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Last updated on March 5th, 2018 at 01:40 pm
Australia has suffered its first military casualty in Iraq:
Flight Lieutenant Paul Pardoel, 35, from Victoria, died when a British C-130 Hercules transport plane crashed north of Baghdad overnight (AEDT), killing up to 15 troops.
Navigator Flight Lieutenant Pardoel was a former member of the RAAF who had enlisted with the RAF, Australian defence officials said tonight.
- Greater love hath no man than this….Posted by crash on 2005 01 31 at 09:47 AM • permalink
- Amen, crashPosted by The_Real_JeffS on 2005 01 31 at 10:02 AM • permalink
- My personal condolences to the people of Australia, and my thanks to a brave nation.Posted by richard mcenroe on 2005 01 31 at 11:03 AM • permalink
- The ABC are a real piece of work.
We had Jon Faine discussing with Aldo Borgu this morning about how the RAF claim it was a crash, but Al Jazeera calim it was shot down, so who are we to believe? This, 15 minutes after a flag-rank RAF officer on AM said all indications were that the Herc was shot down. Talk about being verballed.
I just love how when the ABC wants defence “experts”, they go to ASPI and get guys like Hugh White and Aldo Borgu, ex-Defence bureaucrats and academics who between them have never worn a uniform or fired a weapon. All disciplines of Paul Dibb, who are stuck in the old continental defence mindset that we don’t do anything until the bad guys are storming our beaches.
I was also particularly disgusted at how the ABC exploited Mrs Pardoel’s grief to get her to make political statements less than 24 hours after losing her son.
My brother lost a (baby) daughter, and no parent should ever survive their children. Grief knows no timeframe, but surely in the first 24 hours, nothing less than absolute shock can describe what the parent is experiencing.
I know enough about the media to understand that an ABC producer would have been on the phone with Mrs Pardoel before the interviewer, and one of the producer’s jobs is to get the interview subject (in this case, a grief-stricken mother) wound up to allow the interview to follow a predetermined direction.
That the ABC would have exploited a grief-stricken mother with no media training or experience to politice and dishonour the loss of her son sickens me.
- The ABC has deliberately set out to dig dirt from this tragic event.
Such is the only conclusion I can draw from the fact that only the ABC ‘AM’ Progam’s interview of FLT Pardeol’s mother featured any comment from her about her beliefs on Iraq policy, or her and her son’s opinion of the security situation there. Interviews appearing on the nightly news on Channels 9 and 10 that I saw seemed only to feature Mrs Pardeol talking about his life before joining the air force, and his desire to be a navigator.
Had Mrs Pardoel volunteered her beliefs to the TV crews from Channels 9 and 10, they would have almost certainly been aired – such a statement would probably be thought to be quite newsworthy. The statement was not seen on TV, however, which clearly means that the crew didn’t ask, and she didn’t tell.
Something during the ABC interview, however, caused her to say these comments. Having not volunteered information to the TV crews, it’s unlikely she would do anything different for the ABC, which leaves the interviewer (Rachel Carbonell) and whoever her producer was as the final link in the puzzle, and the people responsible for causing this information to come out.
The hole in this theory is that with the ‘AM’ Interview occurring in the morning, it surprising that no-one in either the Channel 9 or Channel 10 crews heard what was said and responded to it later when they saw Mrs Pardeol, nor played back the statement in question during the story when broadcast at 6pm. The only reason for THIS must be that those responsible for controlling the news coverage saw exactly what I saw: The ABC deliberately set out to dig dirt from this tragic event.
This analysis of the ABC’s actions is missing at The Age, however, who have decided to run with the story.
- I am so sorry about this young man’s death and I feel for his family.
As far as how his mother feels, I doubt if any mother feels it was worth it. The difference is in WW2 you did not have some slime ball of reporter in their faces asking them how they felt.
But these young people are volunteers and professionals and know the risks they take. Having said that every loss is a tragedy.
Do they know for sure the plane was shot down?
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