Plunderbund

I first wrote about this here. Now we learn that though your average soldier will not be able to use sites like MySpace and YouTube, the “official” military will be able to. They have yet to answer bandwidth excuses to any satisfaction and this appears to be yet more stifling of the very freedoms these kids are supposedly over there fighting and dying for.

I can fully understand not giving up operationally sensitive information, but telling it like it is from the ground level is not the same as giving up maps and plans to the terrorists. It makes you wonder what they are wanting to hide and why they are so wanting to control the message coming out of Iraq.

So now you won’t get bloggers telling you like it is, you’ll get nice little “Soft Knock” videos from the MFN-Iraq offical YouTube channel. While I don’t mind seeing those, nor learning of the resurgence of scouting in Iraq (something that surprisingly enough dates back to 1921 in the country), I still want to see what soldiers see, hear, and feel about the war.

It’s hard for me to let MNFIraq claim they are a “boots on the ground” channel while they don’t actually let the boots on the ground blog or vlog. Seems a just a wee bit off to me.