I didn't anticipate having my credibility questioned.
What you're speaking about is the now defunct Security and Defence Forum program that has existed since 1971, whereby the Department of National Defence provided research grant funding to universities across Canada to conduct research on matters related to national defence, including military history. That program, when it was conceived of and established in 1971, and throughout its 40 years of existence, has had as its foundational principle the idea that it would not be directed research, research directed by the Government of Canada to support the Government of Canada. Indeed I would put to you that a great number of the most vocal critics of government defence and foreign policy have been those scholars who come from the various centres—now called the Security and Defence Forum centres across Canada—funded by that pool of grant funding.
Therefore, no one asked the Gregg Centre to conduct that study of Task Force 1-07. Nobody told me to go to Afghanistan. Nobody from Ottawa told us what to include as the findings of that book. We undertook it as an independent scholarly exercise, and I suppose some of the critique came from a rather...the book had some harsh words for the Canadian media about the situation in Afghanistan between 2006 and 2007. One bad review came out from a media person, who was arguably offended by that hard line against the media, and the review stuck.