Day One, Panel Three: Minimizing Risks

Moderator: John Owen, Director, The Freedom Forum, U.K.

JOHN OWEN: As I mentioned earlier, Britain has become the center for what is known as the Hostile Environments Training Course, a rather large mouthful that says basically journalists are being given the benefit of courses that I think most people feel are helping to keep them alive. Or at the very least give them many more smarts in the field about how to stay alive.

The courses came about in part because the BBC took leadership in this area after one of their journalists was killed in Croatia, John Scofield. And working with several groups of ex-soldiers, Royal Marines, and also SAS, what has developed in Britain, is that we now have training courses developed by two major groups. And the leading group, Centurion, is with us today.

The important point I want to make before I introduce Paul is that it is often said that journalists are being taught to be soldiers, that this is sort of journalists become soldiers of war. And often articles written about these training courses make this mistake as well. The critical point is that these courses were developed by journalists in conversations with these former soldiers. They don't look like former soldiers now in their sharp suits, but they indeed are. But the important point is that the control rests in the hands of the journalists. And when you hear that these are courses teaching journalists how to be soldiers, please try to correct the record.

The other thing happening with Centurion and the other group, AKE, is that these courses are for the first time being taught to local journalists. Going back to late November of 1998 in Tirana, Albania, where there were 20 journalists, four from Kosovo, were brought together and given courses again that gave them some of the expertise that Western journalists get before they go off to the war zones. It is a policy now in the BBC that no journalist can go to a conflict zone unless they've been
through this course.

The local journalists who took that course in Albania told me later that they thought it had kept them alive, one journalist said, because they were able to identify land mines in their treks getting out of Kosovo. Another pointed to the first aid training that they got. They said that when one of their colleagues was hurt, they were able to apply what they learned in the course.

So I hope for people on this side of the ocean it will be new information about how these courses can work for the benefit of journalists going off on assignments. And also we'll give you some idea why these courses are important across the board for NGOs, journalists primarily, and how they can also lead to better insurance policies for freelance journalists.

So it's a pleasure to introduce Paul Rees, who has established the Centurion course and has become one of the foremost persons in this whole field.

PAUL REES: My name is Paul Rees. I am the director of a company called Centurion, as was stated. My other colleague is John. John I use as my chief instructor. Underneath John are 10 additional former Royal Marine Commandos. We're all ex-Marines. We've got nothing to do with them anymore. We are a limited company.

John's quite rightly said we were approached by the BBC when I was still serving in the Royal Marines, to come up with a program for journalists for hostile environments. What was the hostile environment at that time? Well, at the time it was the former Yugoslavia. Yes, you've heard quotes, you've heard the numbers, you've heard of the deaths, you've heard the rest of it. It is very, very true. They wanted to do something about the safety training.

We're still very lucky. We were in the Royal Marines. We had seen a lot of experience. We've each done 20-odd years, and we have been to I don't think as many places as these three guys here, God forbid; however, we've done our bit and seen quite a bit. So with our knowledge from being ex-Marines and with the knowledge of journalists, senior journalists, senior media workers, camera crews, reporters, voiceovers, etc., we have come up at the present time with a real good course for journalists.

Now, we're not here to sell this course. We have been invited over here to show you, if you're not acquainted with the service that we do, with how we reduce the risk to assist journalists, aid workers, business people, tourists, anyone going to a hostile environment.

RECORDING: Have you ever wondered just how dangerous it is to report from places like Afghanistan, Kosovo, or Central Africa? Well, around 100 journalists are killed in the line of duty every year, and scores more are injured.

JOURNALIST ON RECORDING: I think it is getting more dangerous whereas before you had clear definitive lines in war zones, for instance. You haven't. The actual lines themselves will move backwards and forwards, given the offensive or the defensive. And I think the other thing that's happening as well is what we had just recently in the likes of Zaire, you're getting things like bounties being put on the macheted arm of a journalist, $500 and things like that. So people are looking at journalists, and they're actually listening and watching, too, what they actually write, and it can't be tolerated.

RECORDING: Bosnia and the Gulf War brought conflict into our living rooms, and since then the demand for the very latest pictures from the front line has been insatiable. That's increased the pressure on journalists to deliver the story whatever the cost.

JOURNALIST ON RECORDING: I don't think you can do this kind of journalism without putting yourself on the line.

JOURNALIST ON RECORDING: Award-winning cameraman Dave Green's closest call came not during a battle but while taping an interview in El Salvador.

JOURNALIST ON RECORDING: So where did the bullet come from? How close did it get to him?

JOURNALIST ON RECORDING: Close enough. I don't know. It had to come past me to hit the wall.

JOURNALIST ON RECORDING: Vaughn Smith was hit while crossing Serbian lines in Kosovo.

MR. SMITH: A bullet hit my mobile telephone, which was in my pocket. If it hadn't been for my mobile phone, it's very likely I would have died. And that's the bullet.

RECORDING: These near-death experiences come with a personal cost, too.

JOURNALIST ON RECORDING: I used to have this really bizarre dream where I'd wake up trying to grab my leg, because one of my biggest fears in life is stepping on a land mine. I've been shot at deliberately for being a journalist. I've been arrested just for filming street shots because I had a camera.

JOURNALIST ON RECORDING: In the Bosnian War, snipers took great joy in knocking off camera personalities. They loved it.

JOURNALIST ON RECORDING: It's a very, very dangerous world out there. In the old days when you had the good guys and the bad guys and you could sit with one side or the other and be relatively safe. That's all changed now. More often than not we're going into situations where you never know where the shots are going to come from.

JOURNALIST ON RECORDING: Ten years ago when I was a cameraman, it cost me 50,000 U.S. dollars to be able to have a camera. Today, you have a small handicam for a few thousand dollars.

JOURNALIST ON RECORDING: And with more inexperienced people working the war zones, the price paid for good footage from established sources is plunging.

RECORDING: To make sure those people come back in one piece, courses like this one run by Centurion Risk Assessment in London have been a popular first step for journalists and camera crews about to jump into a hot spot.

It's an awareness course to make them more aware of the obstacles they face. The normal typical course starts off with a live bullet penetration demonstration. We show them about pistols, rifles, and machine guns that will virtually penetrate anything.

Stone walls, flak jackets, anything. They also show how modern weapons make it easy for a cameraman to be mistaken for a gunman.

That thing on that shoulder can look very similar to a rocket-propelled grenade launcher from a distance. And then, unfortunately, the cameraman becomes a target.

PAUL REES: Well, that's just a few clips just to wet our tastebuds, I think. We're not here to give you quotes and numbers. You're all in the same business, you read about them. Even today in USA Today, I think there's five clips about atrocities going on around the world. That's just unfortunate it's got to be like that every day in the papers.

