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Pentagon Monitors War Videos Online
jonfr writes "According to the BBC, the Pentagon is monitoring online war videos on YouTube and other webpages." From the article: "There is no specific policy that bans troops from posting graphic material. But troops who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan are hearing the message that they should consider carefully what videos they upload to the web. Sites such as YouTube and Ogrish have hundreds or thousands of clips from soldiers, some set to rock music."
Teenagers who stumble across these realize they have nothing else to do with their lives, and end up killing American soldiers. It is a military problem.
You look at the problem from the wrong side of the picture: the problem is that Iraqi/arab teenagers will always find fundamentalist propaganda in bazaars, because fundamentalists don't use YouTube to download their video material, they make their own. On the other hand, if you can't find war videos on YouTube, *american* teenagers won't be able to witness what war really is, and form an opinion on whether or not it is a good thing that their country's military is there, and today's teenagers are tomorrow's voters.
Shutting down real-life war material (i.e. not sanctionned material from "embedded journalists") from the net is a way to skew the american public opinion, therefore it's a problem with the democratic process, not a military problem.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
The problem isn't that it happened - it's that someone dares to post it.
Now what do we all think of those who fear the truth?
"I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." George HW Bush
Holy shit! No wonder the Pentagra^H^Hon is worried, after all, rock music is the tool of the devil, and we can't have that!
Not having a clear policy doesn't make it any better, and probably worse. There's a line, and if you cross it, you're fucked. But we're not telling you where the line is. The pentagon has certainly learned a lot from FCC, probably thanks to the initiative to bring all government agencies closer together, or something.
I understand the reason this is in the censorship section is related to videos showing abusive behavior by US troops, but the Pentagon has far better reasons for clamping down on these videos. Just as they censored the embedded news reports during the initial push into Iraq, they should censor some of these videos because they can reveal operational protocol and troop movements, which would make it even easier to inflict damage on our troops.
Despite what a lot of people want you to believe, most of our troops are good people trying to help establish infrastructure and order in Iraq. It's a small handful of people that are giving the US military a bad image, and those individuals should be exposed and punished for their behavior.
Everything isn't always black and white... this is definitely one instance where there's a lot of gray area.
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
But the military doesn't want the image of an organization full of borderline headcases. They want the image of a group of skilled, professional technicians who do their job out of patriotism and a love of excellence. This is what drives the marketing. The marketing is aimed at the public at large, and feeds into public perception, which feeds into funding. The image of the military is a Big Deal, which is part of the reason (along with OPSEC) they are monitoring what the soldiers/marines/seamen/airmen post online. It may be true that a lot of military members just love blowing stuff up and jacking people up, but the generals can't really let that cat out of the bag, even though doing so would attract the people they want--the price would outweigh the benefit. If the public starts mentally associating the military with people who get their jollies with wanton carnage, then the squeaky-clean image of the military starts to erode, and support for a $.45 trillion budget might evaporate. Besides, it's not as if those kind of people don't already know that the military is the job where you get to go to distant lands, meet interesting people, and kill them. So the adrenaline junkies already know what the deal is.
Also, they don't want to lean too heavily on the psycho angle. People have to be controllable--their aggression has to be channelable. War is controlled chaos, but the control is a very important component. They aren't just passing out grenades to any glassy-eyed wacko who walks through the door.
This may be hard for you to accept, but in war people die. Their language may be crude, but either way I'm sure it makes no difference to the dead insurgent and all the difference in the world to our guys who live to fight another day.
Do you honestly - I mean really, honestly - think that the insurgents are going to get more sensitive information from videos posted days or weeks later on the internet than they will get from their people on the ground, at the site, survivors from our operations or civilian sympathizers from across the street, using cell phones or email/sms/im or face to face conversations to pass on information?
That's just plain ridiculous. You haven't thought it thru.
Y'know, maybe if more people around the world get some upfront video of just how vicious war can be, maybe there would be less... Perhaps especially among young would-be terrorists.
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
They didn't appear to have any weapons, and were trying to hide behind walls and such (which didn't work since the gunship was circling.) That turned my stomach.
Why are you under the impression that war should be fair? That crew is not obligated to give the insurgents a fighting chance -- if they don't have weapons ready, don't know where the fire is coming from and cannot defend themselves -- tough luck!
This response reminds me of recent comments about Israel's "disproportionate response" to Hezbollah. The whole point of war is to destroy the enemy. War is not an Olympic event!
