Drones And CIA Killers Are Acceptable Thanks To Video Games And Movies

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – Former CIA director William Colby went to work for a video game company after he retired, and a former United States marine allegedly confessed to working at a video game company which was really a CIA front to create a game to drum up support for war against Iran. Check out today’s transcript for the rest…

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  Remember yesterday’s conversation about Matt Damon and the Bourne Identity movies and the CIA?  I said we’ve all been desensitized and propagandized and made to believe that it’s okay for our government to hire and for us to subsidize to train the Jason Bournes of the world to go out on behalf of our government, ostensibly on our behalf, and seek out bad guys to assassinate and what have you.  When we watch in movies, we go, [mocking] “Yeah, Jason Bourne is great!”  With our money, with our enthusiasm and with our devotion to the character and the things we say about it, both in public and in commerce, we seem to be embracive and endorsing of the idea that the CIA ought to be killing people, as long as they’re good CIA killers.

Now, we don’t want bad CIA killers; we only want the good killers that are out there executing the president’s kill list.  [mocking] “Mike, they’re doing it with drones now.”  I know that, but there are still CIA agents out there that have — what did Liam Neeson say in the movie Taken?  [mocking Neeson] “I want you to listen to me.  I have a certain set of skills.”  It’s not a laughing matter, though.  George Washington, which is a sobriquet used, posts at ZeroHedge, “Government Pushes Propaganda Through Video Games.”  How many times have you watched your kids or you have played a video game where you blow people’s heads off, or that you are the Jason Bourne, the CIA agent dispatched to go hither and yon and the people you’re told are bad guys, you kill them?  We do this, it seems, with reckless abandon.

[reading]

Former CIA director William Colby went to work for a video game company after he retired, and a former United States marine allegedly confessed to working at a video game company which was really a CIA front to create a game to drum up support for war against Iran. The Guardian reports:

“For decades the military has been using video-game technology,” says Nina Huntemann, associate professor of communication and journalism at Suffolk University in Boston and a computer games specialist. “Every branch of the US armed forces and many, many police departments are using retooled video games to train their personnel.”

Like much of early computing, nascent digital gaming benefited from military spending. The prototype for the first home video games console, the 1972 Magnavox Odyssey, was developed by Sanders Associates, a US defence contractor. Meanwhile, pre-digital electronic flight simulators, for use in both military and civilian training, date back to at least the second world war.

Later, the games industry began to repay its debts. Many insiders note how instruments in British Challenger 2 tanks, introduced in 1994, look uncannily like the PlayStation’s controllers, one of the most popular consoles of that year. Indeed, warfare’s use of digital war games soared towards the end of the 20th century.

“By the late 1990s,” says Nick Turse, an American journalist, historian and author of The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everday Lives, “the [US] army was pouring tens of millions of dollars into a centre at the University of Southern California – the Institute of Creative Technologies – specifically to build partnerships with the gaming industry and Hollywood.”

It’s a toxic relationship in Turse’s opinion, since gaming leads to a reliance on remote-controlled warfare, and this in turn makes combat more palatable.

[end reading]

Mike:  There was a story or opinion column about this two days ago, about how drones are prolonging the war and expanding the war on terror.  You don’t have to have actual physical troops going in there to do the dirty work.  You can do it all by remote control like you’re playing a video game.  This leads to more war.  There are people on the receiving end of those video game controllers used to control those drones.  I think that’s a valid point to make.  Are they people or are they just targets on a television monitor?  War ought to be war.  Killing ought to be killing.  It shouldn’t matter how you execute it.

Again, in our never-ending desire for world domination and for the expansion of the American Empire, we’re willing to hire men and train them to sit behind those video consoles and learn how to precisely take out “targets.”  What’s a target?  A target is a human being.  This goes right along with the abortion discussion from yesterday, doesn’t it?  What life is really protectable?

End Mike Church Show Transcript