Written by aggregator.ca

CTV News thinks your mind is a chamberpot, and their staff is lined up to do their business in it.

We'll print the article in its entirety to prevent CTV from weaseling out of this with drastic edits. The original is here but may be altered by the time you read it.

Canadian troops kill two kids after car nears convoy

Updated Mon. Jul. 28 2008 2:30 PM ET

CTV.ca News Staff

Canadian troops fired on a car approaching their convoy in Kandahar province Sunday, killing a two-year-old boy and a four-year-old girl, officials confirm.

Which one of the two children was driving the car?

A gunner, apparently fearing a suicide attack, fired a giant round from a 25-millimetre cannon after the car came too close to the Canadian convoy.

It WOULD be silly for a gunner to fear a suicide attack from two children. Or would it?

Does CTV News think suicide attacks are rare in Afghanistan? So rare that it would be unusual or odd for a gunner, whose duty it is to protect the convoy, to fear them?

Is the entire staff of CTV News unaware that Canadian troops have a universally known safety zone? And that all unidentified and non-CF personnel are to drive slowly or stop, giving ample space for the protection of themselves and those troops?

It isn't a state secret when everyone in theatre has been made aware of it. You would think CTV would want to include that in their article.

The children, both passengers in the car, were siblings.

Ohh, I see. There was an adult driving the car. Well that makes more sense.

The round tore through the girl's skull and left an open wound in the boy's chest, witnesses told The Canadian Press.

Here's our comparison shot of ammunition sizes. A 9mm round is about the size of one joint of your pinky finger and can leave a head wound the size of a silver dollar. A 25mm round would do more than "tear through" a skull or leave an "open wound".

Unnamed witnesses giving editorialized descriptions in a moment of shock and grief are not newsworthy, and the wound types are not even relevant.

The driver of the car, reportedly the children's father, ignored repeated signals to keep away from the convoy, officials said.

In the unlikely event that this man didn't know the protocol for handling situations involving military convoys, we're left with one assumption: he can't understand hand signals and screaming telling him to stop, even when a gun is pointed at him in a show of force.

"It is with profound sadness that we announce that two Afghan children . . . were killed in this incident," said a statement from the Canadian Forces released Monday.

"We deeply regret this incident, and our thoughts are with the families and friends of the deceased during this difficult time.

"Our soldiers are trained to take all appropriate steps to minimize civilian casualties. However, they must take action to protect themselves when they believe they are being threatened."

Chris Alexander, UN special representative in Afghanistan, said the response to potential Taliban attacks has to be very carefully directed to avoid civilian casualties.

"When innocent people are the victims of that response we know that there has to be investigation, there has to be scrutiny of rules of engagement," he told CTV Newsnet on Monday. "Everyone has to strive for a better result in the future."

Family reaction

At the Kandahar city hospital, the children's mother was frantically pacing the hallways shrieking and cursing foreign soldiers, reports CP.

I wonder what she thinks of her husband?

"My innocent children have been killed by foreigners -- for no reason!" said the mother, according to a police officer at the hospital.

Even CTV News knows there was a reason.

Another hospital visitor told CP if he was the father of the children, he'd personally strap on a suicide vest to get revenge on Canadian troops.

Leftists and jihadi apologists often blame the West for terrorism, and claim that any intervention in the area will only make things worse. We will, they claim, by intent or accident produce more terrorists by intervening.

They must have loved that "hospital visitor's" comment. It's a shame it comes from another unidentified commenter in the midst of the shock and grief of the death of two children--we have no way of knowing if he was already supportive of suicide bombing, or islamic jihad in general, or whether it was a hyperbolic outburst.

CTV expends no energy to identify the man, his beliefs or his connections.

Militants often use civilian cars loaded with explosives to target coalition convoys -- forcing soldiers to make split-second decisions to determine if an attempt is being made.

The police officer at the hospital said the mother can't only blame the soldiers.

"They're not killing civilians in Kabul. Why is that?" Abdul Karim asked rhetorically. "They don't kill them in Kabul because there is peace there. Here, they are scared."

It appears as if an editor with at least the slightest conscience got his hands on this otherwise wretched piece before it was printed--that's an almost worthwhile attempt at balance.

Unfortunately, the piece continues its descent into anti-Western rhetoric:

According to Human Rights Watch, at least 300 Afghan civilians have been mistakenly killed by coalition forces in 2007 -- with thousands killed since 2001.

We're careless murderers is what we are. It's not like terrorists use men, women and children as human shields--right?

CTV reports this factoid without any context to the situation on the ground, or the enemy we face there and his tactics. The enemy who wears civilian garb and hides amongst civilians.

In one incident, Canadian troops killed a 90-year-old man who approached a convoy on a motorbike. The man was a respected political scientist and mentor to President Hamid Karzai.

In another incident, Canadian soldiers shot a young man on a motorbike through his chest. The bullet killed the man's younger brother riding behind him.

Earlier this month, an aerial bombing by U.S. forces wiped out an entire wedding party in eastern Afghanistan. The Afghan government said the bombing killed 47 civilians.

My mistake! I guess they decided to provide some "context".

Afghan police and coalition forces are planning a joint investigation into Sunday's incident.

With files from The Canadian Press

This story, like all stories, is grown from a seed: a small news item which is, in essence, watered by further research and interviews to provide background and context to the seed. With adequate care the article grows in size and fleshes out the story so the reader properly understands what happened without having to do extensive research himself. He is able to form his own opinion without the writers' and editors' own biases bouncing around inside his head.

The problems responsible for the poor journalism in this article -- and the thousand others just like it -- arise during this process of watering. Interviews are poorly conducted and background checks aren't done; research is done quick and dirty, with no opposing views sought; context never finds its way into the article in the first place.

And where, oh where, are the editors? Are they not held responsible for the quality of the work they oversee? We detected what we thought was the hand of an editor in a single paragraph of this article, but judging by the apparent lack of journalistic integrity throughout the rest of the piece it is more likely to have been a biblical miracle than the keen eye of a news editor.

These considerations have led us to ask serious questions:

Is CTV News coming out of the closet as anti-Western/pro-Jihadi? Is this merely an outcropping of the left wing bias CTV has long been accused of? Or is it simply exposing itself as one of the poorest and laziest news organizations in the Occident?