See Laura, CJR, Wired, FAS.
The main focus is on the fact that the media are apparently a non-traditional threat and ought be quashed. CJR:
"It looks like it's official: the United States Army thinks that American reporters are a threat to national security. Thanks to some great sleuthing by Wired's "Danger Room" blogger Noah Shachtman, the Army's new operational security guidelines (OPSEC) hit the Web in a big way yesterday, and the implications they have for reporters -- who are grouped in with drug cartels and Al Qaeda as security threats to be beaten back -- are staggering.At issue, in the main, is this slide:
Make no mistake, this is a very big deal, and every American citizen, not just reporters and soldiers, needs to understand the implications of the Army's strict new policy, because it directly affects how citizens receive information about their armed forces: information that it has every right to get.
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Under these guidelines, reporters digging for information about military projects, funding requests, new acquisition strategies, or other military-related stories could be blown in by an antsy DoD worker or soldier who doesn't like the tone of questioning. That's a pretty dangerous road to begin to travel for any country, and for the U.S. it's simply unacceptable. We have no problem with the Army, or the Pentagon, keeping various things secret. In fact, we expect them to. But a reporter's job is to dig for truth, and when the military begins throwing up roadblocks like these, everyone loses.
As a creepy little addendum to this whole sorry affair, we'll quote what Major Ray Ceralde, the author of the new rules, told Shachtman in an interview yesterday: "A person doesn't have to be in the military or government to support OPSEC...As a Nation, we are in this fight together, and all Americans are encouraged to practice OPSEC."
In other words, it's open season on curious reporters."
I'm not as alarmed as everyone else (at least not by looking at the slideshow (pdf)) - the person who 'developed' the slide pack obviously has no idea what they are doing. (the stuff in the matrix doesn't even exist in the source document (pdf))
Nope - My major concern is how sloppy the military is at communicating ideas. The slideshow is a work of 'art' (pdf). Try this slide for example:
Hmmm. Effective!For starters - they got their USMIL casualty figures from... icasualties.org. The figures are from October 2004.
The bottom line on that slide reads:
"Adaptive, cunning, and learning Adversary ... unlike most previous experiences"
3 comments:
one of the very disturbing things to keep in mind about this latest very disturbing development, is that, like many of the things uranus cited in the previous post, they will very likely still be in place when the next president takes office... my preference, of course, would be to have them rolled back by then but i think that isn't likely, at least in all the vast number of instances that the bushco cabal has managed to put in place... to me, that puts the next election in a much different light and the candidates under a much more intense microscope...
The statement "reporters...could be blown in..." is real interesting. Sure enough, news reporting for Bush's wars is a complete about-face, a very radical departure, from the past. The military used to allow reporters in the field. They were respected and protected. The military was proud to do that, even in Vietnam, where the things reporters had to tell couldn't have painted the military in a more negative way. All that has changed with Bush. I believe there is an order to shoot as many reporters as possible, even though no such thing has been told. The fact more reporters have died in Iraq than any war in history as a yearly average tells you all you need to know.
Isn't it odd Bush thinks everything that happens in Washington or with the military must be kept secret, but everything you and I do must be known? That, too, is a radical departure.
Prof - I propse that we have National Revocation Day in Januray 09 - and get rid of all the nonsense legislation passed in the last 7 years
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