I haven't had a chance to listen to it yet, but Pat Dollard was on with Rush Limbaugh yesterday talking about his Marine war documentary, Young Americans. He shot me a YouTube link to the exchange.

For those of you not familiar with the name Pat Dollard, a bit of brief background may be in order.

Dollard is a former Hollywood agent with an admittedly checkered past, who , with no military or filmmaking experience, took off the Iraq to embed with the Marines to film a raw documentary. The easily offended need not apply, but if you want to see some video clips, go here. Definitely NSFW.

Wikipedia offers up this biographical background:

Pat was a Hollywood talent agent, manager, and producer most known for guiding the career of Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh from his neophyte "sex, lies & videotape" days on up through "Ocean's Twelve" and his multi-picture deal with Mark Cuban's HDNET cable channel. Dollard came from a long line of liberals, and Robert Kennedy, Jr. delivered the eulogy at the funeral of his sister, Ann Dollard. Despite this, Dollard became known as a rare Hollywood conservative in the mid-90's, and is now known as a conservative filmmaker, journalist and pundit. He has been widely attacked by the left for the pro-war stance displayed in early clips of his documentary series "Young Americans". He is becoming known as the right wing version of Michael Moore and Hunter S. Thompson.

Wikipedia also offers up this summary of his activities in Iraq:

While still running a management company, repping Soderbergh and helping to service Soderbergh and George Clooney's production company at Warner Brothers (Section 8 Films), Dollard decided to do a little side project for a few weeks in the three worst combat zones in Iraq: Fallujah, The Triangle of Death, and Ramadi. What was supposed to be a 2-4 week quickie documentary, morphed instead into a 7 month, graphic, unfettered portrait of the frontline hell of these three combat zones. Dollard lived constantly in the dangerous "hootches" with the Marines he covered, and patrolled with them and was severely wounded on more than one occasion. He shot 700 hours of hi-def footage, as reported by the website "Confederate Yankee". His work has been discussed at U.S. News and World Report, Variety, the Huffington Post, the New York Times, Fox News (Guest Appearance), The Washington Times, and "Vanity Fair".

The Wikipedia bio is a bit scant in describing how Pat got wounded: Dollard was in Humvees hit by IEDs not twice, one of which killed two of the Marines he was with, and filled his legs with shrapnel. Crazy, brave, or perhaps a lot of each, Dollard returned each time, and intends to return again.

Like many embeds, Pat is self-financing his ventures. If interested, you can donate here. Look for the PayPal button.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 07:56 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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This is U.S. Army General Vincent K. Brooks.

He might look familiar as the man once known as the "the face of the U.S. military" for his role as spokesman for U.S. Central Command during the beginning of the Iraq War, He was the former chief PAO (Public Affairs Officer) of the US Army. He is currently the deputy commanding general - support for Multinational Division-Baghdad.

Vincent Brooks is also the general that has just threatened to kick Michael Yon out of Iraq.

A general emailed in the past 24 hours threatening to kick me out. The first time the Army threatened to kick me out was in late 2005, just after I published a dispatch called “Gates of Fire.” Some of the senior level public affairs people who’d been upset by “Proximity Delays” were looking ever since for a reason to kick me out and they wanted to use “Gates of Fire” as a catapult. In the events described in that dispatch, I broke some rules by, for instance, firing a weapon during combat when some of our soldiers were fighting fairly close quarters and one was wounded and still under enemy fire. That’s right. I’m not sure what message the senior level public affairs people thought that would convey had they succeeded, (which they didn’t) but it was clear to me what they valued most. They want the press on a short leash, even at the expense of the life of a soldier.

Brooks was chief PAO when the miltary wanted to kick Yon out of Iraq in 2005 over his the "Proximity Delays" and "Gates of Fire" dispatches, and apparently Brooks still harbors a grudge. Now that Yon finds himself in Brooks' territory again, it appears he has taken special interest in trying to kep Yon from doing his job.

Austin Bay weighs in on the witch hunt:

This is stupid... Telling Michael Yon to exit the theater is the WWII equivalent of telling Ernie Pyle to quit filing dispatches.

With terrorist propaganda blanketing the Internet, General Brooks seems intent on silencing one of the few long-term combat journalists in Iraq that can offer a competing voice.

Not a smart move, at all.

Update: Yon speaks about the media war.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 06:50 AM | Comments (35) | Add Comment
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Or at least that is how Keith Olbermann is likely to report it.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 03:32 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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I don't think there is a lot to this AFP photo and caption, but there is just barely enough to make it interesting.

