Blogger Down
Blogger was down for a while this evening/morning and it's just starting to come back. Use this as an Open Post for Friday. Try to behave - we're getting bored again having to clean out 20 and 30 comments at a time about bullshit again. We were all playing so nicely for a while and then the juveniles must have come back from their 4th and 5th period furloughs. Knock it off. Thanks.
posted by SCC at 1:05 AM
37 Comments:
How do the combat veterans of OIF/OEF feel about the airstrike? To them it must be a sense of accomplishment...God Bless the military!!!
I'm so glad that our Mayor is concerned about FASHION in our city.
Let's see... the jobs on the southside are mom and pop businesses, retail, restaurants, fast food and factories! Rare office jobs, so people have to travel 2+ hours per way to commute so they may earn a couple dollars above the hourly wage!
Pretty soon, this jackass of a Mayor will require officers to dress up in uniforms by Versace!!!!
Priorities people, PRIORITES
everyone, i'm fine! really!
soon, i will be back in action. not really my old self, but back in form, i must say!
ald beavers is attched strings to my body so i may be manipulated like a Marionette!
But trust me, I am FINE
1:16
Taking out the No 2 al Qaeda operative was exhilarating for me to hear, but I won't actually "feel" the mission is accomplished until we obliterate Osama!!!
-vet
Finally! George "W" seriously needed to make a statement to the world concerning the War on Terror...Killing the Operations brain of al Qaeda was a major impact! Our KIA Brothers and Sisters did not die in vain.
So...Let's strap on our "Red, White and Blue" ass-kicking boots and get Osama.
-another proud veteran
To those who oppose the idea of Supporting Our Troops...
You are either with us...or against...But REMEMBER this...We will defeat ALL enemies-foreign and domestic!!!
You know who you are...
-Combat Veteran OIF
I've read posts in other blogs about not wanting to support the military because of all the gang bangers in Iraq. Get a clue!
I proudly served in Iraq and I didn't see one gang banger where I was in Mosul. The gang bangers were in the rear with the gear...Why do you think they were able to grafitti tanks and equipment? NOT FRONT LINES... So, get off your high horse about the vets returning from Iraq. Most of us are policemen, firemen, teachers and parents. Leave us alone with your anti-war statements, because you will NEVER understand what we endured, so you wouldn't have to.
Iraq veteran
What happened to Niles Il Mayor. Is mayor richie rich next??
Gang Bangers in Iraq?! Not on my watch pal...We only had quality personnel in our outfit. Military Police and criminals have nothing but disdain for each other...hahaha...MPs are the cops of the military-your typical thug would NOT be caught dead being a "police officer"...Simpletons believe everything they read in the press. We served honorably and are now back on the streets with you. Watch what you say about our fallen...
MP from the Sand Box
My genitalia becomes engorged when I think about the 500 lb bombs destroying our hated enemy!!! That's right-I get a woody...
Proud to admit it and not shy to show it...
Bad ass from the USMC...
Brother in Blue in a District near you...
ps That's for 1:16's question...
Ooh Rah Maggot!!!
As a fellow Marine, I too agree that I was highly excited by the thought of a terrorist meeting his Maker...Allah or whatever...I work in the Southwest Side and I gladly welcome a gangbanger to TRY to off me!
Insurgents couldn't get my ass in Tikrit and I'll be damned if I let a street hood end my life.
This one's for you Brian Strouse and Eric Lee...Semper Fidelis...I'm home!!!
Dude, I am hurting right now...2:09
You made me remember how I felt when I learned of the Corps' loss of two great Marines. Eric was from 007 and Brian was 012. Both stood up for the values of Duty, Country and the Corps.
1:16...How do I feel?
Semper Fi
-Marine
Finally! A blog that asks a vet his/her opinion about the recent triumph over good vs. evil.
Hell Yeah! I'm damn proud of my fellow "fly boys" and their accuracy. Bush needed to make something right-HE SUCCEEDED...
Airforce veteran-Mosul 2004-2005
I'm fuckin' pissed as hell that we (collectively speaking) haven't found Pvt. Maupin?!!! What the fuck America? He's been MIA too damn long now...I'm happy about the airstrike...But vehemently angry about NOT finding our soldier.
Airborne All The Way!!!
