American's still Militarily Occupied but Europe Ready to Stop Practicing War
Although I have never met Tom Hayden, I am familiar with his career and recieve emails like this (below) from him. He calls a spade a spade when he talks of the Military Occupation of the American Mind.
I. The Military Occupation of Our Minds
By Tom Hayden
As Congress weighs Afghanistan funding, the military is escalating what it calls the “war of perceptions” at home and abroad. The question is whether the American media and Congress will collaborate in the Pentagon’s press strategy or retain a critical edge.
It is no accident that the Pentagon is shaping the “information battlespace” by welcoming friendly reporters and think tank hacks to beam back commentaries about the Kandahar offensive to the American people.
Nor is it accidental that the US is soft-pedaling any public criticism of its crooked crony in Kabul, Hamid Karzai, as thousands of American soldiers are being dispatched to face bullets in his defense. [NYT, April 9, 2010]
Nor is there any question that Afghan civilian casualties are being downplayed or covered-up. The agency in charge of counting the bodies, the United Nations Assistance Mission to Afghanistan, published a footnote last year admitting “there is a significant possibility that UNAMA is under-reporting civilian casualties.” [UNAMA Human Rights Report, July 2009].
Paranoia? Do we live under Orwellian thought control? Of course not. But we the people, the media and the Congress, routinely accept taxpayer-funded Pentagon and White House public relations narratives. These often take disgusting forms, such as the false claims and cover-up that soldier Pat Tillman died under enemy fire in 2004, or the recent Special Forces’ killing of three pregnant women which was followed by the digging of bullets out of their bodies to cover up the crime.
The current cycle of military media manipulation began with the Iraq war, when the Pentagon enticed generals, intelligence officers, and defense contractors to become “message force multipliers” for the Bush administration’s version of the war, “sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated.” It took a New York Times’ lawsuit to uncover 8,000 pages of documents showing that the chosen surrogates could be counted on to deliver propaganda messages “in the form of their own opinions.” [NYT, April 20, 2008]
The strategy goes far deeper than the sleaze of everyday public relations. This is about the Pentagon’s turning of computer science into a weapon in the emerging field of information warfare, in which the deaths of men, women and children are less important than the perception of those deaths, or whether they are perceived by anyone at all. As Gen. McChrystal, whose entire career in Iraq remains a classified secret, said during a February briefing,
“This is not a physical war of how many people you kill or how much ground you capture, how many bridges you blow up. This is all in the minds of the participants.” (emphasis added)
[NYT, FEB. 5, 2010]
McChrystal also has said, in a recent London speech, that Afghanistan is not like a football game but more “like a political debate after which both sides announce they have won.” [About.com, Oct. 1, 2009]
McChrystal went on a public relations offensive to promote his request for a troop escalation earlier this year, giving interviews to the New York Times, Le Figaro, Newsweek, and to the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies.
He was featured as a modern god delivering us from the impersonal forces of fate in a worshipful piece by Robert Kaplan in The Atlantic in April. [In a 2003 Atlantic piece by Kaplan, titled "Supremacy by Stealth," he advised that America's wars best be fought "off camera, so to speak."]
Prior to the current media offensive someone leaked [or was it a pre-emptive launch?] McChrystal’s August 30, 2009 confidential assessment of Afghanistan, which includes a lengthy section on “Strategic Communication”, where McChrystal declares that “the information domain is a battlespace” in the war over perceptions.
The irony is that the Taliban insurgents, with little if any information technology, “have undermined the credibility of the ISAF, the international community [IC], and the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan [GIRoA]“, according to McChrystal’s own analysis. [It is noteworthy that the Afghan government is never referred to in the American media as an "Islamic Republic," because the frame is communicated to Afghans only.]
Shortening the term Strategic Communications to StratCom, McChrystal goes on for five single-spaced pages with directives for dominating the information battlespace. Of particular interest might be his plan for Offensive Information Operations [IO], which consists of “a robust and proactive capability to counter hostile information activities and propaganda,” with every soldier “empowered to be a StratCom messenger for ISAF.” A key strategic goal is to win over European and Canadian public opinion, or “the strategic center of gravity which is the maintenance of [NATO] Alliance cohesion” (emphasis added). Afghanistan, in other words, is the glue which holds NATO together, as other official strategists have written.
