Stop-Loss and the new 'embedded journalists'

[rainonlevs]

Great show on Democracy Now! last Friday that I'm watching now:

Stop-Loss: A Look at the US Military Policy that Creates a “Backdoor Draft” to Force Soldiers to Continue Service
With about 175,000 troops deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the US military has been forced to rely on a controversial policy known as “stop-loss” to force soldiers

Comments

[redwoodpecker]

Yeah that was a good one, I wrote a blog about it as well.

I suspect we have been killing real reporters. I think we basically had brown people dress up in rags, kill them on camera, and blame it on the terrorists. I'm just talking out of my ass of course, but an inordinate number of reporters have been killed in the war and I know on at least one occasion we've targeted buildings with missiles that we knew had reporters inside.

[rainonlevs]

There's no question that the US military has been killing reporters, and in particular that they have killed more reporters in Iraq than in any other conflict in US history; the question is why it has been happening. The military has also been imprisoning reporters without charge for months and years, only releasing them when enough pressure is brought against them

[redwoodpecker]

They were talking about this on Democracy Now today, of course they've been doing this since 9/11 but they're still placing undercover agents in innocuous protest organizations and the like, supposedly in the effort to fight terrorism. In this case it was a group protesting the death penalty and setting up stalls at farmers markets.

Clearly, if it is true that they're deliberately killing reporters, which I have very little reason to doubt, it can be for only one reason, to crush dissent. Whether you're here protesting the war, or just general policy, or in Iraq trying to get stories of what's really happening to the people, you are going to be targeted. Eventually no one will be willing to speak out in any way.

I don't expect any of this will stop regardless of whether McCain or Obama gets in the white house, and the fact that they both support telecom immunity only bolsters that belief.