Is CNN still behaving as it did in Baghdad? If they are the only "news oranization" that maintains a bureau in heavily censored Havana, can we believe anything that's reported from that bureau? Here is an interesting take:

�T�O many Cuban Americans, CNN is the "Castro News Network" - an organization that lends legitimacy to a corrupt regime and sneers at the exile community in Miami. CNN is the only American television network to keep a bureau in Havana, in part because Castro maintains tight control over journalistic access to Cuba.

In a comprehensive report released last year, the Media Research Center concluded, "CNN has allowed itself to become just another component of Fidel Castro's propaganda machine." The network certainly hasn't done much to describe the harsh realities of life in one of the world's last Communist holdouts.

It wasn't supposed to be this way. "We will pull no punches," promised chief news executive Eason Jordan when the bureau was opened in 1997. "If we get booted out, we get booted out." But CNN's record with ruthless dictators has been less than stellar - as Jordan himself admits. In an April column for The New York Times, he referred to "awful things that could not be reported" by CNN's Baghdad bureau "because doing so would have jeopardized the lives of Iraqis."

That's a dilemma, to be sure, but CNN didn't respond by yanking its people out of Baghdad. Instead, it decided to pull some punches. "Now that Saddam Hussein's regime is gone, I suspect we will hear many, many more gut-wrenching tales from Iraqis about the decades of torment," wrote Jordan.

Well, Mr. Jordan, your track record is sad and I haven't seen anything lately to indicate that policies have changed.