The general does acknowledge, in one sentence, that the battle of perceptions requires a change of behavior on the ground. But the overwhelming emphasis on perception requires that the negatives always be minimized or covered-up, as in any aggressive public relations campaign.
Already, Special Operations forces account for half or more of the American military missions in Afghanistan, and all the operations in Pakistan. [LAT, April 15, 2010] Clandestine raids against the Taliban – not al Qaeda – more than quadrupled recently, with 90 raids in November 2009. The Red Cross now reports that, as the Kandahar offensive begins, the number of civilian deaths attributed to NATO has doubled, despite McChrystal’s orders to avoid such casualties. [USA Today, April 16, 2010]
From 2004-2009, the Pentagon’s PR budget increased by 63 percent to at least $4.7 billion in 2009. [Associated Press via Wired, Feb. 5, 2009] The entire video budget for Brave New Foundation’s “Rethink Afghanistan” campaign was approximately $381,000 in 2009. [To contribute to Brave New Foundation, please click here.]
This brings us to the US offensive in Kandahar. The deadly hubris underlying the US information battleplan was recently exposed in a poll showing that Kandahar residents support negotiations with the Taliban instead of a military offensive by a 19:1 margin, and that five of six see the Taliban as “our Afghan brothers.” [NYT, April 21, 2010]. As often happens, the poll was uncovered and released by the Wired magazine blog, not by the Congress or the mass media.
Given Afghan public opinion, the challenge for the Pentagon in shaping the information battlefield in Kandahar, therefore, is overwhelming, even impossible. That means the war of perceptions is going to be directed largely at American and congressional opinion as the heralded offensive gets underway.
A few American journalists, like Doyle McManus of the LA Times, have noted that the warm-up offensive in tiny Marja, back in February, has not met the military’s expectations. That it was hardly an “offensive” at all is proven by the handful of US/NATO casualties, estimated in the range of thirteen by late February. [Christian Science Monitor, Feb. 21, 2010] The fatal premise of the Marja plan was that the Marines could bring in “a government in a box” after driving out the Taliban. That’s a form of immaculate conception that will not happen.
In Kandahar, as in Marja before, the local insurgents probably will fight defensively, and may launch spectacular bombing operations in other parts of Afghanistan, before gradually disappearing as the Americans advance, bringing their “government in a box.” It’s confusing, because that same “government” is actually there already, in the form of Karzai’s brother who is widely seen as a corrupt drug-dealing warlord with existing ties to the Taliban. So the US may gain a public relations victory which will mean a deepening of the quagmire. Kandahar is not going to be Iwo Jima, forever frozen in a photograph as the turning point of World War II.
Someday soon the White House and Pentagon will announce on camera that they have captured the Taliban’s “spiritual homeland” of Kandahar. While the offensive goes on, few in Congress will be tough enough to take a hard look at the reality behind the war of perceptions.
This will go on, with American troops dying in vain, unless enough members of the American public, the mainstream media and the Congress finally wake up to the reality that we are no longer citizens but targets in a deliberate war for our minds.
II. Long War Causes Rising Traumas and Suicides
Little or no attention is paid to the fact that more American soldiers have taken their own lives than died in action either in Afghanistan or Iraq. The underlying stress has been reported recently in the New York Times and the Associated Press.
III. Syracuse March Against Drone Base
SYRACUSE – Upstate New Yorkers marched on a drone maintenance facility at the Hancock Air National Guard base on Sunday April 15. The purpose, according to the Syracuse Peace Council, was “to remember the victims of drones.” [contact: Carol Baum, carol@peacecouncil.net]
Recent Congressional hearings have demanded accountability and disclosure regarding civilian casualties and targeting criteria used in drone strikes. The drone war in Pakistan is a pre-emptive war carried out without any formal approval of the Pakistani government. The Pakistan war is cloaked in secrecy from the media, the Congress and the American people.