The course that we have come up with does not, and I reemphasize this already, it does not turn people into military people. That is the dangerous part. But I will emphasize this, if you don't know at times when you should act like a military person, when you've got to duck down and crawl to get out of the trouble rather than stay up and walk or run, you're going to become a target.

So if you can imagine these safety scales either way about being military and being a civilian, how many people do you know, then, who have been offered to go on a patrol. Let's take Kosovo as a patrol out there to get footage, real good footage that will come back and make the news. If you go out there dressed in white, is that military patrol going to take you along with them up to the skyline up to record or film what they're up to? Would they? Of course they wouldn't, because you will be visible from a far, far distance in white. They would want you to dress down in dark clothing like them.

We had this in the Falklands War when it happened. Journalists were coming down in civilian clothes. They are civilians and they should dress like civilians, but the military would not take them with them unless they were in camouflaged clothing. So that means now you're no longer in that civilian bracket. You're now a military person from the eyes of whoever is the enemy of that patrol you may be with at that time. So the safety scales are changing, and it's changing rapidly because of the technology of the war, which John's going to cover when we cover ballistics. So we can see that safety
bounds are totally out of your control at times.

One of the questions we do get a lot about these courses and about what we do is what is a hostile environment? Who wants to emphasize what is a hostile environment?

A PARTICIPANT: Any environment where the journalist is a target.

PAUL REES: That's fine. Basically it's anywhere from walking down the back streets in London, to coming into Washington at nighttime when I don't know where I'm going. If I went down there on my own, I would be pretty heightened. My sense would be heightened about awareness. Am I at risk here? Who's going to come out? I don't know about the area. Is it safe? It may or may not be.

But going from that to a civil disturbance, to riots, to places that local tourist groups were abducted on the border of Zaire. Was something like that, just taken from the rebel group that came across? Now, did they read that in the travel brochure that that would happen to them on that day? Of course they didn't. It's the risks, and it's totally out of their hands. So at times you do not know what is a hostile environment. Why? Because of technology changes.

Let's go quickly back to the Falklands again. When we were in the Falklands we didn't have all this high technology. But think now along the lines of the Gulf War. The emphasis on weapons and the strategics of where weapons can be delivered has changed vastly in such a short period, and I can guarantee it's changing in the next period as well before the next major war.

So unfortunately this goes back to journalists, media crews, businesses, anybody in that allocation of what we class as a hostile environment. So every time somebody signs up for the Hostile Environment Course, they think flak jacket on first day, helmet on and we're off. It's not. It's a general awareness course that covers everything from personal security, from you walking down the street in any city, through to the full-blown war zone where the bullets and the bombs do happen.

We train a lot of people, and 63 percent of our course is external. We are firm believers from our past experience that we only learn or we learn greater when we're on the ground and we're under pressure, when we have to go to these scenarios, get our hands bloodied. So that's why a lot of our course is outside.

Now on the hostile environment, what we have are risk areas in categories. Now about these categories. Chris Cramer, whose names has been mentioned, is now for CNN and used to be former newsman for BBC, as you probably know. When Chris approached us and asked about this training, they categorized their places of operations, and they listed each individual risk. So let's say they're off to Chechnya. What's happening in Chechnya? Loads and loads of things are happening in Chechnya, from the good to the bad to the worse and to the more bad if there's such a word. But he categorized it into category 1, category 2, and category 3. Now category 3 is a film crew going off to film chimpanzees in the jungles of so and so. It's still a hostile environment, because Mother Nature is against you, but not a war infraction, not a tribal faction, no one like that. So that's why they categorized them in those ways.

What we are going to concentrate on is the main one, the category 1, because that is where a lot of the statistics are from now, where a lot of the journalists are getting called out. Now in this category, the lists on the right-hand side there are classified as high-risk areas.

When Roy asked us if we could come here, he emphasized if we could talk about a few of these subjects. We are going to do that. We are not going to cover all the rest of the ones because it's endless. You may have subjects in your mind that you wish should be on that course. Well, that's fine. This is why the course is so popular as well, because when the journalists come in it's an open forum. We never stand up there and say that's black and that's white. We give them options. They may have had options. Like Steve said, he got down and crawled and got out of trouble. We'll try to give them another five options to that problem. So there's nothing black, nothing white.

You can read a book from front to cover and it tells you how to survive in a war zone. Is that going to help you when you get on the ground? It will give you some background knowledge, but when it comes to it, you need the experience and the training to do it.

I need to emphasize another point here. And that is that the military anywhere in the world will not send their force, whether it be a troop strength of 30 people, or a company of 150 men, down to Sri Lanka, for instance, unless they've done some form of training. They're all battle trained. That's part of basic knowledge and training, but they'll emphasize the training for that given area that they go to. They'll be given correct equipment. They'll be given updates every day, intelligence briefs. They'll be inoculated. They'll tell how they're going to get out there, what happens in emergency, what happens if, if, if, if, if. The big question if.

And from our experience mixing with journalists who come on the course, especially freelancers, they don't get that chance. And even staffers sometimes get a phone call, be at Heathrow Airport tomorrow morning. Where am I going? Don't worry, we'll tell you when you get there. So what are you going to pack? You're back to square one again. How much gear can you take?

So all these subjects on the right we cover and I emphasize as well a lot more than that over a four day, five day or six day course, depending on what subjects they want. We're going to try and cover these that Roy was interested in on his visit across the United Kingdom, and we're going to first of all cover the risk assessment one.

Now every day you make assessments when you get up, at night, when you go into the bar in the evening, who's going to pay a tip to the taxi driver. Let's talk about jobs of journalism. What gear and what are you going to cover? We've heard these three guys' stories here, and I think Christ, what a job they're in. But it's their own decision. They have to make their own risk assessments. You're going to see a couple of clips here of people making their own assessments of the risks.

The objectives that we get over the course -- you'll see this as we go about there through these subjects. We tried to cover these objectives that will cover a lot more minor subjects to the people on the courses.

The first one, let's talk about the importance of identifying hazards to reduce the risk to the lowest possible level. Now, we've heard about flak jackets, do you take them, do you not taken them? Again, that is up to the individual. Some people may not even be given them, cannot afford one, they have old ones. Is it worth taking? These are the risks that they are trying to assess prior to going, and we discuss all of these all the way through.

Now this clip here, I don't know if anyone's seen this before. I need to emphasize if you see the clock here, do you see that tank in the background. Can you see that? It's obviously camouflaged out, because it's a military thing. So they want to camouflage that tank out in the background.

