Father's Day: The Dangerous Notions Of Michael Berg

Where do you guys dredge this pap up from? I mean, c'mon! I especially love the quote:

"As one Pentagon general told a group of deception commandos: "The Zarqawi Psy-Op program is the most successful information campaign to date.""

Wow. Can we get any more vague? Or ridiculous? If you can get the quote... then which general said this? Where? And who is the source? I'm sure said general isn't. Or the "deception commandos". Did they have a reporter in the room? This is worse than me saying "As one CAP insider told a group of Greenpeace ecoterrorists: "The Kyoto smokescreen has been the most successful fundraising campaign to date." Well, at least one of the two fictous statements is closer to the truth.

I just love how these opinion pieces are somehow treated as "news". How some blogger from nowhere who has access to his friend's mom's postman's pizza boy heard some obscure tidbit of gossip and this is perpetuated on the net until it somehow becomes fact.

Next you'll tell me that some drunken US soldier was shooting up the Baghdad zoo and killed some poor tiger. Or that the evil corporate military industrial neocon Bush conspiracy gang wired 3 skyscrapers with high explosives to fall in the middle of New York to initiate a complex resource grab throughout the middle east and that nore than 300 trained firefighters were unable to see these explosives during their time in the buildings, and that the explosives and all associated cabling was completely hidden from all maintenance and workers in said buildings for weeks or months while these explosive charges were placed. Oops. Too late. On both counts.

<blockquote>"As one Pentagon general told a group of deception commandos: "The Zarqawi Psy-Op program is the most successful information campaign to date."" <br><br> Wow. Can we get any more vague? Or ridiculous? If you can get the quote... then which general said this? Where? And who is the source?</blockquote> <br><br> Good questions. You can dig up some answers directly from what appears to be the originating source of this quote: <br><br> <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/09/AR2006040900890_pf.html">Military Plays Up Role of Zarqawi Jordanian Painted As Foreign Threat To Iraq's Stability <br> By Thomas E. Ricks<br> Washington Post Staff Writer<br> Monday, April 10, 2006; A01 </a> <br><br> For more information on this subject, I recommend this article <a href="http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=CHO20060418&articleId=2275">Who is behind "Al Qaeda in Iraq"? Pentagon acknowledges fabricating a "Zarqawi Legend"</a> <br><br> You may not agree, but Information Clearing House is a well respected alternative news source. I've always found it to be a very well researched, and I think it's worth bookmarking. <br><br> To see how Zarqawi propaganda was used during military operations in Iraq, a very good and obvious example was the use of Zarqawi to justify the horrific and indiscriminate destruction of the city of Fallujah and all of its remaining inhabitants who refused or were unable to flee. <br><br> <a href="http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&as_qdr=all&q=Fallujah+Zarqawi+&btnG=Search&meta=">Google search on "Fallujah" and "Zarqawi"</a> <br><br>

Damn. I retract my earlier comment about the validity of this source. I was wrong. This does appear in every way to be a valid statement attributed to verifiable source.

The general was Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt (verified as the predominant US military spokesman in Iraq - interviews with everyone from Fox to the BBC)

The source of the statement was an internal briefing in Iraq about Zarqawi. Kimmitt claims "the internal briefing must be mistaken because he did not actually run the psychological operations and could not speak for them." Yeah, well he speaks for the entire military on a host of subjects, so I'm sure someone can find this playback.

I would say that clearinghouse manipulated the context and the intended audience of the operations. The whole "psy-op commando" thing is also over the top. But, as I said, it appears that the source and statement are in fact true. I tip my hat.

Rearguard, you are correct.

The Berg beheading was a recuiting poster for al Qaeda of Iraq. It worked so well that terrorists the world over are adopting the televised public slaughter of innocents to sell their causes - in many cases to Americans and Canadians. In the meantime us know-it-alls will blame everyone but the perpretators. That's all us know-it-all's know.
How would Nick Berg and Christian peacemaker Tom Fox and thousands of Iraqi fathers rate the truth, their wanton murders and torture sessions, that these ads force us to deal with. Their friends demonstrate against Bush and ignore the people who put their so-called friends in their graves, trying their best to sell the suicidal terrorist agenda. Hitler didn't try to sell any crazy ideas this way. But these guys have had great success selling a de facto state religion to people who claim somehow to be secularists.
It's frightening.

"It's frightening."

I'll tell you what's frightening.

I was watching the early evening news with my wife and 3 year old son. The story we were watching was about a bear that was chased up a tree by a cat. During this delightful story, the image of al-Zarqawi's busted up head appeared on the screen! There was no mistake, al-Zarqawi's head trophy was somehow spun into a story about a bear and a cat - we were completely disgusted.

To get al-Zarqawi's head displayed on TV, the US military had a guy fly out over Iraq at unseen heights and drop two very large bombs on a house (so the story goes anyway). We were told that not ony did al-Zarqawi die in the attack, but so did several other people including a child.

I fail to see any difference between al-Zarqawi's methods (real or mythical) and those of the US military and their hoplessly amoral propagandists.

John Tiller completely ignores the "who profits" dictum. Lets ignore who Nick Bergs father is and what he does. Lets ignore the botched beheading video. Lets ignore all semblances of intelligent research. Lets ignore what the General said, and if we can't ignore it lets obfuscate it. Lets stick our heads in the sand and, unlike ostriches who do it to draw predators away from their young 'uns, sing praises to Bush and all his psychotic madmen.