This isn't "the military," but a facet of human nature that we don't want to face. People are more bloodthirsty, and have less decency than we want to believe. If you take a random sampling of people and put them in a situation where extreme violence is normalized, where they are patted on the back after killing a lot of people or using "extreme" tactics to extract information, then latent tendencies tend to flower. We take our moral cues from our environment. These guys were put in a situation where brutal tactics were tacitly sanctioned, where their actions were shrouded in secrecy, where they could beat someone to death and still be considered a patriotic, decent human being, and what the living hell did you think was going to happen?
Read about Milgram's experiments, or Zimbardo's prison experiment--when given power, when given the chance to hurt someone along with the feeling that they aren't responsible, indifference to suffering, or even outright cruelty, quickly surfaces. I knew about Abu Ghraib before I knew about Abu Ghraib, because I already know that if you put people in that situation, those things will happen. Any country, any time. They were shielded from public scrutiny, pressured to "get results," violence was winked at, and they were told outright by the administration that the Geneva Convention was "quaint and outdated." If you can't predict what's going to happen in that situation, you have your head in the sand. People are nice when their environment expects them to be nice. If you put people in a situation where they can torture someone to death and still be considered a great guy, then a considerable percentage (not all, but enough) will gladly do so, and still sleep well at night. The issue here is not that I dislike Bush or hate the military, only that I acknowledge human fallibility and the darker side of human nature, and I know that people will act in these ways when put in these situations.
A country is allowed to defend itself, but it has to be a proportionate response, otherwise it is a war crime. The Israelis are destroying the entire Lebanon infrastructure with little or no regard for civilian lives. Surely you agree that the Israeli response to Hezbolla capturing prisoners of war is a "disproportionate response".
The Iraq War has not affected the lives of the majority of Americans.
Personally, I find such a situation to be gross and atrocious. If we demand that a minority (i.e., the soldiers) of Americans sacrifice their lives for a war, then the rest of America should endure, at a minimum, the sacrifice of paying extra taxes to finance the war. How can I, as an American, support sending another American to die in a foreign land yet refuse to make any sacrifice for the war?
Since the Iraq War has not affected the lives of the majority of Americans, we Americans unconsciously view the war as a sort of remote thing that is happening "over there". The war becomes even more remote when we do not see the upfront carnage of the war. People in Iraq are bleeding and dying on the streets. Islamic thugs are blowing up the bodies of both Iraqi civilians and British soldiers. Yet, we see none of this carnage. It is out of sight and out of mind for most Americans as we stuff ourselves with hot dogs at the baseball stadium. Life is good, and we do not experience the suffering "over there".
I firmly agree with exposing the public to as much of the war as possible. I encourage American soldiers to upload as much of the videos of carnage (to YouTube and the like) as possible. We need to, at least, see the suffering to understand what war is.
I applaud the "News Hour" for broadcasting all the names and faces of the fallen American soldiers as their names are released by the Pentagon. I also applaud Ted Koppel for devoting an entire episode of "Nightline" in 2004 to reading the names of the soldiers who had died in both Iraq and Afghanistan. They must not die in obscurity.
By the way, the prime political supporters of the Iraq War have tried to generate American "support" for the war by sanitizing it -- removing any sacrifice (i.e., delaying paying the cost of the war to future generations) and trying to stop reporters, like Ted Koppel, from broadcasting the names of the fallen soldiers. "Support" generated by such manipulative means does not equate to actual support for the war. If we Americans were forced to pay the actual cost of the war (through higher taxes) and were forced to know the daily carnage in Iraq, then this "support" might evaporate. I daresay that even most neo-conservatives would oppose this Iraq if they were forced to pay for it (through higher taxes).
If the majority of Americans refuse to genuinely support a war (by paying for the cost of the war and by facing squarely the carnage caused by the war), then we should never send our soldiers to die in that war. I believe that most Americans do not genuinely support the Iraq War.
It's incredible how seedy the dark underbelly of the internet has become. I'm sorry, but the videorecording of such events, and posting them on websites for all the world to see, is truly a new low in the conduct of the human race.
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
If they had the technology 100 years ago, they'd be doing it. Perhaps more people would be doing it.
Its better that we see these videos now, than 30 years from now when its too late. Heck yes there will be a backlash.
