Military Draws Iron Veil Over Combat in Iraq

So today the Pentagon pulled the plug on soldiers posting hand cam shots of combat in Iraq by using free access through Defense Department computers. If soldiers find the cash to shill out, they can continue to upload through private Internet cafes. For as long as they remain open on military bases, one imagines. However, access to such cafes remains limited to the large forward operating bases, the very ones that the new new new new newest strategy seeks to disband, for bases much smaller and Internet-free. American soldiers in Iraq are banned from youtube.com, pandora.com, photobucket.com, myspace.com, live365.com, hi5.com, metacafe.com, mtv.com, ifilm.com, blackplanet.com, stupidvideos.com and filecabi.com.

Officials claim the measure is necessary because even in the fifth year of occupation, the American military's Internet access still sucks, and that it's in no way a massive block of footage that shows that anything in Iraq sucks. Meanwhile, the Defense Department plans to continue to upload it's own footage onto those sites showing more a positive "boots on the ground" perspective.



Stars and Stripes runs the WaPost story as "Pentagon limits troops' web access" at the top of its news cycle, and at the bottom the story "soldiers face punishment over blogs."

"Soldiers will be punished if they publicly reveal sensitive information, such as troop movements, planned raids, travel itineraries of senior leaders, or photographs of casualties, new technology or other material that could compromise their location."

Also running is a news story on a new incentives program to try to get officers to not get the hell out. One imagines there are no plans to throw in free Dells with free wireless access.

Everyone's scrambling to spin the story, but a soldier's perspective cuts the cake. Noted down as horrendous sensationalism are mere lines reporting the measure at all, and the AP gets denounced for hiding all the relevant facts of the story by using the means of actually reporting them. No one believes anything they read in the MSM because of all that liberal bias, so of course the most diabolical way to hide the facts are to actually report them. Then the AP is slammed because there is no possible way to report all the facts in the same sentence at once, and so merely having to report any one fact before any other fact is liberal bias.

Human speech is liberal bias, and it's all the AP's fault. Why don't they teach these things in school eh? Speaking of school, take your average public college, thousands of students in dormitories, and the ability to handle all those social lives and JSTOR at the same time. Ah the wonder of the modern information age.

Perhaps the military's new motto really is "what happens in Iraq, stays in Iraq."



Technorati Tags:
Iraq, internet, war, war on terror, global jihad, troop surge, pentagon, military, youtube