March 21, 2006
I received a nice
e-mail from a Spc. Flowers at Centcom the other day requesting I link
to their website. Now I don't know if it was spam or an e-mail sent
after an actual review of my blog. In any event, I googled Flowers
and it turns out that he is part of a military program designed to
address blogs critical of the military and to feed good news to others.
McNorton,
Gehlen and Flowers seem to think there’s enough good news. In fact,
they spend their days feeding stories of good news from Iraq and
Afghanistan to military blogs such as MilTracker, formerly known as
Camp Katrina, a site dedicated to telling the "good news about the U.S.
military."
The team also ask bloggers to link back to the
CENTCOM web site, and when they run across incorrect or incomplete
information in a blog entry, they provide a correction or more
information. "We don’t go in there and get into a debate," said
McNorton. And they don’t go in to police the content of blogs. But they
do report OPSEC (operational security) violations.
So here's my question to Spc. Flowers ... why does the military lie to us over and over again?
We
heard the bogus leak that Zawahiri was killed in the Pakistani
airstrike that actually killed numerous civilians including women and
children (reminding me also of the premature reports of the death of
Chemical Ali) and we heard the laughably low number of deaths being
spun by General Casey in the days after the bombing of the Golden
Mosque (lower even than the spin coming from Al Jafari who necessarily
had to spin to protect his benefactor, the despicable Muqtada Al Sadr).
But today two fresh stories of the military's propensity to lie are making the rounds.
The New York Times
has the latest on the military's lies and cover-up regarding the death
of Pat Tillman. It's an odious tale that deserves a full reading.
Here's the money quote from Tillman's grief ridden father:
All I asked for is what happened to my son, and it has been lie after lie after lie.
Then there's the latest uncovered lie
which involves the possible slaughter of 15 unarmed Iraqis on November
19, 2005. The military initially reported the deaths as being the
result of an insurgent's bomb. Yet, this view was contradicted by
eyewitness accounts that the dead were, in fact, killed by American
gunfire. These accounts were followed up by Time magazine and there are
reports of a video of the aftermath. Only now - when confronted by a
mountain of evidence - does the military change its story. The initial
account was wrong and, the military now claims, the deaths were the
result of American gunfire but as "collateral damage" and not
intentionally so.
But the MO always remains the same --- lie
first then only give up portions of the truth once you are forced to
concede. More damaging in both situations is that the initial lies only
serves to undercut the second story and fuel speculation that something
worse actually took place.
It's sad and disappointing that as American citizens we have to wonder when, if ever, the military can be believed.
So
Spc. Flowers, if you are truly interested in ending disinformation,
might I suggest you spend less time fretting about lil liberal blogs
and more time preventing the lies being spewed from the mouths of your
bosses.
But then again, we all know Flowers can't do that.
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