Have Violent Video Games Gone Too Far?

Call of Duty: Black Ops has just released it's trailer, entitled There's A Soldier In All Of Us, showing real people (including celebrities like Kobe Bryant and Jimmy Kimmel) in actual combat scenarios in lieu of scenes from the game.

How much more can our society glorify war, violence, and antisocial behavior if not by showing real people enjoying the death and destruction of a sovereign nations' citizens and towns as if it's a sport? Maybe I wouldn't find the video as disturbing if it did involve a war that is currently active with soldiers and innocent civilians dying every day...

In my opinion, all the ad and game it's trying to sell succeeds at doing is furthering the dehumanization of the hundreds of thousands of civilians who've died and continue to die in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and anywhere else our military/CIA/war contractors are operating without our knowledge. Perhaps if the commercial was set in Chicago, Boston, NYC, or some other US city that used to be a functioning community before being ravaged by war, people would have a different response. After all, is this how you'd like your hometown portrayed in the media of another nation that is still actively killing US civilians (accidental or not)?

As the Supreme Court hears arguments in the Schwarzenegger v Entertainment Merchants Association case involving California's ability to restrict the sale of violent video games to minors, I feel like this commercial is a perfect example of the normalization of war/violence endemic in our media caused in part by video games like Call of Duty: Black Ops, which will only get worse as graphics become more realistic.

Perhaps I'm just overreacting or idealizing the games that I grew up playing but I see a big difference between hyper-realistic games like Call of Duty and cartoon-based games like Contra, Double Dragon, and even early editions of Grand Theft Auto.

One thing that I find interesting as the Entertainment Merchants Association argues that it's members free speech is somehow different than other forms of regulated commercial speech like porn, alcohol, and cigarettes is that CallOfDuty.com requires people to be over 18 in order to access the site, employing the same online age verification tool as the very industries it's trying to claim differentiation from. See for yourself:

• Smirnoff (21+)
• Hustler (18+)
• Marlboro (21+)

In case you think this game is an anomaly or an exception, here are some statistics on the Call of Duty series:

• Modern Warfare (previous release in the series) holds the single-day record for any entertainment medium with $401 million in sales (4.7 million copies sold) when it was released on 11/10/2009.
• Pre-orders of Black Ops are on track to match sales of Modern Warfare
• The Call of Duty series (7 games total) has accounted for more than $4 billion in sale

As a side note, if a Supreme Court Justice has never played a modern video game, does that disqualified them to hear the case?

A Little Perspective on Cost

As health care reform continues to bring out the worst in us, I thought I'd try to put the projected costs of Obama's plan into a little perspective.

According to a report from The Congressional Research Service, after the passage of the supplemental funding bill of 2008 on June 30, 2008, Congress had spent a total of $864 billion since 9/11/01 to fight the War on Terror (74% on Iraq alone and less than 1% on medical care for veteran). Once you include estimates for 2009 and 2010, the total spent rises to over $1 trillion in the last 9 years.

Or, to put it into more understandable terms:

As of February 2009, DOD’s average monthly obligations for contracts and pay were about $10.9 billion, including $8.4 billion for Iraq, and $2.6 billion for Afghanistan, a monthly average some $3 billion below last year.

If we accept that 9/11 was the root cause of this spending, then it is also fair to state that it was the murder of 2,974 people that gave Bush the "political capital" to initiate the massive government spending program known as the Global War on Terror. If you compare that to the 22,000 people that died last year due to lack of health insurance, over 7x the number of people that died on 9/11, the cognitive dissonance begins to set in.

With most estimates of the cost of Obama's health care plan ranging from $300 billion - $1 trillion over the next 10 years, how can ANYONE go on television and claim that the country can't afford to do it. Where were those same people claiming that we couldn't afford the Global War on Terror? My recollection may be a bit fuzzy, but I don't think ANYONE was claiming that we couldn't afford it. How are health care executives that make tens and hundreds of millions of dollars off of denying these now deceased people access to medical care any different than Al-Qaeda?

So, spending over a trillion dollars (over $10 billion a month) after the death of around 3000 people is a no brainer, but spending an equivalent amount to stop an ANNUAL death total of around 20,000 is considered political suicide? What happened to our government...

None of this even takes into account that the cost of health care causes an American to declare bankruptcy roughly every 30 seconds.

As a bit of a side note about George W Bush and "political capital," listen to this clip from 1999 where Bush claims that if he has the political capital, he WILL invade Iraq:

The Department of Defense, Retired Military Officers, and Selling of the Iraq War to the American Public

In April of last year, David Barstow of The New York Times broke the story (for which he subsequently won the Pulitzer Prize) that the Department of Defense had employed retired military advisors to help them "sell" the American public on the Iraq War through interviews in the media. The question of whether or not this program amounted to a violation of the "use of appropriated funds for publicity or propaganda activities" is still being hotly debated despite two reports, one from the Inspector General of the Department of Defense and the other from the Government Accountability Office, claiming that the programs offenses did not rise to the level of a violation. A close reading of the two reports, however, shows why the debate is continuing.

