Colby Buzzell
The timing of the award is almost as striking as the writing which it honours. A former American machine gunner’s memoir of a year’s tour of duty in Iraq based on his blog has just won a major accolade at precisely the moment when the US military high command is clamping down on blogs among the rank and file.
Colby Buzzell was awarded the £5,000 Lulu Blooker prize for My War: Killing Time in Iraq, which was voted the best book of the year based on a blog. It triumphed over 110 entries from 15 countries.
The paradox of Buzzell’s victory is that it quickly follows the revelation that the Pentagon has introduced new rules restricting blogs among soldiers, fuelling speculation that live and unadorned combat writing from the field such as Buzzell’s may be the last of its kind.
The new rules require all would-be “milbloggers”, as soldier-publishers are called, to submit blog entries to supervising officers before posting them. That turns on its head the existing rules which allowed soldiers to post freely, with the onus on them to register their blogs and to alert officers to any material that might compromise security.
Yesterday the defence department went further and announced it was blocking access “worldwide” to 13 communal websites, including YouTube and MySpace from military computers and networks.
Buzzell’s book has been translated into seven languages. Pentagon policy should be translated into a landfill.
The Brass hates the truth and will never be able to stop it.Dead fish smells no matter how hard they try to hide it.This war was about keeping Iraqs oil off the market and it worked! Lurch and Cheney are just shills for the oil companies.Cheney is a war criminal and Lurch is just a tool.
Our press had a great tradition of wartime journalism. I grew up reading the likes of Ernie Pyle, enjoying the editorial cartoons of Bill Mauldin.
Those days are now as unlikely as any other form of creative, courageous journalism in the land of lapdogs. Maybe we’ll have to look to talent evolving from the world of blogging into for-real journalism.
It won’t be with any help from mass media newspapers, television news-as-entertainment – and pimps as politicians.
The truth is out there … just not in our government.
They want to stop ANYONE from releasing any information about what is going on in Iraq that is not done through its own channels. This way, after the “surge,” they can prop Petraeus up there and say to Congress, “See, there has been progress, now give us all of the money!”
The first 4 posts are all right… Sadly, there will soon be a bunch of right wing lemming posts to inform us that we hate America and we want the terrorists to win.
There is no such thing as freedom of speech in the military..
OPSEC people OPSEC..
How about a post that says maybe there need to be reasonable limits as to how much information about the troops reaches the Internet…and quite effectively also reaches the enemy.
No way am I in the “it empowers them” BS camp, but still…it ain’t helping anyone, either.
Nothing wrong with recording the stories as they happen, but in the middle of a war it just doesn’t make a damn bit of sense to make everything public right away.
“This is a media war. You’d better get on board.”
-from Three Kings, the movie
It stopped being a war when they finished combat operations. Now it is an occupation.