From the watchful NPR Check blog:

http://nprcheck.blogspot.com/2009/12/propaganda-squared.html

A reader noted in the Q Tips section below that Tuesday’s ATC featured Pentagon propaganda on the Green Berets. It’s no secret that NPR do love it some counterinsurgency, including the Green Berets.

Kalish: The film is titled Why We Fight Now, a nod to the World War II series Why We Fight, produced by Hollywood filmmaker Frank Capra for the U.S. War Department…..Why We Fight Now has no narration and consists mostly of Green Berets talking about their work. It was directed by Mark Benjamin, a 62-year-old Manhattan filmmaker who might seem an odd choice for the job.” [Actually there is nothing but narration, provided by Green Berets parroting a simple-minded world view and the worship of war and counterinsurgency which in NPRspeak is "talking about their 'work.' "]

 

Benjamin: “I’ve always been anti-war and never thought I would ever work for the military.”

 

Kalish: On the wall in Benjamin’s office is a poster of Che Guevara, but there’s also a picture of a Green Beret handing a piece of food to a child in Afghanistan. Benjamin’s political evolution is due in no small part to the terrorist attacks of September 11. He knew people who died and has made several films dealing with the day’s repercussions.”

 

Benjamin: “Because of 9/11, I became this liberal hawk. My own political perspective on global conflicts, democracy, capitalism, human rights everything changed. I certainly became more militant. I think we should go after terror wherever it is.”

——————————————————-

Somehow Mr. Kalish seems to have overlooked Eugene Jarecki’s version of Why We Fight.

One of the Green Beret “special” missions is designating targets for air strikes.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/07/world/asia/07afghan.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Thankfully, NPR’s audience will continue to be spared the discomfort of “errors” like these:

Long ago, the mice had a general council to consider what measures they could take to outwit their common enemy, the Cat.

Some said this, and some said that; but at last a young mouse got up and said he had a proposal to make, which he thought would meet the case.

“You will all agree,” said he, “that our chief danger consists in the sly and treacherous manner in which the enemy approaches us. Now, if we could receive some signal of her approach, we could easily escape from her. I venture, therefore, to propose that a small bell be procured, and attached by a ribbon round the neck of the Cat. By this means we should always know when she was about, and could easily retire while she was in the neighborhood.”

This proposal met with general applause, until an old mouse got up and said: “That is all very well, but who is to bell the Cat?”

The mice looked at one another and nobody spoke.

- Æsop

http://www.amazon.com/JFK-Unspeakable-Why-Died-Matters/dp/1570757550

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/oliver-stone/jfk-and-the-unspeakable_b_243924.html

JFK and the Unspeakable

The murder of President Kennedy was a seminal event for me and for millions of Americans. It changed the course of history. It was a crushing blow to our country and to millions of people around the world. It put an abrupt end to a period of a misunderstood idealism, akin to the spirit of 1989 when the Soviet bloc to began to thaw and 2008, when our new American President was fairly elected.

Today, more than 45 years later, profound doubts persist about how President Kennedy was killed and why. My film JFK was a metaphor for all those doubts, suspicions and unanswered questions. Now an extraordinary new book offers the best account I have read of this tragedy and its significance. That book is James Douglass’s JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters. It is a book that deserves the attention of all Americans; it is one of those rare books that, by helping us understand our history, has the power to change it.

The subtitle sums up Douglass’s purpose: Why He Died and Why it Matters. In his beautifully written and exhaustively researched treatment, Douglass lays out the “motive” for Kennedy’s assassination. Simply, he traces a process of steady conversion by Kennedy from his origins as a traditional Cold Warrior to his determination to pull the world back from the edge of destruction.

Many of these steps are well known, such as Kennedy’s disillusionment with the CIA after the disastrous Bay of Pigs Invasion, and his refusal to follow the reckless recommendations of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in resolving the Cuban Missile Crisis. (This in itself was truly JFK’s shining moment in the sun. It is likely that any other president from LBJ on would have followed the path to a general nuclear war.) Then there was the Test Ban Treaty and JFK’s remarkable American University Speech where he spoke with empathy and compassion about the Soviet people, recognizing our common humanity, the fact that we all “inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s futures. And we are all mortal.”

But many of his steps remain unfamiliar: Kennedy’s back-channel dialogue with Khrushchev and their shared pursuit of common ground; his secret opening to dialogue with Fidel Castro (ongoing the very week of his assassination); and his determination to pull out of Vietnam after his probable re-election in 1964.

All of these steps caused him to be regarded as a virtual traitor by elements of the military-intelligence community. These were the forces that planned and carried out his assassination. Kennedy himself said, in 1962, after he read Seven Days in May, which is about a military coup in the United States, that if he had another Bay of Pigs, the same thing could happen to him. Well, he did have another “Bay of Pigs”; he had several. And I think Kennedy prophesied his own death with those words.

Why does it matter? The death of JFK remains a critical turning point in our history. Those who caused his death were targeting not just a man but a vision — a vision of peace. There is no calculating the consequences of his death for this country and for the world. Those consequences endure. To a large extent, the fate of our country and the future of the planet continue to be controlled by the shadowy forces of what Douglass calls “the Unspeakable.” Only by unmasking these forces and confronting the truth about our history can we restore the promise of democracy and lay claim to Kennedy’s vision of peace.

But don’t take my word for it. Read this extraordinary book and reach your own conclusions.

http://www.toysfortots.org/news/details.asp?nNewsID=10

HASBROS G.I. JOE BRAND JOINS FORCES WITH
TOYS FOR TOTS AND ACTOR DENNIS QUAID
IN AN IMPORTANT HOLIDAY MISSION

Be a Hero and Help Deliver the Magic of the Holidays to Less Fortunate Children

Over 14 million children live in poverty in the United States.  They need a hero this holiday season and here to answer the call of duty is the G.I. JOE brand from Hasbro (NYSE: HAS).

Hasbros G.I. JOE brand, the Marine Toys for Toys Foundation and actor Dennis Quaid are joining forces to help make this holiday season a little brighter for less fortunate children.  For every G.I. JOE: The Rise of Cobra toy purchased at stores from November 11 through November 26 (Veterans Day through Thanksgiving), Hasbro will donate a new toy (up to 300,000 toys with a minimum $3.99 value) to Toys for Tots.

