Once again Jveritas at Free Republic has translated another one of the Saddam documents and this one is quite interesting. It shows the Iraqi leadership discussing ways of making a mass grave in Southern Iraq appear to have been the work of the coalition in Desert Storm, plus they discuss getting CNN involved. Ain’t CNN proud?
I did a partial translation of the document highlight the statement related to CNN in bold letters in the body of the translation. The rest of this 3 pages document that I did not translate will go into further deception on how to make big military funerals for the people in the mass graves though out all the Iraq provinces and how high level state officials will participate in these funerals.
Beginning of the Partial Translation
The Republic of Iraq
The Intelligence Apparatus
Date: 7/2/2001
No 1687
n the Name of God the Merciful the Most Compassionate
Secret
To the respectful Mr. Director of the Fourth Directory
Your letter secret and immediate numbered B 264 on 2/4/2001
1. No information is available to us about the Mass Graves in the Southern Region.
2.We see to achieve the observation the following matters:
A. Inspect the graves to confirm the existence of Nuclear Radiations.
B. Were they buried alive or their death was by suffocation.
C. Are they military personnel or civilians.
D. Are there tombstones that carry the names of the martyrs
E. Identify accurate marks and proofs of the graves and the possibility to reach it quickly and identify it.
3. We do not agree that the declaration about it through a direct Iraqi media in the first stage at least and not to cause public and party reaction so that the subject will take as a priority an international interest, and we should work on the following direction during this stage:
A. Leak the news through reliable sources.. News agencies or Satellite stations.. and that there is confusion, and indications from the members of the Coalition forces about the existence of mass graves civilians and military personnel in the South of Iraq.
B. The attempt to search for soldiers from the Coalition forces in a serious way to mention these truth through the agencies.
(1-3)
C. Ask some of the friendly countries with good technology to find these graves and for sure it will be asked from some news agencies in these countries to humanly participate in this effort and in case it is discovered there will be media reactions internationally and foreign and this media must be given a big space to repeat it and leak it to take its natural form of influence on the countries that made this bad deed and give it to the international general opinion.
D. Not to dig these grave by the Iraqi side? and it is possible to make a dialogue with the CNN channel to give them a priority on this subject to have an influence over the international arena and it will be accepted more than the Iraqi media.
End of Partial Translation
They chose CNN, I wonder why? Recall the recent admission by CNN that they failed to report the crimes of the Saddam regime, just so they could stay there.
Every news organization, and every reporter, makes difficult, morally ambiguous decisions when working in a totalitarian state….
Last week, Eason Jordan, the network’s chief news executive, wrote an article in the New York Times in which he described some of the things he had learned but not reported during the 13 trips he made to Iraq over the past decade, while lobbying the government to keep CNN’s Baghdad bureau open. At one point, a CNN cameraman, an Iraqi citizen, was abducted and subjected to electroshock torture. At another point, CNN learned of an armed attack planned on the organization’s headquarters in northern Iraq. Mr. Jordan gives other examples — and goes on to explain that CNN chose not to report the information to protect other Iraqi employees and out of “fear of endangering our staff in Baghdad.”…
If CNN did not fully disclose what it knew about the Baathist regime, and if CNN deliberately kept its coverage bland and inoffensive, that would help explain why the regime was not perceived to be as ruthless as it in fact was, in the Arab world and elsewhere.
And you have to come to the conclusion after reading this new memo that Saddam just loved CNN.
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