The photo shows a pair of parked HMMWVs on the left, a single U.S. soldier running, and a mostly hidden HMMWV that appears to have been hit by an IED between two large trucks that may (or may not) be recovery vehicles.

The caption reads:

A US soldier takes cover as a roadside bomb targets a US convoy in Baghdad's Bayaa district. Meanwhile, Iraq hanged Saddam Hussein's former deputy Taha Yassin Ramadan as the nation entered the fifth year of the US-led war still battling a raging insurgency and sectarian conflict.(AFP/Wissam Sami)

The caption is present tense, and is is quite possible that combat engineers have detected another IED near the site where the one HMMWV was disabled. It is not uncommon of insurgents to place multiple IEDs at an ambush location.

That said, there is no sign that the attack happened with the immediacy the caption suggests.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that mounted vehicle patrols in Baghdad typically do not bring recovery vehicles with them, and yet, it appears that two recovery vehicles are positioned in front of and behind the damaged HMMWV. The close proximity of the two other HMMWVs in the picture on the left-hand side (both in relation to the damaged vehicle, and to each other), strongly suggests that security had already been established and the site cleared of other possible IED threats.

Then there is the fact we see recovery vehicles and no movement other than the one soldier, suggests that those soldiers in the damaged HMMWV have already been evacuated from the area.

An AP picture taken in the same neighborhood on the same day seems to be from the same incident (the door in the street the AP photo also seems to match up with the missing door in the AFP photo), and states that casualties were medevaced by helicopter from the scene. This would have happened in advance of a vehicle recovery effort. Perhaps more telling, the AP caption mentions only one bomb.

Is the AFP exaggerating the immedicacy of this photo in order to sell it to news outlets? It's impossible to tell from just a pair of photos, but it would not be all that surprising if that turned out to be the case.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 10:30 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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As you've probably come to understand by now, reporters that don't understand the subject matter they write about really irritate me. Enter the Associated Press' Kim Gamel (my bold):

The U.S. military said the attack against the Americans began when a bomb went off as a U.S. unit was returning from a search operation, Moments later, a second bomb exploded, killing the four and wounding two other soldiers.

A demolition team that searched the site after the attack found an explosively formed projectile, a type of high-tech bomb the U.S. military believes is being supplied by Iran in support of Shiite militias. The device was detonated by the team.

This is an explosively formed projectile:

It is a spent bullet, an expended hunk of metal, no longer a threat.

What Gamel meant to write that they detonated an explosively formed penetrator, one of these:

This is a live explosive device, and a very dangerous one. This is what EOD team destroyed, not the inert slug of metal as Gamel misreported.

It's rather disappointing that we can't trust a professional war reporter for the world's largest news organization to get such important distinctions correct, but a disappointment that is now hardly surprising.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 09:20 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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Please understand that this is meant purely as a snub by the floundering liberal radio network.

On the other hand, if the state Republican chairmen of Iowa, Nevada, South Carolina, or New Hampshire accept the offer, Air America can revel in something entirely new on a liberal talk radio network... listeners.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 12:41 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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Mike Yon's latest dispatch, "Ernie is Dead" will be posted soon on Foxnews.com.

"Ernie" is Ernie Pyle, the highly respected war correspondent from Scripps-Howard newspapers who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1944. A collection of 40 of Pyle's columns have been collected by Indiana University's Journalism School here.

Pyle's most famous column, The Death of Captain Waskow, shows care, respect, and unvarnished humanity for the American soldier. It is doubtful that a similar column could be printed by today's media, which vacillates between treating our soldiers as unfeeling automatonic criminals and childlike victims. Today, many liberals would refer to someone like Pyle as a right wing propagandist. We just think of him as an American legend.

I'll link Yon's article in an update when it comes online.

Update: Yon's dispatch is now online at FoxNews.com before transitioning over to the extended entry at Michael Yon Online.

True to the title, Michael makes some very interesting observations about combat journalism, and dings both the professional media and bloggers as warranted.

The rules, like the times and tents, have changed. Joe Galloway is retired. Journalists who in previous wars might have spent long tours with combat forces are rare. There have been a few, such as Lee Pitts who was here to cover a Tennessee National Guard deployment for a Tennessee paper. Or Rich Oppel of the New York Times, who has been here repeatedly for longer than typical journalists. John Burns needs no introduction. Likewise Dexter Filkins or Michael Ware. But journalists who roam the battlefield with the troops and write freely for long periods are completely gone. That doesnÂ’t mean good journalists are gone. There are plenty of those, but mostly they are somewhere else, or they only come to Iraq for quick tours.

