“Among the projects awarded for the period 2014-2017 is a Cornell University-led study managed by the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research which aims to develop an empirical model of the dynamics of social movement mobilisation and contagions... Twitter posts and conversations will be examined to identify individuals mobilised in a social contagion and when they become mobilised. Last year, the DoDs Minerva Initiative funded a project to determine Who Does Not Become a Terrorist, and Why? which, however, conflates peaceful activists with supporters of political violence who are different from terrorists only in that they do not embark on armed militancy themselves. The project explicitly sets out to study non-violent activists: In every context we find many individuals who share the demographic, family, cultural, and/or socioeconomic background of those who decided to engage in terrorism, and yet refrained themselves from taking up armed militancy, even though they were sympathetic to the end goals of armed groups. The field of terrorism studies has not, until recently, attempted to look at this control group. This project is not about terrorists, but about supporters of political violence. A raft of Pentagon planning documents which suggest that National Security Agency (NSA) mass surveillance is partially motivated to prepare for the destabilising impact of coming environmental, energy and economic shocks. The Pentagons Human Terrain Systems (HTS) programme training scenarios adapted COIN [counterinsurgency] for Afghanistan/Iraq to domestic situations in the USA where the local population was seen from the military perspective as threatening the established balance of power and influence, and challenging law and order. One war-game, said Price, involved environmental activists protesting pollution from a coal-fired plant near Missouri, some of whom were members of the well-known environmental NGO Sierra Club. Isn’t it reassuring that the Dept of Defense, that is sworn to protect the US Constitution, considers the exercising of your rights of free speech and assembly as “a contagion”? I can smell the “freedom”….and it’s rotten.
Posted on: Sun, 15 Jun 2014 05:03:40 +0000
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