(And if you didn't guess-I'm an OIF vet too)
Priorities? The question of this blog is about how veterans feel about the killing of the terrorist...1:18 chooses to talk about FASHION in the City...WTF
Dude, your priority should be reading the posts...What are you a bleeding heart liberal?
-OIF
WANNA KNOW HOW I FEEL? LIKE I NEED TO KILL AGAIN...AND AGAIN...AND AGAIN...THANK GOD I'M A COP!!!
DEATH TO THE RAGHEADS!!!!
MOSUL OR BUST...
2:32
Ok, this guy clearly needs therapy. What did Iraq do to you to hate so much? Please answer-
If you weren't there-you probably don't care...The guy who you say needs therapy is just misunderstood. Imagine leaving a combat zone where the enemy is vigilent and determined to kill you. Now you are home and have to face another type of evil...crime. To adjust to being back home is to lose the part of yourself. Survival is the key. Don't make light of therapy either...You have no idea what the guy, your fellow officer, saw or encountered. Tread lightly friend...Tread lightly.
Live free or die!
COURT RULING, Chicago Illinois, May 8, 2006 Chicago, Illinois (AP)
A seven year old boy was at the center of a Chicago courtroom drama
yesterday when he challenged a court ruling over whom should have
custody of him.
The boy has a history of being beaten by his parents and the judge
initially awarded custody to his aunt, in keeping with the child
custody law and regulations requiring that family unity be maintained
to the degree possible.
The boy surprised the court when he proclaimed that his aunt beat him
more than his parents and he adamantly refused to live with her. When
the judge suggested that he live with his grandparents, the boy cried
out that they also beat him.
After considering the remainder of the immediate family and learning
that domestic violence was apparently a way of life among them, the
Judge took the unprecedented step of allowing the boy to propose who
should have custody of him.
After two recesses to check legal references and confer with child
welfare officials, the judge granted temporary custody to the Chicago
Cubs, who the boy firmly believes are not capable of beating anyone.
I came crawling back to the USA on my hands and knees for a piece of FREEDOM...and I got shit on by Cindy Sheehan and the fn' cowards protesting the war I lived. Protest terrorism assholes!!!
-Iraqi Purple "Hearted" Freedom Fighter
I'm looking for the Washington Post piece from a while ago that talked about the Pentagon conducting a propaganda campaign to magnify the role of Zarqawi. Some military intelligence officials, believing the campaign may have exaggerated his importance, helped the Bush administration make the link between the Iraq war and the September 11th attacks reportedly used to build sentiment against non-U.S. foreigners in Iraq. One military briefing was entitled: ‘Villainize Zarqawi, Leverage Xenophobia Response’. Another document lists, ‘U.S. home audience’ as a target audience for the campaign. In other words- "You've just been PUNK'd"! Watch Iraq continue it's descent into civil war (same as it ever was) and bet on us withdrawing before the next Presidential erection.
Military Plays Up Role of Zarqawi
Jordanian Painted As Foreign Threat To Iraq's Stability
By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, April 10, 2006; A01
The U.S. military is conducting a propaganda campaign to magnify the role of the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, according to internal military documents and officers familiar with the program. The effort has raised his profile in a way that some military intelligence officials believe may have overstated his importance and helped the Bush administration tie the war to the organization responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
The documents state that the U.S. campaign aims to turn Iraqis against Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian, by playing on their perceived dislike of foreigners. U.S. authorities claim some success with that effort, noting that some tribal Iraqi insurgents have attacked Zarqawi loyalists.
For the past two years, U.S. military leaders have been using Iraqi media and other outlets in Baghdad to publicize Zarqawi's role in the insurgency. The documents explicitly list the "U.S. Home Audience" as one of the targets of a broader propaganda campaign.
Some senior intelligence officers believe Zarqawi's role may have been overemphasized by the propaganda campaign, which has included leaflets, radio and television broadcasts, Internet postings and at least one leak to an American journalist. Although Zarqawi and other foreign insurgents in Iraq have conducted deadly bombing attacks, they remain "a very small part of the actual numbers," Col. Derek Harvey, who served as a military intelligence officer in Iraq and then was one of the top officers handling Iraq intelligence issues on the staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told an Army meeting at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., last summer.