Now, Paul Woods here had to go and do an interview, and fortunately he assessed all the risks, he had done our course, but he forgot to see what was behind it, because it's very hard to see. There's no engines running and this is what happened. We'll explain what happened if you don't pick it up straight away.

RECORDING: The Bosnian Serb military says its forces have now withdrawn from the time of Mrkonjic Grad If so, it's evidence of what the Bosnian Serb political leadership has long feared, that the military balance is once again tipping against them. The Bosnian Serbs now have an overwhelming interest in getting a cease-fire to freeze the confrontation lines, but they --

RECORDING: Here we have the most remarkable sequence where Vuk Draskovic is lying on his back, you're lying alongside him, and he's ordering an assault.

RECORDING: He also told me that he'd have my head chopped off if I showed that footage in the film.

RECORDING: Did he know you were filming?

RECORDING: I said it was off but I lied. He said he'd have my head if he found that footage in any sort of film. And he also got very angry if I filmed him chewing gum or drinking Slivovitz out of the bottle or lying down and looking unprofessional.

RECORDING: He's doing both now.

RECORDING: I like to sort of think about situations before they happen. What's going to happen if this happens? What shall I do if it happens? So I tend to try and think things out in advance, sort of balance covering the story with survival. That's it.

RECORDING: There must be something deeply insubordinate about my character in that I've always liked to go to places which have been forbidden zones. A man in a uniform saying he will not go beyond this gate to me has been a challenge. I will get beyond it and find out what's going on.

RECORDING: After these scuffles, Israeli soldiers arrested a Palestinian cameraman who kept his camera running as they beat him up. Israeli soldiers in Hebron have been ordered to stay out of Palestinian areas tomorrow.

RECORDING: It's a small consolation under such a bombardment, but many of the Russian weapons, like this missile, have proved defective and have failed to detonate.

RECORDING: Again, it is the civilians who are paying the price. Seconds before we arrived here, a shell had struck the road, seemingly killing seven people. Rescuers noted that two showed signs of life but warned us this residential area was now being targeted.

RECORDING: This is a civilian area on the outskirts of the city. These people were civilians trying to flee the fighting.

RECORDING: The blast from another shell blew two of us off the road. Chechen fighters, civilians, and journalists took shelter in a ditch.

PAUL REES: So really they looked at those assessments and put themselves where they were at that time. Now, there's no brave person who can stay up here and say that was right or it's wrong. It's those people on the ground that made that assessment. Now whether those assessments changed instantly just like the Chechen one with Paul Davis at the back there. And unfortunately with that tank, he didn't know. What happened there was the tank driver stood on the firing pedal as he was trying to get out of the tank, and unfortunately they were fired upon. They weren't being attacked. Nothing like that. Wrong place, wrong time. They weren't killed, nothing like that, apart from severe ear injuries for a few days. And, obviously, it's not nice to be close to a large tank like that when it goes off.

Going through those, it's all to do with risk assessment, and I do emphasize on the course we don't tell you what's black or white, it's just to give you the options. They way we give them the options is to show hundreds of clips like these that we've got here today, and let the people in the course be the judge of what can happen. So when we go on and do the scenarios, they have loads of other options to think about.

So that's to do with the risk assessments. That's a very small part of the course, but we tried to cover a lot of the options open to them. The biggest one that we do talk about is to deal with the ballistic awareness that we cover.

What you've got here are the objectives. And I'll hand this over to John now because John used to be a ballistic experts within the Royal Marines, so he knows a bit more about it than I do.

JOHN: Just before I start, ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to say really as a former professional serviceman and having served throughout the world in various conflicts and probably the longest current terrorist threat in the Western world at the moment, I take my hat off to the three individuals who were up here earlier on, and they have my utmost respect for what they've been up to.

Considering the fact that I had a weapon in my hand all those times and they just basically had their wits, their common sense, and maybe dare I say their sense of humor, undoubtedly they have my greatest of respect.

When we talk about ballistics, what do we mean? Basically we mean anything, whether it be shoulder-launched, held in your hand, or fired from artillery, tanks, aircraft or even down to cruise missiles. When you look at the advent of technology where we can be hit from, you're talking about ranges anything out to 300, maybe 400 miles away. If you're in the wrong place at the wrong time, you're not going to really appreciate that until that cruise missile can come up Beirut Street and turn left or whatever the case is.

Fundamentally, though, what we actually look at is how the small arms affect you as the individual on the front line. What we try to make you appreciate is the fact that wherever you are, if you are the target, and it's a big "if," then if you have an appreciation of what's being fired at you and from where it's being fired, and if you are in the actual killing zone itself, by giving an appreciation of what these weapons can do and at the same time what you can lie behind, sit behind, crawl behind, or whatever the case is, to avoid being hurt, even if it's only for a couple of minutes or a couple of seconds in some extreme cases, then hopefully we are giving you some sort of appreciation of where you can and, more importantly, where you cannot go. And if you go into that area, how long you can actually stay there for.

What am I actually talking about, then? Realistically we're talking about weapons you can hold in your hand, weapons that can be held and concealed underneath a jacket, which I am wearing now. All right, we all saw Madeleine's young man up here earlier on. And basically he had his tucked away, quite easily concealed, and really there was very few of us actually aware of what he was actually carrying.

Put it into another place. Realistically we have small arms weapons that could be held in somebody's hand. And at the same time when that weapon is held in your hand, what sort of problem, what sort of dilemma does that open to you? When you look at the actual current weapons existing nowadays in the wide world, the U.S. makes the M-16. Something like 42 million of those weapons currently exist in the world, not all necessarily in legitimately held hands.

The other most popular weapon that exists in the world today is the AK-47, or its derivative. Once again, something like 62 million of those are knocking around the world nowadays. How does that affect us then? How does that affect the journalists on the front line? They can both kill. They are both what we call high velocity weapons. They can engage journalists at the front line, journalists from extreme ranges. They can put them under a lot more pressure. And when we look at the three examples of individuals who are not at the front line, they're beyond the front line, they need to be there because they want the best shots. They need to be there because we enjoy the luxury of sitting back at home realistically appreciating the fact that these images are being portrayed on the screen, at the same time not necessarily equating the images with the problems that they are facing at that time.

If we can, therefore, give journalists an appreciation that if they do that- and let's face it, a lot of them have to put themselves in that sort of position-then we can help them understand what they can hide behind, where they can actually go and force themselves into a bit of cover when the shooting does take place. And hopefully we'll go into that little bit further to give them an appreciation. And as Paul was rightly saying just now, it's an appreciation of exactly where you can and where you can't go.

