Army Invades Youtube Facebook Twitter Hulu XBox…

Sell, Sell, Sell…

“More smoke, darling.  Oh lovely.  So dramatic.  And, action!”

 Your Soul to the Devil.

Touting yet another incarnation of “the truth of what it means to be a soldier” I doubt the new US Army infomercials, excuse me, “realty show” barrage, will be showing the dismembered bodies, the mutilated people in the conflict zones, the childrens’ corpses, the wheelchairs, the prosthetic limbs or the Nuremberg Statutes, etc.

I considered blowing right by this NY Times ode to the misanthropic marketing efforts of militarism, but then again, one cannot escape his nature.

“Program-length commercials are becoming more popular as part of a trend known as content marketing, sponsored content or branded entertainment. The trend is meant to counter the growing habit — particularly among younger consumers, like the target audience for the Army, ages 18 to 24 — of ignoring traditional forms of advertising.”

Young man:

You’re an idiot, a dupe, and a demographic to be sold a lifestyle of so-called “service.”  That is the job of the ad men of Madison Avenue who relish the opportunity to sell you this vision of the future.  And a number of your brethren will sign on the dotted line, not in blood, but it should be.

“The Army’s advertising agency, the McCann Worldgroup, also part of Interpublic, will undertake a promotional campaign for “Starting Strong” in realms like social media”

…We have to innovate to engage the audience,” Mr. Davis said. “That’s the bottom line.”

Well, if that’s what you’re paid to do, then I guess you “have to.”

“Joining the Army is kind of like dating somebody; you don’t marry them on the first date,” Mr. Davis said. “It’s a decision. It’s a long conversation.”

…The idea to try content marketing came after two “Starting Strong” pilot episodes “did extremely well in testing,” Mr. Davis said.

It’s a long, fucking sales pitch, and you don’t really get a guarantee on the product.  In fact, you’re the product.  They won’t tell you that.  But, you’re harvested.  Your body, mind and soul become the exclusive property of the United States Military Industrial Complex.  That’s the deal.  They offer promises of future money and education, much of the time promises not kept.  Injured soldiers find themselves kicked out on their asses with substandard medical care from the perpetually underfunded Veteran’s Administration.

And after you help out with “the mission” and go to war somewhere, for who the fuck knows what in a place you’ve never heard of, and the bodies pile up, the army doesn’t quite give a shit about your concerns.  And if you blow your brains all over the bedroom wall from the guilt of what you have done to innocents half a world away, well the Army and the Madison Avenue clowns contracted by them don’t care about that either.  Nor if you beat your family to death, become a zombie, drug addled spree shooter or whatever.  It’s really not relevant to the mission … of world domination and threat of good old American force against those arrogant little brown bastards who don’t take orders from Washington.

So have fun.  Have a nice fucking life.

“Based on testing, we’re fairly optimistic this will gain the traction we need…”

Coca Cola, Cars, Beer, Smart Phones, Exercise, Joining a Killing Machine, World Domination, Whatever.  Sell, Sell, Sell.

 

Sibel’s Censored Sunday Times Investigation

Sibel Edmond’s case, firing from the FBI and unprecedented gag orders, proves beyond doubt that the US government is corrupt, criminal and basically a protection racket for international terrorism, drug and weapons smuggling.

Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed:

“In a recent book Classified Woman, Sibel Edmonds, a former translator for the FBI, describes how the Pentagon, CIA and State Department maintained intimate ties to al-Qaeda militants as late as 2001. Her memoir, Classified Woman: The Sibel Edmonds Story
, published last year, charged senior government officials with negligence, corruption and collaboration with al Qaeda in illegal arms smuggling and drugs trafficking in Central Asia.

In interviews with this author in early March, Edmonds claimed that Ayman al-Zawahiri, current head of al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden’s deputy at the time, had innumerable, regular meetings at the U.S. embassy in Baku, Azerbaijan, with U.S. military and intelligence officials between 1997 and 2001, as part of an operation known as ‘Gladio B’. Al-Zawahiri, she charged, as well as various members of the bin Laden family and other mujahideen, were transported on NATO planes to various parts of Central Asia and the Balkans to participate in Pentagon-backed destabilisation operations.

According to two Sunday Times journalists speaking on condition of anonymity, this and related revelations had been confirmed by senior Pentagon and MI6 officials as part of a four-part investigative series that were supposed to run in 2008. The Sunday Times journalists described how the story was inexplicably dropped under the pressure of undisclosed “interest groups”, which, they suggest, were associated with the U.S. State Department.

…Edmonds described how the CIA and the Pentagon had been running a series of covert operations supporting Islamist militant networks linked to Osama bin Laden right up to 9/11, in Central Asia, the Balkans and the Caucasus.

