In addition, BDB asserts that the US military constantly announces that they have killed precisely "thirty militants" overseas, and the US media dutifully reports this nonsense. I haven't reviewed all of BDB's links to see the pattern for myself, but there are a couple of historic forces acting here:
- On the one hand, the military learned in Vietnam that constantly reporting the number of Viet Cong killed lent itself to exaggeration and proved to have no relationship to any success or failure the US was encountering in the war effort.
- At the same time, with US and allied troops dying daily, the media and the Government feel the need to assert that the US Government is at least giving as hard as it gets. And so once again we have numbers of dead that cannot possibly be accurate, if only because the US knows that it doesn't know precisely how many people are in the compounds its drones are bombing, and the US doesn't know how many of these are, get this, "the enemy" and how many are just little children trying to grow but without being torn to bits by shrapnel.
Among the additional propaganda efforts of the US Government, BDB points to RawStory article that says:
A key senior figure in a Bush administration covert Pentagon program, which used retired military analysts to produce positive wartime news coverage, remains in the same position today as a chief Obama Defense Department spokesman and the agency’s head of all media operations.
In an examination of Pentagon documents the New York Times obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request -- which reporter David Barstow leveraged for his April 2008 Pulitzer Prize-winning exposé on the program – Raw Story has found that Bryan Whitman surfaces in over 500 emails and transcripts, revealing the deputy assistant secretary of defense for media operations was both one of the program’s senior participants and an active member.
Isn't it all a matter of military people serving the US Armed Forces in uniform and then wearing those same uniforms as they tell the public what to think about wars overseas.
6 comments:
I hate to break it to you, Francis, but Big Dan is disinfo. He is buddies with the notorious Agent99 of BradBlog. They are merely tying you in with Jew haters and tinfoil. It's referred to as right woos left.
One of the inevitable effects of so much Government participation in the Internet is that we never know with whom we are talking and what their agenda is. And that, actually, is one of the Government's goals.
I didn't look at all of the other links they listed, so thanks for the information
Francis, you should check out the Hal Turner story. He's been spreading racist junk for years and was close with Sean Hannity. It turns out he was an FBI informant on the internet. I have given up on the internet except for smaller pockets of awareness. There is a website called What Really Happened. The site owner named Michael Rivero has been listed as having the same contact address of a company named PMC4, LLC. From the wayback machine, one can see that company offered services for groups interested in primarily making money off the internet. No way could Hal Turner be the only internet fake. DaveFromQueens was actually right on this bullshite. He proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that DKos has been rigged and in the business of collecting data on its members. People like us have become vindicated. Even Max Blumenthal of The Nation has reported on the Hal Turner as cointelpro angle. One last thought, Francis, and it is in regards to your feelings about CIA infiltration of the blogosphere. It is apparent that the internet is seen as a wild, wils west for the most part by authorities. Perhaps because of that, the CIA is involved with American websites, even though there are laws against them performing psy-ops on American citizens. Plus, there really isn't an address when people are blogging. It's just about a lot of 0's and 1's. I know folks like yourself are against anonymity, but in a way, why should people reveal who they are on the net. It's bad enough that our views and research are being run through their supercomputers and parsed by their intelligence workers.
Oops, I realise you did cover it, even giving me a hat tip. I should have said maybe you should keep an eye on it. It keeps growing and growing and is our best provable example that the internet is being manipulated by the spy industry.
By following IP addresses and computer motherboard ID numbers, the Government know exactly who is writing everything that is published on the Internet. The vast majority of people haven't the time and energy to try to completely hide their identities.
So, we're not hiding our identities from the Government. We're hiding our identities from each other, and I think that undercuts the responsibility and accountability for which the online and offline press ought to be known.
I've never understood the whiteosphere's obsession with anonymity, except as an indication that they have a lot to hide, even from their readers.
Civil Rights workers and volunteers didn't try (and could not, in any case) hide their identities. Anti-war protesters were and are filmed and identified by Government employees at protests. Is the whiteosphere so afraid of repercussions that they can't be as courageous as Blacks and real anti-war activists always have been.
Either it's cowardice or a very determined effort to avoid accountability and to obscure private dealings that would undercut and discredit their online anonymous writings and politicking.
You make good points, but there have been stories about people getting canned from their jobs for what they wrote on-line. In America, people can be fired for no good reason. Unless the person fired can prove discrimination of some sort, the employer doesn't have to give an explanation unless they say it was for misconduct. If not, then the person is eligible for unemployment insurance. There's also the fear of being stalked in real life. While these two concerns may be overblown, they are what they are. I do agree that anonymity is overrated. I don't agree that it hurts one's credibility. The truth is the truth regardless who the messenger is.
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