War

Obama has united two terrorist groups formerly fighting each other, and NSA failed to identify this terrorist summit before it happened. Or maybe the US wanted them to unite.

The government has blurred war and entertainment, much like in The Hunger Games.

"There was a BBC documentary exposing the rescue of Jessica Lynch as a PR stunt. A local eye witness described the incident as follows:

“Like a film of Hollywood they cry ‘Go! Go! Go!’ and shout ‘Go! Go! Go!’ and with guns with blanks, without bullets. Blanks and the sounds of explosions…They make a show for the American attack for the hospital. Action movies like Sylvester Stallone or Jackie Chan, with jumping and shouting, breaking the door, with the photos, with the photos.”

Who doesn’t love a good “Rescue the Young Blonde P.O.W.” story to kick off a war?"

I knew the Iraqis were surprised by the "rescuers" since they weren't holding Lynch prisoner and there were no Iraqi military forces around, but I hadn't heard all that.

"The National Defense Authorization Act of 2013 unbound the restrictions on the use of government propaganda domestically, so we can expect to see more of this, though whatever restrictions were in place before don’t seem to have restricted much. The CIA’s Operation Mockingbird started as far back as the 1950s. Michael Hastings reported in May 2012, “The Pentagon spends some $4 billion a year to sway public opinion already.” The film Act of Valor was commissioned by the Navy’s Special Warfare Command for the purposes of boosting recruitment, not that the advertising indicated this. From the Washington Post article from 2011:

In June, the Army negotiated a first-of-its-kind sponsorship deal with the producers of “X-Men: First Class,” backing it up with ads telling potential recruits that they could live out superhero fantasies on real-life battlefields.

If E.T. can sell Reese’s Pieces, and the Italian Job can sell Mini Coopers, the X-Men can sell war."

That's news to me too.

"Likewise in our society, if you question the official story, you will be harassed, your career ruined, or worse. Michael Hastings reported that when USA Today was investigating the amount of money spent by the DoD and the Pentagon on propaganda, “the two reporters who were working on the story appeared to have been targeted by Pentagon contractors, who created fake Facebook pages and Twitter accounts in an attempt to discredit them.” Hastings, an investigative journalist whose Rolling Stone exposé led to the resignation of General Stanley McChrystal in 2010, was investigating CIA Director John Brennan’s involvement in the witch hunt being conducted against investigative journalists when his car ran into a tree for no apparent reason. He died in a suspiciously fiery car crash. The U.S. government created a fictional narrative initially about the way Pat Tillman died (heroically! in an ambush!) What the storytellers omitted from the media-friendly version of the Pat Tillman war celebrity story was the fact that he had turned against the war and perhaps was planning to speak out against it upon his return. On September 25, 2005, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that Tillman had become a critic of the Iraq war and had scheduled a meeting with Noam Chomsky to take place when he returned from Afghanistan, which Tillman’s mother and Chomsky later confirmed. Tillman couldn’t confirm the story because he had been killed by “friendly fire” with three shots to the head. Was that someone’s way of cutting out his tongue?"

I knew that.

"Last year, when Lynch emerged for her requisite Victor media tour upon the ten year anniversary of the “rescue,” the media often referenced the controversy surrounding the incident, but they completely mischaracterized the controversy! As you can see in this interview with ABC News, the controversy they addressed has nothing to do with the facts of her rescue but with the facts of the attack in which she was captured. The question the ABC reporter is asking is not: Do you believe your dramatic “rescue” was for the purposes of obtaining titillating footage and creating a sensationalized, heartwarming story to be used as war propaganda in the mass media back home? The question the ABC reporter asks instead is: Did you or did you not shoot back? The fact that the original “story” had Lynch shooting back heroically (like in the Pat Tillman story) and the fact that she later came out and refuted it, saying that her gun had jammed, and calling the original story “propaganda” for making her out to be some kind of hero, when she insisted she was not: that is supposed to be the controversy of record when it comes to the Jessica Lynch story, according to ABC News. By the way, don’t forget to catch Jessica Lynch in her upcoming film debut: She will play the daughter of an American President in a movie about religious liberty and a government takeover of churches. Boy do they know their demographic."

Great essay.