Contributor to Washington Times: "Canadians too cowardly to fight"

[Sythen]

- most Americans think of Iraq when they think of overseas fighting
- where Canadians aren't, so that's why we weren't mentioned

The video plainly says Afghanistan, and its the only conflict that they discuss in the interview.. Don't care what the average American thinks, this guy should know better.

 

[Blackadder1916]

I was a faithful Wayne's World follower -

Good picture.  Though she made a wonderful contribution to Wayne's World, perhaps your expectations were later raised when she amply filled the title role of "Relic Hunter".  However, you shouldn't get your hopes up - she was searching for antiquities, not fossils.

 

[aesop081]

this guy should know better.

Who f'ing cares ?

One guy said something that may or may not be stupid, depnding on how you look at it. I swear some people on here go on like Canada is some kind of untoucheable saint or something.

Plenty of American bashing goes on in this country ( on this site too)...we should know better.

 

[Edward Campbell]

Good picture.  Though she made a wonderful contribution to Wayne's World, perhaps your expectations were later raised when she amply filled the title role of "Relic Hunter".  However, you shouldn't get your hopes up - she was searching for antiquities, not fossils.

Darn!  :crybaby:

 

[Greymatters]

It covers it now, I think.

Ha, nice alteration...

 

[Danjanou]

Darn!  :crybaby:

They were filming Relic Hunter around the corner from my old apartment back before I met/married "she who must be obeyed" and I had the chance to see the uber babe in question up close and personal. I did feel not worthy.  :'(

Now this thread has been totally derailed, which considering the original content seems somehow appropriate.

 

[Edward Campbell]

They were filming Relic Hunter around the corner from my old apartment back before I met/married "she who must be obeyed" and I had the chance to see the uber babe in question up close and personal. I did feel not worthy.  :'(

Now this thread has been totally derailed, which considering the original content seems somehow appropriate.

ff topic:  Well, old chum, I wouldn't worry about it too much. I'm sure she is worthy of me!  :highjack:

 

[Danjanou]

 

[SARgirl]

It's our own fault. We never get the good press, blow our own horns, or have everyone ballyhooing from the rooftops about our great armed forces and the terrific job we're doing.

If we can't get acknowledged in our own country, why would someone from outside think about us, or our contribution?

So why is it that Canadian troops don't get the recognition and acknowledgment that they deserve from Canada's overall general public and press?

Why is it that our military doesn't, "get the good press, blow our own horns, or have everyone ballyhooing from the rooftops about our great armed forces and the terrific job we're doing"? 

 

[Edward Campbell]

So why is it that Canadian troops don't get the recognition and acknowledgment that they deserve from Canada's overall general public and press?

Why is it that our military doesn't, "get the good press, blow our own horns, or have everyone ballyhooing from the rooftops about our great armed forces and the terrific job we're doing"?

Principally, because the media believes it has a duty to be hyper-critical of anything official: all authorities like governments, police, courts and the military. It is considered bad form to praise; just look at what Christie Blatchford is called, in print, by many of her colleagues.

Secondarily, because the military, itself, does not issue enough well written press releases. Much of the "news" you read, hear and even see every day is, essentially, dictation and many "journalists" are little more than stenographers. Even a lot of video is provided by press agents. But, in my personal opinion DND's communications people do not do the job well enough.

Finally, because the media still has a self-image of itself from the 1960s. It wants to be drug addled and freely loved and anti-war and, and, and ...

 

[George Wallace]

......and don't forget a culture of "the quiet professional".

 

[BearW]

I thought the vid. was great.. not only did he omit us as a prominent fighting force but also spoke to his vast first hand knowledge of afghan culture and countryside.

He must have been the only guy available on a friday afternoon before the big shoot monday morning. I'm sure if they had got someone different the story would have changed.

