« Need A Clue? Try Looking At History | Main
nick goticFebruary 08, 2005
Eason Jordon: A Nation Remembers
As the sun struggled to break through the early morning fog gripping the surrounding hills, a still-sleepy nation wrestled with disbelief and shock. One of America's heroes, Eason Jordan, was gone and for many of them the political landscape would never be the same.
How did this happen? The tale is the stuff of nightmares. Real spy-novel material - the kind of thing you expect to see in a Robert Ludlum novel. A brave journalist takes on a power-mad, neo-conservative military junta. Before you know it, he's on the run for his life: in this topsy-turvy world, friends become foes, everyone's on the take, and double-crossing's the name of the game.
And then comes the final act: a double-tap with a Mannlicher-Carcano... and it's all over except for the flowers and the parades.
Somebody please send in the clowns.
He never wanted to be a Hero. Growing up on the hardscrabble streets of West Hollywood, he just wanted to do his job. But the man affectionately known to fellow CNN'ers as "Mr. Jordan" or even "sir" was the 'real deal' - a reporter's reporter. That's why, when he learned that Saddam Hussein's Baathist thugs were targeting CNN's Iraqi staff in Baghdad, he bravely protected their lives by staying on the scene and concealing the atrocities from the public.
Some would have withdrawn the CNN bureau from Baghdad immediately. Or perhaps offered a safe haven to CNN's Iraqi staff members.
Some would have reported Hussein's brutality to the world to focus attention of the plight of the Iraqis under his regime.
But Jordan was no rookie - correctly surmising that such a course of action would negatively impact CNN's bottom line, he took the only logical course of action: he covered up the atrocities. In his April 2003 statement, he declared himself "relieved" that CNN was now free to report the truth about torture in Iraq.
And report he did....with a vengeance.
With his hands no longer tied by the threat of Saddam's brutality, Jordan's troops at CNN were all over the torture story like an Army Reservist in an unsupervised Iraqi prison cell at 2 am.
Jordan dug deep. He picked at the stinking, festering scab of torture constantly... never allowing the tragic plight of Iraqi torture victims to fade from the public consciousness for an instant: