Now I'm really curious what's going on with this Third Infantry After Action Report. It was one of the main items in the news summary at the beginning of the PBS Newshour for 11/28/03.
As I mentioned in the previous post, I linked to this same report nearly a month ago. But now it's being treated like fresh news. I didn't hack into any Pentagon computers to get it (John Aschroft take note!!). It was posted on the Fort Carson (CO) military Web site. The link that I used in the 11/02/03 post was no longer functioning today. But GlobalSecurity.org, a good Web resource on military and security issues generally, has "obtained" a copy of the report and has it posted on their site.
Also, following up on my last post, I've checked the archives of the Weblogs I mentioned there and several others, and haven't found where I first saw it referenced. Normally if I find an obscure document through another Weblog, I'll mention that I found it via that blog. But if the article is in one of the large news services or something like that, I don't necessarily do that. In this case, I must have figured that it's on a US government Web site, so how obscure can it be?
Since the major news organizations now appear to be discovering it for the first time weeks later, I guess the answer is, more obscure than I thought. But now I wish I had linked to wherever it was I saw it referenced so I would remember. Although I do sometimes check out government Web sites on my own, I remember seeing some comment at the time about how the document was marked "For Official Use Only," but was still posted in a publicly-accessible Web site.
I was posting some excerpts here because they related to points I had been making about the special demands of counterinsurgency warfare. But, shoot, if I had known that nobody but a few of us Weblog geeks was paying any attention at all to that report, maybe I should have written an article on the thing and tried to sell it to a magazine or something.
What are the reporters doing who are actually paid money to follow this stuff and write about it?
1 comment:
Yeah, I've noticed that I can run across a real interesting story on the Internet (sometimes in a major media outlet, like the NY Times or Washington Post) and weeks later other outlets (esp. TV news) will jump on it like its a fresh story.
And the reporters are hanging around waiting on their "official sources" to bring it to their attention...
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