Where's the River of Snot?

A senior US law enforcement official asked me if I noticed anything strange about the video footage of the UC Davis incident.

I told him that I had only seen the famous still photo in the press.  I hadn't seen any video.

"You've been exposed to pepper spray before haven't you?", he asked.  I recounted for him the time that I was responsible for a minimal AD from a large canister of the stuff inside a moving vehicle. 

He reached for his IPad and clicked on the first YouTube video he could find.  "What isn't right about this scene?", he asked.  I answered, "the protesters aren't hauling ass out of there. They aren't acting like they have been pepper sprayed."

"Where is the River of Snot?" He continued, "Before riot cops use pepper spray they mask-up.  Do you see any of the cops standing there wearing gas masks?  The stuff that they are spraying is marker.  They are identifying the protesters that they are intending to arrest.  Look right there, that other cop is standing in the mist with no effect."

He got no argument from me there.  That wasn't pepper spray.

"Then why aren't the cops coming to their own defense?," I asked.

Timing is everything.

The Day India Burned – Partition

Of all the episodes in Britain’s Imperial past, its ham-fisted partition and subsequent abandonment of India is one of the most outrageous.

As seen below in the 90- minute documentary The Day India Burned – Partition, Britain behaved with a stunning disregard for India’s national well- being, as it drew up a partition between India and Pakistan almost on a whim, and then got out sharpish as chaos flared in its wake.

By the time of the partition in August 1947, India had been the jewel in the empire’s crown for nearly 200 years. But after being bankrupted by the Second World War, it was clear that Britain could no longer afford to maintain its Indian army. The empire had well and truly crumbled, so it was up to dashing old Louis Mountbatten to trot over and sort out all this bally bother.

Following a series of negotiations between Mountbatten, Muslim leader Mohammed Ali Jinha, and Indian national congress leader Jawaharlal Nehru, it was eventually decided that India would be split up, and Pakistan born, in the summer of 1948. But the following day, Mountbatten suddenly announced that Britain would actually be leaving a year earlier than planned. Sorry about that, old fruit, but must dash, what?

Violent civil unrest was already on the increase by this point, notably during the three- day Calcutta riots of 1946, in which around 5,000 people were killed. As Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims all slaughtered one another (and, in some cases, their own), the British army hid in case they became outnumbered by the rioters. This allowed for horrific scenes of violence to go unmonitored.

The film gathers an impressive number of contemporary eyewitnesses to tell their sides of the tale, including Nehru’s niece, Mountbatten’s daughter, and Gandhi disciple Ashoka Gupta. By the end, the message had come across loud and clear: the partition was a dreadful disaster, Britain is a twit, humans are capable of truly monstrous deeds, and Richard Dawkins is right – religion can be one of the most destructive tools known to mankind.

Partition: The Day India Burned - BBC Documentary (all parts 10 minutes in length)
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A Whole Lot of Hurt To Hide (To Win Those Fickle Hearts & Minds)

Lazily devoting some margarita-ized thoughts to unintentional impacts of remote targeting and killing on the psychology of friend, foe, and neutral, I came across two items that caught my tequila'd attention.

First out is a somewhat truncated piece jacked from Afghanistanica.


While the Soviet-Afghan War more often than not provides the NATO/US forces with lessons on what not to do, occasionally it provides an excellent example of counter-insurgency skill.

I came across a few pages in the late Russian journalist Artyom Borovik’s book The Hidden War about a young Soviet officer who gained a reputation as a COIN specialist:

His name is known in every kishlak [village] in the province of Kunduz. Zakharov is a legend. […] Zakharov, who turned twenty-eight on May 27, came to Afghanistan a year ago. He spent the first four months exploring the territory and learning the customs and traditions of the local peasants. It’s impossible to fight the dukhi [literally: ghosts] successfully without such knowledge. [page 29-30]

Captain Zakharov’s relations with the locals was surprisingly good. Zakharov shared supplies and fuel with them from resources that were meant for his unit. Unlike Soviet forces elsewhere, he refused to mine the trails and small roads that are used to reinforce the mujahideen for fear of killing or wounding non-combatants. He checked with local farmers regarding planting and harvesting schedules so that his combat operations did not interfere with their livelihood. And his refusal to engage the local mujahideen commander Gayur under certain circumstances was remarkable. Zakharov commented on this strategy when Gayur intentionally tried to bring about civilian casualties:

