On this episode of Breaking the Set, Abby Martin talks to Dr. Noam Chomsky, philosopher, linguist, professor, political critic, and author of over 100 books, about the Boston bombings, US terror inflicted abroad, drones, Obama’s rebranding of Bush administration policies, the National Defense Authorization Act & Holder v. Humanitarian Law, conventional wisdom, the evolution of media propaganda, and education as a form of elite indoctrination.
The trend towards movies ripped from the news, or perhaps ripping off the news continues.
Olympus Has Fallen is the latest in the popular “learn to fear thy enemy even more than you did before” category, as director Antoine Fuqua visualizes a story that can’t be more topical with the White House (Secret Service Code: “Olympus”) occupied by a North Korean terrorist fanatic and his barbaric followers.
The President is held hostage, the building is trashed, and its defenses shredded while our hero, a disgraced former Presidential guard, becomes the savior despite the mounting body count including a massacre of civilians and military responders as well as the near capture of top secret nuclear codes.
Of course, at the last moment, Mr. America fights off the incompetent Pentagon bureaucracy, repels the invaders and singlehandedly saves the President’s son, before rescuing the commander in chief and averting the war to end all wars.… Read the rest
Read and think what it would be like to live in fear of drone strikes in your city. It could happen here. Jennifer Gibson describes the terror hovering over Pakistan in the LA Times:
Last week, Stanford University and New York University released a major study about the use of drones in the ever-evolving but never-ending war on terror. Unfortunately, many commentators missed the report’s key message: Drones are terrorizing an entire civilian population.
I was one of the researchers for the study, and spent weeks in Pakistan interviewing more than 60 people from North Waziristan. Many were survivors of strikes. Others had lost loved ones and family members. All of them live under the constant threat of annihilation.
What my colleagues and I learned from these unnamed and unknown victims of America’s drone warfare gave the report its title: “Living Under Drones.”
People in the United States imagine that drones fly to a target, launch their deadly missiles with surgical precision and return to a U.S.
From Peter Fedynsky at Voice Of America:
The United States is adopting a new terror alert system to replace the color-coded one put into place after the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano made the announcement Wednesday in New York’s Grand Central railway station. The new system is set to go into effect on April 26.
Secretary Napolitano told reporters that most Americans have ignored current alert system, while some have lived in fear because of it.
“We don’t want people to live in fear; we want people to live in a state of alertness and awareness,” said Secretary Napolitano. “And we want people to know how they can help themselves, how they can assist their community. One way to do that is to provide people with more information.”
Napolitano noted that the new National Threat Advisory System minimizes, but does not eliminate, the risk of terrorist attacks because, as she puts it, “the United States cannot be put under a glass dome.” But she said the new system maximizes the amount of information shared with the public about credible threats.