Actor Dennis Quaid, who plays GENERAL HAWK in the 2009 blockbuster film G.I. JOE: The Rise of Cobra, from Paramount Pictures and Spyglass Entertainment, in association with Hasbro, will voice a national radio spot, due to premier on Veterans Day, November 11, to help raise awareness for this campaign and the positive impact The U.S. Marines and Toys for Tots make on the lives of children.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/13/falluja-cancer-children-birth-defects

Doctors in Iraq’s war-ravaged enclave of Falluja are dealing with up to 15 times as many chronic deformities in infants and a spike in early life cancers that may be linked to toxic materials left over from the fighting.

The extraordinary rise in birth defects has crystallised over recent months as specialists working in Falluja’s over-stretched health system have started compiling detailed clinical records of all babies born.

Neurologists and obstetricians in the city interviewed by the Guardian say the rise in birth defects – which include a baby born with two heads, babies with multiple tumours, and others with nervous system problems – are unprecedented and at present unexplainable.

A group of Iraqi and British officials, including the former Iraqi minister for women’s affairs, Dr Nawal Majeed a-Sammarai, and the British doctors David Halpin and Chris Burns-Cox, have petitioned the UN general assembly to ask that an independent committee fully investigate the defects and help clean up toxic materials left over decades of war – including the six years since Saddam Hussein was ousted.

“We are seeing a very significant increase in central nervous system anomalies,” said Falluja general hospital’s director and senior specialist, Dr Ayman Qais. “Before 2003 [the start of the war] I was seeing sporadic numbers of deformities in babies. Now the frequency of deformities has increased dramatically.”

The rise in frequency is stark – from two admissions a fortnight a year ago to two a day now. “Most are in the head and spinal cord, but there are also many deficiencies in lower limbs,” he said. “There is also a very marked increase in the number of cases of less than two years [old] with brain tumours. This is now a focus area of multiple tumours.”

After several years of speculation and anecdotal evidence, a picture of a highly disturbing phenomenon in one of Iraq’s most battered areas has now taken shape. Previously all miscarried babies, including those with birth defects or infants who were not given ongoing care, were not listed as abnormal cases.

The Guardian asked a paediatrician, Samira Abdul Ghani, to keep precise records over a three-week period. Her records reveal that 37 babies with anomalies, many of them neural tube defects, were born during that period at Falluja general hospital alone.

Dr Bassam Allah, the head of the hospital’s children’s ward, this week urged international experts to take soil samples across Falluja and for scientists to mount an investigation into the causes of so many ailments, most of which he said had been “acquired” by mothers before or during pregnancy.

Other health officials are also starting to focus on possible reasons, chief among them potential chemical or radiation poisonings. Abnormal clusters of infant tumours have also been repeatedly cited in Basra and Najaf – areas that have in the past also been intense battle zones where modern munitions have been heavily used.

Falluja’s frontline doctors are reluctant to draw a direct link with the fighting. They instead cite multiple factors that could be contributors.

“These include air pollution, radiation, chemicals, drug use during pregnancy, malnutrition, or the psychological status of the mother,” said Dr Qais. “We simply don’t have the answers yet.”

The anomalies are evident all through Falluja’s newly opened general hospital and in centres for disabled people across the city. On 2 November alone, there were four cases of neuro-tube defects in the neo-natal ward and several more were in the intensive care ward and an outpatient clinic.

Falluja was the scene of the only two setpiece battles that followed the US-led invasion. Twice in 2004, US marines and infantry units were engaged in heavy fighting with Sunni militia groups who had aligned with former Ba’athists and Iraqi army elements.

The first battle was fought to find those responsible for the deaths of four Blackwater private security contractors working for the US. The city was bombarded heavily by American artillery and fighter jets. Controversial weaponry was used, including white phosphorus, which the US government admitted deploying.

http://www.truthdig.com/report/print/20090518_the_disease_of_permanent_war/

The Disease of Permanent War

by Chris Hedges

The embrace by any society of permanent war is a parasite that devours the heart and soul of a nation. Permanent war extinguishes liberal, democratic movements. It turns culture into nationalist cant. It degrades and corrupts education and the media, and wrecks the economy. The liberal, democratic forces, tasked with maintaining an open society, become impotent. The collapse of liberalism, whether in imperial Russia, the Austro-Hungarian Empire or Weimar Germany, ushers in an age of moral nihilism. This moral nihilism comes is many colors and hues. It rants and thunders in a variety of slogans, languages and ideologies. It can manifest itself in fascist salutes, communist show trials or Christian crusades. It is, at its core, all the same. It is the crude, terrifying tirade of mediocrities who find their identities and power in the perpetuation of permanent war. 

It was a decline into permanent war, not Islam, which killed the liberal, democratic movements in the Arab world, ones that held great promise in the early part of the 20th century in countries such as Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Iran. It is a state of permanent war that is finishing off the liberal traditions in Israel and the United States. The moral and intellectual trolls—the Dick Cheneys, the Avigdor Liebermans, the Mahmoud Ahmadinejads—personify the moral nihilism of perpetual war. They manipulate fear and paranoia. They abolish civil liberties in the name of national security. They crush legitimate dissent. They bilk state treasuries. They stoke racism. 

“War,” Randolph Bourne commented acidly, “is the health of the state.” 

In “Pentagon Capitalism” Seymour Melman described the defense industry as viral. Defense and military industries in permanent war, he wrote, trash economies. They are able to upend priorities. They redirect government expenditures toward their huge military projects and starve domestic investment in the name of national security. We produce sophisticated fighter jets, while Boeing is unable to finish its new commercial plane on schedule. Our automotive industry goes bankrupt. We sink money into research and development of weapons systems and neglect renewable energy technologies to fight global warming. Universities are flooded with defense-related cash and grants, and struggle to find money for environmental studies. This is the disease of permanent war. 

Massive military spending in this country, climbing to nearly $1 trillion a year and consuming half of all discretionary spending, has a profound social cost. Bridges and levees collapse. Schools decay. Domestic manufacturing declines. Trillions in debts threaten the viability of the currency and the economy. The poor, the mentally ill, the sick and the unemployed are abandoned. Human suffering, including our own, is the price for victory.