2 143/news_video/fallujah_ING512K.mov
E xcerpts.html
I don't know about you, but those napalm bombs being dropped on civilian houses in Vietnam ARE civilian houses... heck, that countryside and houses look just like rural Georgia to me...
http://websrvr20.audiovideoweb.com/avwebdswebsrvr
From ThirdWorldTraveler.com
http://thirdworldtraveler.com/Book_Excerpts/Book_
The US military has no business in IRAQ. None whatsoever. None in Afganistan. The military's purpose is to defend the country, not wage wars overseas in far away places that have absolutely nothing to do with the defense of this country. I'm sorry, but most Americans DO NOT support the military. Just look at all those cars out there on the road WITHOUT ribbons on them and WITHOUT American flags.
No, I don't need you to protect me. I don't need the government to protect me and I did not ask the government to protect me. I can protect myself. In fact, when you get down to it, the only person that is going to protect you is you yourself (and its going to be from your own government, not a foreign power, that you need protection. Who do you turn to then?)
This may be hard for you to accept, but in war people die. Their language may be crude, but either way I'm sure it makes no difference to the dead insurgent and all the difference in the world to our guys who live to fight another day.
In case you haven't noticed, it's not the words that are spoken that matter, but the attitude behind them that is being highlighted.
look, "warrior", YOU invaded THEIR nation based on LIES. They are not "insurgents". You are the invader, they fight back against much higher tech and bad odds. YOU are the "bad guys" in this situation.
And if you can't understand this, you are also a moron. Want a badguy to go depose? How about Mugabe, 1,000 times worse than saddam, not only an evil dude, but can't even keep an economy going? Oh, he doesn't have any oil for the neocons? Or no central location in the middle of all the other oil? You really think oil doesn't have anything to do with this? You dig on mass theft along with murder?
Get real. Very few people "support" you now. The numbers drop daily. Pretty soon you'll be down below single digit support-it's already lower than during the waning days of the nam war. this is a clue, get it? Because the facts are fact, it's a stupid war based on lies told by professional liars out for mega profits and support for some weird ass armageddon end times prophecy crp. these people who are giving you orders are LOONS and liars.. You got in, took out saddam,swell, now go home, if yuou can. Let them folks sort their own crap out, they don't need your high speed screaming death "help". If they choose to destroy their own nation, so be it, it's THEIR nation, not yours. If they need to split up into three distinct countries, again, so be it. None of your damn business, none whatsoever, and never was. Not a single iraqi was involved in 9-11, even though most of you brainwashed tards seem to think so..
How would you feel if some coalition decided to move into the US and start wasting people that they called "insurgents" because they dared to resist the invasion? What would you do?
It's incredible how seedy the dark underbelly of the internet has become. I'm sorry, but the videorecording of such events, and posting them on websites for all the world to see, is truly a new low in the conduct of the human race.
I believe that it is not a new low, but rather a new hope for human change.
The smartbombs blowing up buildings on CNN was supposedly real, but I took from it, "Damn, we are good!" Seeing an internet video of an Apache helicopter crew taking out some Iraqis in cold blood made me say, "Damn, we are bad!" And I see the latter as being more real, honest, and hope for change. The torture stuff such as this is a good thing to have this exposed. Compare that to the Google.cn search results for Tiananmen Square vs Google.com's searches is not a good thing.
I believe that although there are tons of bad stuff coming from the internet, the good vastly outweighs the bad. The amount of information out there and the latency between the event and the vast amounts of coverage for such a thing is absolutely amazing. Even the wacko conspiracy stuff is still a good thing because it at least makes people question what is real vs just taking whatever CNN and Fox or whoever tells us is "news".
I see the internet as one of the biggest boom to human development since other landmarks. So, Pentagon keep monitoring us, because we are monitoring you too. Oh yeah, and there is more of us than you Pentagon guys.
I don't think most people would have an issue with Israel striking Hezbollah rocket launchers/ammunition. What I (and others too I assume), have a problem with is the hundreds of innocent Lebanese civilians that have been killed in Israeli "precision" airstrikes. I also have a problem with Israel destroying infrastructure, preventing civilians from leaving the area.
None of this excuses Hezbollah's missile attacks on civilians in Israel. Or their holding captured Israeli soldiers as hostages. People like Hezbollah, who attack civilians are scum. Plain and simple.
It really sickens me that we (the US) are supporting what Israel is doing. Not only because of how many innocent civilians have lost their lives in the past few weeks as a result of Israeli airstrikes, but because I find it really hard to believe that forcing half a million people from their homes, killing a few innocent people along with a few militants/terrorists, and launching ground assaults against that foreign country, are going to solve any problems. Even if Israel destroys Hezbollah, at what cost? How many non-combatants on both sides will have died in the violence? And how many people in Lebanon who didn't previously have hostile feelings towards Israel will be filled with hate and anger because of Israel's response? Violence breeds violence. Hezbollah's kidnappings caused Israeli airstrikes, which caused Hezbollah to start firing more missiles at Israel, which caused more Israeli airstrikes, ad infinitum.
