The manner in which these soldiers died was truly courageous. Lance Corporal Shaw died from the blast caused by an Improvised Explosive Device (IED). To fight in a battle zone where such devices are abundant is truly heroic.
However, young Corporal Riley showed great determination, camaraderie and valour by risking his own life to try and retrieve the body of his fallen comrade. Sadly he did not make it.
In multi-million pound films you see such tales of bravery depicted with varied degrees of success. But here, in our country, lives the real soldiers with the backbone to throw themselves fearlessly into the face of danger to save their brothers in arms. In the British Armed Forces it clear to see that no man, dead or alive, will ever be left behind. Rule Britannia.
Welcome back and a Happy New Year to you all from militarypress. We start the new year with some good news. After crying out for new helicopters for the British military in Afghanistan over the past year or so the current Defence Secretary Bob Ainsworth has finally decided to answer the call. The government is to buy 22 more Chinook Helicopters from Boeing, which will increase the number of active Chinooks in Afghanistan from 48 to 70. The first of these new transport aircraft is due to be at the front line in Afghanistan by 2013.
You would think that this announcement would be a good thing, improving equipment in Afghanistan as well as keeping those making the helicopters in jobs, if not creating new jobs. But you would be wrong. Of course, under the Labour government the incorrect spending of the military budget has been nothing short of catastrophic.
Now it can be said to be even worse.
Mr Ainsworth has said that RAF Cottesmore in Rutland will close and that further defence jobs will be cut as a result of purchasing the new aircraft. If that was not bad enough worse cuts are to come. A comprehensive list of the cuts that could occur as a result of this purchase can be seen here.
So many comments, some of them to offensive to publish, come to mind. But all that needs to be noted is that Mr Ainsworth should have realised the armed forces would only want the new helicopters if their purchase did not mean the closure of military bases. One really does have to ask the question as to whether or not Mr Ainsworth is aware that our national security is not worth the price of a few transport helicopters.
The only solace to be taken from this sad situation is it is very unlikely Mr Ainsworth will still be in office come the summer. Now there is an announcement worth celebrating.
The first term at the Cardiff School of journalism finished last Friday. There was no online lecture but I could not let the opportunity pass to show the world the two best Digital Narratives of the term. Congratulations to Mr James Franklin and Well done to Mr Dan Bloom, you both did excellent work:
The small footpath, about 200 metres in length, joins the districts of Ely and Fairwater together, crossing over the River Ely and under a railway line. The lane is regularly used by many people to cross between the two regions.
But at night, as the lane falls into darkness, the walkway transforms in the shadows into a sinister place, a dark breeding ground that attracts suspicious characters, an area that harbours crime night after night.
Birdies Lane walkway
Section Inspector Andy Smith, South Wales Police, explained during Ely’s November PACT meeting (Police And Community Together) that many weapons were constantly being recovered from the area, weapons including baseball bats and pieces of wood with nails in.
The Section Inspector also said gangs, sometimes numbering up to a hundred, gather round the lane looking for trouble. He said: “It is a shame really, the groups usually consist of a core of five or so kids set on causing trouble and they then pressure the rest of the kids, who generally come from good homes, to come with them. Yet when they are all running past you in the street it can be quite frightening.”
Problems in the lane came to a head on March 14 this year when 17-year-old Lewis Jones of Fairwater was stabbed by Elliot Bowley of the same age from Ely. As a result of the attack Jones spent six days in intensive care after being stabbed in the chest, whilst Bowley was jailed indefinitely after pleading guilty to grievous bodily harm.
David Elias, the prosecutor in the case against Bowley, said: “It is a situation which has recently been escalating and has resulted in numerous calls to the police about rival groups, mainly young males, arguing and fighting.”
PCSO Will Evans, South Wales Police, backed up the prosecutor’s claims. He said: “We were receiving call-outs to the lane on a daily basis, something had to be done.”
Something was done.
