Glenn Beck
3/31/2011
Michael Yon
On radio this morning Glenn interviewed Michael Yon, the reporter who wrote the scathing review of Rolling Stone’s “Kill Team” article. You can read his review from The Blaze here. Glenn went in depth with Michael Yon about his experience with the brigade now being questioned.
Yon, on his way back to Afghanistan from Japan, said, “I was with the Stryker Brigade, not with the soldiers on the so‑called kill team because the brigade’s quite big. It’s thousands of soldiers, but I was with other soldiers and, in fact, the Rolling Stone posted a video of a day when some soldiers shot two Taliban. They were armed with an AK‑47 and shot those guys off a motorbike just as the motorbike almost landed into the patrol. And so the Rolling Stone wrongly insinuated that those soldiers were a part of the so‑called kill team who actually in, if a fact, apparently murder some Afghan civilians. So there was definitely some crime committed but it was a very small group of soldiers that did it while the Rolling Stone paint, you know, the entire U.S. military as being a part of that, which is simply not true.”
“I understand that there are always bad guys in any given group. But what bothers me about this story is the timing. Because these videos have been around for quite some time, have they not?” Glenn asked.
Yon explained that the videos and pictures have been around for quite some time and he considered this “old news”.
“Der Spiegel, the weekend we go into Libya, Der Spiegel in Germany, where we don’t have any problems with radical Islamists in Germany, none whatsoever, Der Spiegel prints these on the weekend we go into Libya and then Rolling Stone prints them last week. Why all of a sudden are we printing these photos which are old?” Glenn said.
“It is interesting timing, Glenn. You know, a lot of people are so angry with the Rolling Stone now and they’re, you know, painting the military like this. This isn’t the first time,” Yon said.
“Do you have any idea of the writer or how this story in Rolling Stone happened?” Glenn asked.
“Well, the writer, Mark Boal, let’s face it. Let’s put it in plain talk. This guy’s a clown. I mean, you know, the book ‑‑ the movie Hurt Locker, for instance, you know, soldiers, that’s an ‑‑ if a soldier says, hey, that guy’s Hurt Locker, that’s an insult. It means he’s like not very good. And that has come about since the movie actually. The movie is so over the top and fictionalized, I can’t believe it got all these awards. But in any case he’s written the story about, you know, the kill team and all that. And oversensationalized it. I mean, the guy should be a fiction writer. He’s dabbling in nonfiction. He’s trying to conflate the two. So he’s got neither fiction, nor nonfiction. It’s like a platypus.” Yon said.
