President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

By the way, it should warrant mention that the entire premise of Ryan's original statement is also bullshit:

A story too good to check: Paul Ryan and the tale of the brown paper bag

 

Did CNN's Baghdad bureau report the real news out of Iraq?

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.

The News We Kept To Ourselves

 

This is that thing where you (or rather the people that feed you their taking points) try to appropriate a term to mean something it doesn't because it is vaguely similar to something you have been criticized over. Semantic obfuscation is a silly tactic, but man does Rush love it.

 

Yes. One of the biggest -- and toughtest -- parts of the business is deciding what to print and what not to print.

Did the U.S. need more evidence that Saddam was crazy so that people certainly would be killed?

If you know the name of a juvenile charged with a crime, should you print that?

 

So, I've abused the meaning of a term -- fake news -- that burst into the public conversation about a month ago at most?

 

Yes. It is another in your never-ending line of "look over there! Look over there! Oh god don't look here, look over there!" posts

 

You're making a broad point, right? You're not actually defending the specifics of CNN's Baghdad bureau are you?

 

There are other kinds of obfuscation?

 

Curious timing that bursting, dontcha think?

 

The "fake news" the left is now suddenly obsessed with circulates in thinly traversed, dark corners of the internet. It occasionally gets shared by your crazy uncle on Facebook.

Meanwhile, the left is unconcerned with the fake news generated at the WH, that it spreads. It's unconcerned with the fake news its own members create.

I see a much bigger problem with media's participation in creating and spreading false stories.

 

Sure. You can obfuscate in ways that don't solely rely on changing the meaning of words in context