Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

Last week, Ireland's Sunday Business Post printed a piece titled
"Things are not going their way", by Sean Mac Carthaigh and Barry O' Kelly. Among the gems they cast before the unfortunate readers were:

"In a series of intelligence reports, compiled from Russia's vast electronic eavesdropping and spy network and translated for an internet website, Kremlin military specialists say the US and British forces made a series of potentially disastrous errors in the first week of the war."

This pair certainly has access to spectacularly well-informed, respected and unbiased sources. And what does this "internet website" (!) have to say in its translated form?

'Today we can see that the US advance is characterized by disorganised and impulsive actions. The troops are simply trying to find weak spots in the Iraqi defences and break through them until they hit the next ambush,' Russian analysts said.

According to the Russian reports, not a single goal set before the coalition forces was met on time.

"During the nine days of the war the coalition has failed:

• to divide Iraq in half along the an-Nassiriya-al-Ammara line
• to surround and to destroy the Iraqi group of forces at Basra
• to create an attack group between the Tigris and the Euphrates with a front toward Baghdad
• to disrupt Iraq's military and political control, to disorganise Iraq's forces and to destroy the main Iraqi attack forces."

Not content with regurgitating this badly-written nonsense, the two hacks turned to Germany (always good for an independent opinion) for a definitive summation of the rout facing coalition forces. Here's their killer graf:

"Meanwhile, the doyen of German military history research, Professor Manfred Messerschmidt, has said a military defeat for the US and British forces is now 'probable', so long as Saddam Hussein remains in power."

The Sunday Business Post has a section on its website where it holds forth on ethics and standards:

High journalistic standards: "We have built, and we intend to maintain, a reputation founded on the credibility, thoroughness and fairness of our editorial coverage. There has never been, and there will never be, any attempt either to hide or to be economical with the truth."

This paper of lofty principles, by the way, also offers a forum to the ageing rugby commentator Tom McGurk. One of his offerings, written prior to the beginning of war in Iraq, was headed "US is about to commit a wilful war crime". It contained a sentence about Saddam's regime that will surely earn an immortal place in the annals of bad-taste journalism: "That such a government is also run by a criminal monster is neither here nor there."

Neither here nor there? Neither here nor there? That's where the "journalism" of McGurk, Mac Carthaigh and O' Kelly should be.