The Army on any given day is dealing with tens of thousands of untrained photographers, videographers and writers but can’t corral all of them and force them to toe the line.

Who are those untrained people? Why they’re the riflemen, cooks and clerks that make up the Army who were trained to shoot rifles, fry spam and shuffle papers and yet they’re out there shooting digital stills and uploading them to Flickr, recording video to upload on YouTube and blogging on MySpace and the Army can’t get a stranglehold on all of them and prevent them from giving an honest, sometimes gut-wrenching glimpse at life in the mud.

As for controlling the flow of information from these AP reporters in Afghanistan, hey, good job Army. What would have been just another suicide bomb of the day (pardon the cynicism) has been given new legs with the military’s ham-fisted attempts at squelching the Fourth Estate from trying to give the world an objective, third-party view of what’s going on in that region.

People don’t realize that just because you tell your computer/camera/etc. to delete it, it doesn’t mean its gone forever.

There was an explosion between that time and the time the photographer took the picture.