In a transcript of the meeting, Harvey said, "Our own focus on Zarqawi has enlarged his caricature, if you will -- made him more important than he really is, in some ways."
"The long-term threat is not Zarqawi or religious extremists, but these former regime types and their friends," said Harvey, who did not return phone calls seeking comment on his remarks.
There has been a running argument among specialists in Iraq about how much significance to assign to Zarqawi, who spent seven years in prison in Jordan for attempting to overthrow the government there. After his release he spent time in Pakistan and Afghanistan before moving his base of operations to Iraq. He has been sentenced to death in absentia for planning the 2002 assassination of U.S. diplomat Lawrence Foley in Jordan. U.S. authorities have said he is responsible for dozens of deaths in Iraq and have placed a $25 million bounty on his head.
Recently there have been unconfirmed reports of a possible rift between Zarqawi and the parent al-Qaeda organization that may have resulted in his being demoted or cut loose. Last week, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said that it was unclear what was happening between Zarqawi and al-Qaeda. "It may be that he's not being fired at all, but that he is being focused on the military side of the al-Qaeda effort and he's being asked to leave more of a political side possibly to others, because of some disagreements within al-Qaeda," he said.
The military's propaganda program largely has been aimed at Iraqis, but seems to have spilled over into the U.S. media. One briefing slide about U.S. "strategic communications" in Iraq, prepared for Army Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top U.S. commander in Iraq, describes the "home audience" as one of six major targets of the American side of the war.
That slide, created by Casey's subordinates, does not specifically state that U.S. citizens were being targeted by the effort, but other sections of the briefings indicate that there were direct military efforts to use the U.S. media to affect views of the war. One slide in the same briefing, for example, noted that a "selective leak" about Zarqawi was made to Dexter Filkins, a New York Times reporter based in Baghdad. Filkins's resulting article, about a letter supposedly written by Zarqawi and boasting of suicide attacks in Iraq, ran on the Times front page on Feb. 9, 2004.
Leaks to reporters from U.S. officials in Iraq are common, but official evidence of a propaganda operation using an American reporter is rare.
Filkins, reached by e-mail, said that he was not told at the time that there was a psychological operations campaign aimed at Zarqawi, but said he assumed that the military was releasing the letter "because it had decided it was in its best interest to have it publicized." No special conditions were placed upon him in being briefed on its contents, he said. He said he was skeptical about the document's authenticity then, and remains so now, and so at the time tried to confirm its authenticity with officials outside the U.S. military.
"There was no attempt to manipulate the press," Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the U.S. military's chief spokesman when the propaganda campaign began in 2004, said in an interview Friday. "We trusted Dexter to write an accurate story, and we gave him a good scoop."
Another briefing slide states that after U.S. commanders ordered that the atrocities of Saddam Hussein's government be publicized, U.S. psychological operations soldiers produced a video disc that not only was widely disseminated inside Iraq, but also was "seen on Fox News."
U.S. military policy is not to aim psychological operations at Americans, said Army Col. James A. Treadwell, who commanded the U.S. military psyops unit in Iraq in 2003. "It is ingrained in U.S.: You don't psyop Americans. We just don't do it," said Treadwell. He said he left Iraq before the Zarqawi program began but was later told about it.
"When we provided stuff, it was all in Arabic," and aimed at the Iraqi and Arab media, said another military officer familiar with the program, who spoke on background because he is not supposed to speak to reporters.
But this officer said that the Zarqawi campaign "probably raised his profile in the American press's view."
With satellite television, e-mail and the Internet, it is impossible to prevent some carryover from propaganda campaigns overseas into the U.S. media, said Treadwell, who is now director of a new project at the U.S. Special Operations Command that focuses on "trans-regional" media issues. Such carryover is "not blowback, it's bleed-over," he said. "There's always going to be a certain amount of bleed-over with the global information environment."
The Zarqawi program was not related to another effort, led by the Lincoln Group, a U.S. consulting firm, to place pro-U.S. articles in Iraq newspapers, according to the officer familiar with the program who spoke on background.
It is difficult to determine how much has been spent on the Zarqawi campaign, which began two years ago and is believed to be ongoing. U.S. propaganda efforts in Iraq in 2004 cost $24 million, but that included extensive building of offices and residences for troops involved, as well as radio broadcasts and distribution of thousands of leaflets with Zarqawi's face on them, said the officer speaking on background.