…Edmonds clarified, “the FBI counterintelligence investigation which was tracking these targets, along with their links to U.S. officials, was known as ‘Gladio B’, and was kickstarted in 1997. It so happens that Major Douglas Dickerson” – the husband of her FBI co-worker Melek whom she accused of espionage – “specifically directed the Pentagon’s ‘Gladio’ operations in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan at this time.”

This is what the 9/11 Cover Up Commission kept secret and buried.  Sibel saw the raw intelligence pouring in from the region and translated it.  The covert operations involving Jihadists in Central Asia — for the purpose of  taking away Russian territory — is long established and quite obvious to anyone who cares to pay attention.  That’s a tiny minority, though.

“…Youssef Bodansky, former Director of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, cited U.S. intelligence sources in an article for Defense and Foreign Affairs: Strategic Policy, confirming “discussions between the Egyptian terrorist leader Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri and an Arab-American known to have been both an emissary of the CIA and the U.S. Government.” He referred to an “offer” made to al-Zawahiri in November 1997 on behalf of U.S. intelligence, granting his Islamists a free hand in Egypt as long as they lent support to U.S. forces in the Balkans. In 1998, Al Zawahiri’s brother, Muhammed, led an elite unit of the Kosovo Liberation Army against Serbs during the Kosovo conflict – he reportedly had direct contact with NATO leadership.”

Drone Murder as Pilots Understand It

[Would these pilots say the same things if their unmanned planes were circling over the United States itself?]

Drone Pilots Expose Politicians’ Lies

By David Swanson

Our elected and unelected officials tell us that drone strikes target top level enemies of the United States who are imminent threats to us, and that killing innocent people is avoided altogether or minimized.

Congressional hearings, with a couple of excellent exceptions, question outside academics about the legality of this purported strategy. The Obama administration declines to send any witnesses.

But drone pilots have begun talking to the media. And they describe policies that bear a lot closer resemblance to reporting from the areas where the missiles strike. These pilots should be brought before Congress.

Here is a stunning new interview with one of them:

“So the pilot is not only flying the airplane, he or she is using all those sensors to watch a potential target, circling over it for hours or days at a time. What can you really see?

“Okay, so in a village in, say, country X, where the houses are built together, there are adults who live in this house, and these children belong to those adults because we see them out in the fields together or we see them eating dinner. So you can start figuring out who is associated with who. Who is a stranger, who is it that’s visiting this house? There’s a dog and it barks at strangers, so if we needed to go in and free a hostage or conduct a raid, you’d want to tell the land forces there’s a dog there and either it’s an attack dog or it alerts the village that somebody’s coming.

“You must develop an emotional tie with the people on the ground that makes it hard if there is going to be a strike or a raid, people are going to be killed.

“I would couch it not in terms of an emotional connection, but a ” seriousness. I have watched this individual, and regardless of how many children he has, no matter how close his wife is, no matter what they do, that individual fired at Americans or coalition forces, or planted an IED — did something that met the rules of engagement and the laws of armed conflict, and I am tasked to strike that individual. The seriousness of it is that I am going to do this and it will affect his family. But that individual is the one that brought it on himself. He became a combatant the minute he took up arms.”

This pilot, in fact this director of the Air Force Remotely Piloted Aircraft Capabilities Division, has not said that a high level operation leader of terrorists who is imminently threatening the United States is targeted. He has said that some ordinary guy who has chosen to violently resist the hostile foreign occupation of his country by shooting at the occupiers is targeted.

He has also not said anything to satisfy those who support the notion of just wars but want them conducted in compliance with the Geneva Conventions and other such legally binding limitations. This director of a U.S. drone kill program openly says that our public employees target a family for death if needed in order to blow up a foreign soldier from thousands of miles away. Every effort is made to avoid killing innocent family members, he says in the interview, but if it can’t be avoided, well, the target “brought it on himself.”

Here another pilot describes specific such incidents. Here the New York Times reports on the resulting PTSD suffered by drone pilots.

War is murder, and this type of war ought to look to most people like the murder that it is. But even if you accept war, this is not how ANYBODY claims it is to be legally done. This is beyond what Congressional witnesses or even Congress members would say is acceptable or legal. Yet this pilot blurts it out to the media with apparently no concern that his life will be inconvenienced by further questioning.

Enough is enough is enough. End this madness now [petition to ban armed drones].

http://davidswanson.org

David Swanson is the author of “When the World Outlawed War,” “War Is A Lie” and “Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union.” He blogs at http://davidswanson.org and http://warisacrime.org

Abby Martin: Iraq’s View

CAVEAT:

The speaker is a raving anarcho-libertarian ideologue.

