Everyone is buzzing about the new regulations that will be enforced by the Army that require the approval of a superior officer for emails or blog entries written by soldiers stationed in combat zones.
Most conservatives are appalled -- see Michelle Malkin's roundup of opinion. The thinking among conservatives is that such censorship will remove a key source of factual information from the battlefield and thus will prevent fact checking of reporting by the mainstream press. The censorship may also prevent soldiers in the field from expressing their displeasure with Democrat-led congressional leadership.
The Evangelical Outpost's Joe Carter (who served in the Marines) offers a different view -- such censorship is necessary in order to prevent critical information from falling into the hands of an Internet-savvy enemy.
(History buffs will recall that letters sent from the front during WWII often arrived home in the form of photocopies with critical information redacted by military sensors.)
I don't believe that the Army's new policy will shut down milblogs; milbloggers can still receive reports and photos from soldiers returning from Iraq or from official sources within the Pentagon. And we cannot be too careful with regard to al Qaeda and other terrorist outfits. They are very clever and have outwitted our intelligence time and time again.
On the other hand, it has been proved far beyond a shadow of a doubt that the mainstream media's reporting from war zones involving the US or Israel simply cannot be trusted. The oversimplified leftist worldview of the majority of reporters -- "oppressors" (US and Israel) vs. "victims" (Hamas, Hezbollah, Sunni and Shiite militias, or anyone not wearing a military uniform) -- precludes honest reporting because the suffering of the "victims" far outweighs anything good that the "oppressors" accomplish.
The military seeks to prevent US intelligence from falling into the wrong hands. Too bad they can't also keep terrorist propaganda out of our newspapers and off our television screens.
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