As to the weapons themselves, we tried to dispel the myth of Arnold Schwarzenegger and his crew about how many shots could be fired in a room like this, and lo and behold, 71 of us get up and walk out, and none of us have been hit. The myth is destroyed by showing you exactly what you can hide behind and what you can't hide behind by taking the journalists down to a range just outside London. And we actually fire small arms ammunition, whether it be from handguns, shotguns, assault weapons, machine guns, or sniper weapons, to give you an appreciation of what will stop a round. And alternatively, particularly in examples of machine guns, how long you can afford to stay behind a brick wall, a house door, or whatever the case is before those rounds actually penetrate and come through on top of you.

Quite often it's the case you can be there for a couple or three seconds. Alternatively, you can just be there for 30 seconds even. The whole dilemma of what we're talking about here is this. If you can appreciate the fact that, as we found out during the Falklands War, it just takes one man who didn’t necessarily have the training that we had. And if he is just at the right moment at the wrong time, if you understand what I'm saying, and he just presses that trigger once, somebody can get hurt.

We can't, unfortunately, sort that one out for you, but what we can make you appreciate is the fact that if you do take cover behind a wall, forget the myth of television and the films we see on the cinema. If we can destroy that myth a little bit more by making you appreciate exactly where to go and where you can afford to stay for a while, then so much the better.

What I will highlight here is the fact that we are former professional servicemen. And to that end, we have been taught how to fire at people. In a lot of the cases, yesterday's farmer is today's freedom fighter. He picks up that AK-47, and he just sprays the area. A lot of the time that is shear bravado on his behalf. Alternatively, we have the individual who is a professional man and who knows that by firing his weapon at a particular spot for a particular period of time, unfortunate for you if you are the person caught behind the wall, that there is a good possibility that the ammunition will come through the wall. To highlight that, we'll actually show you a couple of examples of that on the video.

RECORDING: Nowhere is it more difficult for journalists to survive than in Yugoslavia. Hatred runs deep and extends to journalists. Thirty-five have been killed there in a year, more than in the whole Vietnam War.

It's a place where friends who we've seen survive other wars are getting hurt and killed.

RECORDING: You have various examples of being fired at the range with various types of cover you could find yourself hiding behind anywhere in the world.

RECORDING: Correspondents are advised to wear different protective garments. Here they are shown the effects that helmets and protective plates have.

JOHN: Sherry brought out a good point. She said are those journalists shooting on the range? No, we don't allow them to do that. A lot of people want to have guns, but by law we're not allowed to, especially with the gun laws in the United Kingdom. When they can here, it's a different matter. It is not our aim to get anybody involved with weapons on the range. Yes, we have our journalists come down to do documentaries and to fire the weapons for the camera, but that has been cleared through the highest of the organization.

I need to emphasize here that people talking about serving in Asia, especially like Cambodia and the big problems there, how many children you see with weapons. Why do they have weapons? Because their dads have got weapons, their brothers have got weapons. They want to be like them. And unfortunately, wrong place, wrong time. It's assessing a situation when someone has got a pistol pointed at you, what are you going to do? John, you told me last night about the aid workers who tried to grab the weapons, the UN peacekeepers. They tried to grab the weapons off the armed factions, the people who were there. Now whether that's right or wrong, we were not there. The people on the ground knew what they were doing, or so they said.

So we emphasize on the range the dangers of weapons, and what can really happen. And often, as John mentioned, you can't hide behind a car door as you see in Diehard movies and come out laughing. It's just doesn't happen. I heard a few "oh, gees" and all that when all those doors were being splattered about. That is reality. So unfortunately, what films do not exactly show you is the reality. Anyway, that's ballistic awareness. John, do you want to comment any more on it?

PAUL REES: I just want to say that I understand why people use snipers and long-range weapons, which you saw at the end there the .50 barrage weapon. That weapon has a maximum range of 2 kilometers. Basically you or I could be up to 2,000 meters away from a man behind that type of weapon. And despite the fact that you might as well be sitting in an armored Land Rover, you and I appear at 2,000 meters about that big (indicating). That has the capabilities of not only hitting you up to that range, but also knocking you down despite whatever flak jacket you might be wearing at the same time.

So what I'm saying to you is, look at the advent of technology. When we were down in the Falklands War we had sniper weapons which were basically used between 600 and 700 meters. We now have the capabilities of tripling that.

So once again, if you're thinking you're in a bit of a safe environment, think otherwise. The potential quite often is there for them to have these types of weapons.

A PARTICIPANT: As part of your training do you do sound tone so people can identify the different kinds of weaponry that they're shooting at?

JOHN: Yes, we do.

A PARTICIPANT: And also to try and get a sense of where it's coming from?

JOHN: Yes, we do that on our awareness track when we take them around. We obviously can't fire live weapons at the people on the course. What we actually duplicate is what we call “crack and thump”. Basically for the initiated, what that actually means is that you will hear the round being fired near you. Hopefully it hasn't hit you. To that end, what you actually hear and what we try to put across to people is something very similar to a wooden ruler, the flat edge of a wooden ruler being smacked on a flat wooden desk. We’ve all heard one of those I'm sure when we were in school. That depicts the actual round coming very, very close to you.

On top of that what you'll hear is what we call the thump, the actual round being fired from however far away it is. Let’s put that into perspective. Basically what we're talking about is when you hear, and have the presence of mind to think about, the time between the crack- the round passing about your head--and the thump--the sound of the round being fired by the person- there's approximately one second between the two. And let's face it, we're thinking about that. But there's a second between the two, and to you and I that means that the individual who's firing at you is approximately 600 meters away.

Once again, we can put that into perspective. From a serviceman's point of view, trying to hit one of you at 600 meters, unless you are really qualified and capable of doing so, is extremely hard to do, particularly allowing for wind, temperatures, et cetera. And it also obviously depends on the capabilities and the abilities of the person firing.

To put that into perspective for you, basically that means that if he's firing at 600 meters from you, you have a possibility of surviving. You have the opportunity to find somewhere, whether it be a tree, a house, or whatever, to get behind a wall and give yourself some cover. Conversely, if it's anything closer to that, and he is much closer to you, you're a lot easier to hit.

PAUL REES: Moving on very quickly to the last item here. What do you personally feel the safest protection would be if you were under fire from a high velocity round?

A PARTICIPANT: Behind one of NATO's eight- foot barrels of sand.

PAUL REES: That's very true. That's what all rifle ranges are made of. The butts are made of sand.

Now what nature provides to you on the ground is the best possible cover that you can get under. Now we're talking about natural hollows in the ground. Earth is the best bullet catcher that we have ever found. That's why you hear probably in a lot of military films that go around, get your ass down, soldier, and get it low.

