US Military Launches YouTube Channel

Jenga717 writes "The US military has launched its own channel on YouTube, in efforts to shift the media's focus of Iraq from a negative to a more positive light, and to 'counter the messages of anti-American sites.' From the article: 'The footage is not picked specifically to show the military in a good light ... and is only edited for reasons of time or content too graphic to be shown on YouTube ... And while all the clips currently posted have been shot by the military's combat cameramen, soldiers and marines have been invited to submit their own clips.' The question is, where are they supposed to submit them? Starting 'on or about 14 May 2007', the Department of Defense will block troop access to Myspace, Youtube, MTV, and more sites, due to a 'growing concern for our unclassified DoD Internet, known as the NIPRNET'." More commentary below. The troops will be unable to access these sites from any computer on the DoD network, yet are still able to access them from their home computers — which they can't use on the DoD network. So why the censorship? The DoD cites security reasons, but the Commander of Global Network Operations (DoD's Joint Task Force)"has noted a significant increase in the use of DoD network resources tied up by individuals visiting certain recreational Internet sites." The PDF released by the DoD reminds troops that this "benefits not only you, your fellow Servicemembers, and Civilian employees, but preserves our vital networks for conducting official DoD business in peace and war." Sounds like quite a sticky situation."

Comments

See All of you!

[Lumpy]

US soldiers only give flowers to children, play games with them and everyone loves them!

They would never stack prisioners in a naket pyrimid and abuse them, or kill anyone running to them, or other nasty things!

See proof we are there to help! we are friendly! we just want to HUG you!

Not saying that the other side is not nasty, but we are sugar coating it pretty damned hard.

The 3 guys I know that finally came back from combat, all with purple hearts and one will never walk again have told me that it is HELL over there for everyone involved.

Re:See All of you!

[IgnoramusMaximus]

Thank you for invoking Godwin's Law.

There is not, nor there ever was, any Goodwin "law". Goodwin's silly jest was simply an ill-conceived, although well meaning, attempt to curb a popualr habit in some Usenet based discussions whereby everything ended up being compared to the Nazis.

This is not a case here, whereby an actual military aggression has occured and whereby an actual military occupation is in progress and where actual torture and collective punishment was commited by the US troops. This, as well as the US war in Vietnam, are legitimate targets for comparison to the activities in various wars past, such as the WWII in particular.

In this case the Godwin "law" is evoked by cowards who desperately wish to avoid exposition of any similarities or parallels, no matter how limited in scope, between the activities of the USA and that of the Nazi Germany.

Re:See All of you!

[IgnoramusMaximus]

Coin tosses for example...a coin doesn't have a good day, a bad day, or really much of a choice. A coin doesn't have its words taken out of context.

As I said, you are denying validity of all statistical sampling in any social context, which means all polls of any kind since you apparently believe that human opinions cannot be sampled in any way as there are "emotional lunatics on either side chanting with a fervor" as soon as any human opinion is involved. While polls can be manipulated (which in this case it was Pentagon conducting its own study and any manipulation would likely be to lessen the negative result of the study) their power to judge prevailing opinions has been proven beyond any reasonable doubt over the last few centuries of their use.

There are approximately 1.1 million Army members counting active and reserve, they talked to a little over 1000 as cited by your link. Now since you are so hot shit to explain to me how I deny statistical sampling, would you care to explain in what field that approximately .09% sampling is valid enough for you to make these broad sweeping claims?

The study specifically applied to the combat troops in Iraq. There is 120000 or so of those. The sample is then around 1%, which is a very large sample size for any sampling of large populations. The size of the sample was selected to produce error rate of around 1%, 19 times out of 20.

would you care to explain in what field that approximately .09% sampling is valid enough for you to make these broad sweeping claims?

The sample size was 10 times larger, relatively, which is huge statistically speaking (most poll samples are much smaller then that) and I do not make any "sweeping claims" other then what the study says: that nearly 1/2 of US soldiers in Iraq would look the other way if their comrades commit attrocities and at least 10% of them admit to committing those attrocities and yet they were not caught or prosecuted and thus were able to participate in this poll. That is according to the soldiers themselves, not me.

Re:See All of you!

[IgnoramusMaximus]

Look, if you are hell bent on believing that all service members are demons then that is up to you.

Not all, but roughly 50% at this point can be qualified as such according to their own assesment.

This is what prolonged wars of occupation and attricion do to occupying armies, especially wars of conquest conducted based on fabricated pretenses.

Add to this a conviction of American exceptionalism which is being instilled from the young age into nearly every citizen of the USA, sprinkle with religious zealotry of Christian Dominionists who are permeating the US armed forces (they practically run the Air Force), add some hate-mongering of Limbaugh, Coulter and the like, and you get a rather explosive mixture.

This parallels roughly the state of affairs in the Werhmacht during the WWII, or as a matter of fact also the Japanese Imperial Army in the similiar time-frame. The result in those cases were wide-scale attrocities commited by both, and under very similar conditions the US army is doing pretty much the same.

This is simply a logical result of the long list of societal, political and ideological circumstances coming together with prolonged combat stress.

If that reflected the average service member it would have to be a random sample, and a bunch of soldiers and marines in a combat zone are not a random sample.

Incorrect. They are a random sample of ... soldiers and marines in a combat zone.

If you want to argue that the troops in the combat zone are stretched thin, stressed out, and prone to making bad judgments due to combat stress then I have no problem with that, in fact I think that was the whole point. But to base an opinion that all service members are like that based on that poll is ignorant at best. It didn't sample service members that have not been in combat, it didn't sample service members who have been removed from combat for some time, it didn't sample 2 entire branches of the military.

As I keep repeating, the poll applies to the troops who saw combat in Iraq, and is quite sufficient to establish that their attitude now (irrespective of any earlier ones, perheaps held in 1998 while comfortably deployed in Jersey, or some such) resembles that of the combat troops of Wehrmacht in 1943. Since a great majority of US troops have been rotated in and out of Iraq within the last two years or so, while the conditions in Iraq remained fundamentally unchanged throughout that period, it is logical to conclude that those who share the same background and who have been through the same conditions would hold the same attitudes.

The poll might not accurately describe the state of affairs in the Army administration buldings in Washington amongst those who never rotated into Iraq, or perheaps the crews of ICMB-carrying submarines etc. But those who did not somehow get mired in the Iraqi quagmire are irrelevant since they have no opportunity to put their opinions into action on the ground in Iraq, and subsequently they do not fundemntally change the situation there.

Please note that similiar things happened in Vietnam, where incidents like My Lai were common (although only few of them reached that kind of iconic status), resulting in nearly 3 million Vietnamese civilians being dead and a string of rapes, torture, infantocide that competes with that of the Japanese Imperial Army in China or Korea.

That is because this is the very nature of wars of conquest and occupation conducted from a supremacist position. And it is the very nature of occupying armies to attain those attitudes, sooner or later. Irrespective of who is the occupier and who are the occupied. If the occupied keep on resisting, this must happen. Always. Inevietably.

In essence you are arguing your position against 5000 years of recorded history of warfare.

Let's see what my dictionary says

[A beautiful mind]

ar.my, pl armies*:
1. a large organized body of men too stupid to realise that they are risking their lives to enforce the will of their political elite, instead of assuring the defense of their country.

Canadian, Australian, Indian, Irish and NZ army exempted from the definition. Other countries have different purpose, names and definitions (in their own native tongue) for their countries' military force.

Re:The truth

[darkpixel2k]

Care to back that up with anything other than uninformed bullshit you just pulled from you ass? Maybe something like statistics?