On October 18th, CNN claimed that it made a decision to air a tape of the assassination of an American soldier after what it described as an intense internal discussion over the video’s news value. Like most people when they heard this, I imagined a crush of sweaty journalists crammed into a conference room, mulling the many nuances of war, the first amendment, propaganda and the adverse affect this footage might have on our selfless troops.

That momentary flight of fancy augured in at Mach five, however, when I learned that CNN had lobbed an e-mail into their ideological counterparts in Iraq asking them if they had any compelling video of American soldiers getting whacked.  This might explain why CNN claimed that it did not know exactly when this gruesome tape was made.  When the tape was made, however, goes directly to the question of culpability. If the tape was made after the request was proffered, then a direct nexus could be drawn between that request and the killing it depicted...the proverbial quid pro quo, if you will.

To gauge whether this is consistent with CNN’s modus operandi in the recent past, we need look no further than what it has already admitted to vis-à-vis promising the terrorists “equal” treatment in its reporting of the war in exchange for the tape. Forgetting for a moment that the terrorists don’t deserve anything remotely approaching equal footing with our soldiers and that journalists shouldn’t be in the business of purchasing “news footage” for the price of a soldier’s life, doesn’t this tactic trigger memories of another unethical decision to purchase news?

CNN producer David Doss wrote, “Whether or not you agree with us in this case, our goal, as always, is to present the unvarnished truth as best we can.” Oh, really? This from the network that sold its journalistic soul to Saddam in exchange for its right to maintain an office in Baghdad during his bloody regime. CNN turned a blind journalistic eye to all of Saddam’s atrocities for a fistful of silver and it now expects us to believe that it wrestled with the decision to air this patently obvious piece of pulp propaganda.

Not unlike CNN’s tacit approval of Saddam’s rape rooms, genocide, WMD ambitions, et al, for a safe haven in uptown Baghdad, they didn’t just air a despicable piece of salacious propaganda at the behest of terrorists; they sponsored the video like a studio backing an independent film with a guaranteed wide release. The film doesn’t get made; ergo the hit never occurs, if not for the proactive steps taken by CNN to insert itself into the story.

But CNN learned from its previous miscue in re its swanky digs in pre-war Baghdad. The blogs have become better at and are certainly more motivated to ferret out these sorts of hypocrisies than the mainstream media has ever been predisposed to do. Knowing this, sources inside our intelligence community tell me that CNN wisely requested the footage in generic terms and when they later learned that one existed...having been procured by means of the first e-mail...they lobbed in a second e-mail re-soliciting the tape. So why would they do this?

CNN has been one of the staunchest opponents of the Patriot Act, habitually referring to its surveillance component as “domestic spying” in an effort to sway public opinion decidedly against it. Knowing that their efforts to reach out to the terrorists would eventually surface, CNN made certain to send more than one e-mail, having previously worked out this strategy with their terrorist counterparts, who knew not to respond until subsequent messages were received. The first message triggers the hit – the distribution funding for our independent film in the above analogy – then the terrorists go out and make themselves a good piece of propaganda, which happens to serve the political purposes of the CNN cabal, as well. The terrorists then wait until they receive another request from their backers before remitting the video. This creates the denial plausibility that CNN needs: they can now safely state that they made these requests at periodic intervals and they eventually received a confirmation that a tape existed. This is why the inability to discern the tape’s date of origin is so significant to CNN.

This is the first of many blogs I intend to write – if you do not wish to be on this list, please let me know and I will remove your addy post haste.