POLITICIAN WATCH : Beat the Press

The April before Iraqi troops swarmed into Kuwait, Sen. Alan K. Simpson (R-Wyo.), on a visit to Baghdad, chatted up President Saddam Hussein on the relationship between Hussein’s bad image and the “Great Satans” of the Western press.

What Simpson said attracted little attention, even after Iraq’s government released a transcript of the conversation.

Had Simpson not let his contempt for reporters--and, by extension, the First Amendment--seize his normally sunny disposition again the other day, the transcript might still be gathering dust.

Lunching with some reporters last week, Simpson chose as his target Peter Arnett of CNN, a stay-behind correspondent in Baghdad who is slowly being joined by other Western media. People who do things like that, Simpson said, are what used to be called “sympathizers.”

Arnett earned a Pulitzer Prize during the Vietnam War, covered the first bombs and rockets of the Gulf War from the windows of a Baghdad hotel and is still there.

It’s not a coveted assignment, just one that Arnett thinks is important. His reports are censored, a fact noted in every broadcast. He goes only where the Iraqis let him go, something he once noted in a gutsy surmise, saying civilian casualties must be low because he’d been shown so few.

Simpson appears exraordinarily intemperate, locked in a grudge match with what he told Saddam Hussein last April is a “haughty and pampered” press--pampered by guarantees of freedoms in the same Constitution that protects him in the act of a smear.