There is the new brand of journalists, the independents, of which I am a charter member. Many bloggers, along with their readers, are changing the face of journalism. Glenn Reynolds, from the immensely popular blog "Instapundit," which I check regularly, calls the new media "An Army of Davids," who are already changing the media by holding it more accountable. A number of very effective blog-storms have provided a needed check to balance the system. DonÂ’t ever fake a photo: Bob at Confederate Yankee is watching.

Huge amounts of blog-energy go into attacks on mainstream media war coverage that might be better spent ignoring the irritant and offering alternative sources, in view of how critical any and all media coverage is to shaping public opinion which in turn determines the outcome of this war. These skirmishes between mainstream and alternative media produce only friendly fire casualties, and neither side can claim a monopoly on accuracy and objectivity. While the reliability and/or agendas of many mainstream media sources are questionable, the blogworld is also often too eager to anoint anyone who's not mainstream as a guru-of-something. If this were the art-world, it would be like anointing anyone with some skill at putting brush to canvas as the "new Rembrandt."

But the dirty secret known to only a few is that many of these "new Rembrandts" are clever forgeries. Some bloggers who advertise themselves as war correspondents with numerous "embeds" in the war, with the implication that they've spent more time on the ground than their mainstream war correspondent counterparts, mostly have spent very little time here, especially in comparison to those mainstream war correspondents.

This week, journalists are all around this area—ABC, Fox, New York Times, Associated Press, The Telegraph, Stars & Stripes (DoD publication) and others, all flagships—but where are the bloggers? Prohibitive costs, very high risks, and an increasingly shrinking market for the work probably contribute to the poor showing. Will the blog-world still maintain the attack on coverage from the mainstream media? Instead of looking for mistakes in some coverage, the common cause might be better served by well-informed bloggers searching all sources for the reports that get it right and driving readers to those.

As if often the case, Yon is direct and offers his honest opinion of the problems of both the media and blogosphere.

Perhaps Yon is right, in that bloggers such as myself should spend more energy directing readers to alternative sources of information, than merely exhaust our resources shooting down erroneous media accounts. I know that in my case, I spent quite a bit of time proving that Associated Press source "Jamil Hussein" was every bit as much a fake as were the 24 people that never died in AP's Hurriyah mosque attack coverage, but for all my efforts, it accomplished very little. We forced Jamil into silence as a named source, and perhaps causing certain AP executives and reporters some heartburn, but none of them were held accountable for what I still feel is a serious case of journalistic fraud. I still think the story was worth pursuing, but might my efforts have been better spent trying to track down alternative sources? It's tough to know, and may vary from story to story, but it is something I'll now consider as I move forward.

As for the "new Rembrandts," I was a participant in a series of heated email exchanges over the past few days (still on-going) involving Yon and a blogger Yon clearly considers a "clever forgery." I'd prefer not to get into the details as I respect both Yon and the work of the person he suspects, and hope that this is a situation where a lack of clear communications, not deception, is the culprit. Time will tell.

That said, the point Yon makes is correct: we must police our own, just as surely as we police the professional media, and hold both the mainstream media journalist and citizen-journalist (blogger) to similar standards of accuracy and credibility.

The focus of Yon's article is also quite true, in that we have very few combat journalists dedicated to long-term embeds with U.S. and Iraqi forces, and when we lack that perspective, we lose something in our war coverage. I can certainly understand it we simply don't have the journalists willing to commit to long-term embeds with our forces, and certainly understand that most bloggers, which tend to hold other full-time jobs, simply can't afford to self-finance the substantial cost of embedding. I hope however, that if journalists and bloggers are willing and able to embed, that they can get the financial backing of media organizations to embark on that most dangerous of journalistic missions.

Ernie Pyle is dead. I wonder if his successors are being given the chance they need to keep his legacy alive.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 08:27 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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You would expect a former military man like talk show host Montel Williams to take good care of the military families he invited on his show to talk about the stress deployments take on the husbands, wives and children left behind when our armed forces deploy overseas into a combat zone.

Instead, the 22-year veteran of the Marines and Navy ran a bait-and-switch, changing the subject to another topic, the problems encountered by some troops as the result of anthrax vaccinations. Williams heavily skewed reality to present only the side of this topic that would cause the most consternation, referred to the troops as "guinea pigs" repeatedly, and asserted that our military was being treated so badly that no one would ever volunteer for the armed forces again and that the draft would have to be reinstated.

