Cases in point, among many current, is the Associated Press decision to publish a photo of a dying Marine in Afghanistan, despite the wishes of the Marine's parents and even ignoring a plea from Secretary of Defense Robert Gates for "common decency." The AP ain't got none of that.
And then there's the New York Times reporter who rushed to the scene of an attack on the Taliban in Afghanistan where U.S. and German troops allegedly killed "innocent civilians." The Taliban has told that same old lie so many times since the war started, you'd think maybe the clueless media would finally stop believing it, but they believe it because they want to believe it.
And when the Taliban kidnapped the NYT reporter, guess who came to his rescue? British commando troops rescued his sorry carcass, but in the process one of the British troops was killed. But the NYT's rescue story focuses on the reporter's translator who was killed in the rescue instead of the British soldier who gave his life. I refuse to link to the NYT, but here's the gist of the story from The Washington Times.
KABUL -- British commandos freed a New York Times reporter early Wednesday from Taliban captives who kidnapped him over the weekend in northern Afghanistan, but one of the commandos and a Times' translator were killed in the rescue, officials said.
Reporter Stephen Farrell was taken hostage along with his translator in the northern province of Kunduz on Saturday. German commanders had ordered U.S. jets to drop bombs on two hijacked fuel tankers, causing a number of civilian casualties, and reporters traveled to the area to cover the story.
So what about those "civilian casualties" claimed by the Taliban? Same old lie told once again.
Here's the facts about that from The Weekly Standard blog by Ulf Gartzke.
Friday’s deadly air strike on two Taliban-hijacked tanker trucks, which was called in by German Bundeswehr forces and carried out by USAF fighter jets, has prompted a sudden barrage of domestic and international criticism vis-à-vis Berlin’s handling of this particular incident and, by implication, the Afghan mission in general. At a press conference in Berlin Tuesday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel was unusually blunt in hitting back at her critics -– including key NATO allies like the United States and France –- and made it clear that she opposes making premature judgments and jumping to conclusions before all results of the on-going military investigation into potential civilian casualties, etc. are known. Just to recap, the Bundeswehr had called in the night-time air strikes after a source said that the Taliban would use the hijacked tankers in suicide attack on the nearby German military base in northern Afghanistan’s Kunduz region.
In an interesting development, SPIEGEL Online just published an interview with Kunduz governor Mohammed Omar who strongly defended the Bundeswehr’s actions. Governor Omar singled out the German top commander in Kunduz, Col. Georg Klein, by stating that he “made the right decision at the right time and acted in a very level-headed way” when calling in the U.S. airstrike.
Omar visited the German military base in Kunduz on Monday. He said he didn’t know how many civilians were killed in the air strike. “But the Germans have the support of the population. We didn’t receive any of the complaints one usually gets in cases where civilians are killed.”
Eyewitnesses said there were 60 armed Taliban on the scene along with 15 to 20 other people. “But at half past two at night, no normal civilians would dare to go out in this area, which is more than four kilometers from the nearest village,” said Omar.
Anyone in the vicinity of the fuel tankers must have been criminal or a supporter of the Taliban, he said. The US criticism of the attack appeared to be a gut reaction, he added.
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