The Tehran Times has an alternate view of why the US bought the exclusive rights to images from Space Imaging’s Ikonos satellite, about which I reported below. Since military imaging is already estimated to be 6-10 times more precise than Ikonos’ 1-meter resolution, there’s no intelligence need; the US must be trying to hide something. If the US had used its legal “shutter control” authority instead of buying out the marketing rights to the pictures, the media could have challenged it as ‘prior restraint censorship’. What are they censoring? The Tehran Times suggests it must be evidence that civilian casualties have been far greater than reported. [thanks, Holden]