So you act like the ground, keep your butt down. I've mentioned it three times. He's on the floor and he's crawling away. Why is he crawling away? He doesn't want to make himself a big target, so he's reduced the risk to himself by getting low and crawling. But the military do it. So if you get seen doing that, is that a military person crawling around with the rest of them or is it a civilian? That's your best bet to get down as well, but the other people might look at you as if you're a military person. It doesn't matter what color clothing you're in.

In Sniper's Alley, how many civilians, and older people were getting hit every day? Some of these soldiers do not care. And John's talking about the high velocity weapons here that are becoming more powerful.

There's a horrible picture here. That guy's dropping a hand grenade just to finish the people off in the armored vehicle.

Now, we haven't got time here to talk about grenades. But generally if we threw a grenade in this room, who would get injured? Let's be honest. Nearly everybody. Some of you are going to be lucky because the people who are in front of you are going to get most of the fragmentation. Well, unfortunately, wrong place at the wrong time. And that's why a lot of these cases are happening.

So it's out of your control. You can do all your risk assessments, all the training that you want, but once you get out there, wrong place, wrong time. I'm sure there are a lot of people who have been in those places.

A PARTICIPANT: One question on flak jackets, which have certainly come into use a lot in the last 10 years among journalists; I think for the first time in any serious way. But with the high velocity weapons you're illustrating, it seems like these flak jackets might really just be insufficient.

They slow you down greatly, they weigh you down, you can't run as fast, and it sounds to me like what you're saying is they don't really protect you. Maybe they give you psychological comfort, but not much more. Is it that a bad thing?

PAUL REES: Well, that is definitely a good question. And it raises a few eyebrows everywhere. When we talk about PPE, what we class as personal protective equipment, bulletproof jackets and all that, we're going to cover that down our list. That's one of the priorities of this.

There are a lot of people who believe in wearing flack jackets. A typical one was Martin Bell, I think you all know him from our side of the world. He's now a member of Parliament. He used to wear this white suit all the time. In fact he still wears it in House of Commons at the moment. You can easily recognize him all the time. And for his interviews he hated wearing flak jackets, but the BBC policy was at that time, when you're in a front line, you will wear a flak jacket. So Martin used to open his coat up and just rest it there and close his coat over the top. So it was just up here so you could see he had his jacket on. So once it was all over, he used to just let it drop and walk off. The individual, the person making that assessment, must decide does he want to wear body armor.

If we put everyone in body armor here, you would see how cumbersome it is, how heavy, and how hot to work in. We do that on the course for a few of our scenarios just to give everyone the feeling of it. Everyone's in helmets as well, just to show them what type of jackets they've made up to date, and we'll show you in a minute. I can understand why a lot of people put them back in their boot and forget about them in a car and leave them there. But don't leave them in your boot because if you can't be bothered to wear them, put them down the side of you between you and your car door. If you don't want to take them out on the ground, that is your decision. But when we show all these jackets there, we are talking about different jackets made for different reasons, depending on low velocity to high velocity weapons, and we'll emphasize that as we go through here.

JOHN OWEN: Bill's point about flak jackets is he doesn't think that it's right for him to be wearing one while the person he's interviewing, an ordinary citizen does not have benefit of the flak jacket. He felt it was an unfair relationship. I mean what do you think about that?

PAUL REES: Yes. That definitely creeps into the evaluation of it. I think one of the ways to look at it is this: a serviceman serving in Northern Ireland was patrolling the actual town itself. And as you are all aware, there is that notorious sniper doing his bits and pieces out there. Well, this particular serviceman actually got hit three times in his flak jacket--in the plate in his flak jacket. Aside from the fact that he actually got up twice more after being hit the first time is beyond all of us. Realistically, though, the actual flak jacket took and absorbed high velocity ammunition. He's still alive to talk about it today.

Conversely, there is an individual who is dead today who, again, was wearing one of these high velocity jackets, bearing in mind we've got a plate at the front and we've got a plate at the back, and he actually got hit underneath his arm here. The round went through, underneath his arm, hit the plate, turned 180 degrees, hit the front plate, turned 180 degrees and killed him.

Unfortunately, what I'm trying to say to you all is, yes, it does work. It does work. The individual who got up three times is here alive to talk about it today. The unfortunate aspect is, just by being 30 degrees the wrong way, another individual isn't. If you went out like the knights used to go out in big metal suits, they're hot, cumbersome. They're not going to move very fast, are they? So when it comes into the technology, moving on about this military wear and body armor, in places like you served in Northern Ireland, we used to have two sets of body armor. The one for town used to be a big concrete vest you used to hang on which is just huge big slabs of protection front and rear because of the high velocity weapons people were using. Journalists had to put them on when they came down. But if they went out to the rural areas, into the sticks, they'd wear a light covert, one which didn't have any plates in it so you could move faster. So all these are available to journalists. And we go back to the point of people who can't afford jackets. Who's going to give you a jacket as a freelancer to go out and cover something? Unless you've got one of your own, which I would imagine quite a few people may have nowadays. So there are pros and cons to all body armor. But I guarantee now, hand on heart, that if you personally build a jacket that will stop the highest velocity weapon and bullet that is out nowadays, someone somewhere else is going to purchase and make a bullet that will go through that jacket. It's the nature of the beast.

A PARTICIPANT: This made me think of the firm moral standard John laid out earlier. The question may be for John or other editors because you mentioned that you either send the journalist or you don't. And on the basis of freelancers, you consider it in the same way. But colleagues here are discussing the importance of allowing the journalists to make their own risk assessments on the ground. And doesn't that make the moral choices of the editor more difficult? I had a Serbian journalist who had a difficult time in Kosovo after the conflict. She wished to go, and I knew that I could make certain stipulations, don't do this, don't do that, don't go there, but I pretty much knew she's bloody single-minded and was going to do what she wanted. And thankfully, she came back quite fine.

Similarly, regarding the Martin Bell story, the BBC editors have got a policy. The bloody guy's not doing it. And does that throw the strong moral position that you are suggesting the editor ought to take somewhat out the window because you really have to leave so much of the choices to the journalist on the ground? And because it’s all very, very complicated when you have responsibility for somebody out there.

PAUL REES: Thank you very much. That is another con to wearing body armor. We have lots of reports of people coming on the courses saying the reason why they can't be bothered to take body armor when they get to a checkpoint, is because whoever is in the checkpoint will take the flak jackets out of the boot from against the wall and shoot the pistol or rifles at them to see if they really work. If they've been shot at, they're really useless to you because the ceramic plate is starting to crumble. But I will emphasize that after our experience, there are reduced, injuries or fatalities of people wearing flak jackets. There are a lot of pros for doing it. Yes, they are cumbersome, hot, and we agree with all that. So it again goes back to the individual's decision on the ground like all of this assessment stuff.

