Arnett Defends Baghdad Reporting : Gulf War: He says that question-and-answer sessions with CNN anchors after he read his censored material ‘saved my reputation.’

Cable News Network correspondent Peter Arnett said Tuesday that being able to conduct unrehearsed question-and-answer sessions with CNN anchors “saved my reputation” during his weeks in Baghdad during the Persian Gulf War.

In his first public account of his time in the enemy capital since he left Baghdad on March 8, Arnett seemed unperturbed by criticism from some on the political right that he was a dupe of the Iraqi government.

“I guess the American people weren’t quite clear about what we were doing,” Arnett said in a speech to the National Press Club here. “I don’t think the American public really has a real concept of what the press does other than that we are to blame.”

He was “amused, frankly” by Sen. Alan K. Simpson (R-Wyo.), who accused the Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent of being an Iraqi sympathizer. Several months before Iraq invaded Kuwait, Arnett said, Simpson had rebuked him and a handful of other journalists for being too critical of Saddam Hussein.

“We were upbraided for referring to this paragon of virtue, an American friend, a future power in the Gulf. We did not understand Saddam Hussein,” Arnett said, adding, “We do still have that video, Senator.”

If anything, Arnett argued, his Iraqi “minders,” many of whom secretly harbored doubts about Hussein, were at risk of being swayed by Western press freedom: “It was clear we were affluent, and clear that we had contacts, and as time went on it was clear that we had special access to the outside world, access that for them was rapidly disappearing.”

Arnett said he believes his nearly eight weeks in Baghdad enabled him to “chart the increasingly rapid deterioration of Iraqi society, the frustration of the average man in the street and eventually the very negative comments of the minders themselves.”

Those “minders,” Arnett said, began pulling him and his crew aside in the halls to complain about the Iraqi government. “We had to be very careful about how we handled all this information” for fear of getting expelled.

A key in helping prove to the outside world that he was not “somehow a robot being manipulated or simply reading material that I was forced to write” were the live question-and-answer sessions with anchors in Atlanta.

Arnett said that his Iraqi censors at first did not even realize that he was on the air when he continued talking to CNN after reading his censored reports.

“I had fashioned a brief approved script” that first night after all the other press had been ejected from the country, Arnett explained. “I read it over the air, and anchorman Reid Collins at the conclusion of it asked me some questions . . . . I was chatting with him for about 15 or 20 minutes.”

At the end of this, the chief Iraqi censor, Sadoom Genabi, asked whom Arnett was talking to. Arnett explained that it was Collins. Genabi asked, “What is an anchorman?” When Arnett told him, Genabi said, “You mean you were on the air?”

Later, Arnett and his minders debated what had happened: “I talked to them about the need for credibility. I said there was no point in my being in Baghdad if all I could deliver each evening was a brief, approved dispatch. I had to have a Q and A. By miracle of miracles, they agreed.”

But the censorship was still extreme. “I would be on the air and I would be trying to give measured responses, and there would be Mr. Sadoom gesticulating, (figuratively) cutting throats, as I’m sure they wanted to do to me.”

Arnett did say that he tried to be subtle in the way he conveyed information when trying to avoid the censorship restrictions. “You didn’t want to rub their face in it.”

Arnett also revealed some secrets. “I often appeared on the air in a rather oily looking leather jacket. It wasn’t sartorially elegant, but it did have $100,000 sewn in the lining, which I spent at a rapid rate.”