The video below on the murder of civilians in 2007 in Iraq went viral, and has been seen all over the world now. I was curious about Denver – it was not mentioned on local TV news, and there is no mention of it in the Denver Post or on its web site. In other words, local news media is performing its two functions: 1) They dominate the local news market Econ 101: exclusion), and 2) they prevent us from getting news.
The US Court of Appeals decision yesterday regarding net neutrality is ominous in this regard, as the Internet has provided us with a way around the news filters. We only know about the existence of the video because of Wikileaks. (A search of the Denver Post web site returned “O’Clock” for Wikileak.) Without equal access, corporations, who own the major news outlets and control the flow of “news”, and who are deeply invested in both foreign and domestic policy, will also control the flow of information on the Internet. You might still be able to access this site, Piece of Mind, for instance, but only after a 30 second or one minute wait, or I might just disappear after refusing to pay pay some corporation for faster speeds (access to the commons, known in economics as “exclusion). I have no illusions of grandeur. I know I am nothing. But on a large scale, this means that we’ll go back to the pre-Internet dark ages, with news coming only from CNN and FOX and local news outlets at the bottom of the food chain.
Finally, Glenn Greenwald made a critical point on Democracy Now! yesterday regarding the Wikileak video: There is a danger in management of perceptions much as with Abu Ghraib and Mai Lai. Most people think that the photographs leaked of Abu Ghraib showed an anomaly, and that the behavior stopped with exposure. Not very damned likely. Much more likely is the Mai Lai effect, where after exposure of that atrocity, Lt. Colonel Colin Powell managed to quarantine and isolate the event by punishing some low-level participants. In doing so he left the impression that it was an isolated event rather than a normal every day occurrence.
That’s how he advanced in rank. He was damned good at his job.
In the Wikileak video. The soldiers in the attack helicopter are going about their jobs much as assembly line workers in Sri Lanka, doing repetitive tasks as if it is just another day on the job. They are detached and indifferent, even laughing as a tank rolls across a dead body.
This is business as usual. It has been going on from the beginning, is going on today in both Iraq and Afghanistan. It was called “counterinsurgency” before the name was tainted. Now it is called by other names, but it is the the same program: Mass murder.
Piece of Mindful 
Colorado Springs casts a shadow well beyond Denver when it comes to media exposure to state violence against innocent civilians, especially when the guns are mounted on aircraft. The “Zoomie” effect. I experienced it in the ’60s when Vietnam War news trickled in from outside the USAF bunker.
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