Police closed the lane for a six-month trial period between 7pm to 5am everyday. The police have called the trial closure a huge success and canvassed opinion for a permanent closure at Ely’s November PACT meeting. The meeting raised mixed responses.
One notable opposition to the lane’s permanent closure was one of Ely’s Labour councillors, Susan Goddard. This week she gave an interview about the Lanes’s closure:
Councillor Goddard Interview
Councillor Goddard acknowledges the problems in the lane before the closure. She said: “At night there was a lot of drinking, drugs, dealing and taking.”
She also believes police exaggerated the lane’s problems to ease their own workload by closing the lane rather than trying different policing methods. She said: “The most serious thing that happened, not on the lane, it happened about, well, a good quarter of a mile to half a mile from the lane. In Ely an Ely boy did stab a Fairwater boy and that was used as the catalyst to close the lane.”
Archer Road
Police have used Lewis Jones’s stabbing as the cornerstone of their operation to close the lane. However, Councillor Goddard rightly points out that Jones was stabbed in Archer Road, not Birdies Lane. The map below shows this:
It is fair to say evil actions occurred in the lane before the closure. However, contrary to the police she believes the closure has done nothing to stop crime in the area. She was asked if she had seen any difference in crime since the gates were fitted. She responded: “Personally no, I have seen no difference whatsoever.
“I think what should have happened, instead of closure and I did make the point and so did my colleagues that there should be more lighting, there should be a camera, there is a camera on the Fairwater side of Birdies Lane and there should be one on the Ely side. I think they’ve used closing the lane as a cheap option”
Police say the number of calls to the area have dropped since the closure. Local residents say there has been little change in crime levels and with less police in the area the potential for the more serious crimes to happen is as high as ever. It seems the police may not have killed evil at the roots, instead they have merely trimmed the leaves.
With social networking sites and tools like Facebook and Twitter around it can be hard to keep on top of it all. There are so many different online devices journalists can use these days that to be asked to be au fait with all them is often a very tall order to meet. Therefore, it is very refreshing to see some relics being dusted off and used once again, notably our old friends Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Access. For those of you who were falling asleep at the mere mention of a macro in high school it is about time you brushed up you skills or you may find yourself clearing out your desk a few more times than you would like.
It is good to know the years we spent in I.T. were not in vain. In fact, it seems these tools are becoming very popular journalistic gadgets for transcribing vast data sets into useful, newsworthy data in a short amount of time. Of course these skills link closely to Freedom of Information Act (FOI) Requests. These requests give us the right as citizens, not journalists, to gain information tax-payers pay for from our government on a whole range of issues, ranging from where your money is spent to which local restaurant has the poorest hygiene. If you want to make one of these requests you can start here.
These tools and data sets combined give us tangible journalism. The journalist will be writing a story based on real figures collected by the government. Thus, assuming the journalist has followed the rules of responsible journalism, the articles written with these tools combined will be accurate and legally bullet-proof, and isn’t that what we as a nation all want? Bullet-proof journalism based on bullet-proof information, it is the way forward.
Head of the British Army General Sir David Richards has gutted Gordon Brown’s promise of an early withdrawal from Afghanistan, rendering yet another of Brown’s promises as nothing more than air passing his lips. Sir David labeled Brown’s claims that the increase in troop numbers was part of a British withdrawal strategy as ’slightly false’, slightly false being used here not to embarrass the Prime Minister by calling them lies. Nice thought Sir David, but a little too late.
The General went on to say the British army would be in Afghanistan for at least five more years. This year alone, 98 British soldiers have lost their lives in Afghanistan. With another five years to go it is quite possible we may lose another 500 soldiers in the country.
Brown has subsequently been accused in the House of Commons by the Conservative’s leader David Cameron of providing the British armed forces and the public with ‘false expectations’ regarding when British troops will actually be withdrawn from Afghanistan.
