You’d think it would be more difficult to maintain a record of being perfectly wrong about everything, but apparently that distinction is not out of reach. A few weeks ago, in the comments to a mostly unrelated post, JimC assured me that I could swing on over to Iraq, take all the photos I wanted of whatever I wanted, and not face censorship or review. He even quoted serial hack and admitted propagandist Pat Dollard in support of his assertions. The whole thing was more irritating than normal because of the topic — being able to shoot part of the biggest news story of the last several years is something any documentary photographer should want to do — and my idea of what journalism is and isn’t. In short, and quoting The Wire, “if I hear music, I’m gon’ dance.” And forget the 18″ gap between me and my partner.

So imagine the shock (and monocle dropping) that followed this piece on media coverage, and yes, restrictions in Iraq, by San Antonio Express-News reporter Sig Christenson:

Petraeus has refused to rescind a 2006 ground rule requiring photographers to receive the permission of wounded soldiers before running their photos. It is a difficult and often impossible requirement, if only because wounded troops are whisked to hospitals far from the photographers and the battlefields they were on.

This policy is officially based on the premise that a wounded soldier’s privacy ought not to be compromised by embedded media. But the problem here is the assumption that soldiers have privacy rights in a firefight. Battlefields, like the street, are public places.

Or they have been until now. The new regulation deviates from a less restrictive rule used during the invasion. That rule guaranteed families wouldn’t see the faces of their wounded relatives before getting word from the government.

What the new rule does is prevent Americans from seeing the reality of war. I believe that is what it is designed to do, although I am sure Petraeus would beg to differ. But couple it with the new Iraqi effort to suppress negative images by forbidding photography for the first hour after a bombing, and the picture we get from Iraq is underexposed and out of focus.

Blurred images of the Iraq war, like fuzzy math, suit both governments just fine. It’s harder to find a Katrina Moment in this development, for the rule hampering the work of embedded photographers is so obscure that even most journalists aren’t aware of it. But it will have a substantial, if subtle, impact. Seeing fewer graphic images makes it harder for photojournalists to accurately convey the war that is being fought in our name. The danger of that ought to be fresh in mind.

Yet all we hear about is how the media won’t cover all the schools we’re painting. Well, they aren’t really covering the war either, and they don’t have a say in it. So I wonder, because JimC dropped some Latin, (velle est posse – to be willing is to be able) wouldn’t my will to shoot anything I wanted be against U.S. military rules and Iraqi law? And since velle est posse, how’s the reenlistment effort coming?