Citizens in a state of permanent war are bombarded with the insidious militarized language of power, fear and strength that mask an increasingly brittle reality. The corporations behind the doctrine of permanent war—who have corrupted Leon Trotsky’s doctrine of permanent revolution—must keep us afraid. Fear stops us from objecting to government spending on a bloated military. Fear means we will not ask unpleasant questions of those in power. Fear means that we will be willing to give up our rights and liberties for security. Fear keeps us penned in like domesticated animals.

Melman, who coined the term permanent war economy  to characterize the American economy, wrote that since the end of the Second World War, the federal government has spent more than half its tax dollars on past, current and future military operations. It is the largest single sustaining activity of the government. The military-industrial establishment is a very lucrative business. It is gilded corporate welfare. Defense systems are sold before they are produced. Military industries are permitted to charge the federal government for huge cost overruns. Massive profits are always guaranteed. 

Foreign aid is given to countries such as Egypt, which receives some $3 billion in assistance and is required to buy American weapons with $1.3 billion of the money. The taxpayers fund the research, development and building of weapons systems and then buy them on behalf of foreign governments. It is a bizarre circular system. It defies the concept of a free-market economy. These weapons systems are soon in need of being updated or replaced. They are hauled, years later, into junkyards where they are left to rust. It is, in economic terms, a dead end. It sustains nothing but the permanent war economy. 

Those who profit from permanent war are not restricted by the economic rules of producing goods, selling them for a profit, then using the profit for further investment and production. They operate, rather, outside of competitive markets. They erase the line between the state and the corporation. They leech away the ability of the nation to manufacture useful products and produce sustainable jobs. Melman used the example of the New York City Transit Authority and its allocation in 2003 of $3 billion to $4 billion for new subway cars. New York City asked for bids, and no American companies responded. Melman argued that the industrial base in America was no longer centered on items that maintain, improve, or are used to build the nation’s infrastructure. New York City eventually contracted with companies in Japan and Canada to build its subway cars. Melman estimated that such a contract could have generated, directly and indirectly, about 32,000 jobs in the United States. In another instance, of 100 products offered in the 2003 L.L. Bean catalogue, Melman found that 92 were imported and only eight were made in the United States.

The late Sen. J. William Fulbright described the reach of the military-industrial establishment in his 1970 book “The Pentagon Propaganda Machine.” Fulbright explained how the Pentagon influenced and shaped public opinion through multimillion-dollar public relations campaigns, Defense Department films, close ties with Hollywood producers, and use of the commercial media. The majority of the military analysts on television are former military officials, many employed as consultants to defense industries, a fact they rarely disclose to the public. Barry R. McCaffrey, a retired four-star Army general and military analyst for NBC News, was, The New York Times reported, at the same time an employee of Defense Solutions Inc., a consulting firm. He profited, the article noted, from the sale of the weapons systems and expansion of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan he championed over the airwaves.

Our permanent war economy has not been challenged by Obama and the Democratic Party. They support its destructive fury because it funds them. They validate its evil assumptions because to take them on is political suicide. They repeat the narrative of fear because it keeps us dormant. They do this because they have become weaker than the corporate forces that profit from permanent war. 

The hollowness of our liberal classes, such as the Democrats, empowers the moral nihilists. A state of permanent war means the inevitable death of liberalism. Dick Cheney may be palpably evil while Obama is merely weak, but to those who seek to keep us in a state of permanent war, it does not matter. They get what they want. Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote “Notes From the Underground” to illustrate what happens to cultures when a liberal class, like ours, becomes sterile, defeated dreamers. The main character in “Notes From the Underground” carries the bankrupt ideas of liberalism to their logical extreme. He becomes the enlightenment ideal. He eschews passion and moral purpose. He is rational. He prizes realism over sanity, even in the face of self-destruction. These acts of accommodation doom the Underground Man, as it doomed imperial Russia and as it will doom us. 

“I never even managed to become anything: neither wicked nor good, neither a scoundrel nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect,” the Underground Man wrote. “And now I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and utterly futile consolation that it is even impossible for an intelligent man seriously to become anything, and only fools become something.”

We have been drawn into the world of permanent war by these fools. We allow fools to destroy the continuity of life, to tear apart all systems—economic, social, environmental and political—that sustain us. Dostoevsky was not dismayed by evil. He was dismayed by a society that no longer had the moral fortitude to confront the fools. These fools are leading us over the precipice. What will rise up from the ruins will not be something new, but the face of the monster that has, until then, remained hidden behind the facade.

http://www.newsmax.com/borchgrave/hasan_martyr/2009/11/09/283713.html

Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan is the proverbial canary in the mine. Gunning down 12 soldiers and one civilian, and wounding 31 was not a random act of violence by an army psychiatrist who was slated to deploy to Afghanistan, an evil war in his mind, where American infidels are killing good Muslims.

http://www.aprodex.com/pipeline-opens-new-front-in-afghan-war-1028-n.aspx

As the Virginia-born major told a female neighbor in his apartment complex, “I’m going to do good work for God.” Hasan wanted, in his mind, to die a martyr, killing American soldiers who had been killing Muslim soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan, or would soon be doing so.

There are tens of thousands of Hasans all over the Western world — from Brussels to Berlin and from Burgos, Spain, to Birmingham, U.K. For them, Sept. 11, 2001, was a conspiracy cooked up by the CIA and Mossad, Israel’s external intelligence service.

http://www.911summary.com/

Even though al-Qaida’s Osama bin Laden and his No. 2 Ajman al-Zawahiri have both taken credit for Sept. 11, countless millions are convinced they had nothing to do with the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.

http://archives.cnn.com/2001/US/09/16/inv.binladen.denial/

In 2001, before Sept. 11, Hasan attended Dar al-Hijrah mosque in Falls Church, Va., where his principal preacher was a U.S.-born Yemeni scholar name of Anwar al-Awlaki who praised the virtues of jihad, or holy war. He is one of 13 million Muslims — or 1 percent of the world’s total — who espouse extremist beliefs about the United States and its NATO allies.

Led by the United States, the West’s Christian nations, as Muslim fundamentalists read the world chess board, are on a crusade to throttle the Muslim world.

http://michaelfury.wordpress.com/2008/10/30/the-ones-who-attacked-us/

About 130 million, 10 percent of the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims, are estimated by moderate Arab leaders to be fundamentalist whose sympathies are with the extremists but who do not participate in acts of jihadi violence.