According the IG's report:

We confirmed only one instance where an RMA was disinvited from Pentagon outreach briefings because of his unfavorable comments on DoD activities. In sworn testimony, a senior DoD official told us that General Barry R. McCaffrey, U.S. Army, Retired, was excluded from future briefings because he provided an “unfavorable perspective on the war” in television commentary.

In my opinion, the fact that even one retired military advisor was excluded due to his anti-war views is enough to consider the program propaganda. A brief consultation with Merriam-Webster would agree, as propaganda is defined as "ideas, facts, or allegations spread deliberately to further one's cause or to damage an opposing cause." Wouldn't the silencing of dissenting opinions be considered a deliberate action to "further one's cause?"

To make matters worse, the GAO report uncovered the follow details about the DoD program (FOIA means Freedom of Information Act, RMO's means retired military officers, and OASD-PA is the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs):

• A "trip schedule" that DOD included in its FOIA release identified nine trips that DOD arranged for RMOs, often accompanied by OASD-PA staff ... In some documents, OASD-PA staff described these trips as paying "huge dividends" with regard to media access, and suggested that future planned travel be limited to those RMOs with the greatest ability to serve as "message force multipliers."
• OASD-PA staff planned RMO conference calls, meetings, and travel to coincide with significant events. For example, OASD-PA staff scheduled conference calls with RMOs to coincide with the release of the President's budget request to Congress, and DOD reports to Congress on Iraq, and to coincide with congressional hearings on troop readiness.
• The Comptroller's Office, however, advised us that it did not have information permitting it to calculate the total cost to DOD of the RMO outreach program, including total RMO travel costs.
• While DOD did provide talking points and other information to RMOs, and some DOD staff referred to the RMOs as "surrogates," RMOs clearly were not paid by DOD to be news readers or otherwise to deliver text provided to them by DOD...The only restriction we found that DOD imposed on RMOs was that they not identify by name any particular individual as a source.

So, to recap, the Department of Defense sent retired military officers to Iraq, Guantanamo, etc at an unknown cost to the taxpayer, then had conference calls scheduled around "significant events" to unify their message to the press, even going so far as to provide them with "talking points and other information." Then, at the next news cycle, they only continued using those RMO's who had been the most effective in spreading the administrations message. Since these retired military leaders were portrayed by the media to be impartial commentators in the discussion of whether or not to invade Iraq, which they clearly were not, how is this not an explicit propaganda campaign?

The most confusing part to me is how the GAO report didn't reach the same conclusion. Part of their own report clearly states:

Agency communications are considered covert and violate the prohibition if they are misleading as to their origin ... or if the agency conceals its role in sponsoring the materials ... Concealing the agency's role in a communication goes beyond the range of acceptable agency public information activities ... Otherwise, to the public it may appear that an independent party endorses the agency's position. Hence, materials prepared by an agency or agency contractors and circulated by them as the ostensible position of parties outside the agency constitute covert propaganda and violate the prohibition.

To me, that sounds like exactly what happened.

Unfortunately, one of the potentially more scandalous aspects of Mr. Barstow's New York Times article, was not even examined by the GAO:

While the New York Times' allegations generated legitimate scrutiny of the relationship between RMOs and DOD and raised questions about potential competitive advantage, compromised procurement processes, and the RMOs' commercial ties, those questions do not, in our view, implicate the prohibition on the use of appropriations for publicity or propaganda purposes and they are therefore outside the scope of this opinion. For similar reasons, this opinion also does not examine whether the RMOs disclosed to the viewing public or the networks whether they had commercial ties to DOD contractors or other possible conflicts of interests.

If we were to find out that a significant number of the RMO's employed in the DoD program were also on the payrolls of the same defense contractors who reaped massive profits off of the decision to go to war, we would truly be living in Orwell's 1984.

Blackwater

Xe, the contractor formerly known as Blackwater, is rapidly becoming part of one of the craziest, jaw-dropping stories I've ever heard. The story, broken by Jeremy Scahill, has been covered on Countdown with Keith Olbermann all week, so I thought I'd consolodate the clips below.

The essence of the story is that Eric Prince, the founder of Blackwater, considered himself the head of a Christan army tasked with the elimination of Muslims around the world who murdered not only countless Iraqi's but also at least one person who was going to testify against the company. It's unbelievable.

The combination of this story, if it is accurate, with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld putting biblical quotes on the coversheets of President Bush's Iraq War intelligence briefings paints a horrible picture of how the previous administration really saw the Iraq War...

Friday, August 7

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