I just caught the last 20 minutes of a Peter Arnett lecture that apparently happened a couple weeks ago. What I saw was really good. I wished terribly that I had been there.
I’m posting this in the hope that someone has a video of the event. I would dearly love to get hold of a copy.
I can’t recall the exact words, but I know it went something like this:
Q: If you could ask George Bush one question, what would you ask?
A: Why don’t you resign?
Peter Arnett - despite being a kiwi - is not someone I would want to see. He is a story-stealing, lying sack of shit. I have met journalists who told me first and second-hand stories of him screwing his fellow journalists over.
For example, when he was reporting from Baghdad as the only journalist there that was complete nonsense. He refused to let the other journalists - his brothers in arms - use his broadcast equipment.
Since when was Peter Arnett considered to be a “journalist”?
why so reticent? why not elaborate?
Caught the late rerun and recorded a few clips with my crappy old digicam. Here is the YouTube link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AflBW6ZooY
He answers a question about GWS saying it is “depleted uranium disease.”
Post moved to this thread:
GBH, you should copy your post onto this thread.
I’d rather talk there about DU. I’d like to keep this one clear for anyone who wants to explain what’s so bad about Peter Arnett. Personally, I hadn’t thought anything in particular about the guy, not even overly familiar with his image on TV being a Canadian non-CNN watcher. But I’m intrigued by the dissing. I’d bet they wouldn’t say it to his face.
What makes anybody think Arnett had any say in who got to use his uplink in Baghdad during the first Gulf Invasion? CNN had an exclusive and of course guarded it jealously. Duh.
Done.
Ha ha ha. Well, we could role play. Come and visit me when you are passing through Jiayi. You can be Peter Arnett and I’ll be a mad drunken Kiwi bastard.
“Wouldn’t say it to his face” ha ha ha. God, what pussy world are you living in?
Back in New Zealand, major celebrities get told to fuck off by Joe Public all the bloody time, mate.
LOL. Yeah I’m not sure where dearpeter was going with the “I bet they wouldn’t say it to his face” thing. Arnett is not a very intimidating looking person.
Regarding his journalistic qualifications, he did win the Pulitzer Prize in international reporting. That’s gotta count for something.
The American Soldier
(Rick Rescorla Pictured / shot by Peter Arnett)
Here is a snippet from The Death of Supply Column 21, the full story is here.
[quote]
For the ten years he was in Vietnam no one drew more anger than Arnett. He seemed to be a lightning rod for the Johnson administration, in part because he was so good and in part because he was from New Zealand; the White House was filled with young men and women studying his stories, looking for mistakes. “Peter, you’re a great reporter,” Gallagher told him as they were leaving the luncheon where Arnett had been awarded the Pulitzer, “but don’t be wrong on a story — there are too many people out there just itching to get you.”. . . .
Arnett had watched the arrival of major American units in mid-1965 with a sinking feeling. He was very wary of what American technology might do and, equally important, might not do. To win, he thought, the Americans would not merely have to fight the Vietnamese, they would have to become Vietnamese, and that was not likely to happen.
In mid-August, he heard about a major battle going on just south of Danang near Chu Lai and got himself on a space-available flight up to Danang, where he found an old friend who got him on an Army supply helicopter to Chu Lai. At Chu Lai he climbed aboard a Marine chopper about to bring fuel oil to the embattled Marines. But on their way to the main fighting in Operation Starlite, Arnett’s chopper pilot spotted a group of American armored vehicles stranded in a rice paddy. At that moment no one knew anything about Supply Column 21, which had been assigned to leave one of the ships just offshore and bring badly needed food and ammo to the embattled Marines of Starlite.
Supply Column 21 was already in danger of being wiped out. It had been ambushed in the night by the Vietcong, and the survivors feared that a renewed assault was imminent. When Arnett’s pilot spotted it, five of its seven vehicles had already been immobilized. The lost column had included two M-48 tanks and five Amtracks (heavy amphibious vehicles). The Vietcong had immediately knocked out one of the tanks and destroyed one of the Amtracks. Three of the remaining Amtracks had bogged down in the paddy, a perfect target.
By the time the chopper arrived, only one Amtrack was intact, around which the surviving wounded had gathered. As it landed, the chopper was immediately surrounded by wounded men screaming to get out of there; Arnett and a photographer named Tim Page, who had also hitched aboard, helped the crew members load the wounded onto the chopper. In those days you could not yet print casualty figures, but Arnett later estimated there were probably about twenty-seven men in the column at the start, that at least five had been killed, eight more seriously wounded, and about ten others more lightly wounded. Arnett flew back to Saigon where he filed his story — the Death of Supply Column 21.
To Arnett it was not just a one-day story — a serious firefight, with higher casualties than anyone had expected, a tragedy caused by bad communications in a brand new war. To him it confirmed a feeling he already had: that Vietnam was something of a quagmire, that a great deal of the technology that America was going to depend on in this country would be inapplicable and might turn out to be burdensome. In his story there are several prescient references to the sheer might and weight of the armored column, 287 tons of steel, and of how incredibly vulnerable it had proven — “a reminder too that armored vehicles have a limited use in Vietnam,” he wrote.
The next day the Marines denied the story. To them, Supply Column 21 did not exist. They were pushing the main operation, Operation Starlite, as a success, the first big engagement of the war, for the Vietcong had finally fled, the Americans had taken the objective, and the casualty rate was presumed to be roughly ten to one. They wanted no mention of Supply Column 21, for it would have tainted the larger story — that American military power was going to work. [/quote]
HG
Peter Arnett is a lying POS (need an explanation for that?).