Shouting “God is great” — “Allahu Akhbar” — as he opened fire on unarmed American soldiers, Hasan was merely emulating what Muslims cry out as they charge into battle.

He was presumably hoping that his last act on Earth would give the powers pause in their crusade to destroy Islam. He had counseled scores of battle-shocked, wounded veterans — in his mind casualties of the Mossad-CIA conspiracy, now an article of faith among many Muslims.

Sept. 11 machination theories have spun a tale of intrigue that has circled the globe and grown from a cottage to a global industry replete with best-selling books in scores of languages, videotapes, Web sites, and lecture bureaus that offer speakers who claim special knowledge on a variety of inside tracks. The fact that this is twaddle in all its unrationed splendor, e.g., Jews were not ordered to stay away from work in the Twin Towers the day before the attacks, is conveniently ignored.

Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead. A conspiracy on the scale of Sept. 11 would have required a lot more than three. Yet two former Egyptian ambassadors in Washington, long since retired, told this reporter in Cairo last month they were convinced there had been “some U.S. government involvement in 9/11.” One of them said buildings as solid as the Twin Towers could not possibly collapse like a house of cards unless explosive charges on different floors had been programmed to detonate as the floor above began collapsing.

http://www.ae911truth.org/

All Arab newspapers have published detailed stories about an Israeli intelligence service manipulating its friends in high places in the Pentagon and the CIA. The conspiracy theories show no sign of flagging. The peddlers of palpably fraudulent accounts constantly embellish, embroidering accounts of Israeli tourists videotaping and allegedly celebrating the collapse of the Twin Towers.

http://michaelfury.wordpress.com/2008/08/18/movers-and-shakers/

This dovetailed neatly with the biggest Sept. 11 canard that had phone banks calling all the Jews in Long Island and the tri-state area who worked in the Twin Towers to stay home the next day.

The Sept. 11 conspiracy theory now rivals Holocaust deniers. Forty percent of Israel’s Arab population say the Holocaust never happened. The phenomenon is, understandably, more prevalent among those born since World War II.

http://www.journal-online.co.uk/article/5056-911-more-than-meets-the-eye

For veterans of the Second World War, now dying at the rate of 2,000 a day, the idea that the Holocaust did not take place is too preposterous to even discuss. Rudolf Hoess, the Auschwitz commandant for three years, admitted at his 1947 trial before an international court in Poland, that 1.3 million Jews had been gassed and burned on his watch. He was hanged over the Gestapo’s offices at Auschwitz.

Hasan is one of millions today who believe America and its Israeli ally are working in tandem to suppress Islam. And for Hasan to go off to Afghanistan would be, for him, to participate in America’s anti-Islam crusade, made all the worse by the accounts he heard from the soldiers scarred physically and mentally by wounds sustained in a war against Islam.

As the FBI’s cybersleuths comb through Hasan’s hard drive, they will conclude that this Virginia-born shrink inhabited an electronic global caliphate, the ummah, or universal community of Muslim believers, next to which the nation-state — even one as powerful as the United States — seems irrelevant.

——————————————————————————

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Arnaud_de_Borchgrave

http://www.newsreview.com/chico/content?oid=32361

From “The Killing Game” by Gary Webb:

As the number of people playing Counter-Strike soared into the millions, the U.S. Army could only watch wistfully. For years, Army recruiters had diligently pursued the very same demographic–middle-class male teenagers–with dwindling success.

In late 1999, after missing their recruiting goals that year, Army officials got together with the civilian directors of a Navy think tank at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey to discuss ways of luring computer gamers into the military.

Combat gamers not only happened to target the right age for the Army’s purposes but, more important, possessed exactly the kind of information-processing skills the Army needed: the ability to think quickly under fire.

“Our military information tends to arrive in a flood … and it’ll arrive in a flood under stressful conditions, and there’ll be a hell of a lot of noise,” said Col. Casey Wardynski, a military economist who came up with the idea for an official Army computer game. “How do you filter that? What are your tools? What is your facility in doing that? What is your level of comfort? How much load can you bear? Kids who are comfortable with that are going to be real comfortable … with the Army of the future.”

With the vast funding of the U.S. government behind them, the Army/Navy team began developing a game that it hoped would turn some of its players into real soldiers. “The overall mission statement … was to develop a game with appeal similar to the game Counter-Strike,” wrote Michael Zyda, the director of the Navy think tank. “We took Counter-Strike as our model, but with heavy emphasis on realism and Army values and training.”

After two years of development, America’s Army was released to the public on the first Fourth of July after 9/11. The gaming world gasped and then cheered. Contrary to expectations, the government-made shooter was every bit as good a $50 retail shooter and, in some ways, better. Plus, it was free–downloadable from the Internet at www.americasarmy.com. That, too, was a calculation, one the Army hoped would weed out people who didn’t know much about computers. The game and its distribution system were difficult by design, Zyda noted.

“That was a very key thing. First, they would have to be smart enough to download the game off the Internet. Then, they would have to become good at [the game], which isn’t easy. To attract those kinds of people, that was the mission.”

In the wake of 9/11, the public and media reactions were, in the Army’s words, “overwhelmingly positive.” Salon’s Wagner James Au, for example, gushed that the game would help “create the wartime culture that is so desperately needed now.” Most media accounts focused on the novelty of using a video game to help find recruits and carried jocular headlines like “Uncle Sim Wants You.”

There are now more than 4 million registered users, more than half of whom have completed the required preliminary weapons training and gone online to play, making it the fourth most-played online shooter. The Army says there are 500 fan sites on the Web, and recruiters have been busy setting up local tournaments and cultivating an America’s Army “community” on the Internet, hoping to replicate the Counter-Strike phenomenon.

“With respect to recruitment, actual results won’t be known for four or five years, when the current raft of 13- and 14-year-olds will be old enough to join,” Zyda wrote.

But not everyone saw the game as a good thing. A Miami attorney named Jack Thompson went on ABC News and threatened to seek an injunction, saying it wasn’t the government’s job to provide kill ’em games to youngsters. He was deluged with angry e-mail and allegedly received death threats.

