The real embedded reporters we need are already amongst us down the squad level. We know we haven't got good press since OIF-I. Part of this is politics, part of it is the reporters don't want to leave the hotel and rely on (unreliable) local stringers, some also feel they lose "objectivity" when they embed with the troops. Worst of all Big Army seems to have developed an aversion of late, as was reported in the Weekly Standard recently (at the time only seven embeds active in Iraq). Al Qaida on the other hand has full reporting down to the cell level (helps to have US/UK educated marketing majors, not to mention all those helpful tips from Al-Jazzeera).

We already have new-media savvy, morally unassailable and unabashedly patriotic embeds with public credibility at every level, and the Army needs to harness them and their free speech and get out of their way.

It's our soldiers. Every other public institution in the free world has had to come to grips with free speech and how the new technology makes everyone a part of the media; Big Army does as well. Don't worry, the ghost of Von Steuben won't frown. He understood his times.

If the Nazis had not invaded Stalin's Russia, and had maintained their mutual assistance and friendship agreement, the American press during WWII would have been as anti-war and anti-American as they were in Vietnam and as they now are in the Iraq mess.

The liberal media always takes their cues from the left wing and when the Soviet Union set the left-wing agenda, the media swallowed hook, line and sinker that agenda. Liberals have always had a soft spot within their hearts for all sorts of socialist and communist policy drivel, accepting without question all their propaganda. Witness the media's infatuation and lack of criticism of Castro's Cuba; extolling Cuba's free medical care and great education while minimizing—or omitting—the negatives of Cuba.

The lesson here is that when the US goes to war, all reporting must be censored and when reporters and newspapers divulge sensitive information they must be arrested and placed on trial. The other lesson is that never again should the US go to war without a formal declaration of war and the attendant emergency powers provided to the government to insure that home-grown subversives are arrested and tried.

When I was preparing a speech this summer which I delivered at Fort Leavenworth on Afghanistan, I ran across an interesting statistic which supports Mr. Wilson's article. I did two Nexis searches of the New York Times database. In one, I found that, through August 1 of this year, there had been 1503 articles on the humiliation of the prisoner at Abu Ghraib by US troops. Then I tried to find how often the Times had referred to Saddam's mass murders by searching for references to the numerous killing fields, such as Mahawil and Hatra. I found a total of seven stories. Given the global reach of the American media, it is not surprising that people tend to have forgotten why we're there. Granted, the humiliation of Saddam's genocidaires is a horrendous crime which deserves press coverage, but is it really over 200 times more horrible than the mass murder these monsters perpetuated?