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Are Marines Censoring Web Access for Troops in Iraq?
Gavin86 and others have submitted links to This Wonkette article (profanity warning) about the Marines Corps blocking access to some Web sites for their people in Iraq. This article was a follow-up to an earlier Wonkette post. Before I posted these links, I looked for verification of this problem but found nothing but links to Wonkette, so I cannot say for sure whether this is true. Hopefully, alert Slashdot readers (like you) will post confirmations if, indeed, there are any to be found. Meanwhile, if this is true, it's eerily reminiscent of an experience I had when I visited Saudi Arabia in January, 2004.
The Wonkette post contains this list of sites blocked and not blocked, allegedly sent by a Marine serving in Iraq:
I spent several hours in my Riyadh hotel room one evening checking sites suggested to me by Slashdot coworker Jamie McCarthy via IRC (which was not blocked by the Saudi filters). Among them were sites decrying Holocaust denial, which were blocked, although many sites espousing the old Protocols of the Elders of Zion antisemitic lies were not.
A number of sites that talked about human rights -- especially women's rights -- were also blocked. Sites that glorified Islam were, of course, fine. Interestingly, Jamie and I found that some (but not all) sites that were blocked when the 2002 Harvard Law School article, Documentation of Internet Filtering in Saudi Arabia, was released had been unblocked by the time of my visit.
And when I met with Eyas S. Al-Hejery, the man in charge of Saudi Arabia's Internet Serice Unit and told him about some of the blocked sites Jamie and I had found, including several innocuous Israeli government ones, he agreeably unblocked them.
I have no way of knowing whether Eyas reblocked those sites as soon as I left his country, but he told me more than once that he did not, himself, decide which sites should be blocked but only reacted to complaints from Saudi Arabia's infamous religious police and submissions from concerned citizens, which he said numbered up to 200 per day, total, while he only received a "trickle" of requests to unblock sites.
Now comes a big question: If the charges of Marine Internet blockage are true, will the Marines unblock incorrectly-blocked Web sites as quickly as Eyas did in Saudi Arabia?
But first, another big questions must be answered: Is the Wonkette story true? It's been up and spreading around the Internet since March 1st, and no official Marine spokesperson has bothered to either debunk it or admit that yes, the Marine Corps is blocking Web sites for political reasons.
It's going to be interesting to see if, here in a country where we supposedly hold freedom of speech dear, we expect our overseas troops to submit to the same sort of censorship that is an everyday thing in Saudi Arabia, a famous breeding ground for the Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism our Marines are supposed to be fighting against.
- Wonkette - "Forbidden, this page (http://www.wonkette.com/) is categorized as: Forum/Bulletin Boards, Politics/Opinion."
- Bill O'Reilly (www.billoreilly.com) - OK
- Air America (www.airamericaradio.com) - "Forbidden, this page (http://www.airamericaradio.com/) is categorized as: Internet Radio/TV, Politics/Opinion."
- Rush Limbaugh (www.rushlimbaugh.com) - OK
- ABC News "The Note" - OK
- Website of the Al Franken Show (www.alfrankenshow.com) - "Forbidden, this page (http://www.airamericaradio.com/) is categorized as: Internet Radio/TV, Politics/Opinion."
- G. Gordon Liddy Show (www.liddyshow.us) - OK
- Don & Mike Show (www.donandmikewebsite.com) - "Forbidden, this page (http://www.donandmikewebsite.com/) is categorized as: Profanity, Entertainment/Recreation/Hobbies."
I spent several hours in my Riyadh hotel room one evening checking sites suggested to me by Slashdot coworker Jamie McCarthy via IRC (which was not blocked by the Saudi filters). Among them were sites decrying Holocaust denial, which were blocked, although many sites espousing the old Protocols of the Elders of Zion antisemitic lies were not.
A number of sites that talked about human rights -- especially women's rights -- were also blocked. Sites that glorified Islam were, of course, fine. Interestingly, Jamie and I found that some (but not all) sites that were blocked when the 2002 Harvard Law School article, Documentation of Internet Filtering in Saudi Arabia, was released had been unblocked by the time of my visit.