IV. 77% of Brits Oppose War
LONDON – 77% of British voters favor withdrawing from Afghanistan as the national election campaign draws to a close. None of the major parties have taken a stand against Afghanistan, but the Liberal Party led by Nick Clegg is seeking to exploit public anti-war sentiment to boost its unexpected rise in the latest polls (source: Stop the War Coalition).
V. Swedish Social Democrats Against War
STOCKHOLM – Opposition to Afghanistan has tripled among Social Democrats since last year. Delegates from Skåne, the largest party district, voted against the war by a large margin recently. A similar motion was dismissed last year. The shift is significant because the Social Democrats have provided key support for the Afghan war in the past (source: Eva Ehrstedt, Stockholm).
I. The Military Occupation of Our Minds
By Tom Hayden
As Congress weighs Afghanistan funding, the military is escalating what it calls the “war of perceptions” at home and abroad. The question is whether the American media and Congress will collaborate in the Pentagon’s press strategy or retain a critical edge.
It is no accident that the Pentagon is shaping the “information battlespace” by welcoming friendly reporters and think tank hacks to beam back commentaries about the Kandahar offensive to the American people.
Nor is it accidental that the US is soft-pedaling any public criticism of its crooked crony in Kabul, Hamid Karzai, as thousands of American soldiers are being dispatched to face bullets in his defense. [NYT, April 9, 2010]
Nor is there any question that Afghan civilian casualties are being downplayed or covered-up. The agency in charge of counting the bodies, the United Nations Assistance Mission to Afghanistan, published a footnote last year admitting “there is a significant possibility that UNAMA is under-reporting civilian casualties.” [UNAMA Human Rights Report, July 2009].
Paranoia? Do we live under Orwellian thought control? Of course not. But we the people, the media and the Congress, routinely accept taxpayer-funded Pentagon and White House public relations narratives. These often take disgusting forms, such as the false claims and cover-up that soldier Pat Tillman died under enemy fire in 2004, or the recent Special Forces’ killing of three pregnant women which was followed by the digging of bullets out of their bodies to cover up the crime.
The current cycle of military media manipulation began with the Iraq war, when the Pentagon enticed generals, intelligence officers, and defense contractors to become “message force multipliers” for the Bush administration’s version of the war, “sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated.” It took a New York Times’ lawsuit to uncover 8,000 pages of documents showing that the chosen surrogates could be counted on to deliver propaganda messages “in the form of their own opinions.” [NYT, April 20, 2008]
The strategy goes far deeper than the sleaze of everyday public relations. This is about the Pentagon’s turning of computer science into a weapon in the emerging field of information warfare, in which the deaths of men, women and children are less important than the perception of those deaths, or whether they are perceived by anyone at all. As Gen. McChrystal, whose entire career in Iraq remains a classified secret, said during a February briefing,
“This is not a physical war of how many people you kill or how much ground you capture, how many bridges you blow up. This is all in the minds of the participants.” (emphasis added)
[NYT, FEB. 5, 2010]
McChrystal also has said, in a recent London speech, that Afghanistan is not like a football game but more “like a political debate after which both sides announce they have won.” [About.com, Oct. 1, 2009]
McChrystal went on a public relations offensive to promote his request for a troop escalation earlier this year, giving interviews to the New York Times, Le Figaro, Newsweek, and to the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies.
He was featured as a modern god delivering us from the impersonal forces of fate in a worshipful piece by Robert Kaplan in The Atlantic in April. [In a 2003 Atlantic piece by Kaplan, titled "Supremacy by Stealth," he advised that America's wars best be fought "off camera, so to speak."]
Prior to the current media offensive someone leaked [or was it a pre-emptive launch?] McChrystal’s August 30, 2009 confidential assessment of Afghanistan, which includes a lengthy section on “Strategic Communication”, where McChrystal declares that “the information domain is a battlespace” in the war over perceptions.
The irony is that the Taliban insurgents, with little if any information technology, “have undermined the credibility of the ISAF, the international community [IC], and the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan [GIRoA]“, according to McChrystal’s own analysis. [It is noteworthy that the Afghan government is never referred to in the American media as an "Islamic Republic," because the frame is communicated to Afghans only.]