Atleast Israel has sort of stated what they want to accomplish (drive Hezbollah from southern Lebanon and destroy their unguided rockets and launchers), and that's an OK goal, though maybe a little unrealistic. Hezbollah's (AFAIK atleast) has no real goal - other than inflicting as much pain as possible on Israel and getting them to stop attacking. I guess you could say their goal is to get Israel to exchange prisoners with them, but I think everyone has moved past that now.
I guess I sound rather anti-Israeli, but I'm really not. Before this conflict, I was probably heavily pro-Israeli, and I still favor Israel. I think both sides in this conflict are rather fscked up, though Israel IMHO still has the "moral highground." It's just that I would have thought that Israel would have been smart enough to realize that this wasn't going to accomplish much by now. They can't stop Hezbollah from launching rockets at them, but they could atleast try to not give Hezbollah any more political ammuntion to recruit more militants with. I will praise Israel for not involving Syria or Iran directly yet. If Iran were to get involved, then I can only imagine how ugly it would get - their border with Iraq, the Strait of Hormuz, and the Persian Gulf could all be threatened.
What do I think a reasonable response from Israel would have been? I think sending special forces into Lebanon to try and rescue their captured soldiers, and to destroy the Hezbollah unguided rocket/artillery infrastructure would have been a reasonable response. There would be significantly less collateral damage, and they would have had a better chance at rescuing their captured soldiers than they have after weeks of airstrikes. Hezbollah started this conflict, but if Israel hadn't attacked Lebanon as strongly as they did, then maybe the conflict wouldn't have escalated as much as it has.
PS: Sorry if this comes out as an incoherent ramble, I'm tired from traveling half way across the country today.
Every time you post an article on Slashdot, I kill a server. Think of the servers!
>The whole point of war is to destroy the enemy.
Then why hasn't Baghdad been nuked?
It's a better strategy in war to enslave the conquered people,
annex their lands, and own their treasure...
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
And the American Revolution was just about taxes. And World War 2 was just about getting out of the Great Depression.
Man, some of you people amaze me.
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
From Air Force Magazine, July 06 issue:
"By June 12, a total of 2,493 Americans had died in Operation Iraqi Freedom... Of those fatalities, 1,965 were killed in action by enemy attack, and 528 died in noncombat incidents.
There have been 18,356 troops wounded in action during OIF. This includes 9,920 who returned to duty with 72 hours and 8,436 who were unable to quickly return to action."
21% of the fatalities were not combat related. 54% of those wounded returned in 72 hours. I assume that their injuries were light if they went back in 72 hours.
It is a war... deaths and injuries are part of it. There will be a lot of blood. I would say we are faring pretty well compared to Vietnam, Korea, and any other past war. There are fewer casualties in this entire war than at many of the battles America has faced in the past. At the Battle of the Marne, there were 12,000 causalities. Iwo Jima resulted in 26,000 causalities.
I am just tired of hearing the casualty and wounded statistics being misconstrued. Most of the sources that try to broadcast this data don't bother differentiating if the wounded was actually seriously wounded because it suits their purpose of making the US sound like its doing a lot worse than it is. Half of the "wounded" were back at work in 3 days...
The war in Afghanistan has a better record. American forces have suffered only 292 casualties and 750 wounded (296 were back in 3 days) in OEF since the operation started.
It does not mean however, that aerial gunners just go roaming from village to village shooting random people. I assure you our gunners are very disciplined and follow strict ROE.
This is laughable. Do you think that every soldier obeys the ROE? I have seen a US soldier fire full auto at almost point blank range, into an unarmed old man who is half lying down in a mosque. In a slow frail manner, he extends his empty hand to the soldier standing over him and then gets a chest full. BTW, the US Army has acknowledged that incident, took the soldier out of action and are "investigating". It happens. Please don't be a tard with rose coloured glasses. We teach soldiers to kill people and to varying degrees dehumanize them for the role and then we're shocked that ROE are broken when these soldiers are high on adrenaline, fear and sometimes the drugs they use to escape the hell of war?