 

[jollyjacktar]

The only thing worse than being talked about, is not being talked about.  - Oscar Wilde

The CF could do a much more proactive job of horn blowing, but then that is not the Canadian way.  Public perception has changed thanks to General Hillier's tenure, I do get the occasional "thank you" now instead of the "F U" of days past.

There will be those who feel that we are indeed not pulling our fair share of the burden.  Well you can't please everyone.  I know what we do and have done and am not ashamed of the record.

 

[tomahawk6]

The problem with speaking in generalities is that you are bound to offend someone. Anyone that can read knows that Canada,Australia,Denmark and the UK have been strong partners in Afghanistan. There are former eastern bloc countries like Poland and Estonia that have shed blood with us. The French have come late to the party but since Sarkozy has been in office they have stepped up their efforts as well. The various ROE's that each ISAF member operates under is the single biggest weakness of the coalition in my view.

 

[OpieRWestmrR]

Principally, because the media believes it has a duty to be hyper-critical of anything official: all authorities like governments, police, courts and the military. It is considered bad form to praise; just look at what Christie Blatchford is called, in print, by many of her colleagues.

Secondarily, because the military, itself, does not issue enough well written press releases. Much of the "news" you read, hear and even see every day is, essentially, dictation and many "journalists" are little more than stenographers. Even a lot of video is provided by press agents. But, in my personal opinion DND's communications people do not do the job well enough.

Finally, because the media still has a self-image of itself from the 1960s. It wants to be drug addled and freely loved and anti-war and, and, and ...

Please don't judge all media by the conehead who prompted this thread. He's a commentator who makes money by offending people. Commentators are the dark side of my profession and bring the rest of us into disrepute. 

Most reporters and editors strive to be fair. Dealing with spin every day of one's working life makes one skeptical, not hyper-critical. I have a very good working relationship with the ADF in Australia, particularly Defence Reserve Support. The strongest criticism I have dealt with was over employer compensation for reservist deployment - bosses want more - and that's a criticism of government provisions, not the military itself.

You're closer to the mark regarding press releases. Most reporters are young people unfamiliar with things military. They don't have enough time to be thorough and there are fewer and fewer experienced editors to backstop them. Earlier this year when I was still working part-time in the mainstream press I had to field a letter of complaint after my paper misidentified Anzac Day marchers as Irish Army veterans of World War II. This week, Canadian media couldn't get the Governor-General's military title right. Given this level of knowledge among reporters it makes sense for military communicators to use very clear language and work hard to develop relationships with key media contacts.

As for self-image, it's hard to maintain cultural vision when your industry is melting down. The problem is fragmentation, not persistence of 1960s vision. Drug-addled? I've never thought of using that excuse to explain my behaviour. Maybe I should start.

 

[Edward Campbell]

This could, properly, go in other places but I think it fits, well enough, here, for now, even though it’s waaaay off topic.

Two stories, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from today’s Globe and Mail, caught my eye:

(There are shown here as they appear, one above the other, in the print edition of the Globe.)
(My emphasis added.)​

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/britain-under-fire-over-deadly-rescue-tactics/article1281450/

Britain under fire over deadly rescue tactics
Critics fear unusually aggressive commando response to kidnappings will inflame Afghan hostilities to foreign presence in country

Jessica Leeder

Thursday, Sep. 10, 2009

A day after British army commandos staged a dramatic rescue that freed a kidnapped New York Times reporter but left his Afghan colleague, one commando and several civilians dead, tough questions linger over why the British chose such a deadly approach.

Stephen Farrell, a 46-year-old dual Irish and British citizen employed by the Times, was captured by low-level militants Saturday and held, alongside his Afghan translator, Sultan Munadi, in Taliban custody until early Wednesday. Then, a team of British special forces commandos rappelled from a helicopter gunship and instigated a chaotic shootout with insurgents that ultimately saved Mr. Farrell but killed Mr. Munadi, one soldier and several civilians.

