What passes for the Portal's "Editorial Board" -- which includes most anybody passing by the computer banks here at the Library -- has green lighted linking to posts at the blog "IraqNam."
Since hammering out our editorial policy enshrined at the flagship site -- pledging ourselves to embed only links "as free as possible of political presentation or editorial framing" -- it has come to our sad attention that media outlets do not maintain articles and coverage of the individual fallen at their websites indefinitely.
In some cases, coverage is archived and can be retrieved upon enrollment with the outlet, sometimes at a fee, sometimes not. Occasionally, as serendipity dictates, articles can be retrieved with the Way Back Machine at the internet Archive.org.
Frequently in our research we'd come across the entries for the fallen at the IraqNam blog, an anti-war (but pro-troop -- our editors grudgingly agreed) site active September '06 to October '07. While deferring to the original source of the articles reproduced at IraqNam, we did notice that the blog had copied and pasted directly from the sources, exercising no editorial rewriting nor highlighting. The blog is quite outspoken in its opposition to the war in its other entries, but interposes none of its views in the biographical postings.
Increasingly this summer, we've discovered that the original documents are no longer featured at the publisher's sites. IraqNam has by default become the readiest access to the sort of biographical material that fully commemorates our heroes.
In future, we'll be including the IraqNam links when content warrants. We're simply going to trust that Americans have not become so supersensitive that they have rejected a heritage of pragmatic review and respect of other's views.
Photo courtesy Jason Barbacovi of Me and Chairman Mao at blogspot.
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