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| Originally Posted by Paul Oliver To me the main point of this is that he has been targeted, and so has his unit, the press would have made sure everyone within shooting distance and a lot further knew he was there and where he was at pretty much any time of the day.
The press really do make it easy for these people.
So although his Unit and Comrades were happy to take the risk is there any point? They have an "I'm Harry" T-Shirt out, in the theme of "I'm Spartacus" |
I was thinking much the same myself, similar in many respects to the situation when the Black Watch were sent into the US Zone of Iraq to help out in a big push there. It was in the media for weeks beforehand, endless questions in Parliament....it was even big news over here too; so the insurgents knew the Black Watch's likely AO weeks beforehand and they also knew that casualties in that unit would be a sensitive political issue - so what happened? They went all out on targeting the Black Watch and it's quite probable that extra casualties in that unit resulted directly from the advance publicity.
I really question the media's "need to know" on these matters which are close to being operational issues. We know the British (and Australian and US) military are on ops in Iraq and Afghanistan but I don't think there's any real "need to know" in terms of who's going where and doing what and especially the identity of individual soldiers in a given unit. When troops are sent to either theatre from this part of the world, the tv cameras aren't allowed to see faces and ID tags are blanked out.
So whatever happened to D-Notices?
Back in the Cold War, reporters were aware of lots of stuff but the editors were told loud and clear that they simply couldn't publish it.
I think the whole thing has been handled very badly by the govt, it should have been a purely operational decision by the relevant senior officers, instead of which, they've let it turn it into a media frenzy and a young bloke courageously striving to find a useful purpose in his life and choosing a much harder road, in the short term, than most of the rest of us is the pig in the middle. There are also parallels here with the balls-up over the recent capture of naval personnel by the Iranians.