Most recent Canadian deaths: A CF "cover up" at Kandahar?/Uppestdate: Matthew Fisher of Canwest News adds to the story

From Michael Yon (via Milnews.ca):

...

A reporter at Canwest News Service, emailed Saturday [Dec. 2] asking for information on the four Canadian soldiers and the journalist who were killed on December 30 in Afghanistan. I supplied a portion of the unpublicized information, and the reporter emailed Sunday that the Canadian military is “trying to suppress our telling of your information.”

The reporter also wrote, “While the Canadian military confirmed to me much of the information you provided, they are trying to prevent us from publishing it, saying it would breach our agency's embedding agreement.”

There is nothing classified or sensitive about the information supplied to Canwest. This smells of a classic cover-up that has nothing to do with winning or losing the war, but more likely something to do with saving embarrassment.

Some information provided to Canwest:

According to my sources, the attack happened during late afternoon on 30th. At least some of the Canadian soldiers had been dismounted doing an “engagement patrol” in district 2 of Kandahar. The soldiers and Canadian reporter Michelle Lang were in the area of the district center and the Dand district border. On the way out (apparently) a LAV (armored vehicle) was hit by the bomb on route “Molson,” flipping the LAV.

Four apparently died on scene. Sgt. Kirk Taylor apparently died at KAF or on the way to KAF (Kandahar Airfield). Five wounded were flown to Germany. One soldier was apparently thought to be dead, but was pulled from the wreckage about three hours after the blast and may have started showing signs of life during helicopter flight.

The five Canadians were killed with about 500lbs of explosives, apparently made from fertilizer, buried under route Molson in Kandahar...

It seems to me Mr Yon may be rather over-stating things; I do not see that there is any "saving embarrassment". It also seems to me that the sort of details given by him, especially in the last paragraph above, are not reported by our media. For whatever reason, presumably their own view of operational security and not fear of embarrassment, the CF apparently do not want such details made public.

This is from a CBC story on the deaths (via Douglas Shimizu in the "Comments" at Mr Yon's post):

...
The huge blast at about 4 a.m. local time occurred just 1,500 metres from the Dand district centre, which Canadian soldiers helped rebuild after a suicide bombing in April. The attack came during a community security patrol to gather information on the pattern of life and maintain security in the area...

Update: From Brian Platt to Adrian MacNair:

Michael Yon Hyperventilates Again

Another Yon FAIL...

...Previous Yon FAIL.

The last link deals with the Canadians and Arghandab district. More here on the US Army in the district recently.

Upperdate: American readers might like to take a look at this post, in which attention is drawn to US forces generally ignored by the Canadian media:

Afstan: Typical Canadian reporting--balderflippingdash, Part 2/Beyonder Uppestdate: "fair and balanced"--hurl

Uppestdate: Matthew Fisher of Canwest News, Canada's best war correspondent and just returned to Kandahar, adds to the story:

KANDAHAR AIRFIELD, Afghanistan — The explosion that killed journalist Michelle Lang and four Canadian soldiers last Wednesday was so massive that the 23-ton armoured vehicle that they were riding in was turned upside down and landed facing in the opposite direction.

"The vehicle flipped completely on its top about 10 metres away from the crater, off the road," Lt.-Col. Roch Pelletier, chief of operations for the Canadian brigade in Kandahar, said in an interview Monday.

"They probably managed to put the (improvised explosive device) under the road by digging a tunnel. It was something that was put in place a few days earlier. It was not a hasty IED, as we call them. It was deliberately planned ahead and took a long time to place . . . They dug it, they placed it properly. It was all set up."

There was no way that sentries on what was a routine patrol could have seen the IED buried on a muddy dirt road, Pelletier said, adding that the crews had carried out checks for "patterns of life," to see if people were behaving normally. There were no reports of anything unusual.

In military parlance, the IED was an HME or homemade explosive device, Pelletier said. While declining to say how big it was because of security concerns and because the incident remained the subject of an intensive investigation, he said it was "a large IED" of a type "they normally use. It was standard tactics. There was nothing new."..

Citing security reasons, the military would not say what kind of detonator that may have been used to trigger the explosion...

Reports this weekend on a U.S. blog about the war [emphasis added] in Afghanistan suggested that Canadian Forces had not provided details of the explosion because it was trying to cover up that it took as much as three hours to free one of those in the blast from the wreckage. Pelletier emphatically denied there was any kind of coverup.

"That is not the case at all," he said. "To extract them we called casevac and we did that quite fast.

"The casualties were here (Kandahar Airfield), most of them, within 30 minutes. The deceased, who are normally extracted later, were back after about an hour" because the wounded are always given priority and moved first...

Those who heard or saw the blast and were interviewed on Monday by an Afghan cameraman working for a joint CBC/Canwest Global pool, expressed no regrets over its lethal consequences. Nine NATO helicopters had quickly arrived over the scene, they said. This had scared them and their children as they feared they would be blamed for what had happened and would come under attack from the air...

Notwithstanding last week's horrific attack, security had been relatively good in that area, the 38-year old infantryman said.

"We are having success with those projects and with the civilians there because we employ them, so they turn in a lot of IEDs and provide us with quite good information on the insurgents," he said.

As a result of this, the insurgents were "being pushed right now by their commander to prove themselves," he said. "One of them tried to prove himself by going for a big hit."

Within 24 hours of the explosion, patrols from the PRT had returned to the same area, Pelletier said.

"It is not fun the day it happens, but the day after it was business as usual because we have to take care of these projects."

Then see this from BruceR. at Flit about Mr Yon:

For shame

And there was also this serious casualty:

Bushra Amjad Saeed, a 25-year-old Foreign Affairs officer from Ottawa, went to Afghanistan because she was passionate about making the world a better place, according to her friends.

Saeed, a University of Ottawa graduate from Orléans, was critically injured in the same roadside blast Dec. 30 that killed four Canadian soldiers and Michelle Lang, the first Canadian journalist to die in the eight-year conflict.

Saeed's parents and two sisters flew Sunday to the medical facility in Landstuhl, Germany [good on the Americans], where she is in critical, but stable condition.

Saeed worked out of the Lester B. Pearson building in Ottawa and was serving as a political officer to the Kandahar Provincial Reconstruction Team...