Denmark is not a country I have visited. It’s a blink-and-you-miss-it peninsula of a country as you fly into northern Europe. And like a bunch of countries participating in the Afghanistan military effort, it has special forces units operating there.

One of the participants in that effort, a man named Thomas Rathsack, has just written a book called Commando – War with the Elite. The Danish military doesn’t like it, and has complained he gives away too much information about operational methods. Defence Minister Tim Sloth Jorgensen wrote Danish newspaper editors this week asking them not to publish or report on any more excerpts from it. And the Danish military began seeking a court injunction to enforce this.

The result? The left-wing paper Politiken devoted a whole issue yesterday to reproducing the entire text of Rathsack’s book. It’s printed in Danish, of course, but an account of the background of the issue is in the English edition of the paper at http://politiken.dk/newsinenglish/article788869.ece

I’d forgotten how important newspapers could be. North American media now are so homogenised and tame, they are losing readers by the boatload every month. Obviously, there’s still a risk-taking mentality around in print media from other places. Rathsack’s book apparently spills the goods on black ops in conflicts in which Danes didn’t know they had troops involved. It is also, presumably, embarrassing to the larger military powers embroiled in the Afghanistan conflict.

So far, I’ve seen nothing about this in other English-language media. It will be interesting to see if the ramifications mean the story is picked up elsewhere. If nothing else, it’s encouraging to see somebody defying the official line on what people are supposed to know about the dubious things being done in far away places.