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Text messages and phone calls add psychological aspect to warfare in Gaza

January 3, 2009 / Klint Finley

srael and Hamas have mounted psychological warfare on each others’ civilian populations. Hamas says it is firing threatening text messages at Israeli mobile phones and jamming radio stations while Israel is bombarding Palestinians with menacing phone calls and leaflets.

“The messages say that the Palestinian resistance missiles will reach you wherever you are and your government won’t be able to protect you,” said Abu Mujaheid, spokesman for the Palestinian Resistance Committees.

Hamas says it can send up to 70,000 text messages but so far there have been reports of just dozens.

“[Israel is] sending text messages and interrupting Palestinian radio and trying to scare Palestinians with their messages so we are running a counter campaign by sending text messages to Israelis,” Mujaheid said.

Full Story: the Guardian

(via Grinding)

U.S. toll in Afghanistan at record high in 2008

January 2, 2009 / Klint Finley

Foreign troops suffered their highest death toll in the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2008, and with thousands more troops scheduled to be deployed, this year could be even worse.

Nearly 270 foreign soldiers, 127 of them Americans, were killed in combat in 2008, versus 169 foreign combat deaths in 2007, according to figures compiled by Reuters.

Hundreds more foreign soldiers were wounded in Taliban attacks last year, mostly involving roadside bomb blasts, which according to the U.S. ambassador, doubled to some 2,000 in 2008 from the previous year.

Reuters: U.S. toll in Afghanistan at record high in 2008

US opposed sanctions against Hussein after he gased the Kurds

December 4, 2008 / Klint Finley

Declassified U.S. government documents show that while Saddam Hussein was gassing Iraqi Kurds, the U.S. opposed punishing Iraq with a trade embargo because it was cultivating Iraq as an ally against Iran and as a market for U.S. farm exports.

According to Peter Galbraith, then an idealistic Senate staffer determined to stop Hussein from committing genocide, the Reagan administration “got carried away with their own propaganda. They began to believe that Saddam Hussein could be a reliable partner.”

Full Story: CNN

(via The Agitator)

Potential military applications of cognitive technologies

August 25, 2008 / Klint Finley

Drugs that make soldiers want to fight. Robots linked directly to their controllers’ brains. Lie-detecting scans administered to terrorist suspects as they cross U.S. borders.

These are just a few of the military uses imagined for cognitive science — and if it’s not yet certain whether the technologies will work, the military is certainly taking them very seriously.

“It’s way too early to know which — if any — of these technologies is going to be practical,” said Jonathan Moreno, a Center for American Progress bioethicist and author of Mind Wars: Brain Research and National Defense. “But it’s important for us to get ahead of the curve. Soldiers are always on the cutting edge of new technologies.”

Full Story: Wired

(via Cryptogon)

Heavy Metal in Baghdad

August 6, 2008 / TiamatsVision

“Heavy Metal in Baghdad is a feature film documentary that follows the Iraqi heavy metal band Acrassicauda from the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003 to the present day. Playing heavy metal in a Muslim country has always been a difficult (if not impossible) proposition but after Saddam’s regime was toppled, there was a brief moment for the band in which real freedom seemed possible. That hope was quickly dashed as their country fell into a bloody insurgency. From 2003-2006, Iraq disintegrated around them while Acrassicauda struggled to stay together and stay alive, always refusing to let their heavy metal dreams die. Their story echoes the unspoken hopes of an entire generation of young Iraqis.”

(via Snag Films. “Heavy metal in Baghdad” site. Acrassicauda’s MySpace)

The Vast and Dangerous Transfer of American Spying to Mercenary Companies

August 1, 2008 / TiamatsVision

“Chalmers Johnson has produced a superb new article on what privatization has meant to the U.S. Intelligence Community.

Focusing on Tim Shorrock’s new book, Spies for Hire, Johnson traces the history of “the wholesale transfer of military and intelligence functions to private, often anonymous operatives” from Ronald Reagan’s day to the present, reminding us of just how crucial the Clinton administration was to this development. He also lays out just what can happen when the intelligence budget soars and startling amounts of it are placed in private, for-profit hands. Not only, he claims, has the privatization of intelligence made it easier for enemies to penetrate American intelligence and greased the slippery slope to the loss of professionalism within the community of intelligence analysts, but, perhaps most serious of all, it has ensured the loss of the most valuable asset any intelligence organization possesses — its institutional memory.

