From: Michael Wiik (mwiik@messagenet.com)
Date: Mon Mar 03 2003 - 07:43:44 MST
Christian Weisgerber wrote:
> This was hyped as the TV event of the season,
> but so far it has been a big letdown. The audience is disappointed.
> All that anticipation has been build up, but there's no war in
> sight. Not only has the climax been delayed, it may never happen
> at all. Lousy script that.
Just as with the Lord of the Rings movie, which wasn't released in all
its expanded DVD glory till a year after the theatrical release, the
best video from our new war won't show up till long after the event. For
instance, on Cryptome they linked to a neat film of an AC-130 gunship
firing its weapons on hapless Afghanis. It was neat to see the effort,
in terms of 105mm shells expended, to kill just one guy! It was an
infrared video, and the people-targets were all lit up like glowing
stick figures. Coolest part was when they finally hit this one guy and
you can see a severed limb flying off, still glowing with body heat!
But sadly, you won't see that on CNN.
And it's not like we don't have the technology. Look at those souped-up
M16's our troops have now. It doesn't seem like it would take much extra
weight to add a small camera on each weapon so each kill-shot could be
recorded for posterity. Perhaps editted into a family video for the
widow and orphans.
I think having more video would make everybody much more supportive of
the war. It should be possible to have a little camera on each bomb or
artillery shell. In fact, I think the U.S. should personalize each and
every bomb, give it it's own URL and let children post messages which
would be printed via some sort of hand-held dot-matrix printer on the
munition as it's loaded. Combine this with the camera on the bomb
transmitting it's last image so you could actually match up individual
dead iraqis with the bomb that killed them. Then the kids could write
the Iraqi widows and orphans explaning why their husbands and fathers
had to die, and it'd all be archived for future historians.
-Mike
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