The woman laughed when she said this and told us her father was a "big time republican".

She told me that the FBI were probably doing the same with the anti-war protestors. This piece of information was scary. When I was taking russian language courses in college, my professors used to joke that just by taking the class we the students were now under FBI scrutiny and we had "files". I'm sure with the Patriot Act, all this kind of stuff is now in hyperdrive mode.

Like I said, it's been a very surreal day. I've got lots more to write about, but I'm tired now. I feel like a witness to history and it's a very strange feeling. It's like a 9/11 feeling only weirder. Events in the world seem to be happening at a dizzying rate.

And SARS is scaring the heck out of me, only because it looks like China is covering up how many death and illnesses they have. Once the war is over, it will SARS, SARS, SARS all day and all night long. If you think the war news was worse, wait till the media gets a hold of SARS. We'll have pictures and videos of sick people, quarantined people and people walking around with masks on their faces, not to mention interviews with grieving relatives, tired doctors and other healthcare people, plus probably a SARS death counter. I'm hoping SARS doesn't turn into a media circus, but I have my doubts.