The new voice of the Iraqi uprising...

December 15, 2004 9:59 AM

The new voice of the Iraqi uprisingspeaks English and knows about propaganda. That said, the music is a bit over the top. Remember that South Park episode, where both Chef and the lead mutant turkey cover themselves in warpaint and give a "Braveheart" speech to their followers prior to battle? It's kinda like that. But hey, it feels good!
posted by insomnia_lj (29 comments total)

totally surreal
posted by mert at 10:10 AM on December 15, 2004

Not to sound like I hate freedom(tm), but I love how much more well-reasoned this sounds than American propaganda.
posted by borkingchikapa at 10:16 AM on December 15, 2004

A new era of Adobe Premiere Propaganda?

This is pretty fascinating. Instead of having leaflets dropped on my head and watching state TV, I am choosing to watch propaganda to satisfy my curiosity, and it's so easy to do. I imagine there's probably around four Kevin-Bacon links between the author, the journalist and me. Yay internet.

That being said, the video's pretty standard stuff. It makes a good contrast with the scared-rat untranslated blurry badly lit masked man type videos the individual groups have been putting out so far.

About time they hired a 'marketing board'.
posted by anthill at 10:29 AM on December 15, 2004

I agree, with you both. It's reasoned, rational and contrasts strongly to some of the recent comments I have heard from US army commanders: Fallujah being a "Nest of Vipers" etc.

It is a bit surreal hearing a Midlands accent in those circumstances... and it would be very easy to string together using stock footage without every having been near Iraq...

...must watch what I say before Homeland Security starts following people home from the Mosque in Wolverhampton.
posted by fingerbang at 10:30 AM on December 15, 2004

Big mistake for these guys to have endless pictures of guys with covered faces. Americans associate those kind of pictures with terrorism.
posted by tranceformer at 10:36 AM on December 15, 2004

What, no subtitles?
posted by wah at 10:40 AM on December 15, 2004

The real uprising needs to be against encoding your video in Windows Media at a shitty bitrate.
posted by mkultra at 10:43 AM on December 15, 2004

Hey, good point fingerbang? - now that you mention it, that video could have been put together a long ways from Iraq. Did I hear a bag of crisps crackling in the background of the voice track? ;)

I'm still guessing the narrator and author are the same guy, and that he's somewhere in a small apartment in one of the less cratered countries in the vicinity, maybe Saudi Arabia?

Cue the Star Wars Kid remixes...
posted by anthill at 10:44 AM on December 15, 2004

I wonder what the statistics are for us soldiers who have tried to leave the army by hiding in mosques.
posted by sourbrew at 10:47 AM on December 15, 2004

also that subtitle video was pretty funny.
posted by sourbrew at 10:49 AM on December 15, 2004

The music is indeed over the top. It reminded me of the movie "Gone with the wind." Great balls of fire!!
posted by dov3 at 10:50 AM on December 15, 2004

Relavant
posted by sourbrew at 10:52 AM on December 15, 2004

I'm always curious about the resistance's claims that US casualties are much higher than our government claims. Does anyone here think this is true? I think the military would have a pretty difficult time masking these figures.
posted by b_thinky at 11:17 AM on December 15, 2004

This is practically like reverse propoganda from Republicans (advocating Europe, etc).
posted by abcde at 11:18 AM on December 15, 2004

Does anyone here think this is true?

Dead? I don't know. Wounded? Yes.
posted by digaman at 11:25 AM on December 15, 2004

This good propaganda.
posted by litghost at 12:01 PM on December 15, 2004

Big mistake for these guys to have endless pictures of guys with covered faces. Americans associate those kind of pictures with terrorism.

Americans associate Arabs with terrorism. Uncovering their faces won't help.
posted by Armitage Shanks at 12:53 PM on December 15, 2004

"There are no American infidels in Baghdad. Never! God will roast their stomachs in hell at the hands of Iraqis!"
posted by mstefan at 1:08 PM on December 15, 2004

I was soooo hoping he'd end that with "it's already been broughten!"
posted by schoolgirl report at 1:18 PM on December 15, 2004

I'm always curious about the resistance's claims that US casualties are much higher than our government claims. Does anyone here think this is true?

Yes, it is true.

There have been nearly 30,000 medical evacuations from Iraq, and yet only a handful of them have reportedly died, according to military statistics -- maybe 15 at this point. Considering that a lot of those soldiers required immediate life-saving operations, or were in a vegetative state, those aren't just good odds... those odds are literally unbelievable.

The reason for this appears to be an attempt of the military to only count KIA and WIA in this war, as opposed to killed and wounded. Those are two very different things.

Fatal accidents in Iraq happen all the time. The soldiers in question are then airlifted out to Germany or back to the states, only to die there. Also, Iraq has a much higher incidence of infectious diseases than the US, but death from infections outside of Iraq are clearly not counted in casualty lists.

