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Ah, the song of Diogenes, I'd recognize it anywhere...
the risks and moral quandaries of war reporting
A thoughtful piece by John Burns on the recent death of NYT translator Sultan Munadi and a British soldier during the successful rescue of NYT reporter Stepehn Farrell:
September 9, 2009, 3:34 PM
John Burns on Those Who Aid War Journalists
By JOHN F. BURNS
Quote:
Sultan Munadi is dead, and a British paratrooper whose name we may never know. There may also have been other Afghan casualties, perhaps Taliban, perhaps not; that we also don’t know yet, for sure. But from where I am writing this, on a sunny autumn afternoon in rural England, the deaths of Sultan and the British commando seem like a grim black cloud darkening the landscape –- a harbinger, perhaps, for the increasingly grim news that seems to await us all from a war that seems to be worsening by the day, and heading for worse yet unless our political and military leaders can find a way to turn the situation around.
Behind these deaths lie complex and highly emotive issues for those of us who have traveled to war zones for The Times and other news organizations, involving our responsibilities for the lives of the locally employed people who make it possible for us to operate in faraway lands -– interpreters and reporters like Sultan, but also drivers, security guards and domestic staff members; altogether, in the case of The Times, at least 200 people in Iraq and Afghanistan over the years of those two wars.
Beyond that, and far more difficult to weigh, if not impossible, are our responsibilities to the soldiers, Marines and commandos who may be deployed to rescue us, as they were in the case of Stephen Farrell and Sultan in the overnight hours of Tuesday to Wednesday.
I know already, from calls and e-mail messages I have fielded in the hours since the raid outside Kunduz, that these are issues that attract highly charged opinions that tend to polar opposites. There are those who say that reporters are to be admired for their intrepid pursuit of stories like the fuel-tanker bombing in Kunduz, and that local staff members who accompany them are keenly aware of the risks, as we know Sultan was, and that military personnel, too, are aware of the risks they take on operations like the one that led to the deaths of Sultan and the British commando. That was a point made in the statement issued by Britain’s prime minister, Gordon Brown, who said of the commandos engaged in the raid –- which the BBC and The Times of London reported as having been approved personally by the prime minister — that they “knew the risks they were running.”
But we know, too, that there are people, including many who have written into this blog, who will condemn us, as they see it, for willfully exposing our local staff and our potential rescuers to fatal risk in our pursuit –- as our harshest detractors see it — of front-page stories, of journalism prize and of a faux claim to courage for our gung-ho ways.
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Farrell, on the other hand,
...shouted "British hostage".
I could really have fun with that but it's not a funny situation.
It is an important commentary on many things though...