I see that Matt Drudge has now posted this on his site, so you may already know about it. Still, I can hardly believe what my eyes are reading. Today in a New York Times Op-Ed, CNN chief news executive Eason Jordan says that CNN withheld news of atrocities committed by Saddam's regime from the viewing public . The article is titled "The News We Kept to Ourselves," and in it, Jordan tells of Uday once informing him that he planned to kill his two brothers-in-law (which he eventually did) and King Hussein of Jordan, of a CNN cameraman (Iraqi) who was kidnapped and tortured, and of Iraqi secret police terrorization of Iraqi media employees. Jordan also reveals (among other things):

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.

I don't blame Jordan for not reporting these things--he was afraid that to do so would endanger the lives of his staff and the people who told them these stories. But the question is, why didn't he pull his staff out of Baghdad and then tell the world what was going on? What was the point of being there if they were only giving us a sanitized, government-approved version of what was going on? And how exactly am I supposed to trust anything else CNN now reports?

To have the head of a major U.S. news organization admitting that his network covered up atrocities for Saddam Hussein is flabbergasting. Jordan says:

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.

Is it possible that it would have been useful for us (particularly many of the pundits on Jordan's own network) to have heard some of these "wrenching tales" about "decades of torment" while Saddam was still in power?