A PARTICIPANT: In terms of flak jackets and bulletproof vests, I remember there was a debate we had about 10, 11 years ago in El Salvador where some people had access to bulletproof vests that were police issue that could stop up to a .357 Magnum. And the question is if that was all you had, is it worth wearing, because some people seemed to think that a high velocity round would go through the vest and the fibers then could complicate your injury and you're better off without it. And I wonder what you would think about that.

PAUL REES: That is a very good question. That is another con to the wearing of flak jackets, because if you're talking first aid, which is next on our list, a lot of people do not die from bullet wounds because sometimes it goes in and out and you never see it again.

What John mentioned there about it going spinning around in your body, well, unfortunately can happen. But then you're talking about the fibers entering and the ceramic plate entering. If the plate is good enough, it won't let that round through.

I won't mention the media company, but they brought out a new jacket and it was really good. The plate that they issued with this jacket was that big (indicating) over the heart. They've been watching too many war movies. Snipers do not look to kill through the heart. They will go for the biggest target area. And where is that? Your torso, unless you're flat on the ground. So the bigger the plate in the front, the more you're reducing the risk to you, because a lot of times you're not going to see these people who are firing at you.

But when it comes on to jackets and fragmentations, then no jacket- and I emphasize no jacket- is bulletproof. We have companies in U.K. who will say ours is. Well, bring it down then. And you can't get a better audience than a lot of journalists who want to criticize someone.

But we have found one plate at the moment- we don't sell it, I don't even know who makes it-- but it's provided with this jacket that the BBC buy in now. Our TV people are buying these jackets now. And this plate has proven time and time again. Over the last year, we fired on the range at these plates once every month, and this bullet has never gone through this plate at the same range. But with the other plates that have been issued from other numerous armored companies, it goes through every time.

Now, we're not saying that you wear this jacket and plate. Now that round hits you, it's going to do you damage even if the plate stops that round. It's still going to break your rib. It's still going to knock you back a bit, make you totally out of breath. And you'll probably have injuries, but you're still alive to think, act, plan, and reduce the risk and move away from that danger area at that time. So, again, I do emphasize with John, they do work. But if you're in the wrong place, wrong time, and that bullet's got your name on it, unfortunately it doesn't matter what protection you're wearing, it's just nature.

A PARTICIPANT: I just wanted to jump in with one quick point for the editors in this audience, that it's worth going the extra mile if you decide to give your reporters body armor to get body armor that is designed for women if you have women on correspondence. I wore a man's vest throughout the Bosnian War. It had a crotch protector, which didn't do me a lot of good, but it also sank down to about here. And so because it was so big, most of my heart was actually exposed. And the tailor finally did shorten it for me, but it really is very uncomfortable. We are shaped a little differently. Very few companies design for women, but one or two do. And by the end of the war, some of us were able to get the special gear. It makes your life a lot easier.

PAUL REES: Thank you. That's a very, very valid point. We hire body armor out to people. It's like the civil riots we had lately, just last Monday in London. We had to send eight body armors up to BBC Leeds who were going to cover their riots and two of those jackets were for women. But they haven't designed a plate, a proper plate, yet for women's body armor, unfortunately.

A PARTICIPANT: Another point with flak jackets. Flak jackets are very heavy, helmets are very heavy. I can't run around all day wearing a flak jacket and a helmet. A cameraman can't. So I think the policy of the BBC, editors insisting that your staff wear flak jackets, is really not very smart. You know, I think sending them on a course like this, and I've done this course, and it is incredibly valuable, and giving them the ability to assess the risks and decide what to do for themselves is actually the smart thing to do.

PAUL REES: We'll end on that PPE point because we're going to show some PPE jackets in a minute after the first aid. But I agree. It is down to the individual. It is down to the individual on the ground.

A PARTICIPANT: I liked what you said about using the different types of flak jacket for different situations. My tendency is to wear a jacket. If I know I'm going to be in a situation that's really serious or I'm driving in a car and there's potential snipers, then I would wear a flak jacket that has the metal plates. But if I'm in a situation that is maybe lower risk and I'm going to have to be moving around a lot, weighing that out, do I need that mobility versus the extra protection. And so there are lternatives.

PAUL REES: There definitely are alternatives. There are what we class as covert vests and overt vests. Covert ones you can wear under a suit, just like probably the President's men over there when he goes out on patrol. They all wear all this. Some suits are made of light kevlar so it's not noticeable.

So there are things on the market. We're not saying that everyone walks around in a jacket or hat, fully armored. There are jackets around for the different types of work you're doing. There are instances people take a full set of body armor and take the plates out until the risks get higher or raise. But do you know when that level of risk is going to happen? You don't. So I'm sorry to say, this is a decision of the person on the ground itself.

The next thing we're going to talk about is emergency first aid. Now, emergency first aid is of paramount importance. For all of this risk assessment training, you can take a pinch of salt, but the first aid you can't, because it can happen any time.

Quick story before we talk into this. There's a guy coming back from Sarajevo along Sarajevo Road. He's coming home after months out playing around with cameras. What happened was the driver who was driving him was run off the road by a local driver. His car ended up in a ditch. He was asleep at the time in the back. He woke up very briefly. His leg was hanging off, unfortunately. Arterial bleeding. The driver, one, he was totally shocked. Two, he didn't know any first aid whatsoever. Three, he didn't know where the safe route was. That disorientated through adrenaline shock. There's no lights on at night because of the curfew and all of this sort of thing. Unfortunately, the guy died. And the driver lived through that. All he was was a rigger and a driver. He lived through that saying why didn't they put me on a first aid course? I could have possibly saved that guy's life. He didn't know the basics of first aid. So that's why there's a lot of companies now that are pushing that they will do emergency first aid on the courses- not the I've got a headache, take a tablet, we'll see you in the morning scam. It's more the nitty gritty out in the field, out on the ground where it matters. And we talk about first aid as if something happened to Roy out on the street. And what I'm standing in, whether it be jeans and t-shirt, can I save his life? I hope I can with the training that we've had. You don't have to be a paramedic going around with a big siren and ambulance behind you, because there are no 911 calls in some of these countries. It's what knowledge you have up here and how much practical knowledge you have that helps you keep that person alive.

There's a lot of objectives in first aid, and we're not going to go into all of them here. But we’ll take as an example a clip from an unfortunate incident that happened down one of the main roads in Chechnya or Bosnia I think.