I’m posting this video for his succinct presentation on Iraq, and NOT to endorse his essentially knee-jerk simplistic anti-state rhetoric.  I did consider deleting it, but I’d rather provide a counterargument.  The libertarians spin every issue to be one problem, one solution: the state is evil and must go.  Such a blinkered view of the world is shown to be ridiculous upon scrutiny.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iquN_rqw9uI&feature=youtu.be

Reagan’s Goons: Genocide Trial

Patron Saint of Death Squads and Plutocracy, Ronnie Reagan, supported Guatemala and its genocidal rampage that killed 200,000 indigenous men, women and children.  Now the Guatemalan dictator is on trial in his home country for what he did.  It was this obscenity in Central America that first alerted me to the horrors and despicable immorality of US foreign policy.

PBS reports, fairly well, on the ongoing trial.  It can happen in the third world, but American overlords will likely never stand trial for their crimes.

See also: 

What I’ve Learned About US Foreign Policy (2 hrs.)

 

PS.

Ignorance kills.

 

Israel’s Latest War Crimes

“Israeli strike kills 42 Syrian soldiers”

-Stars and Stripes

The psychotic double-standard in international relations could easily compare to WW2 Nazi rationalizations.  If any other country does the same thing — invade a country’s air space, drop bombs on its facilities, murder its soldiers, it suddenly becomes quite clear what’s happening.  If Canada flies down into New York and bombs a military base, the United States would have a problem with that.  If Russia flies into Alaskan air space and sinks a US patrol boat, this is clearly to be interpreted as an act of war, a war crime and an atrocity.

But imperialists and “exceptionalists” don’t adhere to reality, morality, common sense or anything approaching ethical behavior.

The big story that US media doesn’t want to talk about:

UN: Rebels, not Assad, appear to have used chemical weapons

United Nations human rights investigators said Sunday they have gathered testimony from outside Syria suggesting rebels, not Bashar Assad’s regime, may have used chemical weapons.“Our investigators have been in neighboring countries interviewing victims, doctors and field hospitals and, according to their report of last week which I have seen, there are strong, concrete suspicions but not yet incontrovertible proof of the use of sarin gas, from the way the victims were treated,” Carla Del Ponte, a member of the independent commission of inquiry on Syria, told Swiss-Italian television. “This was use on the part of the opposition, the rebels, not by the government authorities.”

-The Hill

If the ignorant sheeple don’t hear about it, then it never happened, clearly.

US Neocon Monsters Ready to Chop Up Syria

 

BOILING FROGS POST (BFP):

Uber-Neocons: The Main Architects of Post-Assad Syria at Work

Satan is always hiring.

 

 

 

Censorship is a Moral Crime

I’ve been battling censorship head on this past week, and it is staggering.

Another piece of hard evidence on US media censorship has become too glaring and offensive to ignore.  Yesterday I posted a piece from the Jerusalem Post.

Retired Col. Lawrence Wilkerson:

“A former senior official in the Bush administration said on Thursday the use of chemical weapons in Syria might have been a “false flag operation” of Israel, meant to implicate Syrian President Bashar Assad.”We don’t know what the chain of custody is. This could’ve been an Israeli false flag operation, it could’ve been an opposition in Syria… or it could’ve been an actual use by Bashar Assad. But we certainly don’t know with the evidence we’ve been given. And what I’m hearing from the intelligence community is that that evidence is really flakey,” retired Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, told Cenk Uygur in an interview with Current TV.”

There is not one article in the entire US corporate media reporting this, or mentioning Col. Wilkerson’s concerns over the “chain of custody” of nerve gas evidence.  Wilkerson, of course, knows the nerve gas is in the possession of the Jihadist lunatics supported by our “good friends” in Saudi Arabia and Qatar.  These Jihadists already made a Youtube video spilling the beans and testing the gas.

America doesn’t have a Nazi Volksaufklärung und Propaganda.  It doesn’t need one.  It functions smoothly in the interest of a narrow, elite set of warmongers’ interests right now.

Censorship on matters of war and peace leads to mass murder, war crimes, atrocities beyond words.  That is the game US corporate media plays, and their actions surrounding the Iraq War lies in 2002-2003 should have been the wakeup call tot he world that these shills cannot be trusted.  They do not tell the public the whole story.  It is not in their interest to keep you informed.

Israel Attacks Syria

The fraudulent “nerve gas” claims are cited by Israeli warmongers as they launch World War 3.  In a completely propagandized western public, the truth of official claims is no longer relevant.