The raid was an unusually aggressive tactic that has angered journalists, friends of Mr. Munadi and Afghanistan observers, who worry the civilian casualties will add to hostility over foreign involvement in the country. Although kidnapping journalists has become common in Afghanistan, several high-profile situations have been resolved recently via peaceful, albeit tense, negotiations.

The force of the raid took many by surprise, including New York Times officials, who said they were not informed of the mission until it was concluded.

From Kabul Wednesday, Mr. Farrell, an experienced foreign correspondent who survived a 2004 kidnapping in Iraq, spent time decoding for his colleagues what he could of the events that led to his capture and release.

The ordeal began Friday, when he and Mr. Munadi, a 34-year-old father of two, set out for Kunduz, a city in northeastern Afghanistan. They hoped to report on the aftermath of a double NATO air strike that blew up two hijacked oil tankers Friday and killed 50 to 100 people. Mr. Munadi, who had worked on and off for the Times since 2002, was in Afghanistan on holiday from his Germany-based master's studies, and agreed to accompany Mr. Farrell and translate for him.

On Friday, the pair interviewed several injured people at a hospital. Early Saturday, they and their driver, Abdul Jamshid, set out for the bombing site despite police warnings that Taliban controlled the small village. There, they found the charred oil tankers and a group of angry villagers that quickly grew bigger as word of their presence spread.

“They told us it was very dangerous. I was scared when we got there because the villagers were angry at us,” Mr. Jamshid told The Washington Post. “An old man came up and told us we should leave,” he said. “But two minutes later we saw Taliban coming with Kalashnikovs.”

Mr. Jamshid sprinted away through tall grass and rice fields, but Mr. Farrell and Mr. Munadi were captured by militants. Over the next four days, Mr. Farrell told his Times colleagues, the pair were moved several times.

At first they felt optimistic. Village elders held a public meeting Sunday to request that local militants release the men. At a higher level, diplomatic negotiations began with United Nations officials, the Red Cross, area elders and local Taliban leaders, including a man named Mullah Saleem, who has been identified both as a Muslim cleric and a mid-level Taliban leader who is the “shadow governor” of Kunduz.

Privately, colleagues of Mr. Farrell who were observing a media blackout, which has become customary in cases where journalists are kidnapped in Afghanistan, were feeling positive about his release.

In Kunduz though, tension rose on the third day with the arrival of new Taliban figures who appeared more senior. Mr. Munadi translated for Mr. Farrell their discussions about moving the captives to a new region. The atmosphere, Mr. Farrell said, grew menacing; Mr. Munadi became the subject of threats and taunts.

Then, early Wednesday, as Mr. Farrell and Mr. Munadi languished in the last of the tiny rooms in which they were held, they heard the familiar sound of approaching helicopters.

“We were all in a room, the Talibs all ran, it was obviously a raid,” Mr. Farrell told colleagues. Before abandoning the mud hut, one of the captors came back and tipped his gun toward the two journalists. He fled, and minutes later, the pair followed suit, groping their way out of a courtyard and then along the outside wall of the compound. In a matter of minutes, Mr. Farrell would be in a helicopter; Mr. Munadi's lifeless body remained on the ground.

Later Wednesday it emerged that British Prime Minister Gordon Brown had approved the commandos' mission, according to The Times of London. Plans for the raid were drawn up over the weekend and the mission was headed up by the deputy commander of NATO's International Security Assistance Force, Lieutenant-General Jim Dutton, a Royal Marine. High level British officials were kept informed and “supported the operation,” according to the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

In a statement, Mr. Brown expressed his condolences to Mr. Munadi's family and that of the fallen British soldier, but also defended the raid.

“This operation was carried out after extensive planning and consideration,” Mr. Brown said in a statement. “Those involved knew the high risks they were running.”

With a report from the Guardian News Service

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/journalist-held-by-taliban-did-his-profession-proud/article1281423/

ournalist held by Taliban did his profession proud
Why Stephen Farrell's run into harm's way was a courageous chase for the truth, not recklessness

Christie Blatchford

Wednesday, Sep. 09, 2009

A soldier's life for a reporter's. That's the bottom line of the dramatic raid that saw New York Times reporter Stephen Farrell rescued from his Taliban kidnappers.

