( Michael Yon )Military Mysteriously Cuts Short Top War Correspondent's Time in Afghanistan

The military has cut short a war correspondent's embed, and there may be evidence that the decision may have been part of a smear campaign against the writer.

Michael Yon, a former Green Beret, has been covering Iraq and Afghanistan for six years. He has also covered conflicts in Thailand, the Philippines, and Nepal. Following a string of events covered by Yon that cast a negative light on two top NATO commanders, the military decided to terminate Yon's embed prematurely, citing reasons that didn't add up.

ISAF's reason for disembedding Yon was “embed overcrowding.” Yet in an email to Admiral Gregory J. Smith, an ISAF public affairs officer, Yon wrote, “I rarely see journalists. Those journalists I see have been doing drive-by reporting.”

Yon states that he has forwarded to his attorney “compelling evidence” of a smear campaign perpetrated by members of Gen. McChrystal's staff. He says that the general's staff have released official statements that are “defamatory and libelous

Thank you for posting this. I had formatted it, saved it to post, and then gone crazy with this flotilla from hell crap.
Everything is just getting too crazy. The world is so close to war and no one seems to get it.

Everything that Yon has concluded, I have posted here since the day McChrystal was appointed to this command. I have insisted that the man is certifiable and is a danger to our troops. Over the year he has been in command, our worst fears about McChrystal have proven true. We came to our conclusions independently BEFORE Michael Yon ever sent out a report.
While others kept up with Yon, we were keeping up on McChrystal on our own. When this was first brought to my attention, it was very apparent that Yon was being tossed for telling nothing but the truth.
I am at a loss and cannot understand what has happened to our military. The high command is worthless. What is more, I question their judgment and their allegiance to the oath they swore. America is in the most danger it has ever faced and we seem to be asking, even begging for it.
I pray. There doesn’t seem to be anything else left to do.

Saturday, September 12, 2009 9:32:22 AM · 126 of 3,316
MestaMachine to maine-iac7
REPOST of a REPOST
EVERYONE NEEDS TO SEE THIS!!!

Wednesday, September 09, 2009 10:40:05 AM · 139 of 187
MestaMachine to RabidBartender; 444Flyer
REPOST:

Thursday, September 03, 2009 6:36:09 AM · 8 of 15
MestaMachine to ImpBill
THIS is why Peters, and many guys with boots on the ground, are angry at the changes in ROE and McChrystal’s throwing caution to the wind where it comes to protecting our troops.
He thinks our TROOPS have acted too defensively in their own best interest and caused the “poor, helpless civilians” humiliation.

NOTE THE DATE.
General wants more troops for Afghan war
By: The Associated Press - The Sentinel-Record - Published: 08/02/2009

MORE TROOPS: Lt. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the U.S. general in charge of turning around the war in Afghanistan, may recommend significant changes to U.S. and NATO operations in a report due in August.WASHINGTON - The U.S. general put in charge of turning around the war in Afghanistan is likely to recommend significant changes in the campaign and may include a request for more U.S. forces that the White House is expected to resist.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s long-awaited reassessment of the war against Taliban insurgents aims for a transformation of the shaky relationship between U.S. forces and Afghan civilians as troops press a counterinsurgency strategy of clearing and holding populated areas, said officials apprised of the report’s contents.

The biggest change urged in McChrystal’s report is a “cultural shift” in how U.S. and foreign troops operate - ranging from how they live and travel among the Afghan population to where and how they fight, a senior military official in Kabul said Friday.

The latest draft of the assessment also urges speeding up the training of Afghan soldiers and police and nearly doubling their numbers to roughly 400,000, said a senior defense official in Washington, one of several uniformed and civilian officials who spoke on condition anonymity because the report has not been made public.

As McChrystal readies the assessment of the war, due in two weeks, numerous U.S. officials and outsiders aware of his thinking suggest that he will request in a companion report that more American troops, probably including marines, be added next year.

Several people familiar with the work being done cautioned that McChrystal could opt not to ask for an increase at all - a recognition that President Barack Obama and other White House advisers would not look favorably on adding new numbers to U.S. forces after already agreeing to boost their ranks by 21,000 troops earlier this year.

