As Austin Bay notes here, Michael Yon and Bill Roggio are the crème de la crème of Iraq war bloggers. I frequently link to both in my posts on the war.
Now the Army is (again) telling Yon, who two years ago broke a cardinal rule of journalism and pissed off the brass by picking up a rifle to save the life of a trooper, that he is not welcome.
Michael explains:
A general emailed in the past 24 hours threatening to kick me out. The first time the Army threatened to kick me out was in late 2005, just after I published a dispatch called “Gates of Fire.� Some of the senior level public affairs people who’d been upset by “Proximity Delays� were looking ever since for a reason to kick me out and they wanted to use “Gates of Fire� as a catapult. 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.
Don’t get me wrong. This is a cardinal rule that should have been broken under the circumstances in which Michael found himself and I would have done the same thing.
I know first hand that the entire Pentagon public-relations apparatus — from the defense secretary’s office on down to the lowly uniformed flack in the field — is designed to relentlessly push the good news (even if it has to be fabricated), filter out the bad news and, if the bad news cannot be avoided, lie about it.
That should come as no surprise. It’s the nature of the beast. But to exile a terrific journalist and photographer like Michael Yon who has been rather upbeat about the war while not hesitating to call things as he sees them, is wrong.