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A puzzling story from the NY Times:
This week the Web site ifilm.com introduced a new "channel" called WarZone (www.ifilm.com/warzone) with film clips from World War II, Vietnam, Israel and Iraq. Looking at the selection of videos about Iraq, it's hard to say which are scarier: the clips themselves or the advertisements that run with them.Some of the clips:
From inside a car, you see a roadside bomb attack.The sponsor - that's who. And according to the Times, that sponsor is the US Army.
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Next in the lineup is an Al Jazeera video of a missile attack on a British C-130 plane, as broadcast on MSNBC.
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Now it's on to a promotional video for the Mahdi Army, a Shiite militia. The clip, nearly four minutes long, shows lots of guys, presumably recruits, waving guns. Much of it is boring, since you can't understand what they're saying. And before you can see it, you have to pay your dues once again. A young American tells his mother, "I found someone to pay for me to go to college." Guess who.
If you want to watch the mujahedeen attack a Mi-8 chopper, first you must listen to a young man having an earnest talk with his father at a pool table: "I'm going to be part of something that's important." The father is doubtful. "Good training?" The son reassures him: "It's the Army."The Times story offers no comment from the Army, in fact it doesn't even mention whether the reporter attempted to contact the Army for a comment. Some of the videos are described as "horrific" - but the story quotes Roger Jackson, ifilm's vice president for content, who says the editors at ifilm look over submissions to weed out anything too ghoulish (like beheadings).
More:
Some of the clips critical of the war, though not all, are stashed in a special section within the WarZone channel called "Spin Zone." There you will find a Norwegian rap group's attack on President Bush, "Kill Him Now," and a clip titled simply "Rumsfeld Caught Lying."I'd like to think the Army ads appearing with these videos are an unintentional result of sponsoring the site as a whole - but as noted, there is no response from the Pentagon included in the story.Other antiwar clips are tucked away even further. They're not on WarZone and can be found only by searching for "Iraq" from ifilm's homepage. One is a short and biting history of Saddam Hussein's long relationship with the C.I.A., set to the tune "Thanks for the Memory." Another is a film clip from the documentary "The Ground Truth" in which soldiers who have lost limbs during the war discuss what happened. One woman's leg was crushed because her Humvee had no doors.
But if you like to watch the Army's toys at work, the "Latest" section of WarZone is the place to be. There you'll find "angel decoys" that repel heat-seeking missiles, a "bunker buster" bomb, and an F-18 Hornet fighter racing against a Formula One car. You can even watch a couple having sex in a convertible as seen by an OH-58D surveillance camera. The video lasts nine minutes.