Ask him about this bit of lying he almost got away with.
*I am a US VN Vet, so I an not unbiased when it comes to exposing the lies that are tried to be perpetuated about this conflict.
Good for you, hone in on the man’s mistakes, but do bear in mind that if people had listened to what he was saying back in 1966, well that could have saved you, for one, considerable grief.
HG
[quote=“Huang Guang Chen”]Good for you, hone in on the man’s mistakes, but do bear in mind that if people had listened to what he was saying back in 1966, well that could have saved you, for one, considerable grief.
HG[/quote]
It was being said long before he came on the scene. I highly recommend works by the author Bernard Fell. In particular his best known, Street without Joy, published in 1961. I was fortunate in having it recommended to me just before my service in VN.
Bernard Fell, Street without Joy
It quite clearly portrayed what the war was about and what was required to fight it.
from WikiWacki:
“Fall wrote many books about his experiences in Vietnam, including The Viet-Minh Regime (1954), The Two Vietnams (1963), Viet-Nam Witness, 1953-66 (1966), and Hell in a Very Small Place: The Siege of Dien Bien Phu (1966). Fall also wrote Anatomy of a Crisis: The Laotian Crisis of 1960-1961 (published 1969). Perhaps Fall’s most famous and important book was Street Without Joy (1961), which detailed the kind of warfare he had witnessed during his first trip to Vietnam. His last book, Last Reflections on a War (1967), was published after his death.”
TC.
Cheers for that.
HG
About face-to-face, I was merely saying that I doubt many of his detractors would risk losing face by taking him on verbally, as I suspect he would be a very difficult adversary in debate, especially over his own career’s validity, etc. And since he’s Kiwi, I bet he does know how to fight. Whatever. Go back to your Taekwondo lessons or something.
So I googled Arnet and poison gas. I’m not convinced of anything. The number 4 hit is a rant on WorldNetDaily for God’s sake. I’ll quote a bit:
[quote]I was inclined to believe the CNN investigative report earlier this week [so trust me already] alleging the U.S. government used lethal nerve gas during a mission to kill American defectors in Laos during the Vietnam War in 1970. However, after having reviewed the findings of a parallel investigation conducted by a Vietnam vet attached to the accused elite commando unit, I no longer find Peter Arnett’s CNN report credible.
At the heart of Arnett’s report, the result of an eight-month investigation based [color=yellow]supposedly [/color]on interviews with 200 people, are the [color=yellow]claims [/color]of Lt. Robert Van Buskirk, a platoon leader in “Operation Tailwind” who says he threw a white phosphorous grenade down a hole to kill two suspected U.S. defectors. [color=blue]Take away the allegations of Van Buskirk and CNN’s report is little more than conjecture.[/color][/quote]
Well, if you took anything away from this line of argument, there wouldn’t be much of anything left.
The “case” against Arnett still seems to be decades old bitterness that he abetted the evil commie enemy in Nam, and did likewise with Saddam. It is all pretty subjective. If Arnett is polite to Saddam, and gives the dictator some airtime to say what he has to say, Arnett is still just being loyal to his own internal definition of what a journalist - specifically, a war journalist - is and ought to do, or not do. Judging him for it is stupid and ignores the professionalism of the trade.
As for the Vietnam thing, here is a bit from Time, 1965:
[quote]For months, U.S. newsmen in Saigon had been trying to pin down rumors that South Vietnamese troops “were using gas”—none of the rumors said what kind—against the Viet Cong guerrillas. Last week, quite by accident, German-born Associated Press Photographer Horst Faas succeeded, and thereby touched off the noisiest and most hysterical protests since the Communists accused the U.S. of waging germ warfare in Korea.
Macabre Memories. Hitching a ride back to Saigon from a remote staging area, Faas found himself in the midst of a major operation by South Vietnamese troops against a Viet Cong stronghold in Binh Duong province. He noticed that the troops were unusually edgy and soon learned why. Helicopters were scheduled to lay down a cloud of “nausea gas” just before the attack and, while the gas was nonlethal, the South Vietnamese were leery of it.
As it happened, the attack was called off. But Faas hurried back to Saigon and [color=blue]told Australian-born A.P. Reporter Peter Arnett what he had seen. Within hours, Arnett sent clattering out over A.P.'s wires a dispatch that began: “U.S. and Vietnamese military forces are experimenting with nonlethal gas warfare in South Viet Nam.”[/color]
Hardly anybody noticed the word “nonlethal.” Compared with napalm bombs that incinerate whole villages, or white phosphorous shells that burn a man to the bone, the temporarily disabling gases used in Viet Nam seem more humane than horrible. But the words “gas warfare” and “experimenting” stirred macabre memories. [/quote]
What exactly did Arnett do wrong? I’m not going to Google anymore. I’ll need better links served up to me. I’m probably a bit like Peter Arnett that way. Hey, we share a first name. For the record, half of the first ten links go to the same rant by Mona (sic) Charen in which she says “in 1998, Peter Arnett reported a [color=blue]totally fabricated[/color] story on CNN on the so-called Operation Tailwind. Arnett told viewers that in 1970, during the Vietnam War, the United States Army had secretly hunted down American “defectors” in Laos and killed them using poison gas.”
Note: “Mona Charen is a syndicated columnist, political analyst and author of Do-Gooders: How Liberals Hurt Those They Claim to Help .” Ayn, is that you?
I recommend Wikipedia’s succinct page on Operation Tailwind and the 98 CNN story. I think “totally fabricated” is totally bullshit. Not that I’m an expert. I only know what I read in that Wikipedia account. (Strawman is served…)