It's not quite that simple or clean, of course. Nothing ever is in Afghanistan. Killed with the unidentified British commando in the raid, and the gun battle that was part of it, were Mr. Farrell's Afghan interpreter and fellow journalist, Sultan Munadi, and an Afghan woman.

But the focus of the British-led rescue mission was Mr. Farrell, a dual British-Irish citizen.

He and Mr. Munadi were taken hostage early on Saturday as they attempted to report from a village near Kunduz in northern Afghanistan, the very place where just the day before a NATO air strike had destroyed two fuel tankers hijacked by the Taliban. The explosion killed an as-yet-undetermined number of civilians. NATO has admitted there were Afghan casualties and has appointed a Canadian officer, Major-General C.S. (Duff) Sullivan, to lead a formal investigation.

It was precisely the controversial nature of the bombing – as is often the case in Afghanistan, where the usual game is to inflate the number of dead, Afghans were claiming a huge number of civilian casualties while NATO was demurring until the facts were ascertained – that led Mr. Farrell to go see for himself.

This was an act of such remarkable courage that it may be seen as recklessness by some.

Little understood in this country is just how dangerous is reporting in Afghanistan.

I have worked there only as an embedded reporter, travelling with Canadian troops. That has its own peculiar dangers, as convoys attract attention and attacks and are the usual target of the improvised bombs buried in so many Afghan roads and paths.

But the embedded journalist has at least the comfort of other people, the knowledge that medics are close at hand in the event of injury, and that there are plenty of friendly guns about in the event of attack.

The reporter who works like Mr. Farrell is alone but for his trusted “terp” – his interpreter and fixer – in this case Mr. Munadi, who had impressive journalistic credentials of his own. My friend Rosie DiManno of the Toronto Star has travelled through parts of Afghanistan this way, with only her fixer for company and only his pistol for protection. It is a lonely way to go through the Afghan moonscape.

The country is so fraught with peril of almost infinite variety that fewer journalists are willing or able to report like this, first-hand, and fewer news organizations are willing to put their people in such jeopardy. The Globe and Mail, for instance, still allows its reporters to travel with soldiers, but not to move about Kandahar independently.

The result is that journalism suffers. While local fixers and reporters can be employed to go places Western reporters can't or won't go, there is implicit in such an arrangement the unpleasant and unjust notion that Western lives are more valuable, Afghan ones more expendable.

And while this new-style reporting has sometimes produced reasonable results – though I believe readers should be explicitly informed that this is a different sort of journalism, not the first-hand reporting to which readers are accustomed, but second- or third-hand – there is in my view no substitute for a newspaper having its own eyes on the ground.

In Mr. Farrell's case, they were seasoned, smart eyes. A veteran reporter, with time in Iraq where he worked for The Times of London, Mr. Farrell would have gone to the Kunduz area only because while the NATO report may end up being the most thorough account of the air strike, it will also be the tardiest, weeks or months in coming, and the only way to sift through the claims of mass civilian casualties was to get there himself in a more timely way.

He had been kidnapped once before, in Iraq in April of 2004. Months later, in a BBC interview, he relived the experience and the question it raised: Is the story worth dying for?

His answer was that when the Kalashnikov-brandishing bandits appeared, “the greatness or otherwise of the story couldn't have been further from my mind. All that was going through my head was, ‘Are we going to die right here or are they going to take us off to a room somewhere, chain us to a radiator and kill us there?' I was certain we were dead.”

Mr. Farrell was able to talk his way out of trouble. The biggest barrier, he wrote in a story for The Times, the reason his captors suspected he might be a soldier, was that he had a shaved head. “You are soldier,” one of the kidnappers said. “You have short hair. You are CIA.”

“I am civilian,” Mr. Farrell said he replied. “I am journalist. I have just lost my hair.”

