A Stitch in Haste

Two chilling reports of how the War on Terror clashes with freedom of thought:

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ITEM: The U.S. Army channels Sonny Corleone —

The U.S. military asserted that an American soldier was justified in erasing journalists’ footage of the aftermath of a suicide bombing and shooting in Afghanistan last week, saying publication could have compromised a military investigation and led to false public conclusions.
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“Investigative integrity is one circumstance when civil and military authorities will reluctantly exercise the right to control what a journalist is permitted to document,” Col. Victor Petrenko, chief of staff to the top U.S. commander in eastern Afghanistan, said in a letter Friday.

He added that photographs or video taken by “untrained people” might “capture visual details that are not as they originally were.”

MY TAKE: I’ve heard of the camera adding ten pounds, but not ten casualties.

It’s quite simple really. Someone equipped with a video camera, but not with Photoshop, cannot distort an image, especially from a “hot zone,” so radically as to warrant express censorship in the name of “investigative integrity.” Dead is dead; blown up is blown up. And censorship is censorship.

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ITEM: Meanwhile, back on the home front, a Member of Congress channels Tony Soprano —

Congressman Bill Shuster (R-PA-09), a member of the House Anti-Terrorism Caucus, introduced legislation urging owners of video-trading websites like You Tube [sic] to take action to remove jihadi propaganda videos.
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Shuster’s legislation would express Congress’ desire to see the corporate owners of video-sharing website [sic] take action to remove jihadi videos from their sites. Additionally, the legislation encourages website owners to cooperate with law enforcement if their sites [sic] users are found to participate in terrorism.

MY TAKE: “Mighty nice YouTube you have here. Pity if something were to happen to it.”

The retort that Shuster’s bill is a non-binding resolution misses the point. The underlying rationale — that ideas can be so dangerous as to warrant suppression, is itself the only idea worthy of suppression. Mere words do not kill. Mere words do not destroy. And to the extent that words are powerful, ours are more powerful than the Islamofascists’ could ever be. You fight ideas with better ideas, not with a censor’s rules — or even his “expressions of desire.”

The terrorists want to destroy our way of life — including freedom of thought. With the help of censorship advocates such as Representative Shuster, they are succeeding.

[Sidebar for Representative Shuster: Please hire a copy editor. Your repeated grammatical errors are irritating.]

(Via Reason Magazine.)