The Prime Minister has since clarified his stance: “There was no question of us withdrawing out troops until the point that we were sure that the Afghans could take over our security control themselves. Even if one or two parts of a district or a province are transferred in 2010, we will continue to have our troops in Afghanistan at that point.”
To clarify, any signs of an exit strategy out of Afghanistan from the current British government have been wiped away by Brown’s remarks today. These comments come at the same time President Obama announced he will be sending 30,000 more troops in the coming months, even though he has categorically stated he will start to bring US forces home in 2011, a promise that we cannot yet match. Comments have been made that this time frame by the President is ‘ambitious’, but at least ambition is something the US seem to have, unlike their British counterparts.
Gordon Brown is fast becoming known as the military’s ‘Black Jack’ as the Prime Minister tries to both stick and twist on his Afghanistan policy. On November 29, Brown set out his timetable for the handover of power to Afghan forces and the eventual withdrawal of British troops from the country, a timetable set to commence in a years time.
However, on December 1, some two days later, Brown decided to send 500 more British troops to Afghanistan for Christmas, taking the number of active British servicemen in the country to over 10,000. The two contradictory announcements, given over such a short period of time, begin to show the true frailty of Brown’s policy in Afghanistan, if indeed there is one. If anyone has read an official document stating our government’s true policies in Afghanistan please do not hesitate to post a link to it at the bottom of this post.
Whilst we all hold our breath in vain waiting for a magic post to appear let’s go over the facts. We have over 10,000 soldiers currently deployed in Afghanistan. The number of brave soldiers who have died there for their country is 236 as of December 1, 2009. We have a Prime Minister who does not know if he wants he deploy more soldiers into the area or to withdraw them altogether. We have a Defence Secretary, Bob Ainsworth, with no prior military experience, a man who cannot even work out how much equipment the armed forces need to correctly function in Afghanistan. We have a government that ignores the advice of the few individuals who have the knowledge to make informed decisions such as Lieutenant General Sir Graeme Lamb who has said that we should not talk ourselves into leaving Afghanistan a defeated nation.
As more and more of our servicemen perish fighting a cause our government has not yet fully decided on it must be fair to surmise that our government is fruitlessly gambling with soldiers’ lives on an hourly basis. If Mr Brown wants to play a game then maybe he should try his hand at black-jack. You are on 236 Mr Brown…stick or twist?
From Caxton’s printing press, to modern-day printing presses, to the internet, progression in the newspaper industry has only ever travelled in a linear fashion with communication mediums becoming increasingly faster and cheaper to produce and access.
However, the emergence of online journalism could have foreseeably put and end to this linear progression. The invention of free online news has opened up a world where people no longer have to pay to get news, a world the public will not give up lightly. It is a bit like giving a child a toy on Christmas morning and then trying to take it off them again in the afternoon, practically impossible.
Thus, as fewer people are willing to pay for news less money is entering journalism. At this rate it will not be long before some of the big names in journalism start to fall. The London Evening Standard has already had to resort to scrapping its cover price in order to get higher circulation figures, but is hoping to recover the cover price with increased advertising revenue. The results of this experiment have yet to be seen.
Has online journalism inadvertently killed journalism, or has it just sent progression round full-circle back to newspapers? With no obvious way of charging the public for what they have had for free over the past few years it seems that newspapers without the revenue to support such vast free operations will either put up pay walls or close altogether. So what will that leave the public with? With sites like The Times putting up pay walls in the near future and other sites disappearing for good how will people get hold of their news? The only practical and affordable way I can think of involves buying sheets of paper with ink on them from your local corner shop.
I’ll leave you with a link to the Times Online, I suggest you click on it and get your fill, before the pay-wall drives you back to the printed product…Murdoch must be laughing his head off.
Posted in Military on November 27, 2009 by militarypress
Shooting them at dawn is not the answer. Capital punishment is an option that should be carefully thought out and then thought out again before it is administered. In fact, it is hard to see a set of circumstances where its use could ever truly be justified. However, any soldier found guilty of desertion should not be allowed to walk away a free man or woman.