The Zarqawi campaign is discussed in several of the internal military documents. "Villainize Zarqawi/leverage xenophobia response," one U.S. military briefing from 2004 stated. It listed three methods: "Media operations," "Special Ops (626)" (a reference to Task Force 626, an elite U.S. military unit assigned primarily to hunt in Iraq for senior officials in Hussein's government) and "PSYOP," the U.S. military term for propaganda work.
One internal briefing, produced by the U.S. military headquarters in Iraq, said that Kimmitt had concluded that, "The Zarqawi PSYOP program is the most successful information campaign to date."
Kimmitt is now the senior planner on the staff of the Central Command that directs operations in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East.
In 2003 and 2004, he coordinated public affairs, information operations and psychological operations in Iraq -- though he said in an interview the internal briefing must be mistaken because he did not actually run the psychological operations and could not speak for them.
Kimmitt said, "There was clearly an information campaign to raise the public awareness of who Zarqawi was, primarily for the Iraqi audience but also with the international audience."
A goal of the campaign was to drive a wedge into the insurgency by emphasizing Zarqawi's terrorist acts and foreign origin, said officers familiar with the program.
"Through aggressive Strategic Communications, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi now represents: Terrorism in Iraq/Foreign Fighters in Iraq/Suffering of Iraqi People (Infrastructure Attacks)/Denial of Iraqi Aspirations," the same briefing asserts.
Officials said one indication that the campaign worked is that over the past several months, there have been reports that Iraqi tribal insurgents have attacked Zarqawi loyalists, especially in the culturally conservative province of Anbar. "What we're finding is indeed the people of al-Anbar -- Fallujah and Ramadi, specifically -- have decided to turn against terrorists and foreign fighters," Maj. Gen Rick Lynch, a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, said in February.
Remember- use of PROPAGANDA on US citizens is illegal (unless they feel like it...)
Where's those 72 virgins?
I'm on fire and Satan won't decapitate me!
Allah, you lied.
I'm in Hell!
Ok, this guy clearly needs therapy. What did Iraq do to you to hate so much? Please answer-
Not just Iraq but every bomb builder nation. They can all go to allah Hell. Muslim faith...kill all who are not muslim. Mix that in your latte yuppy asshole.
Where's "Finding Private Daley" the Mayors son?
Is he set to return Home as a war hero and take dads place?
We can't take anymore of the Daley family (or the Kennedys)!
We can't take anymore of the Daley family (or the Kennedys)!
6/09/2006 12:26:36 PM
"WE" what are you French? or do you have a mouse in your pocket?
Daley did not complete Basic Training, so he is not in the service. All that talk about him becoming a Special Forces operator was BS! Should have known he wouldn't follow through...just look at how he deserted West Point. He will NEVER be a soldier.
To 2:25
Get it right, it was Spc Maupin, and the Army promoted him while MIA status to Sergeant. The sad truth is there is no way he is alive. RIP.
Brother as long as I live and breathe...SGT Maupin is considered to being alive. You gotta have faith baby boy! We soldiers NEVER FORGET and we always paln for the day we will rescue our soldiers. Lead, follow or get the hell out of the way...cause this crazy fucker is a POW/MIA supporter who will kill for freedom...We NEVER say DIE!!!!
Hey John Wayne what's your paln? Stupid military fuck! You types NEVER learn that you are the minority. We don't support you or your corn-holed belief of POW/MIA...
Grow up and be a man...
FYI, the word your military brain couldn't handle was PLAN...
Huh????? What you be talkin......Man.
7:38 PM
Young citizen Daley now lives in the Castro, San Francisco.
Boys will be boys!
Personally, I feel like I have more to give and shed in the Giant Sandbox. I lost many friends while at war...killed in their youth...But I would go through the misery, sadness, pain and fear all over again...to honor those who paid the ultimate sacrifice.
So, my anser to the blog is...I feel like kicking ass is the way to go!!!
Why am I so good at kicking ass? Is it my training? Is it my survivor sense and my Nordic-godlike looks? I am the Master of delivering pain...Why am I so damn good at kicking ass?
-Army Ranger-75th Rgr Batt
Cuz you are who you are baby boy!!!! God Bless Ya!!!
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