Johnson concludes: “The current situation represents the worst of all possible worlds. Successive administrations and Congresses have made no effort to alter the CIA’s role as the president’s private army, even as we have increased its incompetence by turning over many of its functions to the private sector. We have thereby heightened the risks of war by accident, or by presidential whim, as well as of surprise attack because our government is no longer capable of accurately assessing what is going on in the world and because its intelligence agencies are so open to pressure, penetration, and manipulation of every kind.”

(via Alternet)

“Who Will Stand”-Documentary Tackles PTSD & Wounded Soldier Issues

July 21, 2008 / TiamatsVision

“More American soldiers kill themselves than are killed by the enemy, and many others suffer the effects of post traumatic stress disorder. As many as eighteen soldiers a day are committing suicide and most of those soldiers kill themselves after they return home. Their divorce rate has tripled since the beginning of the war and substance abuse among veterans is four times the national average. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg according to Who Will Stand producer/director Phil Valentine.

The two hour documentary covers, in detail, the plights of more than a dozen soldiers who have returned either physically or psychologically wounded, including hard-to-measure effects of post traumatic stress disorder. ‘Nobody is surprised that war creates amputees, homelessness, drug and alcohol abuse, divorce, but very few people are aware of the enormous rates of these issues,’ said Valentine. ‘And almost no one is aware of the psychological issues that nearly 100% of combat soldiers suffer with, namely Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or PTSD.’ Many of the films on the war in Iraq and Afghanistan take sides on whether we should have gone there, whether we should still be there and when we should leave. Who Will Stand covers none of these issues, focusing instead on the plight of returning disabled American veterans.”

(via Alternative Approaches. See also: “Soldier in Famous Photo Never Defeated ‘Demons'” via MSNBC)

(“Who Will Stand” trailer)

VA Testing Drugs on War Veterans

June 19, 2008 / TiamatsVision

“The government is testing drugs with severe side effects like psychosis and suicidal behavior on hundreds of military veterans, using small cash payments to attract patients into medical experiments that often target distressed soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, a Washington Times/ABC News investigation has found.

In one such experiment involving the controversial anti-smoking drug Chantix, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) took three months to alert its patients about severe mental side effects. The warning did not arrive until after one of the veterans taking the drug had suffered a psychotic episode that ended in a near lethal confrontation with police.”

(via Washington Times)

US Special Forces counter-insurgency manual leaked on Wikileaks

June 19, 2008 / TiamatsVision

“US Army Field Manual FM 31-20-3, Foreign Internal Defense Tactics Techniques and Procedures for Special Forces; 2004 edition. Made US Army doctrine (policy) on 20 September 1994; 219 printed pages. Written at the sensitive but unclassified level.

This sensitive US military counterinsurgency manual could be critically described as “What we learned about running death squads and propping up corrupt government in Latin America and how to apply it to other places”. Its contents are both history defining for Latin America and, given the continued role of US Special Forces in the suppression of insurgencies and guerilla movements world wide, history making.

The document, which is official US Special Forces policy, directly advocates training paramilitaries, pervasive surveillance, censorship, press control, restrictions on labor unions & political parties, suspending habeas corpus, warrantless searches, detainment without charge, bribery, employing terrorists, false flag operations, concealing human rights abuses from journalists, and extensive use of “psychological operations” (propaganda) to make these and other “population & resource control” measures palatable.”

(via Wikileaks. h/t: Conspiracy Planet)

The Documentary “Why We Fight”

June 10, 2008 / TiamatsVision

“Why We Fight (2005) is a documentary film directed by Eugene Jarecki about the United States relationship with war. Its title is an allusion to the World War II-era newsreels of the same name, which were commissioned by the United States to justify their decision to go to war against the Axis Powers.

It describes the rise and maintenance of the United States military-industrial complex and its involvement in the wars led by the United States during the last fifty years, and in particular in the 2003 Invasion of Iraq. The film alleges that in every decade since World War II, the American public has been told a lie to bring it into war to fuel the military-economic machine, which in turn maintains American dominance in the world.

It includes interviews with John McCain, Chalmers Johnson, Richard Perle, William Kristol, Gore Vidal and Joseph Cirincione. The film also incorporates the stories of a Vietnam War veteran whose son died in the September 11, 2001 attacks and then had his son’s name written on a bomb dropped on Iraq; a 23-year old New York man who enlists in the United States Army citing his financial troubles after his only family member died; and a former Vietnamese refugee who now develops explosives for the American military.”

(via Google Video)

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