“The Army and the Defense Department have a very long history of conducting unethical, illegal experiments upon soldiers and civilians,” Thompson angrily reminded players in a posting to the official Army Web site. “This ‘game’ is yet another experiment upon the unsuspecting pawns who play it. You are the latest guinea pigs.”

Thompson was more right than he knew. Recruiting computer gamers was only one of the goals behind the creation of America’s Army. The other purpose, aptitude testing of potential recruits, has gotten virtually no publicity.

Currently, Army game developers are in the process of creating a statistics-tracking system that can tell how much time a player spends online, how many kills he’s made, which battlefields he’s best at, how many kills he averages an hour and similar minutiae.

 Why would the Army spend tax dollars tracking and collecting arcane statistics about the players of its game? Because the data can be used to predict what kind of soldier they’d be.

“Suppose you played extremely well, and you stayed in the game an extremely long time,” Wardynski explained in an interview last year. “You might just get an e-mail seeing if you’d like any additional information on the Army.”

America’s Army isn’t merely a game, recruiting device or a public-relations tool, though it is certainly all of those things. It’s also a military aptitude tester. And it was designed that way from the start.

In a paper written while he was still developing the game, Navy computer expert Zyda noted that “the research focus is to determine if games can be instrumented to be able to determine the aptitude, leadership abilities and psychological profile of the game player.”

Wardynski confirmed that the aptitude testing research had been successful. “That’s as far as we’ve taken it. It’s something we’ll be moving ahead with in the coming year.”

The Army has been collecting player information in a vast relational database system called “Andromeda,” Wardynski said, that recruiters will be able to use to look up a player’s statistics if one of them shows up in a recruiting office. A version of America’s Army now in development will take that a step further, allowing players to create a “persistent” online alter ego, one that steadily progresses through the virtual ranks by taking additional training or specialized missions, generating valuable data along the way.

Recently, an updated version of the game called Special Forces was released, and there was a reason why that particular theme was chosen. “Specifically, the Department of Defense wants to double the number of Special Forces soldiers, so essential did they prove in Afghanistan and northern Iraq; consequently, orders have trickled down the chain of command and found application in the current release of America’s Army, which features Special Forces roles, missions, and equipment,” a Navy-produced booklet states.

—————————————————————————–

Officially, Gary Webb decided to put two .38 slugs into his own head just two months after publishing this prophetic, balls-out indictment of the Pentagon’s techno-seduction of children. So he did not live to see the Army Experience Center prototype become operational in Philadelphia.

 http://www.thearmyexperience.com/virtual-tour

Those who remember Webb remember how he fought the spook-media Establishment to expose the dirty-war source of crack cocaine addiction for the kids of LA–an utter corruption gone global in the tsunami of Afghan heroin now battering another generation.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-heroin26dec26,0,7339972.story?coll=la-home-headlines

www.thestar.com/News/Canada/article/243554

To the last Gary Webb was the real thing–a journalist, a hero, a defender of the least among us from the depredations of the Machine.

——————————————————————————-

In seventeen years of doing this, nothing bad had happened to me.  I was never fired or threatened with dismissal if I kept looking  under rocks.  I didn’t get any death threats that worried me.  I was winning awards, getting raises, lecturing college classes, appearing on TV shows, and judging journalism contests.

So how could I possibly agree with people like Noam Chomsky and Ben Bagdikian, who were claiming the system didn’t work, that it was steered by powerful special interests and corporations, and existed to protect the power elite?  Hell, the system worked just fine, as far as I could tell.  It encouraged  enterprise.  It rewarded muckraking.

And then I wrote some stories that made me realize how sadly misplaced my bliss had been.  The reason I’d enjoyed such smooth sailing for so long hadn’t been, as I’d assumed, because I was careful and diligent and good at my job.  It turned out to have nothing to do with it.  The truth was that, in all those years, I hadn’t written anything important enough to suppress.

- Gary Webb, from Into the Buzzsaw

Remember this major news story from February? No? Search the US corporate news archives of your choice in vain.

http://www.torontosun.com/news/canada/2009/02/27/8560781.html

The company that released contaminated flu virus material from a plant in Austria confirmed Friday that the experimental product contained live H5N1 avian flu viruses.

And an official of the World Health Organization’s European operation said the body is closely monitoring the investigation into the events that took place at Baxter International’s research facility in Orth-Donau, Austria.

“At this juncture we are confident in saying that public health and occupational risk is minimal at present,” medical officer Roberta Andraghetti said from Copenhagen, Denmark.

“But what remains unanswered are the circumstances surrounding the incident in the Baxter facility in Orth-Donau.”

The contaminated product, a mix of H3N2 seasonal flu viruses and unlabelled H5N1 viruses, was supplied to an Austrian research company. The Austrian firm, Avir Green Hills Biotechnology, then sent portions of it to sub-contractors in the Czech Republic, Slovenia and Germany.

The contamination incident, which is being investigated by the four European countries, came to light when the subcontractor in the Czech Republic inoculated ferrets with the product and they died. Ferrets shouldn’t die from exposure to human H3N2 flu viruses.

Public health authorities concerned about what has been described as a “serious error” on Baxter’s part have assumed the death of the ferrets meant the H5N1 virus in the product was live. But the company, Baxter International Inc., has been parsimonious about the amount of information it has released about the event.

On Friday, the company’s director of global bioscience communications confirmed what scientists have suspected.

“It was live,” Christopher Bona said in an email.

The contaminated product, which Baxter calls “experimental virus material,” was made at the Orth-Donau research facility. Baxter makes its flu vaccine — including a human H5N1 vaccine for which a licence is expected shortly — at a facility in the Czech Republic.

People familiar with biosecurity rules are dismayed by evidence that human H3N2 and avian H5N1 viruses somehow co-mingled in the Orth-Donau facility. That is a dangerous practice that should not be allowed to happen, a number of experts insisted.

Accidental release of a mixture of live H5N1 and H3N2 viruses could have resulted in dire consequences.

While H5N1 doesn’t easily infect people, H3N2 viruses do. If someone exposed to a mixture of the two had been simultaneously infected with both strains, he or she could have served as an incubator for a hybrid virus able to transmit easily to and among people.

That mixing process, called reassortment, is one of two ways pandemic viruses are created.

There is no suggestion that happened because of this accident, however.

“We have no evidence of any reassortment, that any reassortment may have occurred,” said Andraghetti.