How do I know this?! Simple. Recently, it was reported that there were 102 wounded soldiers who had contracted A. baumannii, a rare blood disease that occurs in less-than-sanitary medical circumstances. A. baumannii has a 42% fatality rate... and yet there's not a single dead soldier that we know of from OIF who died of the disease. So, where are the bodies? A. baumannii isn't the only such opportunistic disease, either. Is it hard to imagine wounded soldiers returning to Germany or the US, where they get an operation and die of post-operative infection? Hardly. NPR got part of this story right a few months ago...

Also, the definition of what is a KIA is a lot different in this war than in past wars. The new definition is even more restrictive than in Vietnam, where there was widespread accusations of not counting the dead. An early report on casualties pointed out that suicides are also not counted.

Also, you have to take into account the policy of imminent death, the retirement of soldiers who are expected to die within 72 hours. Some of these imminent death soldiers have lived to tell the tale. How many have died?

In short, yes, casualties are significantly underrepresented.
posted by insomnia_lj at 1:21 PM on December 15, 2004

Death while in a retired status may result in greater benefits to a soldier’s eligible survivors than when death occurs on active duty.

Being largely ignorant of the minutia of military regulations, why in the world would a retired soldier's family get more benefits than a soldier who has died on active duty? That seems completely ass-backwards to me. Of course, it's the military, so perhaps that shouldn't be such a surprise.
posted by mstefan at 2:25 PM on December 15, 2004

thanks, insomnia. That makes a lot of strange things much clearer.
posted by anthill at 2:44 PM on December 15, 2004

They forgot Poland.
posted by lazy-ville at 3:25 PM on December 15, 2004

"We are simple people who chose principles over fear." 


LOL
posted by Steve_at_Linnwood at 3:27 PM on December 15, 2004

oh... I absoloutly love the tag line of that website too:

NEWS YOU WON'T FIND ON CNN

Yes... it is funny that won't find "news" like this on CNN....

We only wish we had more cameras to show the world their true defeat. The enemy is on the run. They are in fear of a resistance movement they can not see nor predict. We, now choose when, where, and how to strike.

So I guess you boys just "choose" not to fight in Fallujah anymore...
posted by Steve_at_Linnwood at 3:37 PM on December 15, 2004

exactly. it's called whack-a-mole. we're the mole.
posted by quonsar at 3:42 PM on December 15, 2004

So I guess you boys just "choose" not to fight in Fallujah anymore...

Yeah, much like the Americans who choose to cower in the Green Zone in Baghdad.
posted by pompomtom at 3:45 PM on December 15, 2004

"Being largely ignorant of the minutia of military regulations, why in the world would a retired soldier's family get more benefits than a soldier who has died on active duty?"

See this document for your answer. Although there were steps taken (after heat from Congress) to change this policy, implementation of the new policy has been slow.

I also wanted to supply tle link to the story about the A. baumannii problem.

"That makes a lot of strange things much clearer."

Unfortunately, it doesn't. The truth is, I do not *KNOW* to what degree each of these issues is a factor, because the military's policies regarding who did and didn't die a member of OIF is incredibly convoluted. Intentionally so. All I (and the press) can do is sit around and guess where they aren't counting. When a single, clear number is requested, they are criminally unresponsive, even to Congress.

Trying to get more accurate casualty figures . . . Sen. Chuck Hagel (Rep.-Nebraska), a Vietnam veteran and former deputy administrator of the Veterans Administration. . . tried to obtain the "total number of American battlefield casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq" from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The senator had also tried to find out: "What is the official Pentagon definition of wounded in action? What is the procedure for releasing this information in a timely way to the public and the criteria for awarding a Purple Heart [awarded to those wounded in combat or posthumously to the next of kin of those killed or those who die of wounds received in action]?"

Hagel had been seeking an accurate, updated count on the number of Purple Hearts and the dates they were awarded to US military personnel in Iraq. That number is significant because it is an official record of the total number of battlefield casualties. After six weeks, the reply Hagel received was, "the Department of Defense does not have the requested information."

It's a classic case of bait and switch... and even the bait doesn't taste very good.
posted by insomnia_lj at 5:09 PM on December 15, 2004

Incidentally, I have been pointing out that Pentagon numbers just don't add up since Feb. '03 now.

"It seems to me, whether it is intentional or not, that the DoD - by dividing the casualty counts into subsections and divided statistics, are causing considerable media confusion on what should be a simple, straightforward cost of the war."

The only reasonable answer to reach at this point is that this *IS* an intentional policy on the part of the DoD to make it appear that there are fewer casualties.

In other words, we are being nickeled and dimed to death.
posted by insomnia_lj at 5:23 PM on December 15, 2004