A series of strange coincidences began on February 24th, when a group called the American-Iranian Council held a special event featuring CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour and a screening of her documentary, "Revolutionary Journey," in which Amanpour, who was born in Iran, returned to the country to tell us about all the wonderful changes going on there. Three days later her program aired on CNN. Then, about three weeks later, the American-Iranian Council held a conference featuring Madeleine Albright hailing the changes in Iran. Albright's spokesman, James Rubin, is married to Amanpour.

Amanpour says that her documentary, which was filmed last October, was aired to coincide with the parliamentary elections occurring in Iran on February 18. But the fact that it was screened at a meeting of the American-Iranian Council suggests that there may have been another purpose behind it -- to support the "overture" to Iran that was announced by Albright at the subsequent council meeting.

All of this matters because, by Amanpour's own admission, the government of Iran hasn't changed in the areas of foreign policy, the military and the judiciary. That means that the Iranian regime continues to sponsor terrorism that targets American citizens. Even on the matter of the internal changes in Iran, Amanpour admits that what may be developing there is a "Moslem democracy." This means that Jews, Christians and members of other religious faiths will continue to be discriminated against. In fact, some Iranian Jews are going on trial on trumped-up charges of being spies.

Overall, Amanpour's program was geared toward encouraging a change in U.S. policy toward Iran. Talking about her program on the day it aired, she said, "I believe it is now up to the United States to take a fresh approach to Iran and come up with some significant gestures." That, of course, is exactly what happened with the Albright speech. Obviously, Amanpour's views were communicated to Albright through her husband, or perhaps in person, and a U.S. policy change was coordinated with the airing of the CNN program.

This is not the first time that a possible conflict of interest has surfaced in relation to CNN on the one hand and the State Department on the other. Writing in his newsletter CounterPunch, left-wing journalist Alexander Cockburn has cited reports that Pentagon personnel may have assisted CNN in doing stories on the war in Kosovo. Eason Jordan, CNN's president of newsgathering and international networks, has disputed this, but Cockburn responded:

"It's impossible not to laugh when CNN execs like Eason Jordan start spouting high-toned stuff about CNN's principles of objectivity and refusal to spout government or Pentagon propaganda. The relationship is most avidly summed up by the fact that Christiane Amanpour, CNN's leading foreign correspondent, and a woman whose reports about the fate of Kosovar refugees did much to fan appetite for NATO's war, has been in bed with the spokesman for the US State Department, and a leading propagandist for NATO during that war, her husband James Rubin."

Media other than CNN have failed to even exhibit curiosity about what is happening here. On the Fox News Sunday show, host Tony Snow asked the panelists about Albright's highly publicized "overture" to Iran. Juan Williams of National Public Radio said he welcomed the speech if it could lead to lower gas prices. Like many others in the media, he failed to mention the Iranian role in terrorism, including the Beirut bombing of 1983 and the Khobar Towers bombing of 1996. Williams' only concern seemed to be lower gas prices.

Ironically, Albright did mention an oil-related issue in her speech, saying that she regretted a U.S.-supported coup in Iran back in 1953. The regime was overthrown for several reasons, including the government's legalization of the Communist Party and nationalization of the oil industry. But many of the stories we saw about Albright's "overture" to Iran failed to mention the current role that some oil companies are now playing in the pro-Iran policy.

Those who saw live coverage of the conference of the American-Iranian Council on C-SPAN noticed that one of the speakers was Rosemarie Forsythe, senior government relations adviser at Exxon-Mobil. She laid out in a straightfoward manner what the company wants the U.S. Government to do. She said Exxon-Mobil wanted the repeal of a bill known as the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act, which prohibits trade and aid to the governments of Iran and Libya. The web site of the American-Iranian Council lists Exxon-Mobil and other oil companies as "sponsors and co-organizers" of the organization's events.

Albright's speech didn't include a pitch for those companies to get back into Iran, but she did announce a lifting of a ban on U.S. imports of Iranian luxury goods, including Iranian nuts, caviar and carpets. This doesn't sound like much, but to those who have been victimized by Iranian terror, it is an outrage and an insult. A story by Associated Press was one of the few which mentioned a highly negative reaction. Malcolm Kalp, a former captive of the Iranians, said, "Let them pay major sums of money to the 241 U.S. servicemen they killed at the Marine barracks and the embassy people they killed in Beirut -- and then I'd be more than happy to eat their nuts, eat their caviar and lay on their rugs."

Stephen Flatow of New Jersey, whose daughter was killed in a 1995 terror bombing in Israel by an Iranian-backed group, said the Clinton Administration is putting "caviar, carpets and pistachio nuts" before the fight against terrorism. The Clinton Administration has blocked the Flatow family from collecting a financial judgment against Iran by seizing Iranian assets in the U.S. Echoing the views of Kalp and Flatow, Senator Connie Mack said that "American victims of terrorism deserve justice, not pistachios and caviar." (30)

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