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Tuesday, May 8, 2007

Loose Lips Sink Humvees

Interesting article entitled "Army Squeezes Soldier Blogs, Maybe to Death":

http://www.wired.com/politics/onlinerights/news/2007/05/army_bloggers

In case you are disinclined to wade through the whole thing, the Cliff's Notes version is that the United States Army will no longer allow soldiers to blog or send personal e-mail without first having the content cleared by a superior officer.

Sound feasible to you? Me neither.

There are a couple of possible but ultimately untrue conclusions to be drawn from this new policy. Let's call the first the "Bush Paradigm," which is the explanation the Army puts forth, that this is a matter of national security. This explanation is not only possible, but plausible. Unfortunately, to believe it is to have voted for Bush in 2004, to not be bothered by the Patriot Act, to doggedly believe both Fox News and my blog, because surely somebody would stop us if we were not strictly factual wouldn't they? It might be perfectly reasonable for the Army to take a proactive stance recognizing the safety risk to our soldiers from an apparently innocent note in a blog that gave away what, I'm not sure. See, by and large, soldiers don't know that much, and what they do know they rarely have time to blog or e-mail before implementing. This isn't the nineteenth century. Strategies are not decided months in advance and executed painstakingly on foot, communicated by horse messenger.

The other untrue conclusion is for the more ACLU-inclined. This is not censorship. Well, it is censorship, but on a level that Americans have already accepted. There are almost no jobs left in America without some kind of a policy against personal e-mail at work. Blogging about work is a well-documented legal disaster. The Army is a bit specialized because if a soldier happens to be deployed, when exactly is he or she not at work and what exactly goes on in their lives that is not, strictly speaking, work?

The new Army policy is damage control. I am guessing that it would be easier to list times and places for your upcoming weekend plans (which could potentially be a security problem) than it would be to criticize the Bush administration, which would, everybody say it along with me, send a clear message to the terrorists that they have won and the United States is not strong. I apologize for belaboring this point as it was probably self-evident.

For those of you unfamiliar with our present movie project, my partner Angela Gant and I wrote a screenplay based on the experiences of a college friend who quit his six-figure job after 9/11 to join the Army. He deployed to Iraq in 2004 with a platoon filled with outsized characters (many of whom I have had the pleasure of meeting). Every man returned alive, and the platoon was one of the most highly decorated from this war. We are also helping to polish this friend"s book, which already has several publishing offers on the table. We have engaged the Army on both fronts seeking approval for these projects.

Where movies are concerned, we do not need Army approval. We can do whatever we want; however, with Army approval you can use actual Army equipment, use Army extras, shoot the movie on an active Army base, have Army support marketing the movie, so on and so forth. At first blush, better to do it with them than without them. Of course, everything they grant comes with the caveat that you only might be able to use it. While this is perfectly reasonable from the Army perspective (not being in the movie business, they might find with little or no warning that they want to do something else with the stuff on any given day, week, month"), it sounds like a disaster for making a movie. I have no idea how frequently they actually pull equipment or bodies or your set in the middle of filming, but it would really only take once.

Just the phrase "Army Approval" should chill anyone who has ever jumped through hoops for a government permit of any kind. The Army is really, really big. Who exactly gives approval? Actually, the answer seems to be everyone. Every single person in the United States Army has to like your script for it to government cooperation. So if you see any service men or women, please take just a second to talk up our project. Actually, save your breath. We have already peaceably proceeded without the Army. We finally got to a guy who did not like our script (after many guys who did) and demanded some changes.

Ahem. Some changes.

Now, the script he got is our second draft and likely to undergo significant voluntary changes before it is actually shot. So we're relatively open. However, the Cliff"s Notes version of this little interaction was "take out all the plot points and characters and replace them with action sequences." By the way, since I know you are wondering, government approval also requires that you assume the expense for a couple of Army officers (who, I kid you not, are stationed in Los Angeles entirely for the purpose of doing this) to oversee the project to keep you from reverting to the pre-approval version of the script. We could not see the point in gutting our movie and turning it into a two-hour equipment demonstration for the eight magic beans the Army offered with two dozen caveats.

My lawyer Heather, who is a good sort of person despite her unfortunate career choice, called my attention to the article in question and has said that the Army is displeased with the latitude they granted for the HBO documentary Baghdad ER, and that this combined with poor public opinion about the war has made them suddenly very image-conscious.

After all this, do I buy that the new Army policy is for national security? Do you

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