US Military Recruits Children: "America's Army" Video Game

[PepperFritz]

US Military Recruits Children:
"America's Army" Video Game Violates International Law
Wednesday 23 July 2008
by Michael B. Reagan, t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Link: _http://www.truthout.org/article/us-military-recruits-children


Read this article in full. It is beyond scary. It's horrifying.

 

[vinny]

as now featured on SoTT: here

 

[domi]

And they will know exactly whom to recruit for which unit based on the tracking data they're collecting.

Who's to say the deck of cards won't be rigged to get a person targeted for recruitment in a position where armed services is the most palatable way out whatever predicament is created.

 

[iggy]

Want to hear something especially creepy when it comes to this story and this exact video game? Probably the most respected writer in the US died after writing about this game and its connection to the US military....Gary Webb! Thats right... the same Gary Webb who exposed the CIA and various politicians to rock cocaine in the 1990s. I was shocked more people hadnt discussed the fact that this was Webb's last subject. Instead everyone was talking about how it was impossible for Webb to commit suicide since he was reported to have shot himself TWICE in the head...

Anyways, if you want to read Gary Webbs article on Americas Army called "The Killing Game", he wrote it for the San Jose Mercury in late 2004. He was dead a couple months later....

http://www.newsreview.com/sacramento/Content?oid=23529

 

[iggy]

I found this section of the article especially telling....

Four years after the game was introduced at the 2002 Los Angles E3, and half way around the world in Mosul, Iraq, "America's Army" was having an effect. Sgt. Sinque Swales had just fired his .50 caliber machine gun at so-called insurgents for only the second time. "It felt like I was in a big video game," he said. "It didn't even faze me, shooting back. It was just natural instinct. Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!" While Sergeant Swales found game training conditioned him for combat situations, other soldiers report "America's Army" played a direct role in guiding them to the military. Pvt. Doug Stanbro told The Christian Science Monitor in a 2006 interview that he "never really thought about the military at all before I started playing this game." An informal Army study of the same year showed that 4 out of 100 new recruits in Ft. Benning, Georgia, credit "America's Army" as the primary factor in convincing them to join the military. Sixty percent of those recruits surveyed said they played the game more than five times a week. And a 2004 Army survey found that nearly a third of young Americans aged 16 to 24 had some contact with the game in the previous six months.(12)