UPDATE:

It seems that one of the Army Majors who worked on the restrictive new regulations on blogging and Internet use has begun to back off a bit from their earlier, all-or-nothing stance.

In an interview he gave the AP, "Soldiers Face Punishment Over Blogs," (if my link doesn't go through, you can find it at Truthout.org), Army Major Ray M. Ceralde, said that, well, the soldiers wouldn't have to clear EVERY posting with their commanders.

"Not only is it impractical, but we are trusting the soldiers to protect critical information," he said.

He also said there would be "no effort" to block soldiers from setting up or commenting on blogs, and that e-mail would be excluded because:

"Soldiers have a right to private communications with their families."

Indeed.

Otherwise, they're leaving it up to individual commanders to be more restrictive of combat blogging, as they see fit.

Here's why I find this interesting.

In one of the postings I was reading on this subject, and I can't remember which one now so can't supply a link, I remember reading that the new Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, had started a policy of inviting combat bloggers to participate in conference calls with Pentagon high-ranking officers involved in war-planning.

Hmmm.

Seems like the new guy ain't Rummy, and he kinda liked those guys telling the truth.

So somebody, somewhere, but the kabosh on the Nazi-style effort to control information on the Internet.

I'd kinda like to think it's the guy who handed my son his degree from Texas A&M.

It would be a sort of poetic justice, don't you think?