PERMISSION TO SPEAK

Suppressing the truth? Mission accomplished.

Wired is reporting that soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan have been ordered to stop posting to blogs or sending email messages without first getting approval from a superior.

This is infuriating on multiple levels.

For starters, the soldiers' reports from the frontlines have provided the only honest, unfiltered assessment of the reality of our war, in contrast to Senator McCain's rosy assessment of our so-called success in Iraq.

Moreover, I don't believe for a second that the army is really concerned about protecting military secrets. (Does anybody know of any soldier blogs that revealed sensitive information or otherwise damaged national interests?)

With soldiers turning on the Bush Administration -- four years later and still no protective armor, can you blame them? -- silencing them is the White House's only hope for winning the War on Bad PR.

What really chaps my civilian hide is that the regulations even apply to civilians working for the military, Army contractors, and soldiers' families (!), according to the Wired article.

We already deny our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan proper protective equipment. We deny them proper health care when they return to America. When they die, we don't even honor them with our flags at half mast.

And now, we're denying their constitutional right to freedom of speech.

This is just a dumb decision that can't be good for a morale that is already so depressed into the fertile crescent that new craters are being formed for the next Saddam Hussein to hide in.

On a related note, I wish I could poll our troops in Iraq and ask them to rank the following in order of likelihood of lowering troop morale:

A. The army removes your First Amendment rights.

B. The Secretary of Defense extends your tour of duty.

C. You learn that veterans' hospitals are delivering inadequate health care and mental health care to soldiers who make it back home alive.

D. Your President still can't articulate an exit strategy.

E. An openly gay soldier volunteers for duty and fights alongside you.

I'm guessing that even the most homophobic soldiers would rank E last.

But now that their blogs are effectively being shut down, we'll never know.

--Junichi