Have you seen the video they are talking about? I saw it a long while ago and I don't see where ROE or identification of these people even come into it. They keep saying over and over to stay away from the building which is considered to be a mosque, yet gun down people who are in the beginning just casually walking around, oblivious to the threat above. There is no way that any of the gunners can identify that the people they are killing are combatants, let alone armed combatants. The people on the ground AT NO TIME fire at the AC-130 or even appear to be holding or moving weapons at all.
But don't hit the mosque!!!!
Please, ROE is to cover the militarys own ass. Remember, as a police friend once told me, "dead men tell no lies".
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
I think you're incredibly naive. The militant groups are putting those violent videos out on the Internet as recruiting tools. They're saying "Hey, this is what we do every day! Wanna come murder some people with us?" And judging by the response, quite a few people want to do just that.
/ etc., they might not even be regarded as fully human. The idea that 'killing is always wrong,' and 'all life is sacred' is not a universal premise; or it's a universal premise only when you factor in various definitions of 'life' or 'killing,' which wouldn't be universal.
The fact that such a video has been produced in the first place, and circulated, ought to be a wake-up call to people like you, because there are a whole lot of people who see something like that -- see videos of someone beheading someone else, or blowing someone else's brains out -- and don't say "Dear God, that's horrible!" but instead "Wow, I wish I could do that!"
Not everyone looks at violence and killing and reacts with distaste; quite frankly, I think that reaction is one that's only become accepted as the norm rather recently, in some major (mostly Western) cultures. In fact, in quite a lot of places in the world, they probably wouldn't even understand the 'moral high ground' you're standing on -- because to them, it's not murder if the person getting killed is a Sunni/Shiite/Jew/Muslim/Nigger/Pashto/untermensch
Human life, particularly human life if it belongs to somebody who's not in your ethnic/cultural/religious/tribal group, is very, very cheap, in many parts of the world. People aren't going to stop killing just because you show it to them on TV, and in some cases they might be more attracted than repulsed. I think human nature may be a little uglier in reality than you're imagining it is.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
"Should soldiers really expect the same rights as far as freedom of speech as other civilians?"
No. When I joined the military, I signed away those rights. I gave up mine, to protect yours.
...the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.
Well, if our soldiers can use a $20 million helicopter to watch people having sex, then I don't see why other government employees (teachers, officeholders, etc) shouldn't be allowed to use their $1000 office PC to watch porn while on the job. After all, they are only human.
What makes you think they don't? I am not saying that the soldiers shouldn't be punished, just that I don't think it is a damning revelation to find out that 20 year old kids with thermal imaging devices act like 20 year old kids. The revelation that kids with toys play with them doesn't warp my concept of reality and leave me disgusted with the army. The is true with police officers and teachers that like to close the doors to the offices and watch porn on school computers. I don't think they should be doing it, but it doesn't really have much barring on my opinion of them in general.
Hell, I might even refuse to do it. Unless there is an actual invasion of my homeland going on, I'll stick to jobs that don't require me to carry out mass murder. Trumped up wars started on highly dubious grounds aren't worthing losing my soul over.
Your refusal to carry out a mission because you don't see the immediate utility in it would make you a very bad soldier. Part of being a soldier is killing people. Some times you might very well be kill utterly innocent people. Other times you might be killing mass murders. Unless you are privy to the intelligence that led up to the decision to commit violence, you really have no way of making that determination while you are circling around at a few thousand feet strapped to a pile of guns and explosives.
I am not saying that your attitude is bad, just that it doesn't make for an even vaguely worthwhile soldier.
The trick isn't to train better killers, so much as to find ways of dealing with the world that don't require lots of trained killers.
Like it or not, the world has killers in it. It has had killers in it since before humans were walking up right all the way to this very day. People have been willing to kill other people for countless reasons for the entirety of human history. One nation laying down its arms isn't going to make the killers go away. So long as two people want the same piece of land or one person wants to impose a government or ideology on another person who doesn't want it, there will be violence. The best you can do is work things out diplomatically when you can, and have guns and killers willing to use them for when you can't.
That said, if you know a way to make all of the people in Iraq or Afghanistan happy, please, enlighten us. Maybe we should have just talked Hitler out of World War II, or used naughty language to repulse the North Korean invasion of South Korea, or strongly condemned the genocide in Yugoslavia. Some how though, I think the answer to all of those problems was violence.
I disagree. I prefer to see people who would otherwise ignore this stuff have it relentlessly thrust in their face.
Actions have consequences, war and terrorism are facts of life, and the public should not be distanced too far from them.
The Ogrish stuff is, BTW, a fine way for non-Jihadists to see the Jihadist POV in a way they cannot pretend is something different because it is straight from the source.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."