Setting the Record Straight

Mistakes happen, I suppose. But it’s always a little frustrating for me when a journalist makes such monumental ones. The National Post ran a story on the “murder” of 26 villagers in Panjwayi by the Taliban whose headless bodies were then strung up in various locations for days. A macabre image indeed but also completely wrong. My sources went to verify the story and came back with this:

A NATO informant was found by the Taliban living in Tulkan Bazar, a small village not far from where Canadian troops are building a road in southern Afghanistan. Under interrogation, he identified 7 other informants in the area. Six of those were captured, one escaped. Two of those captured later managed a getaway. The remaining five were “convicted” of spying in a Taliban Shari’a court and executed, in the traditional Taliban way - beheading. One body was strung up in the village, for less than a day, as a warning to any others thinking about spying for the enemy.

Gruesome, but nothing close to the scale of the Post story. My understanding is that the reporter wrote the piece based on a single phone call from an Afghan police officer. There was apparently no attempt at follow-up or verification. Nor, apparently, any serious logical thought put in before writing what is obviously a sensationalist story. If you have any understanding of the Taliban, you would be very suspicious of an informant reporting such a grizzly scene. First off, how could Taliban fighters prance around the area dragging along more than 2 dozen bodies and then string every one of them up in trees without being noticed by Afghan or ISAF forces? Tulkan village is in an area where there is a strong NATO and Afghan presence. Why would the Taliban be stupid enough to string up that many bodies, risking being discovered, when one would be enough to get the message across to the local people? And to let them hang for days, preventing villagers from burying the dead – this is totally un-Islamic. The Taliban, remember, are Islamic zealots.

I don’t want to completely trash a colleague, even if he does work for the National Post – a publication with about as much credibility as Fox News. I know how much pressure there is on reporters to get a scoop and how frustrating it can be to work in the information vacuum of a military embed. But there was obviously no consideration for truth in the making of this story and a journalist’s primary loyalty is to the truth, not the voracious appetites of his editors for sensational stories. The Post has been guilty of this in the past and they will likely be guilty of it again in the future. That’s their problem. But then again, it’s also our problem, a problem for the entire media industry. This is why the public is losing trust in us and why what is simply bad reporting needs to be exposed.

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