Warriors Press For Propaganda - 4

Three years ago on this date, I published the first post of this series.

Perhaps some regular Dredd Blog readers thought this subject matter might be a bit over the top, since the religion of nationalism is stronger than any other "ism" these days.

However, I still think that most Dredd Blog readers, who also read later posts dealing with American propaganda, even though they may find it difficult to swallow, can't deny the evidence:

I spent last year in Afghanistan, visiting and talking with U.S. troops and their Afghan partners. My duties with the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force took me into every significant area where our soldiers engage the enemy. Over the course of 12 months, I covered more than 9,000 miles and talked, traveled and patrolled with troops in Kandahar, Kunar, Ghazni, Khost, Paktika, Kunduz, Balkh, Nangarhar and other provinces.

What I saw bore no resemblance to rosy official statements by U.S. military leaders about conditions on the ground.

(Truth, Lies, and Afghanistan, Armed Forces Journal, by Lt. Col. Daniel L. Davis [naturally BSCOM ordered this removed, so here is the Wayback Machine copy]). The last post dealing with the subject was just as shocking, just as true, and only a short while back ("Exceptional American Propaganda Inspired NAZI Goebbels").

The previous two posts in this series are here and here, but the following text is the original post from three years ago:

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We covered psychological operations (psyops) in an article last month.

Bloggers responding to that thread mentioned that psyops are illegal if they are conducted on Americans (wink, wink - as if making bank robbery illegal stopped bank robbery).

The Mainstream Media (MSM) has now come clean and said what we have been blogging for years:

The Bush administration turned the U.S. military into a global propaganda machine while imposing tough restrictions on journalists seeking to give the public truthful reports about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Associated Press chief executive Tom Curley said Friday.

Curley, speaking to journalists at the University of Kansas, said the news industry must immediately negotiate a new set of rules for covering war because "we are the only force out there to keep the government in check and to hold it accountable."

(Huffington Post, emphasis added). That begs the question "don't we have rules that prevent the military from being a propaganda machine which uses the American press to promulgate its propaganda"?

Our current national schizophrenia would produce the "answer" yes and no, which is what a past president warned us about.

The next post in this series is here.