While being tossed around the world from place to place as a teenager, I wasn't really tethered to any place or anyone.

I wanted the American public to know that not everyone in Iraq and Afghanistan were targets that needed to be neutralized, but rather people who were struggling to live in the pressure cooker environment of what we call asymmetric warfare.

Sometimes You Have to Pay a Heavy Price to Live in a Free Society

As Iraq erupts in civil war and America again contemplates intervention, that unfinished business should give new urgency to the question of how the United States military controlled the media coverage of its long involvement there and in Afghanistan.

I have served a sufficiently long sentence. I am not asking for a pardon of my conviction.

The press and free speech landscape has totally changed. There is far less news reporting today. Instead, we have this endless stream of - largely meaningless and speculative - analysis by sideline commentators and self-proclaimed "experts."

There are very few distinctions between el bueno and el malo en la prisión militar. Instead of the good and the bad, there is the boring and la repetición - the repetitive. The routine is as endless as it is numbing.