Dan Froomkin asks in the Washington Post what is the content of the some 60K messages taken down for political reasons from the military's web site?
No Place for Dissent
Remember how President Bush earlier this summer asked Americans to log on to AmericaSupportsYou.mil , a Department of Defense Web site, and register support for the troops?
At the time , I did some word searches and it didn't look to me like the site was posting many - if any - comments that suggested that the soldiers might be victims of bad policy decisions.
There are now more than 60,000 viewable messages - out of a reported 128,000 received - on the site.
I encouraged my colleagues at washingtonpost.com to look into this, and yesterday, Robert MacMillan and Mary Specht reported: "The Defense Department has removed messages containing political commentary from a Web site designed for people to show their support for US forces serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. . . .
"Last month the Wall Street Journal reported that two antiwar messages had disappeared from the site, but at the time the site had no posted policy on political statements."
Now the site has taken down some overtly pro-Bush messages as well, and a policy posted on the site last week now warns that political speech will be barred.
Still unclear: What was the nature of the 60,000-plus messages that never made it to the site in the first place?
Are those messages government documents discoverable via a FOIA request? Even if they are, the problem is that the costs that the military would impose for disclosure expenses would likely be prohibitive to any curious individual.
It doesn't seem likely to me that any commercial media organization is going to pay the frieght to free the speech of all those Americans who have been censored by the military, nor devote the man-hours to searching and disseminating that information.
No, unless there is a grassroots effort to request, pay for, and disseminate those citizen's voices, they will never be heard.