Tuesday 12 October 2010

Passing blame for Linda Norgrove

I have been hearing lots of conflicting views about the death of British Aid worker Linda Norgrove in Afghanistan.
Sympathy for the victim and anger at the Taliban, then anger at the American troops who apparently bungled the attempt to rescue her and now the view that she shouldn't have been there in the first place.
Not mentioned is the bravery of the American troops who risked their life going in to try and get her out. True, it seems that they had bad intelligence about what room she was being held in but it isn't as if they went in to try and kill her. They went to rescue her from people who would probably have killed her but it all went horribly wrong.
She was there, despite it being probably the most dangerous place on the planet at the moment, to help people.
I would like to know how many of the people sitting at home dishing out blame and fault would have the guts to do what either the American soldiers or Linda did. Not many if any.
What i did find distasteful was the almost instant decision to blame the Taliban only to change their minds 2 days later to being accidental killed by her rescuers.
They obviously didn't know how she died and either jumped to conclusions or lied about it.
It happens so much that we are told one thing initially only to later discover it was actually something else. Just wait before apportioning blame then you don't have the farce of having to backtrack and turning an horrendous incident like this into who did what rather than the death of an innocent victim.

2 comments:

Cheezy said...

This all reminded me of the Jean Charles De Menezes shooting. It seems there's some mad PR machine that goes into overdrive as soon as we kill one of our own. If you believe the very first press release issued by either the armed forces or the police (of pretty much any country I can think of) then I've got some nice magic beans that you might be interested in.

Bottom line though: Nothwithstanding the rights & wrongs of supporting a corrupt regime in Afghanistan to begin with, you can't blame the troops for Linda's death. They did their best, shame it didn't work.

Falling on a bruise said...

Exactly cheezy, to hear some people go on you would think they did it on purpose! It is getting that you have to question all initial releases.