Rumsfeld Zeros in on the Internet

WoodPeckr

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George Orwell's Big Brother vision seems to be Rummy's cup of tea.....
Team 'w' propaganda campaign's aren't working and things have to be 'controlled' better, much better says Rummy.
:eek:

By Mike Whitney

02/24/06 "ICH" -- -- Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was warmly greeted at the recent meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations. The CFR is the hand-picked assemblage of western elites from big-energy, corporate media, high-finance and the weapons industry. These are the 4,000 or so members of the American ruling class who determine the shape of policy and ensure that the management of the global economic system remains in the hands of U.S. bluebloods.

As the Pentagon’s chief-coordinator, Rumsfeld enjoys a prominent place among American mandarins. He is the caretaker of their most prized possession; the high-tech, taxpayer-funded, laser-guided war machine. The US Military is the crown-jewel of the American empire; a fully-operational security apparatus for the protection of pilfered resources and the ongoing subjugation of the developing world.

Rumsfeld’s speech alerted his audience to the threats facing America in the new century.

He opined: “We meet today in the 6th year in what promises to be a long struggle against an enemy that in many ways is unlike any our country has ever faced. And, in this war, some of the most critical battles may not be in the mountains in Afghanistan or in the streets of Iraq, but in newsrooms—in places like New York, London, Cairo, and elsewhere.”

“New York”?

“Our enemies have skillfully adapted to fighting wars in today’s media age, but for the most part our country has not”.

Huh? Does Rummy mean those grainy, poorly-produced videos of Bin Laden and co.?

“Consider that the violent extremists have established ‘media relations committees’—and have proven to be highly-successful at manipulating opinion-elites. They plan to design their headline-grabbing attacks using every means of communications to intimidate and break the collective will of free people”.

What gibberish.

It’s foolish to mention “intimidating and breaking the collective will of free people” without entering Abu Ghraib, Guantanomo and Falluja into the discussion. Rumsfeld is just griping about the disgrace he’s heaped on America’s reputation by his refusal to conform to even minimal standards of decency. Instead, he insists that America’s declining stature in the world is the result of a hostile media and “skillful enemies”; in other words, anyone with a computer keyboard and a rudimentary sense of moral judgment.

(Our enemies) “know that communications transcend borders…and that a single news story , handled skillfully, can be as damaging to our cause and as helpful to theirs, as any other method of military attack”.

If the Pentagon is really so worried about “bad press coverage” why not close down the torture-chambers and withdrawal from Iraq? Instead, Rumsfeld is making the case for a preemptive-assault on free speech.

“The growing number of media outlets in many parts of the world….too often serve to inflame and distort, rather than explain and inform. And while Al Qaida and extremist movements have utilized this forum for many years, and have successfully poisoned the Muslim public’s view of the West, we have barely even begun to compete in reaching their audiences.”

“Inflame and distort”?

What distortion? Do cameras distort the photos of abused prisoners, desperate people, or decimated cities?

Rumsfeld’s analysis borders on the delusional. Al Qaida doesn’t have a well-oiled propaganda mechanism that provides a steady stream of fabrications to whip the public into a frenzy. That’s the American media’s assignment. And, they haven’t “poisoned Muslim public opinion” against us. That has been entirely the doing of the Pentagon warlords and their White House compatriots.

“The standard US government public affairs operation was designed primarily …to be reactive rather than proactive…Government, however, is beginning to adapt”

“Proactive news”? In other words, propaganda.

Rumsfeld confirms his dedication to propaganda by defending the bogus stories that were printed in Iraqi newspapers by Pentagon contractors. (We) “sought non-traditional means to provide accurate information to the Iraqi people in the face of an aggressive campaign of disinformation….This has been deemed inappropriate—for examples the allegations of ‘buying news’”.

A brazen defense of intentionally planted lies; how low can we sink?

This has had a “chilling effect for those who are asked to serve in the military public affairs field.”

Is it really that difficult to print the truth?

Rumsfeld boasts of the vast changes in “communications planning” taking place at the Pentagon.

A “public affairs” strategy is at the heart of the new paradigm, replete with “rapid response” teams to address the nagging issues of bombed-out wedding parties, starving prisoners, and devastated cities. No problem is so great that it can’t be papered-over by a public relations team trained in the black-art of deception, obfuscation, and slight-of-hand. Trickery now tops the list of military priorities.

“US Central Command has launched an online communications effort that includes electronic news updates and a links campaign that has resulted in several hundred blogs receiving and publishing CENTCOM content.”

The military plans to develop the “institutional capability” to respond to critical news coverage within the same news cycle and to develop a comprehensive scheme for infiltrating the internet.

