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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."
If you have any concerns, just speak into a nearby phone and the NSA will be right with you.
I just surfed on over to Ogrish.com and found this headline and linked video:
Army of Ansar Alsunnah Attacks an Iraqi National Guard Recruitment Center
Friday, July 28 2006
The Army of Ansar Alsunnah, an Iraqi Insurgency group, released a 19 minute video showing a raid on an Iraqi National Guard Recruitment center. The video shows the group capturing members of the Iraqi center and then executing them on the streets. The video then ends with the militants entering the building and destroying the recruiment center with explosives.
Wow.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
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
I don't choose to look at the photos, but in a way I think it's good to de-sanitize war, because it isn't.
I lost significant respect for soldiers the day I found some clips on a military-ish website.
One was a surveilance helicopter (dunno which one...probably the one with the camera/sensor ball above the rotor) and the video was from a training session. Most of the video, however, was of the crew watching thermal imaging of a couple having sex in the back seat of a convertible. So, if you think your military isn't spying on you as a civilian, you're right- "The Military" isn't, but a bunch of bored 20-somethings in multi-million-dollar toys ARE. And discipline in the military is so lax that apparently that kind of crap is tolerated.
Second sealed the deal for me. It was video from one of the big cargo-plane gunships in either Iraq or Aghanistan. The video consisted of thermal camera footage of them systematically gunning down people at some sort of small building- almost like a small church, quite possibly a mosque.
It showed people running for cover and the crew gunning them down, and it went for a good 5-10 minutes. 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. However, when I listened more closely to the radio chatter, I wanted to throw up. The gunners and crew were laughing and joking. "Oh, quick, get 'im, there he goes!" "Oh, he thinks he's safe now, ahaha!", "hey, good shot there man! You really got him good!" etc. It was like a video game to them; my portrayal just doesn't do it "justice". There was no hate or malice- just very sickening joy on the part of those watching a video screen and plugging real people with real bullets and shells from miles away up in the sky.
Talk about video game violence just doesn't compare to the joy these murderers (I don't think the term "soldier" is even appropriate) took in killing other human beings. I feel a twang of guilt after a session of Battlefield 2, but these guys took joy in the real thing.
Please help metamoderate.
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
Hm, 'A Clockwork Orange,' anyone?
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
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.
It's a small handful of people that are giving the US military a bad image...
But those people are in Washington.
What?
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.
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.
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?