MetaFilter posts tagged with terrorism and war

Advertising in the public interest

Rhaomi — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 09:54:54 -0800

"What if America wasn't America?" That was the question posed by a series of ads broadcast in the wake of the September 11th attacks, ads which depicted a dystopian America bereft of liberty: Library - Diner - Church. Together with more positive ads like Remember Freedom and I Am an American, they encouraged frightened viewers to cherish their freedoms and defend against division and prejudice in the face of terrorism (seven years previously). The campaign was the work of the Ad Council, a non-profit agency that employs the creative muscle of volunteer advertisers to raise awareness for social issues of national importance. Founded during WWII as the War Advertising Council, the organization has been behind some of the most memorable public service campaigns in American history, including Rosie the Riveter, Smokey the Bear, McGruff the Crime Dog, and the Crash Test Dummies. And the Council is still at it today, producing striking, funny, and above all effective PSAs on everything from student invention to global warming to arts education to community service.

Additional resources: A-to-Z index of Ad Council campaigns - Campaigns organized by category - Award-winning campaigns - PSA Central: A free download directory of TV, radio, and print PSAs (registration req'd) - An exhaustive history of the Ad Council [46-page PDF] - YouTube channel - Vimeo channel - Twitter feed

"I started the movement with the firm resolve that I will never be caught alive by the enemy. That has spread down the ranks."

shoebox — Tue, 19 May 2009 16:56:16 -0800

Velupillai Prabhakaran, the elusive and ruthless leader (timeline, short bio) of the violent separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) has been reportedly killed in battle by the Sri Lankan Army (self-loading video) (Previously) So far, most news organizations are reporting this as fact (guardian obituary) and calling a definite end to the war, but the LTTE are denying all claims as to the death of their leader and state that this is simply government propaganda to dissuade their movement. Sri Lanka has been subject to a heavy media blockade since hostilities resumed in December 2005 in the ongoing conflict. Whether or not the claims are true, the army has completely surrounded and routed the Tigers from their strongholds in Northern Sri Lanka and the Prime Minister has declared victory. It is unclear what will happen from now as many in the Tamil minority are wary of the government. However, one thing is clear: This is a definite turning point in the history of this young, post-colonial nation torn apart by civil war and internal strife for decades.

Rape as a War Crime Against Your Own

davidstandaford — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 13:49:16 -0800

Iraq: "A woman suspected of recruiting more than 80 female suicide bombers has confessed to organising their rapes so she could later convince them that martyrdom was the only way to escape the shame."
Algeria: "Evil al-Qaeda chiefs are raping young male converts to shame them into becoming suicide bombers, it emerged yesterday. "

Closing Guantánamo

homunculus — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 22:00:42 -0800

Closing Guantánamo: A forum on what to do with detainees.

The True Price of Torture

homunculus — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 18:45:12 -0800

Tortured Reasoning. "George W. Bush defended harsh interrogations by pointing to intelligence breakthroughs, but a surprising number of counterterrorist officials say that, apart from being wrong, torture just doesn’t work. Delving into two high-profile cases, the author exposes the tactical costs of prisoner abuse."

Are fortification and foreign aid making Kabul more dangerous?

homunculus — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 16:28:18 -0800

The Archipelago of Fear. "International surveys show that the more people trust their neighbours, strangers, and their government, the more likely they are to help strangers, to vote, and to volunteer. If better streets, sidewalks, walls, and buildings all improve the ways people engage with one another, then the reverse should also be true: antagonistic architecture can corrode trust and fuel hostility. Kabul just might be a laboratory of toxic urbanity."

UAVs over Sadr City

odinsdream — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 11:31:23 -0800

A sanitized look at the use of UAVs 1.9 miles above Sadr City, Iraq. [print version] 60 Minutes is granted access to information about the use of Unmanned Arial Vehicles (UAVs) over Sadr City as part of Ray Odierno's counterinsurgency strategy. The video includes footage from both unarmed and armed drones used to provide so-called "persistent surveillance" of the city and to execute direct attacks on groups identified and tracked over hours or days. Other parts of the strategy include a nearly two-mile long concrete wall separating the city:

"It seals off about a quarter of Sadr City and it's been beautified, with local artists painting murals of peaceful, happy scenes, that have to be approved by the U.S. Army. To get from one side of the wall to the other, the locals have to go through "entry points" and are checked when going back and forth."

~~Awakening Councils~~ ~~Concerned Local Citizens~~ Sons of Iraq [mefi], another component in the strategy, have had their salaries reduced from $300 per day the U.S. was paying, to about $250 to be paid by the current Iraqi government. 2008 per-capita income is approximately $1,200.

Talibanistan

homunculus — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 22:45:22 -0800

Right at the Edge. "The Taliban and Al Qaeda have established a haven in Pakistan’s tribal areas along the Afghan border. This is where the war on terror wil be fought – and possibly lost."

The American Military Crisis

homunculus — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 11:40:36 -0800

Illusions of Victory: How the United States Did Not Reinvent War… But Thought It Did. Is Perpetual War Our Future? Learning the Wrong Lessons from the Bush Era. Two excerpts from The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism, the new book by Andrew Bacevich (previously: 1, 2, 3, 4).

Pakistan’s Phantom Border

homunculus — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 16:55:10 -0800

Pakistan’s Phantom Border. "Pakistan is often called the most dangerous country on earth. Increasingly, its people would agree. Despite nearly $6 billion in U.S. military aid for the border region since 9/11, the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and homegrown terrorist groups have eroded the border with Afghanistan, inflicting a steady toll of suicide bombings. Going where few Westerners dare—from Taliban strongholds to undercover-police headquarters—the author sees what’s tearing the country apart."