Israel Bombs Syria as the U.S. Considers Its Own Military Options

 

“All this was inspired by the principle–which is quite true within itself–that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.”
-Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

 

The Kill Team (2013)

From the Tribeca Film Festival, a documentary about some of America’s armed murderous thugs in its foreign legions.  See the review.

“Kill Anything That Moves”

We fight fascism here, and this is the front line.

“Citing a recent Gallop poll, journalist Robert Sheer reports that “a majority of Americans ages 18-29 believe sending U.S. troops to Vietnam was not a mistake… the young now approve of an irrational war in which 3.4 million Indochinese and 58,000 Americans died…” Holding steady across the age divide, “70% of those 50 or older… with contemporary knowledge…” retain their beliefs in the war’s essential wrongness. “

The real Vietnam war: Kill Anything That Moves, a new history by Nick Turse is reviewed over at Counterpunch. Using a large cache of firsthand accounts by US soldiers on the ground there, this is the wake up call generation dumbass needs to read.

That said, Michael Uhl’s review of the book is far from flattering, with a sense of the one-upsmanship and infighting of the left.  Uhl, a veteran of the war criticizes the young Turse for his limited knowledge and knee jerk myopia.  More from Vietnam era veterans found at In the Mind Field.

It’s often a thankless job fighting the neo-nazism of the current empire. These aren’t the articles, posts, videos, books and films that draw the big crowds. A video called “Beer Boobs” would probably reach millions virally on Youtube, but the descent of the nation into barbarism, mass murder and totalitarianism fails to attract much notice. They say you get the government you deserve. What does that say about the US public?

“…an old lifer Sergeant Major spoke, pointed to us and very specifically stated, ‘These whining, complaining Vietnam veterans will die off. I want to assure you, we have written the history of the Vietnam war your grandchildren will read.’”

If you want to hear what a real hero sounds like, listen to helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson’s account of how he stopped the My Lai massacre by turning his helicpter’s guns on the infantrymen massacring women and children.

Parry vs. Hanks, re: Afghanistan

Robert Parry takes on Charlie Wilson’s War, and the Hollywood fictional foreign policy that nearly always kowtows to official spin. As always, I have a healthy skepticism of Parry’s own take, but he seems to have come back to hard factual reality lately. Good.

“Yet, as deputy assistant secretary to the Air Force, J. Michael Kelly, put it, “the most critical special operations mission we have … is to persuade the American people that the communists are out to get us.“”

The film made it seem like Wilson was instrumental in getting this Mujahadeen resistance started, when in reality he didn’t even get involved until 1985, six years after radical Islamic terrorists were sponsored under Carter/Brzezinski to destabilize pro-Soviet Afghanistan.

…Hiding the unspeakable realities of the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan was almost as high a priority as concealing the U.S.-backed slaughter in Central America. Reagan’s pet “freedom fighters” in Afghanistan as in Nicaragua were tainted by the drug trade as well as by well-documented cases of torture, rape and murder.

…The problem, as Avrakotos explained, was that the Afghan mujahedeen [Reagan's "freedom fighters"] routinely tortured and then murdered any Soviet soldier who fell into their hands, except for a few who were kept around for anal rape.

…Despite this knowledge about the true nature of the Afghan “freedom fighters,” the Reagan administration — and the “Charlie Wilson’s War” moviemakers — concealed from the American people the inhuman brutality of the jihadists who were receiving billions of dollars in U.S. and Saudi largesse.

Continue

Parry concludes with one hell of a detailed history of the conclusion of the Afghan/Soviet War.  He destroys the myth of “abandonment” used by DC to keep garrisons in nation after nation.  The Taliban was a creation of the Pakistani ISI.  The Pakistani ISI was a creation of the CIA, and this massive money spigot.

FURTHER

Coincidentally, today Globalresearch has an in-depth analysis of women’s rights used as an occupation pretext and the real history of fomenting Jijad and actually financing extremist textbooks through USAID to teach children Islamic fundamentalism.

Women of Afghanistn – BEFORE 30 YEARS OF USG ‘HELP’

Afghan Women Today – Under Sharia Law

Thanks Charlie Wilson!

From Afghanistan to Syria: Women’s Rights, War Propaganda and the CIA

“The [Madrassa school textbook] primers, which were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have served since then as the Afghan school system’s core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American-produced books…

The White House defends the religious content, saying that Islamic principles permeate Afghan culture and that the books “are fully in compliance with US law and policy.

…The [USAID] agency removed its logo and any mention of the U.S. government from the religious texts, AID spokeswoman Kathryn Stratos said.”

 

’”These gentlemen (the Taliban) are the moral equivalents of America’s founding fathers.” -Senile Ghoul R. Reagan