“Then the rascal thought of something else. As a way of forcing the peasants [who were friendly with Zakharov] to leave Afghanistan, he began to fire at my position straight from the neighboring kishlaks [villages] in an effort to draw our return fire. The provocations were repeated every day, but our guns remained silent. I refused to fire on peaceful civilians.” [page 30-31]

Aside from putting a large price on Zakharov’s head and failing to bribe Zakharov himself, Gayur also attempts to feed Zakharov malicious intel through his agents. Zakharov thanks these “well-wishers” for their very valuable information and then checks with his own sources:

“I checked the information quickly through other channels. I have many friends among the local population, so there are people to ask. I get along well with the peasants who live in the kishlaks here. Never do I deceive them…” [page 28]

Zakharov was kept quite busy since his post was on both a strategic northern transport corridor for weapons from Pakistan and on a gas pipeline from the USSR. However, Zakharov met every challenge from the mujahideen thanks to his intel and counter-intel capabilities. One one occasion false intel was provided to Zakharov about a convoy of weapons that would be passing 5Ks from his position. Zakharov vetted this intel with the locals and found it to be false. So at dawn his sent out his main force to ambush the non-existent convoy. And then under cover of darkness the men from the ambush force returned to base. Of course a large force of 600 mujahideen attacked the base expecting to find very few men left behind. Zakharov’s full force met them head-on and forced Gayur to retreat all the way to Baghlan.

Gayur then retried the same tactic in reverse, feeding intel to Zakharov about an imminent attack on the base. But instead of sitting and waiting for a non-existent attack, Zakharov went out with his main force and destroyed a Mujahideen weapons convoy that included about a hundred pack animals and a dozen Toyotas.

When Artyom Borovik left Zakharov’s base Zakharov was contemplating a strategy to counter Gayur’s tactic of punching holes in the pipeline and lighting it up:

“Now its been done for sure. They hope to divert my forces into distinguishing the fires while they try to lead another caravan to Gayur. So let’s postpone our talk…” [page 31]

The Soviets later inflict heavy casualties on Gayur’s forces. Gayur then spreads false rumours of his own death. And so on and so forth…..

Further reading can be had in the Russian army’s self-critique that was translated into The Bear Went Over the Mountain: Soviet Combat Tactics in Afghanistan or in the description of mujahideen tactics in The Other Side of the Mountain: Mujahideen Tactics in the Soviet Afghan War.


Second out is a streaming audio broadcast of an episode of This American Life featuring a story about the controversialized Iraq mortality study.

It includes interviews with both Mark Garlasco, former chief of high-value targeting on the Joint Staff and a fascinating account by Iraq mortality study co-author Les Roberts of how the study was conducted inside Iraq.

More Les Roberts AV on the study: interview on DN (streaming audio) and lecture (YouTube video) given at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.

IO Friday: Tipton Enough

Could Cameron Have Made It Any More Hokey?

The Iran info-op got some "big time" juice yesterday.

Vice President Dick Cheney used the deck of an American aircraft carrier just 150 miles off Iran's coast as the backdrop yesterday to warn that the United States was prepared to use its naval power to keep Tehran from disrupting oil routes or "gaining nuclear weapons and dominating this region."

(Watch AP's video snippet of speach)

Mr. Cheney said little new in his speech, delivered from the cavernous hangar bay of the John C. Stennis, one of the two carriers in the Persian Gulf. Each line had, in some form, been said before at various points in the four-year nuclear standoff with Iran, and during the increasingly tense arguments over whether Tehran is aiding insurgents in Iraq.

But Mr. Cheney stitched all of those warnings together, and the symbolism of sending the administration’s most famous hawk to deliver them so close to Iran's coast was unmistakable. It also came just a week after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had talked briefly and inconclusively with Iran's foreign minister, a step toward re-engagement with Iran that some in the administration have opposed.

Mr. Cheney's sharp warnings appeared to be part of a two-track administration campaign to push back at Iran while leaving the door open to negotiations. It was almost exactly a year ago that the United States offered to negotiate with Iran as long as it first agreed to stop enriching uranium, a decision in which Mr. Cheney, participants said, was not a major player.

Senior officials said Mr. Cheney's speech was not circulated broadly in the government before it was delivered. ...

Without question, symbols of coercion were part of the backdrop: Mr. Cheney spoke in front of five F/A-18 warplanes. While he never said so, it is clear to the Iranians that several of their major nuclear sites, including the uranium enrichment facility at Natanz, are within reach of the Navy's weapons. ...

"This is about saber-rattling, and power projection," one senior State Department official said yesterday. "And who better to do it?"