“And we have no evidence of any increased transmissibility of the viruses that were involved in the experiment with the ferrets in the Czech Republic.”

Baxter hasn’t shed much light — at least not publicly — on how the accident happened. Earlier this week Bona called the mistake the result of a combination of “just the process itself, (and) technical and human error in this procedure.”

He said he couldn’t reveal more information because it would give away proprietary information about Baxter’s production process.

Andraghetti said Friday the four investigating governments are co-operating closely with the WHO and the European Centre for Disease Control in Stockholm, Sweden.

“We are in very close contact with Austrian authorities to understand what the circumstances of the incident in their laboratory were,” she said.

“And the reason for us wishing to know what has happened is to prevent similar events in the future and to share lessons that can be learned from this event with others to prevent similar events. … This is very important.”

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Now back to “reality”. Remember how the “swine” flu was first described? Mexico City, April 2009:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/apr/25/swine-flu-mexico/print

President Felipe Calderón said his government learned only on Thursday night what kind of virus Mexico was facing after tests by specialist laboratories in Canada confirmed the outbreak as a type – labelled A/H1N1 – not previously seen in pigs or humans. Few cases have had any contact with live pigs.

The WHO said the virus appeared to be able to spread from human to human and contained human virus, avian virus and pig viruses from North America, Europe and Asia. It might be completely new or has only now been detected.

Five months later, we get this parenthetical from Dr. Gupta:

http://pagingdrgupta.blogs.cnn.com/2009/09/23/i-went-to-afghanistan-and-all-i-got-was-h1n1/

(The term swine flu is a misnomer, as this strain is made up of several different components, including swine, but also avian parts.)

He must have been feverish.

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Meanwhile, the dangerously incompetent Baxter International has been banned from producing and distributing flu vaccine, right? Wrong.

http://www.baxter.com/about_baxter/press_room/press_releases/2009/10_07_09-celvapan.html

DEERFIELD, Ill., October 07, 2009 — Baxter International Inc. (NYSE: BAX) today confirmed that the European Commission (EC) has granted marketing authorization for CELVAPAN H1N1 pandemic vaccine using Baxter’s Vero cell technology. CELVAPAN H1N1 is the first cell culture-based and non-adjuvanted pandemic influenza vaccine to receive marketing authorization in the European Union.

Baxter continues to deliver vaccine to national public health authorities that have agreements with the company. Initial quantities of vaccine have already been received by a number of countries, including the UK and Ireland, for use in their national vaccination programs.

Baxter is confirming the safety and immunogenicity of CELVAPAN H1N1 in clinical trials and will supplement the licensure post-approval with data from its ongoing clinical trial program . Preliminary safety data from CELVAPAN H1N1 clinical trials in adults age 18 and older indicate the vaccine is well tolerated. The observed systemic and local reactions are similar to those generally experienced after vaccination with licensed seasonal influenza vaccines.

Immunogenicity data from the first vaccination in adults will be submitted to the European Medicines Agency within days. The current dosing schedule, as specified in the EMEA mock-up licensure for CELVAPAN using another virus strain, calls for two 7.5 µg doses of vaccine to be given 21 days apart. Baxter expects the data from the trial of healthy adults to indicate whether a single dose may be possible for CELVAPAN H1N1. This study will also determine whether a lower dose, 3.75µg, is sufficient to induce the necessary immune response.

About Baxter’s Pandemic Vaccine Development

Earlier this year, the EMEA granted mock-up licensure for CELVAPAN using a different strain with pandemic potential, which was tested in five completed clinical trials worldwide in more than 1,300 people. In addition, more than 3,500 people have been vaccinated using the same strain during an ongoing Phase III study. Mock-up licensure is a regulatory pathway for pandemic vaccines that was created by the EMEA in 2004. This pathway allows for the development, evaluation and licensure of a company’s pandemic candidate vaccine using an available influenza strain that has the potential to cause a pandemic. Once a pandemic is declared and the influenza virus strain causing the pandemic is identified, the mock-up licensure allows for fast track approval of a pandemic vaccine containing the actual pandemic strain.

Baxter received the H1N1 strain for testing and evaluation from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (a WHO Collaborating Center) in early May. The company then undertook pre-production testing and evaluation of the virus strain to assess its growth characteristics in the company’s proprietary Vero cell culture technology.

Baxter initiated commercial production in early June, and made its first commercial product within 12 weeks of receipt of the virus. The company produces bulk CELVAPAN H1N1 vaccine at its large-scale commercial facility in Bohumil, Czech Republic, and then sends the vaccine to Vienna, Austria for the final formulation, fill and finish before distribution. Baxter completed production of the first batches of CELVAPAN H1N1 vaccine in late July and initiated its first delivery within two weeks. The company continues to deliver vaccine on an ongoing basis to national public health authorities.

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http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9589897/

President Bush, increasingly concerned about a possible avian flu pandemic, revealed Tuesday that any part of the country where the virus breaks out could likely be quarantined and that he is considering using the military to enforce it.

“The best way to deal with a pandemic is to isolate it and keep it isolated in the region in which it begins,” he said during a wide-ranging Rose Garden news conference.

The president was asked if his recent talk of giving the military the lead in responding to large natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and other catastrophes was in part the result of his concerns that state and local personnel aren’t up to the task of a flu outbreak.

 “Yes,” he replied.

Pentagon in charge
After the bungled initial federal response to Katrina, Bush suggested putting the Pentagon in charge of search-and-rescue efforts in times of a major terrorist attack or similarly catastrophic natural disaster. He has argued that the armed forces have the ability to quickly mobilize the equipment, manpower and communications capabilities needed in times of crisis.

But such a shift could require a change in law, and some in Congress and the states worry it would increase the power of the federal government at the expense of local control.

Bush made clear that the potential for an outbreak of avian flu is much on his mind, and has had him talking with “as many (world) leaders as I could find,” consulting a book he read over the summer on the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic that killed 40 million and meeting with staff and experts.

“I have thought through the scenarios of what an avian flu outbreak could mean,” he said.

He acknowledged that a quarantine — an idea sure to alarm many in the public — is no small thing for the government to undertake and that enforcing it would be tricky.

“It’s one thing to shut down airplanes,” Bush said. “It’s another thing to prevent people from coming in to get exposed to the avian flu.”

