[cross posted a NPR Check]

In these times of austerity and job "shedding" at NPR, I have an excellent money-saving idea for those running the show at NPR. Instead of spending all the money it must take to embed a reporter like Tom Bowman with the US military in Afghanistan, why not cut him out of the picture and just hand a microphone to one of the officers or commanders there? Heck, if that's too expensive, why not just get on the Internets and pull some hard-hitting journalism from the military web site of whatever unit Tom would have been embedded with? It sure would be a lot cheaper, even though it would mean we wouldn't get the kind of critical insight that Bowman coughed up for us this morning:

"What they're going to be doing is something similar to what they did in Anbar province in Iraq. They're going to move out into the countryside and really live among the people - and that's the whole point here, is the counterinsurgency technique is to live among the people, provide security, and eventually help rebuild this part of Afghanistan...." [Could you have a more sanitized, propaganda laden description of the often repressive, brutal and violent strategy of counterinsurgency?]

And how about this informative answer when Liane Hansen asks about the "new top commander, General Stanley McChrystal...can you tell us something about him?"

Bowman: "....[he] ran the Joint Special Operations Command, that's the secretive unit that goes after high value targets. These are the guys that rolled up Saddam Hussein in Iraq and also Abu Musab al-Zarqawi...so he's sort of a specialized soldier with specialized forces...."

How's that for on-the-ground, in-depth reporting. From Bowman's report we'd never even guess that the whole Afghanistan counterinsurgency surge strategy (or any military solution) is likely to fail. And when asked to "tell us something" about McChrystal, Bowman somehow failed to mention the specialized assassinations and specialized interrogations carried out under McChrystal's tenure with JSOC.

I guess I can see why NPR doesn't want to can Bowman; imagine how boring plain, old propaganda, straight from the Pentagon would be without Bowman telling us how the Marines at Camp Leatherneck have some apprehensions, but are "really eager to get out of this base and really start doing the job here....they're eager to get out into the field and into the fight" (and really live among the people, too.)