It’s ironic, isn’t it, that the Lulu Blooker prize for for books based on blogs went to an American soldier writing an account of his time in Iraq at about the same time the U.S. military has blocked its soldiers’ access to resources like MySpace and YouTube.

The book, “My War: Killing Time in Iraq, by Colby Buzzell,” may be the last “frank and open military blog book,” according to Blooker judging chair Paul Jones, quoted in a BBC article.

A Department of Defense policy set to go into effect today will block military access worldwide to 13 popular websites, most of them examples of social media. The rationale, according to Gen. B.B. Bell, the U.S. Forces Korea commander, is protection of information and reduction of drag on the department’s networks.

The complete list: Metacafe, IFilm, StupidVideos, and FileCabi, the social networking sites MySpace, BlackPlanet and Hi5, music sites Pandora, MTV, and 1.fm, and live365 (the Internet radio site), and the photo-sharing site Photobucket.

“These actions were taken to enhance and increase network security and protect the use of the bandwidth,” according to Pentagon spokesman Col. Gary Keck. All this on the heels of another effort to curtail soldier blogging.

What crap.

When I spoke about a year ago to a group of U.S. Army public information officers, I was asked how I would deal with the negative publicity associated with the release of the Turkish film, “Valley of the Wolves, which portrayed U.S. soldiers and evil and bloodthirsty. “Simple,” I said. “Get a bunch of soliders’ blogs together and aggregate them on a single page where anybody can see that these soldiers are real live human beings with families and opinions and lives. There’s no better way to dispel the two-dimensional myth than with the observations of flesh-and-blood three-dimensional people.”

They liked that idea. They evidently get very far with it.

This is consistent with the views of Noah Schachtman, writing for a Wired magazine blog, in which he said, “This is as much an information war as it is bombs and bullets, and (the Pentagon is) muzzling their best voices.”

But it’s not just a matter of the soldiers being able to express themselves to the world. For some time, deployed soldiers have had few channels to communicate with loved ones other than the Net. When my son, Benjamin, was first sent to Iraq with the 101st Airborne, our only contact with him initially was a rare and brief phone call. This was during the initial invasion. But after he was garrisoned at Mosul (after President Bush pronounced “Mission Accomplished”), we spent hours with him as he IM’d us from the cybercafe set up at the base.

Today, soldiers have adopted a wider array of social media tools than just IM. They upload their videos to YouTube (and their families do the same for them) and they communicate with friends and families via the message boards and friends feature of social networking sites like MySpace.

All of which is being yanked away from them. Rather than address security through other means (which could be a specious issue to begin with—is it really a matter of security or one of the military hearing things they don’t like? After all, it’s already a serious crime to pass along military secrets using any channel) and simply increasing their bandwidth, they have shut down channels of communication that have a positive effect on soldiers and humanize our military to the audiences we’re trying to influence.

Don’t you just love it when the world’s biggest command-and-control organization goes head-to-head with the transparency of social media?