Monthly Archives: August 2007

Advertising Iraq

Ari Fleischer, Mr. There-is-no-question-that-Iraq-has-weapons-of- mass-destruction, is now running a $15 million dollar ad campaign to sell their war to America. His television commercials feature wounded veterans and relatives of dead soldiers. I can tell you, they don’t speak for all veterans, not for me, and not for all families either. This man speaks for me.

Hear Bill Moyer’s brief commentary on the new wave of advertising.

82nd Soldiers on Iraq

I’ll admit it. I’ve always thought the mighty eighty deuce, my old division, was head and shoulders above all others. How can it not be, when it has soldiers and NCOs smart enough, articulate enough, and courageous enough to write this. I’m so proud.

Here, you can see a representative from the pro-war media playing damage control, and here is a great comparison between the soldiers’ Op-Ed, and a recent paper by the Brookings Institute, an increasingly neo-con “think” tank, which thinks hard about how to best convince America to keep sending its children into harms way for dubious reasons.

On Privacy

Here’s a great CNBC special on privacy. What I learned:

1) Every digital picture you take is encoded with the camera’s serial number.

2) Every Google search you do is stored and can often be connected to your name. Already, a man’s Google searches have been used against him in court. (He deserved it, but that doesn’t justify the invasion of privacy.)

3) Federal agencies are forbidden from keeping information on private citizens, so contractors do it for them. You’ve never heard of these companies, but they’ve heard all about you.

You can Google search anonymously here or here.

CIA editing Wikipedia

In many ways, the innocuous changes described here are not news. Since tuning in to indy press (InformationClearinghouse, RawStory, PrisonPlanet, HuffingtonPost, WhatReallyHappened), I’ve taken federal tentacles in the media as a given, and have considered the freedom of the internet the current battleground. Nevertheless, here is the CIA with their pants down. Perhaps this is just carelessness, or a rogue employee. It’s a no-brainer for them to simply use non-CIA computers for the real dirty work.