And when I met with Eyas S. Al-Hejery, the man in charge of Saudi Arabia's Internet Serice Unit and told him about some of the blocked sites Jamie and I had found, including several innocuous Israeli government ones, he agreeably unblocked them.
I have no way of knowing whether Eyas reblocked those sites as soon as I left his country, but he told me more than once that he did not, himself, decide which sites should be blocked but only reacted to complaints from Saudi Arabia's infamous religious police and submissions from concerned citizens, which he said numbered up to 200 per day, total, while he only received a "trickle" of requests to unblock sites.
Now comes a big question: If the charges of Marine Internet blockage are true, will the Marines unblock incorrectly-blocked Web sites as quickly as Eyas did in Saudi Arabia?
But first, another big questions must be answered: Is the Wonkette story true? It's been up and spreading around the Internet since March 1st, and no official Marine spokesperson has bothered to either debunk it or admit that yes, the Marine Corps is blocking Web sites for political reasons.
It's going to be interesting to see if, here in a country where we supposedly hold freedom of speech dear, we expect our overseas troops to submit to the same sort of censorship that is an everyday thing in Saudi Arabia, a famous breeding ground for the Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism our Marines are supposed to be fighting against.
When you sign up for the military, you are signing up for a contract; they say it's something more, but in reality, it isn't. In that piece of paper, you surrender your rights, in totality, and become U.S. Army property to the term of the contract; why else would they issue you a barcode and dogtags? A soldier is a slave, in every sense of the word. It's similar to social security in that when you sign up for social security, you yourself incorporate and insure the stock of the socail security administration which is itself a corporation; ever notice that your social security card looks like a stock certificate? In doing so, you also surrender your rights.
Also, technically, just by being born under the 14th amendment and handing a birth certificate to the state, you give up all your constitutional and god-given rights. You are a U.S. citizen instead of a citizen of your state, who is a part of a democratic government known as the U.S. government, who's power is derived by the martial law enstated during the Civil war who is technically waiting for the people to peacefully expatriate back to their states and rebuild them, which is currently going on. If enough people do it, the U.S. will collapse under its own debt obligations. Under the 14th amendment, you have "civil rights", which you surrender in social security for the benefit, implied, explicit, or otherwise, of having social security. What are those benefits? Social security actually secures no benefits for you, whatsoever at all if you read the paper.
The basic idea is to get soldiers and citizens to do what the government tells them to. In the end, they've found shooting people causes revolutions which cause the rich merchant class to take risks they'd rather not take. So they make you deal with all forms of nastyness in order to get your freedom back which is the deterrent, unless you're educated, atwhich point you for some reason become a part of the affluent society and gain the respect of these grand predators.
Military personell are ordered to go into combat, ordered to use weapons which may maim or disable them, ordered to fire on their own countrymen, ordered to maim, kill, capture, torture, and inprison people who are in the wrong place at the wrong time for no reason, ordered into medical experimentation, ordered to take innoculations (they line you up, 9 doctors stand on either side of a hallway, they inject you with 30 or 40 vaccines, then tell you to stand by the side for 10 minuntes and if you can do that, you're fine). From reading sniper training manuels, it's vital to their operation to control what the soldiers think. You can't just up and shoot 3 year old children unless you _Absolutely Believe_ it to be necissary, atwhich point you can begin thinking things like "those goddamn 3 year old rock throwing ragheads!". Otherwise, the soldiers might start taking the problem into their own hands and start releasing prisoners, fixing powerplants, stop planting bombs on Iraqi supply trucks at roadstops, and generally stop their nastyness. That's why soldiers who return from Iraq have a high incidence of suicide; they realize they were tricked and then believe themselves to be murderers. I still consider them hero's myself.
What the elites will find, given enough time, is that all predation is self destruction because on a fundemental level, by believing it necissary to be a predator, you are doubting your own ability and will to survive, and on a slightly less fundemental level a parable suffices; a city of thieves contains no bread.