The main recommendations for change stem from the military’s new counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan, which is now designed to focus less on going after Taliban strongholds and more on protecting the local population.

The new U.S. strategy is also aimed at helping develop an Afghan government that civilians will embrace rather than siding with the insurgents, two senior military officials said. To achieve that, one official said, the latest draft of McChrystal’s assessment includes the following recommendations:

- Using intelligence less to hunt insurgents and more to understand local, tribal and social power structures in the areas where they operate. McChrystal is considering concentrating troops around populated areas rather than going after sparsely populated mountain areas where Taliban hide.

- Getting troops more active in fighting corruption. U.S. forces will need to take care in their dealings with local Afghan leaders to ensure that they are not perceived by the Afghan population to be empowering corrupt officials.

*PLEASE NOTE THIS PARAGRAPH IN PARTICULAR.
In preparing his assessment of the Afghan command, McChrystal found an American military culture that showed a great concern for troops’ protection – sometimes at the expense of their relations with Afghan civilians.

To change those relations, McChrystal wants American forces to think twice about basic conduct - for instance no longer pointing their guns at people when they pass in convoy or blocking narrow roads with their convoys, while relegating Afghans to the ditches.

To deal with the most contentious aspect of those shaky relations, McChrystal has already committed to try to reduce civilian casualties by issuing new orders that restrict when troops should call in bombing strikes.

.... Yon couldn’t accept that rationale. “McChrystal’s crew has declared an information war on me,” he posted to Facebook. “If McChrystal knew what he was doing, he would not be drawing attention to his staff.”

He called McChrystal’s aides “crazy monkeys,” and said that he had “compelling evidence of General McChrystal’s smear campaign” against him. “Official statements by his people — in writing — have been defamatory and libelous.”
________________ “I think the best analogy is to a court of law. If I (or the state) accuse X of some criminal act, I bear the burden of proof. If I fail to provide legally sufficient proof, X will be acquitted even if he never raises a single defense or provides any exculpatory evidence.

This is the situation with Yon.

He has accused PAO and McChrystal. But he has provided no evidence.”
http://www.villainouscompany.com/vcblog/archives/2010/05/the_credibility.html

And now Mudville too? “Over on Facebook, our old friend Mike Yon links a piece by Chris Carter at Human Events. That piece is an unqualified endorsement of Mike Yon, so no surprise there.

And unfortunately, this comment Mike added later doesn’t surprise me either:

Michael Yon: “James — some of the milkookery is catching up to them. They will be left with no responsible readership. These days I don’t take anyone seriously who links to Blackfive, Mudville Gazette, and some of the others. Notice that none have admitted just how badly they messed up. More likely to want to compare service records, which is like grown men talking about their high school football days. Sad but also darkly funny. None of them had the guts to take on Menard. None are taking on McChrystal. Some of the milkooks are blogbullies who did not expect to be called out.”
So, like yesterday, I asked Mike for clarification.

Mike, Chris Carter, the guy you link above, writes at Blackfive.
But what’s Mudville got to do with it?
I got no answer yesterday, so I don’t expect one today...” either. http://www.mudvillegazette.com/033709.html

“Yon that cast a negative light on two top NATO commanders, the military decided to terminate Yon’s embed prematurely, citing reasons that didn’t add up.”
ADD THIS. No reporter has spent more time embedded with American and coalition troops since 9/11. Few reporters have put themselves at more personal risk — or spent more of their own money — during their times on the battlefield. Yon produced one of the most iconic images of the Iraq war, and defended the conflict as winnable when most experts assumed the opposite.

But this wasn’t the first time Yon had been separated from his unit, or started public fights with military leadership. As early as 2006, Yon was warning that the United States was falling behind in the Afghanistan war. The following year, when he felt he was being treated unfairly in Baghdad, he unloaded on “Public Affairs officers [who] stagger like sway-backed mules with shifting excuses.”