He urged Congress to give him the ability to use the military, if needed.

“I think the president ought to have all … assets on the table to be able to deal with something this significant,” he said.

As a standby precaution, Bush in April signed an executive order that added pandemic influenza to the government’s list of communicable diseases for which a quarantine is authorized. It gives the government legal authority to detain or isolate a passenger arriving in the United States to prevent an infection from spreading.

At the time the order was signed, a spokeswoman for the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the Public Health Service would probably recommend home quarantines when possible, but said they would be voluntary. It’s unclear whether the federal takeover of state and local quarantine powers that Bush discussed Tuesday would be limited just to travel or involve broader home quarantines as well.

Bush also said he has been urging world leaders to improve reporting on outbreaks of the virus, and exploring how to speed the production of a spray, now in limited supply, that “can maybe help arrest the spread of the disease.”

“One of the issues is how do we encourage the manufacturing capacity of the country, and maybe the world, to be prepared to deal with the outbreak of a pandemic?” he said.

Yet it is the pill Tamiflu, which makes symptoms less severe and shortens the duration of the illness, that is in short supply — not its harder-to-use inhaled competitor Relenza.

Experts agree there will certainly be another flu pandemic — a new human flu strain that goes global. However, it is unknown when or how bad that global epidemic will be — or whether the H5N1 bird flu strain now circulating in Asian poultry will be its origin.

Just in case, experts are tracking the avian flu, which has swept through poultry populations in large swaths of Asia since 2003, jumped to humans and killed at least 65 people.

Most human cases have been linked to a contact with sick birds, but the World Health Organization has warned the virus could mutate into a form that spreads easily among humans — changing it from a bird virus to a human pandemic flu strain.

http://edition.cnn.com/2009/US/07/28/military.swine.flu/index.html

The U.S. military wants to establish regional teams of military personnel to assist civilian authorities in the event of a significant outbreak of the H1N1 virus this fall, according to Defense Department officials.

The proposal is awaiting final approval from Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

The officials would not be identified because the proposal from U.S. Northern Command’s Gen. Victor Renuart has not been approved by the secretary.

The plan calls for military task forces to work in conjunction with the Federal Emergency Management Agency. There is no final decision on how the military effort would be manned, but one source said it would likely include personnel from all branches of the military.

It has yet to be determined how many troops would be needed and whether they would come from the active duty or the National Guard and Reserve forces.

Civilian authorities would lead any relief efforts in the event of a major outbreak, the official said. The military, as they would for a natural disaster or other significant emergency situation, could provide support and fulfill any tasks that civilian authorities could not, such as air transport or testing of large numbers of viral samples from infected patients.

As a first step, Gates is being asked to sign a so-called “execution order” that would authorize the military to begin to conduct the detailed planning to execute the proposed plan.

Orders to deploy actual forces would be reviewed later, depending on how much of a health threat the flu poses this fall, the officials said.

Brian is all over it. Yet somehow Mr. Williams and his fellow Trusted Faces and Voices in the US corporate media missed that Toronto Sun report about Baxter’s “accident”. Nevermind. Had you needed to know you would have been told.

 ”One night Pat [told Lane], ‘You know, if I get killed over here, don’t let them parade me through the street, that’s something I just — I hate to think about. I’m afraid if I die, you know they’re going to make me into this symbol and they’re going to parade through the street, you know, don’t let that happen.’” – Jon Krakauer

“We will not question the reasons for our being here or allow any personal beliefs to interfere with our job. My hope is that decisions are being made with the same good faith that Kevin and I aim to display. … I hope [this war is about] more than oil, money & power. … I doubt that it is.”

- Pat Tillman in his journal, March 13, 2003

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4815441/

Tillman, 27, was a member of the 2nd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, based at Fort Lewis, Wash. The battalion was involved in Operation Mountain Storm in southeastern Afghanistan, part of the U.S. campaign against fighters of the al-Qaida terror network and the former Taliban government along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, military officials told NBC News.

U.S. military spokesman Lt. Col. Matthew Beevers said Saturday that Tillman was killed Thursday night in a firefight at about 7 p.m. on a road near Sperah, about 25 miles southwest of a U.S. base at Khost.

After coming under fire, Tillman’s patrol got out of their vehicles and gave chase, moving toward the spot of the ambush. Beevers said the fighting was “sustained” and lasted 15-20 minutes.

Beevers said Tillman was killed by enemy fire, but he had no information about what type of weapons were involved in the assault, or whether he died instantly.

Tillman turned down a three-year, $3.6 million contract with the Arizona Cardinals of the National Football League to enlist in the Army in May 2002 in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, which killed about 3,000 people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

“My great grandfather was at Pearl Harbor, and a lot of my family has … gone and fought in wars, and I really haven’t done a damn thing as far as laying myself on the line like that,” Tillman told NBC News in an interview the day after the attacks.

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When Pat raced into his living room and switched on his television, the first thing he saw was a film clip of a Boeing 767 crashing into the World Trade Center at 590 miles per hour, sending a fluorescent blossom of fire bursting through the upper floors of the south tower. A newscaster was explaining that the footage showed United Airlines Flight 175 striking the tower an hour earlier, at 9:03 a.m. eastern daylight time, and that the entire building had just collapsed with thousands of people still inside. Another Boeing 767, American Airlines Flight 11, according to the reporter, had flown into the north tower at 8:46 EDT, and that building was now burning out of control. Twenty minutes later Pat was still staring at the screen, transfixed, when the north tower plummeted to the ground before his eyes. “I left to go to work,” says Marie, “but he sat there watching all morning, and it had a big impact on him.”…Like most Americans, Pat found it very difficult to get his mind around this. It seemed beyond belief.

- Jon Krakauer, Where Men Win Glory, p. 119

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2007/07/was-pat-tillman.html

Was Pat Tillman Murdered?

by Andrew Sullivan

I don’t know, but it seems increasingly conceivable. Just absorb these facts:

O’Neal said Tillman, a corporal, threw a smoke grenade to identify themselves to fellow soldiers who were firing at them. Tillman was waving his arms shouting “Cease fire, friendlies, I am Pat [expletive] Tillman, damn it!” again and again when he was killed, O’Neal said…

In the same testimony, medical examiners said the bullet holes in Tillman’s head were so close together that it appeared the Army Ranger was cut down by an M-16 fired from a mere 10 yards or so away.