RECORDING: An artillery round has hit the street and has taken out quite a few of the people walking down the street.

PAUL REES: There are numerous casualties here from lower leg injuries and from fragmentation wounds happening to locals, passersby. Unfortunately, wrong place, wrong time. If they had stayed in bed that morning instead of going out shopping, they'd probably still be alive today. That is all the damage that the artillery round made in the road. The rest of it was from fragmentation from the artillery shell and from the concrete or the mock dirt on the road.

That goes on for about a good five minutes prior to that. And the cameraman walks down the street and there's some horrific shots in there and there's someone’s lower leg- we are going to do graphic details- hanging off. There's someone trying to pull someone out from the danger area, and there is arterial bleeding. There are people just shocked, stunned, and not committing themselves to do immediate first aid to save these people. No one's ever asked them to. But it's the wrong place, wrong time again. But how we combat that on our course is that we try- I won't say reenact--is that we use scenarios--the latest instance was a refugee camp. And a child had found a grenade that had been in the ground for ages, and he pulled it out. At that very time, it went off, and the people in the refugee camp--there's about 15 of them--all caught a bit of fragmentation. So that's why we cover this little sketch here of journalists doing first aid on our casualties.

What we have is a series of injuries which we can tape onto our body, and what we're looking for is some sort of control from the journalists coming up and dealing with the situation and their ability to analyze who needs immediate help and who can actually stand off and be helped at a later period whilst the very poorly injured people are dealt with first.

This is all video coverage that we use afterwards to give them an appreciation of what they've done and how well they've done it, and at the same time to give them the opportunity to see themselves actually go through the first aid procedures.

A good point on this training is that they've got to act as a team. If they act as an individual, they'll never be able to carry one person out of that situation and still conduct the first aid. Four days of first aid training.

As you see, we've showed them here how to make improvised stretchers which we ensure they make correctly because we're the ones being carried out.

Quick question for you as this finishes off now. If you came across two people, one had the upper arm nearly ripped off and there's blood pouring everywhere, and his colleague was over to the left absolutely silent, who would you treat first? Any guesses?

A PARTICIPANT: The silent one.

PAUL REES: Definitely the silent one. It comes down time and time again on the first aid courses, people always go for the ah, my bloody arm, come and help me. Don't worry about him, he's dead already and all that sort of thing. We play these scenarios out and give the journalist a lot of this. It is the silent ones you treat first. They're the ones that are probably on the way out. That person over there giving it all this mouth, he's all right. He can last for another couple of minutes, whether he's bleeding profusely or not.

So the first aid is a very, very big subject on all our courses, and it is very important to one and all. So that is going back to the first aid here.

What we want to talk about here is mines and boobytraps. Mines and boobytraps are a very, very big problem throughout the world. Now what we don't want to do is emphasize the objectives that we do cover. But on here we cover a lot of different types of mines that people have come across in the past.

Now on these mines, are we interested in what they're called? We're not. We shouldn't be. If you're that close that you can identify that mine, there is something wrong. Now unfortunately there is a chance, there's lots of chances that people will come across a mine that's there, especially the children in Cambodia. They're making skateboards out of these things. I’ve seen them there, it's horrible. But it's too late. So we don't want to say that's PMs, they're the thing made in Russia . Stop. How do I get out of here? Look behind you, try and see where you got into the problem in the first place. Can you retrace your steps? Walk back, just like in the snow if you had steps, in the mud, in the desert, because if there’s one's there, you don't know if there's any others around you. Did you know that you were in that minefield? No, you didn't.

Mines are made of plastic. Not all of them, but a lot of them are. They can stay in the ground for years and years. We have a video here that’s just full of facts and figures on the atrocities of them.

Incident: One guy did go down and saw these mines that are just unearthed very quickly out of the mud track. They have been there for years. But he couldn't recognize anything else. It just didn't seem right. And what it was was an old British mine, what we call an LC mine, and I'll show you if we can bang it up quickly. See that little thing in the middle, there is a little LC mine. That will blow your foot off without a doubt. But it wasn't open like that. See that leaf just above it there, if I move that leaf over the top of it, how many people would see that? You wouldn't.

Let's go down to this one here about boobytraps. There are still lots of countries that play around with boobytraps. Does anyone see something out of order in that picture?

A PARTICIPANT: Trip wire.

PAUL REES: Some trip wires. Anything else? What about here? Do you see the difference in color? That is the shaft head of a hand grenade. There's pineapple bits of a British L2 hand grenade, that's attached to a wire that's attached to a tree between a trap. And part of the observation stance where people go down during the day on our course, will they see that boobytrap? No, they won't. Will you see the piano wire that's attached to it to pull the pin out before it's too late? No, you won't. It's all to do with observation, awareness.

There are a lot of cases unfortunately where you will not be able to reduce the risk to journalists because it's totally out of your control. And because of the technology of the areas you go into and the evil thoughts of the people who are banging these out and putting your people at risk.

Talking about mines and boobytraps here -- I'm trying to cover as much as possible before we talk about hostage abduction. Now hostage abduction, we cover a lot of. There's a lot of objectives that we do cover on this, and unfortunately it is happening time and time again. We had the nice thing of ABC from USA come across the other time and they wanted to film a documentary.

You will never know where it's going to hit you, and that's what we're trying to make people more aware of.

RECORDING: I didn't know when it was going to hit me. When it did it happened in an instant. A car darted in front of us blocking our path. A gunman shot my driver. Four masked men yanked me out of the car, dragged me to the ground, blindfolded me, and hauled me into the back of a waiting van.

MR. HATTY: It's designed to give them an experience of that sort of thing to learn what happens to their mind, what happens to their body, and how to cope with the stress of the situation and keep thinking.

RECORDING: That's an important lesson as I discovered. It all unfolded so quickly. I had no time to react.

PAUL REES: On this hostage thing, everyone unfortunately has to go through this on our course. It's not because we're being a pain. People have requested it for so many months and years now. Big media clients who send their people down say, yes, we definitely want that. So they go through this. Don't tell anybody, the cat will be out of the bag. But people go through it just to see what their own body goes through. In our old job we did a lot of this training. We never got captured, thank God, but we went through training. And the adrenaline and what goes on in the physical part of your body and mentally, it's just totally draining. It will tire you out, and we've been playing. So if this happened in reality, our heart goes out to anyone who's ever been in that or detained, because shock treatment with adrenaline flowing, you don't know what's going to happen. You don't know if they're going to kill you. You don't know what's going to happen around the corner. You're going to get beaten up, the rest of it.

