http://www.ottawasun.com/News/Columnists/Harris_Michael/2009/03/13/pf-87311 01.html March 13, 2009
Telling dirty little secrets By Michael Harris American writer Gore Vidal recently referred to his country as "the United States of Amnesia." That's because so much of the first rough draft of history, the standard description of good journalism, is written by cheerleaders -- the ones who confuse patriotism with their profession and revile anyone who doesn't. That way, there is nothing to remember but the rose-coloured portrait of ugly events passing for the news. Perhaps that explains why I am such a fan of Scott Taylor, who bills himself as a maverick war reporter in his excellent new book, Unembedded. He underestimates himself. >From the first time I heard it, I altered "embedded" to reflect what I thought it truly meant -- "in bed with." Tie the journalist to the mission and he becomes part of the mission; a live-in PR guy ready to praise. What is lost in this cozy arrangement? Everything that matters in reporting. When you are part of the team, you do not tell the military's dirty little secrets. Taylor has told more than a few -- to everyone's great benefit. In Kuwait, for example, in the aftermath of the first Gulf War, the military didn't bother to advise 500,000 coalition soldiers that our side had used uranium-depleted munitions that could lead to serious health problems. Using dirty bombs is bad enough; concealing that fact from your own troops, ugly. Not long after 1,200 Canadian troops were sent to Croatia from their base in Germany, Taylor was on the ground, alone, reporting a very different war in Bosnia than the one most Canadians were reading about. He covered both sides. What a pity Michael Ignatieff didn't do that when he was busy cheerleading for NATO's intervention in Kosovo. [BRAVO, Michael Harris!!! ] Taylor, like Maj.-Gen. Lewis MacKenzie, knew that it was false to airbrush either side in the bloody implosion of the former Yugoslavia. Neither did he back away from reporting the scandal involving Canadian troops in the Bakavici mental hospital scandal. All the while Taylor was exercising his independence, Esprit de Corps was morphing from an in-flight magazine into a hard-hitting journal that other news organizations began to notice. After reporting that the appointment of military know-nothing Marcel Masse as Canada's defence minister was an insult to Canadian troops returning from the Gulf War, the guys without faces in the federal bureaucracy came with a rope. They ordered Air Canada to stop distribution of Esprit de Corps on military flights. Taylor rode it out and then came Somalia. After a previous deadly force incident, Canadian soldiers from the Airborne Regiment tortured and executed Shidane Arone. Ottawa tried to bury the story but thanks to Taylor and Trooper Kyle Brown, the best efforts of then deputy defence minister Robert Fowler failed. Brown contacted Taylor after his arrest and that led to the famous "scapegoat" issue of Esprit de Corps. Taylor knew he had just burned his bridges with DND, but he couldn't have realized that bureaucrats immediately formed a "Tiger Team" to put the magazine out of business. And that's roughly where this newspaper comes into the story. After seeing the photos of Arone, the Sun editorialized that we could finally put the Somali scandal to bed. When Maj. Barry Armstrong read that, he wrote to the Sun's publisher and told the rest of the story. As a military surgeon in Somalia, he had been ordered to destroy evidence by senior officers. Rick Gibbons put the story on the front page and the web of official lies began to crumble. War reporter? National hero. [email protected] . Serbian News Network - SNN [email protected] http://www.antic.org/
