Baghdad Peter

[Derek Ortt]

Way to act as an Iraqi agent, Peter Arnett. Way to give Iraqi propaganda. Going in Iraqi Tv and saying how poorly we are doing and how he is causing the anti-war protest. Nicely done, thanks for a repeat again form the last war.

[rainstorm]

he is an iraqi sympathizer. what he said was disgusting. hanoi jane move over. HEY PETER!!
DONT FORGET THOSE POW'S THAT WERE BUTCHERED!!! I WISH I COULD USE THE WORDS TO DESCRIBE HOW PUKE-WORTHY YOU ARE!!

[Derek Ortt]

RS,

Best post of the year

[Aslkahuna]

Iraqi TV should not still be on the air-we need to blast it off the air and leave it there! I'm sure if the old time Soviets were running this thing Iraqi TV would have been eliminated along ago-along with all of the reporters in Baghdad.

Steve

[rainstorm]

he has always sided against the united states. msnbc should kick his sorry rear end off the air. this is horrifying.

[Derek Ortt]

Why do we have to be PC and not take this off of the air? The Arabs have and will always hate us, regardless if we kill 0 civilians or 1 million. This propaganda from Baghdad Peter needs to be terminated by a 5K lb bunker buster

[Lindaloo]

Who is Peter Arnett?

[breeze]

OK - what have I missed? Last time I heard from Peter Arnett,
he was hunkered down during an attack...I DID note that he
kept repeating how "scared" the marines around him were...??

[rainstorm]

he said. he was on IRAQI TV and was very cozy to them. even a liberal democrat said it was nauseating

[JQ Public]

i've not heard anything about this. lemme see an article or smthg

[azskyman]

Tis good that Peter is inside Baghdad. Wouldn't want him running loose anywhere else.

How quickly they forget who THEY'RE friends are too.

With him hanging around the TV studios, one never knows what might accidentally fall on the fellow.......

Not that I wish harm on him, but he certainly has shown his loyalties on this one.

[breeze]

Evidently, his reputation preceeds him........

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Peter Arnett: American True and Blue?

CNN still stands, but the hallways of its Atlanta headquarters run deep with blood and network staffers around the world ain't happy. Three CNN producers who concocted the once-upon-a-time-nerve-gas-was-used-in-Laos fairy tale have bit the dust. But Peter Arnett remains standing.

Arnett, like every occupant on death row, protests he's not guilty. He says he "contributed not one comma to the story." Duh. Who then was the fast-talking New Zealander who said on the TV program, " We've nailed down the fact that nerve gas was used and American defectors were killed in the course of the war?"

The talking head looked like Arnett and he sounded like Arnett. Yet, he now claims "I didn't know whether (the story) was true or not."

And was this the same "reporter" whose name was on the Time Magazine story claiming our Special Operations warriors were guilty of heinous war crimes in Laos? Col. Art Bishop, one of the pilots who supported the Green Berets during their daring raid in Laos, says he told Arnett before the stories ran that "Sarin gas had not been dropped." Why would any reporter put his name on any report, especially a story that painted Americans as war criminals, if he didn't know he was signing off on the whole truth?

Perhaps the answer is Arnett- style "journalism." I've seen him report from the bloody streets of Port-au-Prince while standing behind a palm tree in Haiti's safe Montana Hotel; report from the sniper-infested alleys of Sarajevo while on a hotel roof in far away Belgrade. His credibility and license to stretch the facts are not exactly up to "60 Minutes" standards. I met Arnett in Vietnam in 1965 right after he published a yarn saying U.S. Marines used "poisonous chemicals" against innocent civilians. Arnett was referring to tear gas. The same nonlethal stuff every grunt gets a whiff of during basic training. His source was Communist Radio Hanoi.

Immediately, peaceniks around the world claimed that Americans in Vietnam were using weapons of mass destruction against the Communists. Many soldiers who fought in Vietnam consider war correspondent Arnett a traitor. We were "All the way with LBJ" but he was from the school that "Ho Chi Minh has got to win." In one unit in my "Kill a Commie for Mommy" 101st Parachute Brigade there was actually a price on his head. You could bet money that had he accompanied that unit on a mission he wouldn't have returned. This hatred still exists among tens of thousands of Vietnam vets with long memories and after his recent phony story, they aren't going to take any more Arnett lies.

