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Re:Blackwater Founder Wants to Provide “Turn Key” Mercenary ... by spraak on Sunday August 06, 2017 @11:50PM (#14945201)
Wow, I'm shocked that I didn't even realize the US was still 'at war' in Afghanistan. Now I'm looking at the Wikipedia page and reading that "[t]he War in Afghanistan is the longest war in United States history" [1].

How embarrassing :( I wonder how many Americans are un/aware of this.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Afghanistan_(2001%E2%80...

Re:Blackwater Founder Wants to Provide “Turn Key” Mercenary ... by 3131s on Monday August 07, 2017 @12:21AM (#14945284)
A lot probably. The US population seems to be totally unaware of what their military is really doing.

The whole thing is obfuscated in a web of foreign governments, three-letter agencies, contractors and tech giants, endless acronyms and euphemisms (e.g. 'disposition matrix', 'extraordinary rendition', 'enhanced interrogation techniques', 'collateral damage'), and as others in this thread have said, a lot of it is about creating distance from culpability. Barack Obama was a remarkably adept and slick PR guy, possessing the perfect confluence of personal attributes to make Americans not care about whatever their government was doing. But now Trump is letting the cat out of the bag! It's a dangerous course of events but maybe has more opportunity for creating lasting change if people unite against him.

Can I suggest this news network?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Real_News

They have a Youtube channel with all their videos up. The name pre-dates the "real" vs. "fake news" thing. It's a rare example of American journalists speaking candidly about the US war & arms industry. They have other content too, along the lines of Democracy Now but with less focus on social justice issues, but I know that the CEO / editor Paul Jay believes that US war profiteering is presently the main existential threat to humankind:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAEF0iToJ5Y&t=747s