---

"Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth."
(Albert Einstein)

Next MichaelScott will tell us that remote control wireless detonators don't exist and that building number 7 at the WTC was hit by a jumbo jet airplane and just like the one at the Pentagon, it left no traces. Then he will tell us that the fact that building #7 had all the armed forces accounting data that was reputed to show where the missing 2.3 Trillion dollars went couldn't possibly be a motive or that the SEC data on 300 Enron sized corporate investigations was not a motive, then he will tell us that the fact that Building #7 was evacuated whereas the Trade Towers were not, means nothing. Then he will tell us that My Lai never happened and that the US government was not convicted of conspiracy in the murder of Martin Luther King. What is next, will he tell us that President Bush can't tell a lie because he is a Christian?

---

"Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth."
(Albert Einstein)

Al Qaeda has become a buzzword in the manner of "comunism" thirty or more years ago. Such people do exist unfortunately, but the same could be said about Bush, Blair, Harper or most other politicians. All of these are engaged in acts very much like those attributed to them by their opposite number. This scum need each other the way certain retrovirus "need" white leukocytes. Actually political authority needs "terrorism" the way a rhinoceros needs a tickbird.
Surely we can oppose the Empire without being a cheering section for religious loonies. There is such a thing as making distinctions, is there not? It's all like the "agonising" a while back about those Danish cartoons. Some leftists appear to feel guilty about any criticism of Islam no matter how much it is deserved...as if this were an automatic vote for the American invasion. The term used here most often is "Islamophobia". Well this is one socialist who is NOT particularly worried about about such things. Yes, I am willing to be courteous to persons of "faith" but only up to a point. Anyway opposition to the Iraq war should be based on principle and NOT the personalities of the nuts who manage to get on the evening news.

As wealth can not be created, only taken, the purpose of war, crime and monetary economic competition is the acquisition of benefits against the owners' will.

This is also the ultimate purpose of so called "globalization", basically the reinvention of colonization under the perceived power of imaginary capital, using the fraudulent tenets of neoclassical economics as the occupying forces.

As long as we agree to so called "competition" as a way to "wealth creation", these horror stories will keep coming up every day.

Look into history. All wars have been started to acquire economic benefits, or some form of energy control. WW2 was one of the best examples both on the nazi and Japanese sides, now we have Iraq proving it in spades.

Stop so called "economic competition" as the principle of economics and it will stop most of the reasons for wars and the resulting crime waves either by uniformed military, or self made heroes.

This has nothing to do with any nonsense of ideological left, or right, which don't exists, but a well proven historical fact covered up with pseudo religious propaganda.

The political spectrum has no left, or right, only the predators and the predated.

Ed Deak, Big Lake, BC

I can't quite agree with all of what you have said although generally I feel much sympathy with the way you look at things. Some stuff that is valuable even in monetary terms ( not the only thing important of course ) is created by the efforts of individuals; everything is not simply taken from someone else. Many public services are an example and without some of these we would probably be in a great of trouble. As for the differences about political beliefs I would go as far to say that philosophies become ideologies when political parties become part of the mixture. The consensus on Vive ,at least to my eyes, is that there is not that much to distinguish one party from another in practical terms. Because of this influence political views have tended to become sterotyped [with adherents occasionally playing a role determined by such beliefs]. Some examples here. All socialists do not believe that massive state ownership is the universal answer to private competitiveness, all anarchists are not bomb throwing nuts, all conservatives are not necessarily blind to the problems inherent in the market economy and so on.

<blockquote>Look into history. All wars have been started to acquire economic benefits, or some form of energy control.</blockquote> <br><br> Agreed. Anyone who studies history in depth should come to this same conclusion. <br><br> An excellent example of what is happening today is the former British Empire, which arguably spanned a period of about 300 years. <br><br> In those days, the troops went in a region to secure the available "wealth" which was usually in the form of natural resources. The wealth was created by talking it away from the local inhabitants by force, thus creating povertry at the other end of the spectrum. You simply cannot have wealth without poverty because these terms are always relative to each other. <br><br> The British sent in missionaries to pacify and normalize the populations thinking, and they did plenty of "reconstruction" in the form of road building, schools, hospitals, etc. <br><br> A large segment of the British population went along with the concept of colonization even when brutal force was used, because the propaganda of the day presented the local inhabitants as being hoplessly poor savages who could not make use of the "wealth" they had around them anyway, and the feel good part was that the local savages were benefiting from the reconstruction and education, turning them into civilized people albeit still subhuman. <br><br> If we look at what is happening today, we have the troops moving in to secure the wealth, we have the missionaries moving in to wipe out radical fundamentalism and introduce "democracy", and there's no end to the "reconstruction" effort. <br><br> Instead of "colonization", the new buzzword is "democratization". We're supposed to go along because the propaganda of the day tells us that the local inhabitants were suffering under brutal dictatorships and/or radical religious lunatics. The feel good part is that we're bringing "democracy" to a hoplessly defensless people who cannot ever help themselves, and we're building wonderfull schools, roads, hospitals, etc (we won't mention that it's being done at the point of a gun - "Here's your nice shiny new school, now take our expensive generosity or we'll shoot you dead!" or "Do you know how many people I had to kill to build you this wonderfull school? Where's your gratitude!". <br><br> For some reason I doubt that this new World Empire will last 300 years, and in fact I think it's already going down the toilet drain. The former British Empire builders knew how to colonize well, but these modern day colonists are hoplessly incompetent buffoons, who either studied no history at all, or have studied only a perverted version that was designed to feed their own corrupt desires. <br><br>