The Pentagon’s strategy for taking over the internet and controlling the free flow of information has already been chronicled in a recently declassified report, “The Information Operations Roadmap”; is a window into the minds of those who see free speech as dangerous as an “enemy weapons-system”.

The Pentagon is aiming for “full spectrum dominance” of the Internet. Their objective is to manipulate public perceptions, quash competing points of view, and perpetuate a narrative of American generosity and good-will.

Rumsfeld’s comments are intended to awaken his constituents to the massive information war that is being waged to transform the Internet into the progeny of the MSM; a reliable partner for the dissemination of establishment-friendly news.

The Associated Press reported recently that the US government conducted a massive simulated attack on the Internet called “Cyber-Storm”. The wargame was designed, among other things, to “respond to misinformation campaigns and activist calls by internet bloggers, online diarists whose ‘Web logs” include political rantings and musings about current events”.

Before Bush took office, “political rantings and musings about current events” were protected under the 1st amendment.

No more.

The War Department is planning to insert itself into every area of the Internet from blogs to chat rooms, from leftist web sites to editorial commentary. Their rapid response team will be on hair-trigger alert to dispute any tidbit of information that challenges the official storyline.

We can expect to encounter, as the BBC notes, “psychological operations (that) try to manipulate the thoughts and the beliefs of the enemy (as well as) computer network specialists who seek to destroy enemy networks.”

The enemy, of course, is anyone who refuses to accept their servile role in the new world order or who disrupts the smooth-operation of the Bush police-state.

The resolve to foreclose on free speech has never been greater.

As for Rumsfeld’s devotees at the CFR, the problem of savaging civil liberties is never seriously raised. After all, these are the primary beneficiaries of Washington’s global resource-war; should it matter that other people’s freedom is sacrificed to perpetuate the fundamental institutions of class and privilege?

Rumsfeld is right. The only way to prevail on the information-battlefield is to “take no prisoners”; police the Internet, uproot the troublemakers and activists who provide the truth, and “catapult the propaganda” (Bush) from every bullhorn and web site across the virtual-universe. Free speech is a luxury we cannot afford if it threatens to undermine the basic platforms of western white rule.

As Rumsfeld said, “We are fighting a battle where the survival of our free way of life is at stake.”

Indeed, it is.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article12060.htm

Only Team 'w' knows the truth!!!
 

WoodPeckr

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Arabian Guy said:
why, Iraq is not big enough?
Iraq is only the start!
 

Arabian Guy

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I doubt they will do more, I mean the US military is wounded, and it needs time to recover and lick its blood for a while from what is happening in iraq... didnt they say the army is stretched thin to the point it will snap?
 

WoodPeckr

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Army at the Breaking Point?

Despite what the Pentagon says, there is growing evidence that the military is dangerously stretched in Iraq
By MARK THOMPSON/WASHINGTON

Posted Thursday, Jan. 26, 2006
Even as the Pentagon claims that the military is making great strides against the insurgency in Iraq, there are growing signs that U.S. forces may be near the breaking point. Some 600 top officials of industry, academia and the military are huddling in the capital this week to figure out how to defeat the lethal "improvised explosive devices"—roadside bombs—that have become a grave threat deployed by the insurgency against U.S. troops in Iraq. Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England told some of the military-industrial complex's brainiest thinkers on Monday that "we owe it to the troops" to harness new technologies to squelch the IED threat. Such remote-controlled weapons kill and wound more U.S. troops than any other inside Iraq, England said. Highlighting just how seriously the Pentagon takes the threat, last week England signed a memo elevating what had been a mere Pentagon task force into the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization. Army Secretary Francis Harvey revealed last week that only one in 20 U.S. troops killed in Iraq die from gunshot wounds. Nearly all of the rest—he declined to be more specific—perish from explosions, primarily roadside bombs.

At the same time, a new report—paid for by the Pentagon—echoes the recent private grumblings of some top military brass that the rapid deployment of troops to Iraq is in danger of crippling the fighting force that the nation has steadily rebuilt since the shaky post-Vietnam Army of a generation ago. Andrew Krepinevich, a retired Army officer and West Point graduate who wrote the 136-page report assessing the military's Iraq strategy, warns that the Army cannot maintain its current pace of operations in Iraq without leaving permanent damage. Plans to trim U.S. troops there this year—now at 138,000, with hopes of reducing that to 100,000 by year's end—is a tacit acknowledgment that the Army is stretched too thin, he maintains in a section he entitles "The Thin Green Line." The service's failure to achieve its recruiting goal in 2005—the first time it has missed it since 1999—and hefty bonuses for soldiers to reenlist are further evidence of the Army's erosion, he writes.