In the old days, it wasn't only the warriors who roiled against him. Both LBJ and Richard Nixon complained about his anti-American reporting. During that war, Arnett joined the anti war propaganda campaign and made a pilgrimage to Hanoi. At least to his credit, he didn't climb into a Red gun position for a photo op as did his Siamese twin "Hanoi Jane."

During the Gulf War, he was for a time the only U.S. journalist allowed to stay in the Iraqi capital, where he nightly presented "The War According to Saddam Hussein." Remember his "baby milk" factory story which showed the pummeled plant and Iraqi workers with curiously convenient English lettering on their coveralls? The facility was a Pentagon-confirmed Iraqi intelligence unit.

Angry CNN journalists say they have no confidence in Arnett's reporting because of past journalistic sins and his long-term obsession that Americans used nerve gas during the Vietnam War. It doesn't help that many of his peers think he didn't get canned because he's still connected ideologically at the left hip with Jane Fonda-Turner.

Gen. Perry Smith, the former consultant who quit CNN over the now retracted story, says, "We don't need a liar like him reporting news to us."

CNN star Christiane Amanpour says "I believe, contrary to what Peter Arnett appears to believe, that a network correspondent should be responsible for what he or she says on the air." Roger that Smith and Amanpour!

Scores of other good CNN journalists agree. They're "grievously wounded by this shoddy piece of journalism," says CNN's Jamie McIntyre.

And I don't blame 'em. So are a lot of folks!

[wx247]

I found it distasteful and tacky!

[streetsoldier]

After this blatant display, perhaps NBC/National Geograhic might want him to go to Australia...to interview some "distressed and oppressed" crocodiles? "CRIKEY!"

[breeze]

Ooops - then, that might be Steve Irwin's turf!

[JQ Public]

Peter Arnett: U.S. war plan has 'failed'

Sunday, March 30, 2003 Posted: 10:11 PM EST (0311 GMT)

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- The U.S. war plan has "failed," veteran war correspondent Peter Arnett told Iraqi TV in an interview that aired Sunday.

"The first war plan has failed because of Iraqi resistance. Now they are trying to write another war plan," Arnett said. "Clearly, the American war planners misjudged the determination of the Iraqi forces."

Arnett -- who is reporting for National Geographic Television and NBC News -- also said Iraq has given him and other reporters a "degree of freedom which we appreciate," this despite the fact that Iraq has expelled several journalists, including CNN's Baghdad team, and apparently has imprisoned two journalists from the New York newspaper Newsday.

Arnett is a member of the Board of Directors of the Committee to Protect Journalists, which is trying to locate the missing journalists.

"I'd like to say from the beginning that the 12 years I've been coming here," Arnett said, "I've met unfailing courtesy and cooperation, courtesy from your people and cooperation from the Ministry of Information."

Arnett told the Iraqi TV interviewer, who was dressed in an Iraqi Army uniform, that President Bush is facing a "growing challenge" about the "conduct of the war" within the United States.

"President Bush says he is concerned about the Iraqi people, but if Iraqi people are dying in numbers, then American policy will be challenged very strongly," he said. In the interview, Arnett said reports from Baghdad on civilians being killed are being shown in the United States, and "it helps those who oppose the war when you challenge the policy to develop their arguments."

He pointed out U.S. claims that civilians killed in an explosion at a downtown Baghdad market were the victims of Iraqi missiles, and that Iraq had said the missiles were definitely incoming coalition fire.
NBC News issued a statement supporting Arnett, saying that Arnett gave the interview to Iraqi TV as a "professional courtesy" and that his remarks "were analytical in nature and were not intended to be anything more."

Arnett also said "clearly this is a city that is disciplined, the population is responsive to the government's requirements of discipline," and "Iraqi friends tell me there is a growing sense of nationalism and resistance to what the United States and Britain is doing."

The longtime war correspondent, who reported on the Persian Gulf War for CNN in 1991, said U.S. war planners miscalculated the will of Iraqis and he does "not understand how that happened."

He said his reports "would tell the Americans about the determination of the Iraqi forces, the determination of the government and the willingness to fight for their country."