Mottaki Claims Beggared By Rice

Today in an interview with Swedish National Public Television (SVT) Iran's Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki claimed that the U.S. is on the threshold of implementing major changes in its policies for the Middle East.

Mottaki claimed, referring to the meeting last week between himself and Condoleeza Rice at Egypt's Sharm el-Sheikh, "Now they are asking for meeting. They are asking for cooperation. They are asking [us] to guide them, how to solve the problem which was based on their wrong policies in Iraq."

The interview with Mottaki can be found at the following link. It comprises 3 tête à tête interview segments in English interspersed among commentary in Swedish. (Requires Real or WMP)

Foreign Minister of Iran Dr Manouchehr Mottaki will visit Sweden today for talks with Deputy Prime Minister Maud Olofsson and Minister for Foreign Affairs Carl Bildt. His visit is part of a European tour that will include Norway.

In Stockholm Mottaki will also meet the Speaker of the Riksdag and the Parliamentary Committee on Foreign Affairs. He will also be giving a lunchtime speech at the Stockholm School of Economics

Weapons Of Mass Deception

There were two wars going on in Iraq - one was fought with armies of soldiers, bombs and a fearsome military force. The other was fought alongside it with cameras, satellites, armies of journalists and propaganda techniques. One war was rationalized as an effort to find and disarm WMDs - Weapons of Mass Destruction; the other was carried out by even more powerful WMDs, Weapons of Mass Deception.

WMD, a 100 minute non-fiction film, explores this story with the findings of a media insider-turned-outsider, former network journalist, Danny Schechter, a prolific media critic.

Burn Down The Mission

Today marks the fourth anniversary of the Bush administration's now-infamous photo op when Bush landed in a fighter jet on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln and declared "mission accomplished" in Iraq. His speech was one of many publicity stunts and media manipulations used to sell a fantasy war whose real and very tragic consequences are still being felt.

Some of those consequences underwent public scrutiny last week when Henry Waxman, the chair of the House Government Oversight Committee, held hearings titled "Misleading Information on the Battlefield." The hearings featured testimony from Jessica Lynch and the family of Patrick Tillman, two soldiers who themselves were previously used as icons in the fantasy war.

The reality described in congressional testimony starkly contradicted the media narratives through which the public first heard of Jessica Lynch and Patrick Tillman — two real soldiers who were transformed by the Pentagon image machine into advertisements for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their stories are stunning illustrations of how gendered myths about masculine valor and a helpless damsel in distress can be called forth to create fictional narratives in the service of war.

Propaganda has been reinvented for the endless war on terror. The rescue of Jessica, a classic damsel in distress story mixed with Black Hawk Down's, "no soldier left behind," provided the tale of heroism and patriotism needed for boosting morale and public support for the war.

Four years into the misadventure in Iraq — and more than five years into the war in Afghanistan — the public perhaps deserves better than the vacuous "militainment" that brought us "mission accomplished" and a host of other lies wrapped in mythic imagery. But then again, maybe we've been getting what we all along deserved.

Operation Hollywood

The documentary Operation Hollywood centres on the book of the same name by Dave Robb, who was an investigative reporter for a Hollywood trade paper. He began to look through some of the documents detailing the various involvements of the US government in the movie industry and was astonished by the depth of the collaboration. Robb points out, “every film that the military assists always says that war is the answer and every film that the military assists is worse than any film that they don’t assist”.

The military has an outreach strategy. Philip Strub, a former navy colonel who headed the liaison office says it is a process of damage control. The pentagon offers its assistance to various projects. In this way the filmmakers get access to military hardware at discounted rates and the military can suggest alterations which may or may not be heeded.

The filmmakers sign a contract featuring these clauses….

“The production should help armed forces recruiting and retention programmes”.

“The production company agrees to consult with the DOD project office in all phases of pre-production, production and post-production that involve the military or depict the military”.

This creates an unfortunate climate

“Perhaps the worst thing about the collaboration between Hollywood and the military is not the censorship that goes into the films but the self-censorship. When you know that you are going to need the military’s assistance and you know that they are going to be looking at your script, you write it to make them happy right from the beginning.”

It is not hard to understand why these collaborations are so important to the military…

“To be a superpower there is a basic belief that you must glorify war in order to get the public to accept the fact that you are going to send their sons and daughters to die”.

Joe Trento – Director of public education centre.

Since 9/11 the climate has changed and the US military is much more active in its efforts to put forward its interpretation of events.

