The military giveth and the military taketh away

An interesting trend from today's headlines:

U.S. Military Shows Its Side of Iraq War on YouTube

In one video, a U.S. soldier blasts insurgent gunmen with a heavy sniper rifle as the room fills with smoke. In another, members of an Iraqi family throw their arms around soldiers, weeping and rejoicing, after learning that their kidnapped relative has been freed.

The U.S. military has opened a new front in the Iraq war: cyberspace.

Moving into a realm long dominated by Islamic militants, the military has launched its own YouTube channel offering what it calls a boots-on-the-ground perspective of the conflict. The move recognizes that the Internet is becoming a key battleground for public opinion at a time when domestic support for the war is dwindling.

..."This effort was not designed to combat what ends up on extremist websites," said Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, a spokesman for the U.S. military in Iraq. "But we understand that it is a battle space in which we have not been active, and this is a media we can use to get our story told."

vs.

Army Squeezes Soldier Blogs, Maybe to Death

The U.S. Army has ordered soldiers to stop posting to blogs or sending personal e-mail messages, without first clearing the content with a superior officer, Wired News has learned. The directive, issued April 19, is the sharpest restriction on troops' online activities since the start of the Iraq war. And it could mean the end of military blogs, observers say.

...The new rules (.pdf) obtained by Wired News require a commander be consulted before every blog update.

"This is the final nail in the coffin for combat blogging," said retired paratrooper Matthew Burden, editor of The Blog of War anthology. "No more military bloggers writing about their experiences in the combat zone. This is the best PR the military has -- it's most honest voice out of the war zone. And it's being silenced."

Now call me crazy, but I get the feeling that a soldier who wants to blog, e-mail, or otherwise opine about how the Iraq war is making progress and that President Bush is the greatest military leader since Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Rasputin, and Attila the Hun wouldn't have any problems getting clearance to do so -- whereas a soldier who wants to give the unsanitized truth asnd critize the Bush Administration will promptly get slapped down and tossed in the brig.