We have two sketches that we do on our course. One is a professional group would abduct someone. And the other scenario we do is kind of a guerilla scenario where everyone is shouting, pointing weapons at you, prodding you and all the rest of it, because in Southeast Asia that's what was happening. You didn't know from one side or another if you were going to get killed or beaten up or whatever.

So those are the types of scenarios that we did to cover abduction. But the abduction normally goes on for two hours, with a debriefing. It's an open forum and the questions that you get from the audience are what if this happens and what if that happens, how can you reduce this, how can you control your breathing, what if you see this, and it just goes on and on and on. The big ifs.

John just came up there and asked me to talk very quickly about this woman called Shampsa Paybuck who worked for BBC World Service. She went back to Somalia after doing the course. About three months later she was abducted with her uncle and a family between two towns. She was walking like everybody else down the lane to get to the other town. There were quite a few people around. In fact, they came up and said "Are you Shampsa?" She says "What is it?" She had a camera, handbag, and a notebook and all the rest. they said "You come with us." They dragged her by her hair. And her uncle and family were saying no, no, don't do that, leave her alone. And they were just pushed and shoved and hit with the rifle butts. The uncle fell to the ground, still got up trying to protect Shampsa.

Shampsa was taken down to the water's edge and she had a plastic bag put over her head, and not a nice clean bag like we give them all washed daily and it smells lovely. It's more to the point of a plastic bag where she's going to restrict your breathing anyway. So she's on her knees on the bank of the river. Her uncle now is still screaming. What happens to him? He gets beaten up again. The other locals are all around, they're just watching. They don't want to get involved. Her sister comes up, "leave her alone." She gets beaten. All Shampsa can hear in her head here is from these people shouting well, let's rape her. No, let's just murder her here. Why? Because she wrote a report about what was happening in that local vicinity, and she was targeted by that group.

So this was all going on and she just tried to keep calm, control her breathing. What we tried to teach her on the course was about staying calm, don't do anything to antagonize your captors, think about options. Just play it by the book. So lo and behold, they were arguing and arguing, let's kill her now. Let's rape her and all this sort of thing. She just hated it every minute. She lasted for an hour and a quarter, and she went through the horrible nitty-gritty that happened to her, what she was thinking about whether she will ever see her family again and all this.

Lo and behold, the last statement she heard was something like we've got to let her go. Let's give her her equipment back. So the equipment came back, and she knew that she had a camera in that bag, all of her money, notebook, personal possessions, the lot. Her bag was empty. Before that, they took the bag off her head. Do you know what she said to herself? As soon as that bag comes off my head, if and when, I'm going to look at these--excuse my language--bastards and I'm going to put a Centurion instructor's head on each one of them as a friendly head to get her through that next shock instant. If she saw a rifle pointing at her, she said she'd probably freak out.

So when they took her out, she saw John's head and his brother and that's how she got through it. Now, she has made it through that, she says, thanks to training. Whether it's our training or somebody else's training, it doesn't matter, but the vital clues of how to handle a situation like that managed to get her through it. She just kept calm. If she would have antagonized them, something could have happened desperately for her personal safety. So it worked for her.

JOHN: I think the highlight on that is the fact that the fact the people who had abducted her were Somalis themselves. So she, therefore, first and foremost, knew the language. If it were somebody else, somebody else's language, not knowing exactly what was going to happen to her, maybe that would have thrown things into confusion. At the same time because she did know, maybe that would have added dimensions to the problem.

What she did actually say, because she actually had the decency to come back on one of our courses afterwards and go through the actual hour and a quarter, she was actually held captive talking for that hour and a quarter. She actually turned around and said afterwards that the overriding thing that kept her alive is the fact that she had some sort of training. And she would have possibly reacted in a different way if she hadn't had some sort of training and awareness training that goes with it. Whether or not that speaks volumes or not, I'm not quite sure, but at the end of the day she's alive to talk about the situation.

PAUL REES: Thanks. So we're going to just end up here with that. What we're trying to say here, does the training really work? Well, here are just a very few quick clips to show you.

RECORDING: Big organizations like the BBC are determined to minimize the risks as far as possible. All staff who work in hostile environments are now routinely sent on courses like this one. The training doesn't come cheap, but if it saves one life, it's worth it.

Has it saved lives? It has saved lives, indeed, and obviously, we're starting to see some of the benefits now of people coming back and reporting in certain instances. And one in particular sticks in my mind of a cameraman who went down a track in Cambodia a couple of years ago and spotted a mine indicator that the Khmer Rouge had left. And that was very significant because he managed to actually stop the convoy and turn the convoy around before they hit an anti-tank mine.

I, for example, was ambushed by the IRA some years ago, and I did completely the wrong thing, I now know. And I was extremely lucky to survive. I was basically warned against going down a certain road. I went ahead. I was hailed down by some masked men who were clearly armed, and I didn't stop. And I was extremely lucky to escape with my life.

RECORDING: Paranoia, perhaps. But in the past 10 years, hundreds of journalists and tourists have been killed, often through ignorance.

Another hostile situation, caught in crossfire or being in the wrong place at the wrong time. What to do? Don't run and panic, get below the line of fire. And if you are kidnapped, don't be confrontational. Stay calm. BBC news producer Shampsa Paybuck used those techniques and saved her life when recently abducted by rebels in Somalia. So all in all, a memorable course?

PAUL REES: We are looking to send anyone who wants further information about all of this the CD itself. We haven't had time to cover all the videos, all the slides. The CD will be just like that so you can watch it at home so you can study it if you want some more graphic details. There are more graphic videos in there if you wish to look at it.

Roy, thank you very much.

ROY GUTMAN: Thank you very much for that riveting presentation. As a reporter, I think if I were an editor I might think twice about sending anybody into any zone after having seen that. But in fact, what we were deliberately trying to do in having this session and the previous one was to point out some of the worst situations you can be in, and then the ways to moderate or reduce the risk. And I think that this course is definitely a smart thing to do.

I'm only sorry we didn't see today one thing I saw when I attended the Centurion course, which were the various light weapons and just showing in every case where the safety was and how you would know when the safety was engaged or when it was not. It was a rather simple thing, but different forces use different weapons. And if you know that one little thing, you'll know whether you're really in danger at that moment or not. And this was a three-hour session where they went through different weapon systems just to familiarize yourself with them. And it's amazing how so many of us have covered things and have never actually gotten that education and really could use it. But I think that was a terrific presentation. I really appreciate it.

John Owen, Bio.
Director, European Center, The Freedom Forum

Paul Rees,Bio.
Managing Director, Centurion Risk Assessment Services

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