The ambushed families were shocked and angered, as can evidenced in an accounting of the ordeal at SpouseBuzz, a military families web site:

The trouble started during the second taping, when we learned that Montel's agenda with military people wasn't what it had been portrayed to be when our group was invited to attend. And as military families have been burned so often by unscrupulous media members (I'm not attacking the ones who work professionally here!), we probably should have sensed it from the beginning. We were going to be ambushed.

And later:

But it got worse. The show was being presented in the most scaremongering fashion possible. There was only attention given to the worst cases. There was no attention given to those who had experienced no adverse affects, or only the mild swelling and soreness around the injection site, even though we had people like that present with us. There was no mention about the actual percentages such reactions actually occur in. And there was no mention of those, like an EOD friend of mine, who actually requested the vaccine and makes sure to keep it updated.

Finally, we all got up and left during a break before the taping was over. And I should probably add that there was a quite acrimonious exchange with Montel that resulted in one person being escorted out by the show security (who were very polite and professional, for the record). I did say, "You told us this was going to be about deployment, Montel!" to which the reply was, "Please, just leave." If there was any discussion of how deployment issues affect family members after we left, it happened without us. All I can say is that the direction and tone of the show definately made it look like the topic was not going to come up.

Ambushing military families is something that no American should stand for. If you would politely like to tell Montel Williams that you find his bait-and-switch attack deplorable, please contact the show via this form.

Our military families deserve better, especially from someone who should understand what these families are already going through with their military family members deployed overseas.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 08:26 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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As I do from time to time, I was scanning though Yahoo! News images to see if anything interesting might be going on, when I came across the following.

Unless Nancy Pelosi snuck something into law in the past hour or so, the AFP caption writer is apparently going far beyond bias to outright fabrication.

There is a certain amount of editorializing that we are used to in many news organizations, and the "Brushing aside US public opinion" comment is a clear example of that, but then the writer goes beyond editorializing to complete fabrication, whe he or she states (my bold), "the Pentagon is to send more soldiers to Iraq on top of the extra troops announced in January which may now have to stay in the country until February 2008."

There is no set timetable for the withdrawal of U.S forces in Iraq in February 2008, nor at any other time. The writer is simply making up the news.

And no, I'm not buying the explanation that the writer might mean that the troops announced in January might be there until February 08. As many of the troops of the "surge" announced in January will not even deploy until later this spring or summer, that means their deployments would be roughly 6-9 months long, and that is clearly not what the writer is trying to convey.

I suspect that is the same caption writer the wrote the captions here:

I was able to find several stories discussing Clinton's comments, and yet in neither account can I find Clinton using the term "shabby rehabilitation," nor anything even reasonably close.

Well, that isn't entirely true.

I was able to find the words "shabby rehabilitation" in one account.

Did AFP crib from the Iranian-government controlled news agency, or was the AFP caption biased enough that it fit perfectly into the headline of the press agency of a repressive government?

In either event, I'm not sure it matters. What is clear is that our AFP caption writer seem quite content to make up the news as they go along.

Update: Added links to the Yahoo! photos.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 03:59 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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Ann Coulter just labeled John Edwards' campaign manager a terrorist supporter.

IT'S ALWAYS GOOD TO DIVERT BONIOR FROM HIS PRINCIPAL PASTIME WHICH IS FRONTING FOR ARAB TERRORISTS.

I've got a screen capture as well, should the comment disappear.

I suppose it is just a matter of time before Coulter takes a sudden fancy to Kevin Federline.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 12:41 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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Should we bomb Connecticut, kill their pundits, and convert them to Christianity?

Ann Coulter is a verbal suicide bomber, willing to blow away her credibility and that of those around her for a few extra moments of infamy. Sooner or later, CPAC and other conservative and Republican groups are going to learn that Coulter is far more interested in promoting herself than any ideology they share.

Captain Ed said it a bit more tactfully than I might, but he said it well:

At some point, Republicans will need to get over their issues with homosexuality. Regardless of whether one believes it to be a choice or a hardwired response, it has little impact on anyone but the gay or lesbian person. We can argue that homosexuality doesn't require legal protection, but not when we have our front-line activists referring to them as "faggots" or worse. That indicates a disturbing level of animosity rather than a true desire to allow people the same rights and protections regardless of their lifestyles.

Ann Coulter can be an entertaining and incisive wit. Unfortunately, she can also be a loose cannon, and CPAC might want to consider that the next time around.

Ann Coulter stopped being an asset for conservatives a long time ago. I think it is time we move on past her.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 09:41 AM | Comments (27) | Add Comment
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