The top U.S. officer in Iraq said Thursday that his forces, while strained, are not broken. "The forces are stretched," Army General George Casey said. "I don't think there's any question of that. But the Army has been for the last several years going through a modernization strategy that will produce more units and more ready units." Still, his boss, Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, flat-out declared Wednesday that Krepinevich's study "is just not consistent with the facts." But as the defense secretary spoke to reporters at the Pentagon, Democrats led by former defense secretary William Perry released a report making similar claims as Krepinevich's. Today's Army, the second report concludes, is under enormous strain with potentially "highly-corrosive and potentially long-term effects on the force."

And while a near-doubling of roadside bombs in Iraq—from 5,607 in 2004 to 10,953 last year—might be seen as a sign that the insurgents are on the rise, the U.S. military doesn't view it that way. "The number of IEDs have gone up," Harvey, the Army secretary, said last week, "but the effectiveness of those explosions has been cut by 66 percent. And I'm not going to get into any more detail than that."

This tendency to accentuate the positive is likely to permeate the U.S. military's soon-to-be-released 2007 budget proposal and the accompanying Quadrennial Defense Review. The QDR, released every four years, guides annual spending decisions by venturing how the U.S. military is likely to be waging war in years to come. But, defense officials say, it continues to pump billions of dollars into weapons of dubious utility in the war on terror—like the Army's $161 billion Future Combat Systems. The Army says this welter of weapons—tanks and helicopters, both manned and unmanned, all bound together with computer data links—will let soldiers "move, shoot and communicate better than ever before." But at a time when the military is still belatedly buying sufficient armor for its Humvees and troops on the ground in Iraq, critics suggest such grandiose schemes only fuel suspicion that the Pentagon itself is a victim of the fog of war.

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1153175,00.html

Our War President !!!
 

Papi Chulo

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What I find humourous is that Iraq is a very small country, about the size of Texas. Iran is much bigger. Think of the prblems the US will have when it invades Iran.
 

WoodPeckr

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Papi Chulo said:
What I find humourous is that Iraq is a very small country, about the size of Texas. Iran is much bigger. Think of the prblems the US will have when it invades Iran.
Watch for members of the neocon War Party, Rummy, Condi, DICK, et al., to dust off the old saw they used before invading Iraq namely:
"Neocons have great intel (probably from their oil pal Ahmad Chalabi) saying the Iranians will welcome the US troops as liberators and greet US forces with rose petals!".........:p

Time to spread democracy to Iran !!!
 

cyrus

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Papi Chulo said:
What I find humourous is that Iraq is a very small country, about the size of Texas. Iran is much bigger. Think of the prblems the US will have when it invades Iran.

The biggest problem with US military is its overwhelming reliance on technology, as technology alone will never win them the War.
To prove that look into the books and point to a real war or two (I am not talking about invading Granada with population of 2500 people) that they got into on their own and actually won, including the WWI & WWII?


The USA government is very aggressive in its foreign policies and at the same time it is very much aware of a major flaw in the character of its people, hint it spends billions of tax money to ensure either U.S. stay on top or to prevent others from getting at par with them.
Why that is a flaw? Well, because USA government knows that Americans are not willing to sacrifice their lives for what mostly don’t consider justifiable or necessary war, for that matter.
A sore reality that is not the case with most other nations, including with many Democratic countries in Europe!
 
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arclighter

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cyrus said:
To prove that look into the books and point to a real war or two (I am not talking about invading Granada with population of 2500 people) that they got into on their own and actually won, including the WWI & WWII?
Point to one they lost! What that hell kind of logic are you using? The "il" variety I suspect.
 

cyrus

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arclighter said:
Point to one they lost! What that hell kind of logic are you using? The "il" variety I suspect.

What? You want a history lesson!
Look it up yourself. Start with WWI, WWII, Koran War, Vietnam War, Gulf War, Iraq war . . . .
When, why they joined & their human sacrifices versa of their allies.
The final result in terms of achieving strategic objectives, what they had to do to save face or end the war etc. . . lalala . . . .
 
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arclighter

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cyrus said:
What? You want a history lesson!
Look it up yourself. Start with WWI, WWII, Koran War, Vietnam War, Gulf War, Iraq war . . . .
When, why they joined & their human sacrifices versa of their allies.
The final result in terms of achieving strategic objectives, what they had to do to save face or end the war etc. . . lalala . . . .
The US defeated the Germans in WWI and WWII, fought to a negotiated peace in the Korean and Vietnam Wars, defeated Saddam in Gulf Wars I and II, and defeated the Taliban in Afghanistan. lalalalala....

