Could Academic/Pro Collaborations Rejuvenate Embedded War Reporting?

DENVER – As budget cuts have decimated national security journalism, one of the first things to go has been the kind of deep and prolonged embedded reporting that keeps the public abreast of what is happening in the two wars that the United States is waging, in Afghanistan and Iraq. The University of Oklahoma and veteran broadcast reporter Mike Boettcher have come up with an intriguing model for how to help sustain that kind of journalism, while also using it as a tool for teaching the next generation of national security journalists. Boettcher , a visiting professor at OU’s Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication, will work with students to produce multimedia content based on his reports from Afghanistan, [...]

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On WikiLeaks and Pakistan

Some Obama administration officials and congressional lawmakers in recent days
 have sought to downplay the significance of the massive leak of secret U.S.
military files by the organization WikiLeaks by saying it’s “old news,’’ or a 
rehash of what is already well known about the prolonged war.
 But why would they think such a dismissive characterization of the remarkable 
trove of documents makes things better, not worse? If anything, what they are conceding is that top U.S. intelligence and 
policy-making officials know full well that at least some of the billions of dollars that they have given to Pakistan in recent years has gone to funding the very insurgency that they are trying to wipe out in Afghanistan – with little, [...]

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Will COIN in Afghanistan ever work?

Sen. Jim Webb’s recent comments about his concerns about the U.S. role in Afghanistan didn’t make any headlines, but the Obama administration — and the many reporters who cover it—would do well to play close attention to them. Webb, D-Va., said during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing that, in drawing up its congressionally mandated December report, Progress Toward Security and Stability in Afghanistan, “the administration must provide us some clarity, not only as to specific programs, but as to what their policies are expected to accomplish in a larger sense.” “The argument that we are in Afghanistan because of 9/11 is true only in the sense that the presence of international terrorists inside Afghanistan at that time illuminated the [...]

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Top Secret America unveiled by the Washington Post

The Washington Post unveiled the first installment of its much-awaited investigative series on the vast post-Sept. 11 counter-terrorism-industrial complex this morning, and it appears to be all that national security watchers were hoping for – or fearing. The “Top Secret America” series is the result of two years of reporting by two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Dana Priest and William Arkin, a veteran national security  journalist. By all accounts, it appears to be – by an order of magnitude – one of the most ambitious media projects on the U.S. response to the 2001 terrorist attacks. It is a must-read for anyone interested in seeing how the U.S. government is trying to protect its citizens from another attack, and how many [...]

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