Later, when he was being released and had most of his belongings returned (though not the $15,000 in cash he'd been carrying), he got back an old scuba diving card showing him with a full head of hair. “See,” he said. “Not soldier. Just bald.”

There, and in Kunduz last weekend, Mr. Farrell was doing his job, in the most tedious and old-fashioned way, in a Taliban-held village in that dangerous country, trying to sort out the truth in a place where truth is hard to find and harder to recognize.

The British special forces who saved him may bitch to one another about losing one of their own to save a journalist, but if they think about it for a minute, they'll recognize that while it was a tragic trade-off, Mr. Farrell was also doing honourable work. He does the profession of journalism, often correctly seen as ignoble, proud.

Now, it is no secret that I regard journalism as a far less than noble calling but I do respect those who go into harm’s way – it isn’t always physical harm, either - to report whatever facts they can find.

But I find most journalists terribly self obsessed and I worry a wee bit about the “double standard” implicit in the self imposed ”media blackout, which has become customary in cases where journalists are kidnapped.” As far as I know, and I may be wrong, there is no media blackout when NATO or Israeli soldiers or aid workers are kidnapped. I accept that the life of a journalist is “worth” the life of a soldier – it is the soldier’s duty to do whatever is required to safeguard any and all “innocent civilians,” especially their own countrymen. That’s what the whole sheep/wolves/sheepdog argument is about. I do not accept that a journalist has any higher “value” than any other person – not because of their “calling.”

The role of journalists, the only role of journalists, is to provide some interesting, entertaining, maybe, now and again, even informative “fill” for the white spaces or air time that their proprietor could not fill with advertising.

 

[tomahawk6]

This reporter had disregarded ISAF guidance and was captured for a second time by the taliban endangering himself and his translator and eventually his rescuers. This should be broken off and moved to Tony's thread here.

http://forums.army.ca/forums/threads/89006/post-873282.html#new

 

[Haggis]

Secondarily, because the military, itself, does not issue enough well written press releases. Much of the "news" you read, hear and even see every day is, essentially, dictation and many "journalists" are little more than stenographers. Even a lot of video is provided by press agents. But, in my personal opinion DND's communications people do not do the job well enough.

I don't believe this is an entirely true of fair criticism of the ADM (PA) efforts.  It doesn't matter if the DND/CF were to hand deliver an MLVW of good news to the MSM each day, the only material that gets published (electronically or in print) is that which falls into line with the editorial/political agendas of the media outlet.  The DND/CF have absolutely no control over that.

 

[OpieRWestmrR]

The role of journalists, the only role of journalists, is to provide some interesting, entertaining, maybe, now and again, even informative “fill” for the white spaces or air time that their proprietor could not fill with advertising.

I'm prepared to agree with your first two pars. Not sure about double standards, because we can't know when the media respects embargos at military request. Media respects Police embargos all the time. I'm respecting a significant Defence business-related embargo right now.

The journalist who, as Tomahawk6 points out below, repeatedly puts himself in danger and disregards advice shouldn't expect military help. In that respect he or she is comparable to solo sailors on long sea voyage who expect rescue if things go wrong; they're not 'heroes' but risk-takers. There's nothing inherently ennobling about recklessness. Blankley has been reckless and deserves the censure we give him here.

The point I'm trying to make is you can't tar all journalists with the same brush as you do in the par I've quoted. Yes, many are self-obsessed and self important. Yes, many are reckless with facts. Yes we give priority to stories we believe will attract attention. That doesn't mean there is a pervasive anti-military agenda in the media. Many of us support the military strongly.

Haggis, perhaps hand-delivering material to the press would achieve a better result. Human-to-human contact might improve communication. Young reporters, even editors, who've never had any contact with the military could ask a real person what the acronyms mean. It's hard to bad-mouth someone you have met and like.

 

[George Wallace]

Ah!  Yes!  The infamous TLAs.  Most are found here.