Shortening the term Strategic Communications to StratCom, McChrystal goes on for five single-spaced pages with directives for dominating the information battlespace. Of particular interest might be his plan for Offensive Information Operations [IO], which consists of “a robust and proactive capability to counter hostile information activities and propaganda,” with every soldier “empowered to be a StratCom messenger for ISAF.” A key strategic goal is to win over European and Canadian public opinion, or “the strategic center of gravity which is the maintenance of [NATO] Alliance cohesion” (emphasis added). Afghanistan, in other words, is the glue which holds NATO together, as other official strategists have written.
The general does acknowledge, in one sentence, that the battle of perceptions requires a change of behavior on the ground. But the overwhelming emphasis on perception requires that the negatives always be minimized or covered-up, as in any aggressive public relations campaign.
Already, Special Operations forces account for half or more of the American military missions in Afghanistan, and all the operations in Pakistan. [LAT, April 15, 2010] Clandestine raids against the Taliban – not al Qaeda – more than quadrupled recently, with 90 raids in November 2009. The Red Cross now reports that, as the Kandahar offensive begins, the number of civilian deaths attributed to NATO has doubled, despite McChrystal’s orders to avoid such casualties. [USA Today, April 16, 2010]
From 2004-2009, the Pentagon’s PR budget increased by 63 percent to at least $4.7 billion in 2009. [Associated Press via Wired, Feb. 5, 2009] The entire video budget for Brave New Foundation’s “Rethink Afghanistan” campaign was approximately $381,000 in 2009. [To contribute to Brave New Foundation, please click here.]
This brings us to the US offensive in Kandahar. The deadly hubris underlying the US information battleplan was recently exposed in a poll showing that Kandahar residents support negotiations with the Taliban instead of a military offensive by a 19:1 margin, and that five of six see the Taliban as “our Afghan brothers.” [NYT, April 21, 2010]. As often happens, the poll was uncovered and released by the Wired magazine blog, not by the Congress or the mass media.
Given Afghan public opinion, the challenge for the Pentagon in shaping the information battlefield in Kandahar, therefore, is overwhelming, even impossible. That means the war of perceptions is going to be directed largely at American and congressional opinion as the heralded offensive gets underway.
A few American journalists, like Doyle McManus of the LA Times, have noted that the warm-up offensive in tiny Marja, back in February, has not met the military’s expectations. That it was hardly an “offensive” at all is proven by the handful of US/NATO casualties, estimated in the range of thirteen by late February. [Christian Science Monitor, Feb. 21, 2010] The fatal premise of the Marja plan was that the Marines could bring in “a government in a box” after driving out the Taliban. That’s a form of immaculate conception that will not happen.
In Kandahar, as in Marja before, the local insurgents probably will fight defensively, and may launch spectacular bombing operations in other parts of Afghanistan, before gradually disappearing as the Americans advance, bringing their “government in a box.” It’s confusing, because that same “government” is actually there already, in the form of Karzai’s brother who is widely seen as a corrupt drug-dealing warlord with existing ties to the Taliban. So the US may gain a public relations victory which will mean a deepening of the quagmire. Kandahar is not going to be Iwo Jima, forever frozen in a photograph as the turning point of World War II.
Someday soon the White House and Pentagon will announce on camera that they have captured the Taliban’s “spiritual homeland” of Kandahar. While the offensive goes on, few in Congress will be tough enough to take a hard look at the reality behind the war of perceptions.
This will go on, with American troops dying in vain, unless enough members of the American public, the mainstream media and the Congress finally wake up to the reality that we are no longer citizens but targets in a deliberate war for our minds.
II. Long War Causes Rising Traumas and Suicides
Little or no attention is paid to the fact that more American soldiers have taken their own lives than died in action either in Afghanistan or Iraq. The underlying stress has been reported recently in the New York Times and the Associated Press.
III. Syracuse March Against Drone Base
SYRACUSE – Upstate New Yorkers marched on a drone maintenance facility at the Hancock Air National Guard base on Sunday April 15. The purpose, according to the Syracuse Peace Council, was “to remember the victims of drones.” [contact: Carol Baum, carol@peacecouncil.net]
Recent Congressional hearings have demanded accountability and disclosure regarding civilian casualties and targeting criteria used in drone strikes. The drone war in Pakistan is a pre-emptive war carried out without any formal approval of the Pakistani government. The Pakistan war is cloaked in secrecy from the media, the Congress and the American people.
