ABC News Spikes General Sada

I've attended a remarkable weekend retreat, helping to host some great Christian leaders, including Dr. Terry Law, author Stephen Mansfield (The Faith of George W. Bush, The Faith of the American Soldier), and General Georges Sada (Saddam's Secrets).

Mansfield confirmed in a story what I have insisted for years, that missionaries wrongly assume local and national governments will be adversarial to their work, so they commonly lie and sneak around when they do not necessarily need to. He referred to his own church's work in Kurdistan, and the rewards being up front, including helping the Kurdish president and council draft a constitution (they hope to achieve independence in years to come), and the dramatic positive fallout in Kurdish society, including educational and business initiatives that have benefitted the entire region.

Of course, another speaker highlighted the fact that some governments (e.g., China) will fake openness in order to get ministries to "go legit," and stop supporting the house church movement, so there are definitely two sides to the approach Mansfield suggested. Nonetheless he spoke brilliantly.

General Sada was interviewed by Terry Law (Sada's preferred format), and together they told how last week ABC news spiked their interview and the story confirming Saddam's taped conversations about WMDs and how they could kill 100,000 Americans with nerve gas. Sada was supposed to appear on World News Tonight and Nightline, but ABC clearly does not want President Bush to be proven right about weapons of mass destruction. Still, there's a plan to get the information to other networks, so be on the lookout for it.

I'm writing this on the run, so I apologize for the lack of hyperlinks. More later…