Army Bullies Blogger, Invades YouTube

One step forward, two steps back, in the U.S. military's information war.

For years, the Pentagon has come under harsh criticism its brain-dead approach to handling the media, broadly defined. From clamping down on bloggers to chucking out embedded reporters to banning digital cameras to quaking in fear of web developments, the military's press operators seemed to miss no opportunity to shoot themselves in the collective foot, repeatedly. All this, while insurgents trained potential terrorists online, advertised their martial prowess on YouTube, even sold t-shirts over the 'net.

But recently, things have begun to change. The Defense Department's Pentagon Channel started posting YouTube-esque videos. Bloggers have been called into more and more conference calls with senior leaders in Iraq and Afghanistan. Multi-National Force-Iraq set up its own YouTube channel.

Now, the Army has set up shop on content-sharing sites like Flickr, del.icio.us, and YouTube. The material is pretty awful -- like the stilted, propaganda-like reports, straight from the Armed Forces Network. It's a start, though.

But the military is a huge organization. And not everybody gets with the program, at an equal pace. A general is threatening to boot Michael Yon, the special-forces-soldier- turned-milbogger-supreme, out of Iraq -- again.

The first time the Army threatened to kick me out was in late 2005, just after I published a dispatch called "Gates of Fire." ...In the events described in that dispatch, I broke some rules by, for instance, firing a weapon during combat when some of our soldiers were fighting fairly close quarters and one was wounded and still under enemy fire. That’s right. I'm not sure what message the senior level public affairs people thought that would convey had they succeeded, (which they didn’t) but it was clear to me what they valued most. They want the press on a short leash, even at the expense of the life of a soldier.

The general, Vincent K. Brooks, doesn't seem to have succeeded in getting Yon out of the country. But he's doing his damnedest to make Yon's job as difficult as possible.

*...this eviction notice I received last week, ostensibly because of the surge, but in fact I was told the order came from Brigadier General Vincent K. Brooks, and there were still trailers available. General Brooks used to be the
Chief of the entire Public Affairs. The man who would stand up there and give all those fancy CENTCOM briefings.(Which make for interesting reading.) Now his big office is just down the road... *

*My new work space *[that's Yon's photo of it, above] has no internet capability, no surface for work, not to mention the obvious problem with secure storage for the heavy pile of incredibly expensive gear needed to cover this war the way it should be covered. Can’t run a mission AND keep an eye on it, and can’t do the work the way it needs to be done without running missions to see and hear it first hand.

(High five: TF, Glenn)