Joe Glenton, (his rank is not given as he is accused of deserting the army), is currently in a prison cell in Colchester awaiting trial on charges of desertion. If found guilty, he will face a sentence that can carry up to 10 years in prison.
He is widely known as the first British soldier to publically protest against the war in Afghanistan. Civilians who do not agree with the war are free to say so publically, it is one of their rights under The European Convention of Human Rights. However, it must be remembered that Joe Glenton is a soldier, not a civilian.
The question that needs to be answered here is whether or not it is his place to speak out against the war. Protesters have periodically gathered outside the Ministry of Defence in Whitehall to protest that Glenton’s right of free speech has been compromised. However, many people will correctly argue that as a soldier he does not necessarily have the right to do so.
It is this publication’s opinion that he has undermined the entire military operation in Afghanistan single handed. When he joined the army he knew what he was doing. He was not a 16-year-old recruit who was not aware of what he was being asked to do. He joined the army a man, after being in the army cadets beforehand. He knew what being a soldier involved, he knew what jobs he had to do, he knew the dangers, he knew what he can and more importantly cannot say.
If he is allowed to speak out against the army and walk away from this establishment in this manner does that mean army recruits can just start saying what they please? Opposing the war? Giving away military secrets? Leaving the army whenever they so wish?
Is it ok for a soldier to act is this manner? The answer to all these questions is no. Free speech is all well and good, but soldiers do not have the right to speak out against their superiors and even less of a right to go absent without leave from their duties, duties they signed for on a legally binding contract.
Put simply, Glenton is accused of going absent from the army without leave. This is illegal because as a soldier he is duty bound by the contract he signed, and thus by the law, to complete the time period he signed up for in the military. If he is guilty of desertion then he should go to prison for a long time to remind all British soldiers that once you are in the army your job is to serve the army, and that is it.
Posted in Military on November 21, 2009 by militarypress
This week I had the pleasure of being embedded with part of the 40 Commando Brigade of the Royal Marines on a few training exercises. During these exercises I was able to speak personally to Royal Marines of all stations. From Marines to Majors, I got the views on many of the military issues currently dominating newspaper headlines straight from the horse’s mouth. The opinions I was given were very different to what I have read in the press.
There were many issues raised, but the one I feel needs the most clarification is the problem of equipment shortages. I myself have written on such a subject on several occasions (see here - here - here). However, as journalists we usually only write stories based on second-hand data which we have often analysed ourselves without being experts on the subject. However, on a wet and windy hill in South-Wales I had the most interesting and thought-provoking conversation with Captain Robert Garside, 25, of 40 Commando.
During this conversation I asked him what he thought about the reporting of shortages in military equipment in Afghanistan. Capt. Garside replied with the following: “In Afghanistan we have loads of kit, we have loads of helicopters, but more is needed for training purposes. We need more body amour, we need more metal detectors to detect IEDs.”
Just as he had finished speaking I saw a Marine running past us with a crutch in one hand. I asked the Captain if he was really injured or if it was just part of the exercise. He replied: “It’s meant to be a metal detector.” At that moment I saw that what he had said to me before was nothing but the truth, no political spin or an agenda to speak of, just a soldier trying to do his job and asking for the right materials to be provided so he can carry out his duty to his country as safely and as effectively as possible. The fact a soldier has to pretend the crutch he has in his hand is a metal detector, as if he was a five-year-old boy playing a game, is both ridiculous and frightening and is something that cannot be allowed to continue.
Thousands of column inches have been dedicated to this subject alone, yet it seems that in the space of two sentences one soldier has expressed the problem far more clearly and accurately than any newspaper or politician ever has. Captain Garside is due to go on tour in Afghanistan in 2011, hopefully this situation will have resolved itself by then.