A case in point is the US TV series “Profiles from the front” which was about US soldiers in Afghanistan. This programme was presented as a documentary about the job US soldiers were doing in that country. The success of the series encouraged the military to go with the embedding strategy in Iraq. Bertram van Muster, the producer of the series was later appointed the pentagons official film maker.

Furthermore, one of the documentaries suggests that there is a “trusted list” of Hollywood people which it will come as no surprise, includes Jerry Bruckheimer.

In fact, after 9/11, at the pentagons request meetings were set up between military officials and “30 Hollywood ‘creatives’ chosen at random” who signed confidentiality agreements.

Also, since 9/11 there has been an expansion of the kinds of media being used.

The computer game “America’s Army” looks like something between a movie and a recruitment advertisement. The 50 million dollar ‘Institute for Creative Technologies’ (ICT) uses film professionals and computer experts to develop ways to train soldiers. The head of the ICT is the former head of special effects at paramount studios. The US government retains the rights to what is created at ICT but the designers may be allowed to use some of the work to sell commercially in the form of computer games.

Assymetric Careers

I, and a buddy, spent a good chunk of 1999 keeping up with invites to attend and ocassionally actively participate in conferences, workshops, seminars, and think tank sessions spawning odd ball scenarios for national security related exercises/games de readiness - all centered around the intersecting themes of information and assymetric warfare in open societies. Anyways, I just read somewhere that my former buddy de seminars et think tanks is a co-director on this video that has apparently gone ballistic over at YouTube. Anyways...

Perception Management Made Easy

Nationally syndicated columnist, media critic, and author Norman Solomon presents an outline of some of the key perception management techniques that have played significant roles in the promotion of U.S. wars in resent decades.

He presents significant similarities in the efforts of various administrations to justify, and retain public support for war.

Keynote: Norman Soloman Part I & Part II
Producer: Jeffrey Keating
Length: 28m 5s / 29m 9s

[Watch I] [Watch II] (streaming video)


**RealPlayer is required to play the video.

Weekend Matinée - Huffin' 'N Puffin' Pigs

Here's an animated narrative from a fabled past, a past the so-called neo con's (or the whackos, as they were endearingly referrred to by people in Bush Sr's administration and by Colin Powell) are ever so feverishly trying to hijack to pretext their special agendas and expressions of Stalinoid loyalties.

Somehow we are begged to take seriously that an advanced industrialized nation state the likes of Hitler's Third Reich, hellbent on wars of aggression that deployed all of a modern and sovereign state's plethora of resources to such invasive ends, is now to be seen as little more of a threat than a band of roving neolithic thugs and a few thousand partisans (few of whom reasonably own even one biometric passport) who seem to only fight us where we have occupied them - and at that with little more than the type of weapons that only demand the sophistication of a single illiterate to fire them.

I'm guessing though that in the long run the generalized flexibility of the now ubiquitous term “terrorist” will prove to make it infinitely more useful as a political instrument than evoking memories of a specific nation or regime, and so invests the term with a long half-life more suiting the actual deep campaigns at hand. After all, it only took us four or so years to bitch slap German into democratic and complacent place.

With semantic abracadabra, the notion (Rand Corporation terminology and insight at that) that is Al Qaeda is transformed in such a way that every Arab, every Muslim, every immigrant, every dissident, every person of color, every (choose your enemy) is a threat; and the world is divided between Us and the Dark Other with no resolution except the agonal. Here the calculated anger riled up by the Danish cartoons and the Pope's comments serve an instrumental role in achieving this connect between terrorist and people.

In a stunning bit of linguistic legerdemain, the actual mass movement of political Islam has been recoded by the neocons as Islamo-fascism, and among the crypto-libertarians of the white right, fascist is an epithet reserved now for liberals.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has twice invoked the historical analogy to appeasement—referring to the years just before World War II, culminating in the Munich conference of September 1938—to frame the globe’s current struggle with terrorism in apocalyptic terms. Vice President Dick Cheney has used the same analogy, without even gracing it with a name, to defend what he calls the “battle for the future of civilization.”

The Bushies clearly intend to evoke an atmosphere of shattering events, but their history is fractured and misleading, and their use of this analogy is a throwback to the methods that led America into Vietnam

None of their jive is true and quite frankly I'm stunned that members of the American Legion or folks out at Offut Air Force Base put up with the demeaning lies fed to them by Rumsfeld and Cheney. There was no mass political movement demanding appeasement of Germany. Rather there was a specific policy choice—made primarily by Sir Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister of the time—to mollify Hitler and gain time for rearmament.