The Rebellion Within

homunculus — Tue, 27 May 2008 12:15:19 -0800

The Rebellion Within: An Al Qaeda mastermind questions terrorism.

Bin Laden Determined To Strike In U.S. Part 2

homunculus — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 18:45:43 -0800

"The United States Lacks a Comprehensive Plan to Destroy the Terrorist Threat and Close the Safe Haven in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas" (PDF). A recent GAO report claims that the Bush administration has failed to prevent Al Qaeda's reemergence in Pakistan, and that we're basically right back where we started in 2001.

Afghanistan on the brink

homunculus — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 23:31:09 -0800

Stumbling into chaos: Afghanistan on the brink. A report from the Senlis Council think tank claims that the Taliban has a permanent presence in more than half of Afghan territory and the country is in serious danger of falling back into their hands. The Canadian and British governments disagree.

It's Tuesday

chuckdarwin — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 05:15:38 -0800

Martin Amis on 9/11 and the cult of death:

"Let us briefly trundle through the argument for moral equivalence, and let us begin with a trio of ascertainable truths. First, the years 1947 and 1948 saw two imperialistic decisions that guaranteed an increase in hostility between Muslim and nonMuslim: the partition of India along religious lines, and the establishment of the state of Israel. (These decisions also led to, but did not invent, murderous hostility between Muslim and Muslim – in East Pakistan, in Gaza). Second, throughout the 1970s the Arab regimes sponsored by the US started to head off political dissent by guiding the opposition towards Islamic fundamentalism. And, third, in the 1980s the US backed the Mujahidin against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, and also helped to fund the Pakistani madrassas, whose graduates (all of them unemployable zealots) increased from 30,000 in 1987 to well over half a million by 2001. Thereafter, or so the equivalence argument goes, the Islamist vanguard, having wearied of seeing the battles fought exclusively on its own soil, visited a taste of this destruction on the West. Which turns out to suit the neocons and Christian Zionists, who can now place the US under military rule while they prepare their push for Islamic oil and for Israeli hegemony in the Middle East. The goals of the so-called “terrorists” (who are merely responding in kind to state terrorism from the US and its clients) are not delusive or messianic but solemnly political. So it has always been: the oppressed struggle against the oppressor; the wrongs of the past rise up to avenge themselves on the present."

Con vs. Con

brain_drain — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 21:00:51 -0800

But Is It War? A vigorous debate among three conservatives about the limits of post-9/11 executive power.

bin Laden transcript

ND¢ — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 13:54:37 -0800

Transcript of the most recent Osama bin Laden tape. [pdf] Likes: Noam Chomsky, Michael Scheuer, Jews, Jesus, Mary Dislikes: the Holocaust, Bush, corporations, global warming

Death Grip

homunculus — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 16:45:30 -0800

Death Grip: How Political Psychology Explains Bush's Ghastly Success. Interesting article on the work of psychologists Jeff Greenberg, Sheldon Solomon, and Tom Pyszczynski. [Via Disinformation.]

America to the Rescue

homunculus — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 18:55:12 -0800

Three Generations of “America to the Rescue.”

Darth Cheney Strikes Back

homunculus — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 20:26:36 -0800

Hussein's Prewar Ties To Al-Qaeda Discounted. A newly declassified report (PDF) by the Pentagon's inspector general claims that Iraq was not working with al-Qaeda before the U.S. invasion and that the intelligence was manipulated by then-Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith. On the same day as the report came out, Dick Cheney claimed that they did have a relationship via Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Zarqawi may be dead, but he's still useful. [Via TalkLeft.]

Doing our homework on the Middle East

LobsterMitten — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 14:41:44 -0800

22 basic suggested readings on the Middle East from history professor and informed commenter on Middle Eastern affairs Juan Cole.

The Redirection

homunculus — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 09:22:27 -0800

The Redirection. "Is the Administration’s new policy aiding our enemies in the war on terrorism?" New article by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker.

Terrorism

homunculus — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 13:49:52 -0800

The Iraq Effect: The War in Iraq and its Impact on the War on Terrorism. "The war has inspired a wave of terrorism around the world. Excluding Iraq and Afghanistan, the number of jihadist attacks has jumped 35 percent in the past four years. A Mother Jones exclusive study by Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank."

Guantanamo Bay: 5th Anniversay Today Triggers International Protests

Bodyguard — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 01:12:34 -0800

Jan. 11, 2002, the first 20 detainees, shackled and blindfolded, arrived from Afghanistan .... and since then, nearly 800 prisoners have passed through the detention center in southeastern Cuba. To mark the anniversary, demonstrations are planned Thursday in New York, London, Sydney, Australia, and other cities as well as dozens of small towns in the United States and Britain. Gitmo Detainees Join Hunger Strike .... & .... WikiPeidia History Article

the year of the truthiness

wendell — Sat, 09 Dec 2006 15:40:01 -0800

Merriam-Webster's 2006 Word of the Year is NOT in their online dictionary. Officially coined on October 17, 2005, it had already won the American Dialect Society's 2005 Award _(pdf) where they claim that "other meanings of the word date as far back as 1824", and is probably a shoe-in for for the Banished Words of 2007 list.

A distant number 2 is our friend "the goog", and after that, it's all NewsFilter/PoliticsFilter/IraqFilter (with that all-time classic "war" at #4).
(From the MeFite who posted the Favorite Words of 2004 and the Banished Words List in 2003 and 2004)

Martin Amis - The age of horrorism

Kraftmatic Adjustable Cheese — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 07:37:50 -0800

The age of horrorism. On the eve of the fifth anniversary of 9/11, Martin Amis analyses - and abhors - the rise of extreme Islamism. In a penetrating and wide-ranging essay he offers a trenchant critique of the grotesque creed and questions the West's faltering response to this eruption of evil.