IV. 77% of Brits Oppose War
LONDON – 77% of British voters favor withdrawing from Afghanistan as the national election campaign draws to a close. None of the major parties have taken a stand against Afghanistan, but the Liberal Party led by Nick Clegg is seeking to exploit public anti-war sentiment to boost its unexpected rise in the latest polls (source: Stop the War Coalition).
V. Swedish Social Democrats Against War
STOCKHOLM – Opposition to Afghanistan has tripled among Social Democrats since last year. Delegates from Skåne, the largest party district, voted against the war by a large margin recently. A similar motion was dismissed last year. The shift is significant because the Social Democrats have provided key support for the Afghan war in the past (source: Eva Ehrstedt, Stockholm).
posted by Kevin Anthony Stoda at 11:16 PM
3 Comments:
http://www.spiritone.com/~gdy52150/littleboys.html
On January 28, 2003, amid the furor of the impending war with Iraq the British press briefly reported on Operation Ore, the most thorough and comprehensive police investigation of crimes against children before being squashed by the Blair government. Besides implicating Rock guitarist Peter Townsend of the Who, the report claimed that senior members of Tony Blair's government were being investigated for pedophilia and the "enjoyment" of child-sex pornography. With the investigation reaching to senior members of his Government, Blair declared a news blackout on the story.
Read this piece ben Glen Yeadon
http://www.opednews.com/a/34764?show=votes#allcomments
his is� a piece that is written mostly in documentary film script style describing the type of film we are waiting from Oliver Stone and others in Hollywood to give us--just as we await the impeachment of a president.
I was reading through George Monbiot's article "Routine and Systematic Torture is at the Heart of America's War on Terror" in the Guardian a few days ago and was reminded of my long-proposed Hollywood movie plot.The author's (Monbiot's) main theme is that in "the fight against cruelty, barbarism and extremism, America has embraced the very evils it claims to confront". Therefore, on these next pages, I am going to purposefully use long quotes or excerpts from Mr. Monbiot's recent writing on terror and torture. By both: (1) appropriating texts from Monbiot's writing and (2) adding caveats of information from my past and my nation's past describing the 20th Century American adventure-along with a new perspective of our "hero" or "victim" George W. Bush who can best be understood through docu-fiction.
The Sundance documentary, "The Tillman Story" (I liked the original title better, "I'm Pat _____ing Tillman!") will be released Aug. 20th.
In his book, “Where Men Win Glory,” Jon Krakauer blamed only the Army and the Bush administration for the cover-up of Pat Tillman's friendly-fire death. In contrast, the film's director (Amir Bar-Lev) emailed me thathe was pretty hard on the Democratic Congress in his film. I certainly hope so.
Just before the 2006 mid-term elections, Kevin Tillman published his eloquent letter, “After Pat’s Birthday” in truthdig.com. Kevin hoped a Democratic Congress would bring accountability back to our country. But, just as with warrantless wiretapping and torture, those responsible for the cover-up of his brother’s friendly-fire death have never been held accountable for their actions.
The cover-up was actually a thoroughly bi-partisan affair. The Democratic Congress and the Obama Presidency protected General Stanley McChrystal from punishment for his central role in the cover-up.
It’s not surprising that after the initial cover-up fell apart, Army officers and the Bush administration lied to protect their careers. But after they took control of both Houses in 2006, the Democratic Congress could have gone after those responsible. Or at least not promoted them!
The documents posted at http://www.feralfirefighter.blogspot.com describe how General McChrystal has been protected by Congressman Henry Waxman, Senator James Webb (along with Senators Carl Levin and John McCain), the New York Times Reporter Thom Shanker, the Center for a New American Security's (CNAS)Andrew Exum,and President Obama.
Five years ago, Pat Tillman’s family was handed a tarnished Silver Star. It was a travesty of justice that General McChrystal was promoted to the Army’s highest rank, and handed his fourth star.
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