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June 4th 2002: The first casualty of war is truth, & the Afghan operations were never supposed to be a war in the first place, only police action to get rid of the noxious Taliban, bombing with cluster bombs benighted natives both to revenge September 11th & in order that their women could be liberated.
Well - the truth is different!
UK casualties are supposedly zero, but @ 0.20 a.m. one morning in April 2002 BBC 24 Hours TV announced they had received a statement from the Ministry of Defence (MOD) that 8 British soldiers had been injured in operations in Afghanistan, & one had his foot blown off.
I turned to Sky television to check this story, but there was no mention of it, nor in the next day's papers, w hich had already "gone to bed" at the time the MOD announcement was made.
And this statement was never mentioned again, either on the BBC, or any other media. In fact the reverse was stated.
Ben Brown reporting from Kabul for BBC TV a few hours later said specifically that there had been no casualties in the Afghan operation.
Puzzled by this discrepancy, between what Ben Brown said & what his news room colleagues had stated only a few hours before, I wrote to my MP David Lammy asking him to press the MOD for an explanation - here below.
You will note the MOd states there was no censorship, only that the journalists were a bit dim & could not understand MOD briefings!
You can make what you like of this tortured logic!
If the Government relies on stupid journalists to inform the public on defence issues, what about the rest of the news they churn out?
Can we rely on either of them, dim journalists, or the Government, to tell us the truth?