The motive? I don’t know. It’s still likeliest it was an accident. But there’s some mysterious testimony in the SI report about nameless snipers. A reader suggests the following interpretation:

News this weekend said that there were “snipers” present and the witnesses didn’t remember their names. I believe that’s code in the Army–these guys were Delta. In the Tillman incident, these snipers weren’t part of the unit and they were never mentioned publicly before. That’s a key indicator that they weren’t supposed to be acknowledged.

If you’ve ever read Blackhawk Down, Mark Bowden explains how he grew frustrated because interviewed Rangers kept referring to “soldiers from another unit” while claiming they didn’t know the unit ID or the soldiers’ names. It took him months to crack the unit ID and find people from Delta who were present at the fight.

Randy Shugart and Gary Gordon, the Delta operators who earned Medals of Honor in Mogadishu, have always been identified as snipers, too.

If my theory is correct, the Delta guys could have fired the shots – a three-round burst to the forehead from 50 yards is impossible for normal soldiers and Rangers, but is probably an easy shot for those guys. But because Delta doesn’t officially exist and Tillman was a hero, nobody in the Army would want to have to explain exactly how the event went down. Easier just to claim hostile fire until the family forced them to do otherwise.

This makes some sense to me, although we shouldn’t dismiss the chance he was murdered. Tillman was a star and might have aroused jealousy or resentment. He also opposed the Iraq war and was a proud atheist. In Bush’s increasingly sectarian military, that might have stirred hostility. I don’t know. But I know enough to want a deeper investigation.

www.thearmyexperience.com

http://tinyurl.com/yacuytd

PHILADELPHIA (Army News Service, Aug. 29, 2008) – The Army opened the Army Experience Center, a one-of-a-kind, 14,500-square-foot virtual educational facility Friday at the Franklin Mills Mall.

The AEC, central to the Army Experience Pilot Program, offers visitors the opportunity to virtually experience many aspects of Army life, while evaluating new marketing strategies.

Located near a popular entertainment facility and an indoor skate park, the AEC features a number of interactive simulations and online educational opportunities. It is manned by more than 20 Soldiers who are available to share their stories with visitors and answer questions they may have about the Army. Although the Soldiers who run the center are trained recruiters, the AEC is not a recruiting center, according to Ryan Hansen of Ignited Corporation, who partnered with the Army on the project.

“The center is an attraction tool. There is no recruiting mission here,” Hansen said. “Here it is more about changing perceptions.”

The Soldiers at the AEC don’t have quotas. They don’t wear traditional Army uniforms, but rather black Army polo shirts and khaki pants. They are from diverse backgrounds and have unique stories to tell. At first glance they seem more like tour guides than Army recruiters, and in a sense, they are. They guide center visitors through their tour of the facility.

“They are the Army,” Hansen said. And as the center’s slogan states, “The Army is more than you think it is.”

Through market research, and proven outreach tools like the “America’s Army” game and the mobile “Virtual Army Experience,” Hansen said the Army learned that the best way for people to become acquainted with their Army was for them to be able to touch, feel and see the Army in a non-threatening environment. By incorporating the lessons learned from and technologies of those outreach tools, officials believe the Army Experience Center will make the Army accessible to visitors.

“What we are doing here is reaching out to Americans, giving them the opportunity to understand their Army,” said Maj. Gen. Thomas P. Bostick, head of the U.S. Army Recruiting Command. “Oftentimes people have a negative perception of the Army, but the negatives are a very small part. Our Soldiers are well-trained, well-equipped and serving a great mission.”

The Army Experience Center, Bostick added, will help dispel many of the myths that exist about the Army.

Transparency was one of the main focuses in the design of the center, said Maj. Larry Dillard, AEC program manager. The outside is made of glass, as are the fronts of every enclosed space within the center, with the exceptions of the simulator areas, which require low light to operate.

“Everything’s transparent. We don’t want to fuel the misconception that once our Soldiers tell their great Army stories, we drag kids behind a ‘black curtain’ and they come out enlisted,” Dillard said. “We have nothing to hide. If someone wants to know more about the Army, great. If not, at the very least we will have changed their perception of the Army. The Army is a great deal and people just don’t understand that.”

The idea of the center, which cost $12 million to design and construct, was first conceived in December 2007, said Ed Walters, chief marketing officer and principal deputy secretary of the Army. “Visitors to the center will have a better idea of the training and career opportunities afforded our Soldiers, and the high-tech nature of our institution.”

Upon entering the AEC, visitors provide a minimal amount of information to register — name, date of birth, address and education level. They have the option to receive additional information about the Army, but are not obligated to do so. People of all ages are welcome to visit the center, but gaming activities are limited to people 13 and older, as the Entertainment Software Rating Board rates many of the gaming activities T for teens.

Following registration, visitors are then issued an identification card, which is swiped at each station within the center. All activities are free to participants.

“Everything in the center showcases a piece of the Army,” said Dillard.

The Global Base Locator highlights Army installations throughout the United States and abroad. The Career Exploration Area lets visitors use its touch-screen technology to learn about 179 different Army career fields. The simulator area houses three simulators, including an Apache helicopter with pilot and co-pilot experiences, Black Hawk helicopter with four door gunner positions, and an armored Humvee with driver and gunner positions.

The gaming area lets visitors play America’s Army, the Army’s official computer game, as well as other games. There are a number of Xbox 360s plus networked PCs for video games.

The Tactical Operations Center highlights Army career opportunities in communications, command and control, military intelligence and technology. The area can also be used for group presentations and online education, Dillard said.

A large lounge area fills the middle of the AEC, and there is a small retail area that offers Army-branded merchandise and snacks for sale (the Army does not receive profits from sales).

The Army will run the Army Experience Center as a pilot program for up to two years, Walters said.

“We will be analyzing results of the various areas throughout that time, and determine if any of the innovations can be used as separate entities at other locations.”

There are no plans to replicate the center in other markets at this time, Walters said.

“The Army is not all about boots and guns,” Dillard said. “We want to give people the opportunity to experience the Army for themselves, so they have an understanding of what Soldiers do, and they can be proud of their service.”

 There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!

- Mario Savio, 1964