In February 1965 President Lyndon B. Johnson invoked Munich in his reasoning for responding to a terrorist incident in the Central Highlands by beginning the bombing of North Vietnam. That summer, when LBJ sent U.S. armies to fight in Vietnam, he invoked Munich again. As Johnson’s secretary of state, Dean Rusk repeatedly mentioned the dangers of appeasement. It was the effort to avoid another Munich that led to years of stark tragedy and desperate peril in Vietnam.

The correct lesson to be drawn from Munich today is that when the Bush administration raises its specter, it is a sure sign they want to pursue extravagant policies, usually of violence, based on narrow grounds with shaky public support.

It is dangerous because it claims that the only solution to any situation is to fight—Cheney’s point exactly. Having done nothing beyond silly propaganda—despite its own claims—to undermine the jihadists by eliminating the economic and political oppression that form the basis of jihadist appeal, the Bush people counsel that the fight is everything and that talking is “appeasement.”

Bush administration history is like their reality—faith-based.

The same speeches that contain the Munich claims portray the Iraqi and Afghan people as “awakening to a future of hope and freedom” (Cheney) and say the U.S. strategy in Iraq “has not changed” (Rumsfeld).

The faith is that if you repeat falsehoods enough times then you the public will believe them.

There is another historical analogy there—a real one—to Adolf Hitler’s henchman, Josef Goebbels. He called it the “Big Lie.”

Weekend Matinée - Ducktapers

Propaganda film used during WWII.

Weekend Matinée - Unconstitutional

Unconstitutional: The War on Our Civil Liberties, is the third in a series of Public Interest Pictures films that follows Unprecedented: The 2000 Presidential Election and Uncovered: The War on Iraq. This hour-long documentary from Robert Greenwald details some of the ways that the civil liberties of American citizens and immigrants alike have been infringed upon, curtailed and rolled back since 9/11 and the USA Patriot Act.

Dan Rather: Media Down

A lecture featuring Dan Rather, who was anchor and managing editor for the CBS Evening News for 24 years, and now hosts and produces long form programming examining major global topics and events for the Discovery Channel, will be in conversation with Orville Schelll, Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism. Sponsored by the University of California, Berkeley and the Graduate School of Journalism.

Perception, Persuasion, and Communications

John Davies is one of the nation’s most respected communications strategists. He is the CEO of Southern California’s third largest public relations firm. He applies the study of human behavior and proven communications strategies to gain influence in the complex information-saturated decision-making process today. As a political consultant, John Davies enjoyed a nearly 90% win ratio with more than 150 campaigns. This is a lecture by John Davies held at the University of California, Santa Barbara (January 6, '06)

The High Art Of Keeping A Straight Face

I know we said the Jesse McBeth video was a must see - and it was. But this one takes the cake though it has little to do with psyops other than demonstrating the contextualizing power of a straight face. It's apparently (it seems a bit too Jesse McBethish to be for real. Notice how the audience members keep perfectly straight faces) a video of a dutch interviewer on a LIVE TV show (Dutch version of 60 Minutes) about surgeries gone wrong. He's interviewing a man who's surgical team inadvertently removed his testicles. No translation is needed to understand what is happening...

Narrative Warfare - Outfoxed: A Case Study

"Outfoxed" takes a peek into Rupert Murdoch's Fox News and the dangers of ever-enlarging corporations taking control of the dissemination and moulding of information vital to the American voter's ability to understand and safeguard her own interests. Media experts, including Jeff Cohen (FAIR) Bob McChesney (Free Press), Chellie Pingree (Common Cause), Jeff Chester (Center for Digital Democracy) and David Brock (Media Matters) provide context and guidance for the story of Fox News and its effect on society. Official Site: http://www.outfoxed.org/

Former CIA Analyst and Presidential Daily Briefer - Iraq And Iran: Pretexts, Lies, And Kooks

Ray McGovern, former CIA Analyst and Presidential Daily Briefer, talks about the role that fudged and spun intelligence played in the lead-up to Iraq and the pending war against Iran. This is an episode of BackTalk produced by Salisbury Democracy for America, Salisbury, MD. Washington DC March 8, 2006

Shape Shifting News

Using the 1992 presidential election as his springboard, documentary filmmaker Brian Springer captures the behind-the-scenes maneuverings of politicians and newscasters in the early 1990s. Pat Robertson banters about "homos," Al Gore learns how to avoid abortion questions, George Bush talks to Larry King about halcyon -- all presuming they're off camera. Composed of 100% unauthorized satellite footage.