The news they kept to themselves

Eason Jordan, an executive at CNN, tells the world what they couldn’t report about Iraq over the last two decades:

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.

We take freedom of the press for granted here in the US, but in many places in the world, both the value and consequences are significant.