Ps No thanks on the revisionist history lesson. Not interested in your defeatest spin.
 

mrpolarbear

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arclighter said:
The US defeated the Germans in WWI and WWII, fought to a negotiated peace in the Korean and Vietnam Wars, defeated Saddam in Gulf Wars I and II, and defeated the Taliban in Afghanistan. lalalalala....

Ps No thanks on the revisionist history lesson. Not interested in your defeatest spin.
Hey arc are you slipping? Fought to a negotiated peace in Vietnam? Please pass me the crackpipe youve had it to long.
 

Asterix

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mrpolarbear said:
Hey arc are you slipping? Fought to a negotiated peace in Vietnam? Please pass me the crackpipe youve had it to long.
Oh c'mon sure it was. Escaping from rooftops by helicopter was just part of the deal.
 

WoodPeckr

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arclighter said:
The US defeated the Germans in WWI and WWII, fought to a negotiated peace in the Korean and Vietnam Wars, defeated Saddam in Gulf Wars I and II, and defeated the Taliban in Afghanistan. lalalalala....

Ps No thanks on the revisionist history lesson. Not interested in your defeatest spin.

arcy,
First off, welcome back.
Second, your revisionist history sucks!

The Korean War from June 25, 1950 to cease-fire on July 27, 1953, ended as a draw - the war has not ended officially - there was NO NEGOTIATED PEACE only a signed armistice! This is why after 53 years US troops are still in Korea.

Viet Nam's US created proxy government collapsed shortly after we pulled out. We supported the wrong guys - the rich guys - the other side was more dedicated. Our US military won all the battles, it was the politicians in DC that lost Viet Nam. Same thing is likely to repeat in Iraq!

The Taliban in Afghanistan shows signs of regrouping and making a comeback. Attacks by them are on the increase over there but this is ignored and downplayed by Team 'w' for obvious political reasons....the neocons in the War Party, don't like looking like the fools they obviously are.

You call these facts defeatest spin as mandated by Rove's propaganda mill.
If you take enough OxyContin it is easier to believe and swallow this Cheney/Rove/Rummy fantasy.

I'm a War President !!!
Join my KKKrusade(s) arcy !!!
 

cyrus

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arclighter said:
Point to one they lost! What that hell kind of logic are you using? The "il" variety I suspect.
This is going to be a long one . . .
Where to start! :D
Koran war maybe!
USA went to this war with help of over 15 other nations including UK & France
Yet U.S. 24th Infantry Division was crushed & driven back with heavy losses at Osan
The 24th Division was also overwhelmed and forced to fall back to Taejon,
In 1950 Chinese assualt on US force, resulted in the withdrawal of Eighth Army , a retreat that recoded by Historians as the longest US Army retreat in the American history.
Finally in 1951 the war become a total Stalemate thus USA had to engage in a very lengthy peace negotiations to get out of the damn thing never mind the fact that the war offically is still on.
There is a good reason American’s call this war the Forgotten War because they don’t want to talk about it.

Now lets dial back a bit to let say, the great WW I
Well, from 1914 to 1918, over 10 million soldiers and another 10 million civilians were killed, right?!!!!
Yet United States casualties were no more than 110,000, why?
Because USA did not join the war until the last year of the war, until the April of 1917 when Germany was already at the brink of defeat even then they did not record any significant victory until the battle of Cantigny, somewhere North of Paris in May of 1918 with the help of French.

The same goes with WWII, never mined the fact that they had to Nuke their enemy, not once but twice to force the end of the war
As for the rest i.e., Vietnam War hey . . lets not even go there.
As for the gulf war, . . . right that was not a war, who are we kidding. . and on and on. . .lalala . .
 

WoodPeckr

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cyrus said:
Now lets dial back a bit to let say, the great WW I
Well, from 1914 to 1918, over 10 million soldiers and another 10 million civilians were killed, right?!!!!
Yet United States casualties were no more than 110,000, why?
Because USA did not joined the war until the last year of the war, until the April of 1917 when Germany was already at the brink of defeat even then they did not record any significant victory until the battle of Cantigny, somewhere North of Paris in May of 1918 with the help of French.
Sadly for most of WWI the USA stayed neutral because USA special interests, Prescott Bush, just to name one, a grandfather of Dubya, was making lots of money supplying both sides. Then the USA position was let the rest of the world kill off each other while we stay out of harms way and profit handsomely from the madness.

MIC have always done well
by the Bush dynasty !!!
 
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