Last September, he was told to leave the British 2 Rifles in Afghanistan’s Helmand province. In return, he blasted the local British media officer Minister of Defence Bob Ainsworth as “Bullshit Bob.”

But that came after weeks of friction over Yon’s criticisms of the British lack of helicopters in the region. This time, Yon tells Danger Room, there were no early warnings. “There was no back story. None. Zero indication from the brigade company or unit level,” he says over an intermittent cellphone connection from Jalalabad, Afghanistan. “I’m mystified.”

Lt. Col. Tadd Sholtis, a spokesman for the U.S.-led International Security Assistance Force in Kabul, says there’s a simple explanation: Yon’s extended embed was holding up other reporters who wanted similar access.

“The problem is that there are more than 100 other reporters on a waiting list to get into embeds with the 5-2 and other units — especially in and around Kandahar — which is why embeds are established for defined periods of time. Since demand far exceeds supply, we try to balance the needs of individual reporters with our responsibility to provide information through embeds to a large and diverse a field of reporters,” Sholtis tells Danger Room in an e-mail.

Yon did ask the commander to stay, and the commander said OK, but he did so in ignorance of the fact that Yon’s embed had been granted under terms set by [the regional headquarters]…. Frankly, given Yon’s request, the commander was only faced with the choice of whether to be a nice guy or not. The region[al HQ], on the other hand, was faced with the choice of whether being nice to Yon was worth turning away a significant number of other reporters. They determined it was not.

Yon couldn’t accept that rationale. “McChrystal’s crew has declared an information war on me,” he posted to Facebook. “If McChrystal knew what he was doing, he would not be drawing attention to his staff.”

I asked Yon what that evidence was. He pointed me to an e-mail exchange between Sholtis and blogger Herschel Smith. In it, Sholtis said Yon’s campaign to stay with the 5-2 “amounted to a choice to disrespect his colleagues,” and that contrary to the blogger’s claims in this case, “the most significant impediment to independent reporting from Afghanistan has been Michael Yon himself.”

It’s a pair of phrases Sholtis now says he regrets. But they’re hardly libelous.

Yon still has his defenders in the tight-knit community of military bloggers. Smith, for one, likens Yon to legendary World War II journalist Ernie Pyle.

But many of his biggest fans and advocates are now speaking out against him. “I swear, I really need to step up my game and start posting completely randomly made-up tweets or Facebook comments about public figures like ’so-and-so is the world’s biggest idiot,’” writes Milblogging.com founder J.P. Borda.

“Michael Yon has done some excellent reporting from both Iraq and Afghanistan, but if my count is correct he has now been kicked off four embeds. Each time he has excoriated those who booted him and blamed them for his predicament,” blogs Blackfive.net’s Hanson. “There comes a time when you have to look in the mirror and accept responsibility. It is not a collection of incompetent public-affairs officers or some conspiracy to silence truth telling, it is his own fault.”

Yon, for his part, says he’ll remain in Afghanistan — but not as an embedded journalist. “I’m still reporting,” he says, but now I’m outside the wire.”

All links are provided at url http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/04/milbloggers-turn-on-their-frontline-hero/#more-23891#ixzz0pmY01okq

"Within a day of Tillman's death, McChrystal was notified that Tillman was a victim of fratricide. Shortly thereafter, McChrystal was put in charge of paperwork to award Tillman a posthumous Silver Star for valor. On April 28, 2004, six days after Tillman's death, McChrystal approved a final draft of the Silver Star recommendation and submitted it to the acting Secretary of the Army, even though the medal recommendation deliberately omitted any mention of friendly fire, included the phrase "in the line of devastating enemy fire," and was accompanied by fabricated witness statements. On April 29, McChrystal sent an urgent memo warning White House speechwriters not to quote the medal recommendation in any statements they wrote for President Bush because it "might cause public embarrassment if the circumstances of Corporal Tillman's death become public." McChrystal was one of eight officers recommended for discipline by a subsequent Pentagon investigation but the Army declined to take action against him." Wiki( ? )on McChrystal.

On the other hand, he's a good jogger, has low fat, and is a good rear echelon chubby hunter.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.