American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders - A Review : The Octopus Thrives in Muddy Waters

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A flawed but good enough documentary mini-series that serves as a place to dip your toe into the pool of the villainous conspiracy that is currently ruling the U.S. and the western world.

American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders, is a true crime documentary mini-series on Netflix that explores the mysterious 1991 death of journalist Danny Casolaro and the vast criminal conspiracy – named The Octopus, which he was attempting to uncover at the time of his demise.

The Octopus Murders is directed by Zachary Treitz and Christian Hansen, who act as guides and protagonists while leading viewers through the tangled web of The Octopus and of Casolaro’s death – which was officially ruled a suicide but which is certainly circumspect.

The series opens with Treitz being concerned about his friend Hansen – who is a respected photo-journalist, having become obsessed with Casolaro’s story and the allure of a vast conspiracy.

Casolaro’s story is this…that he was just a regular writer working for a small computer-related magazine when a massive story about government corruption fell into his lap. He investigated the story and discovered a deeper and more complex conspiracy than he ever could have imagined. And then, just as he was on the verge of breaking the story wide open, he goes to meet a source in West Virginia and is found dead, in his hotel room with his wrists slashed a dozen times.  

While the authorities were quick to rule his death a suicide, his family, and many others, disagree. The fact that his body was embalmed without family permission before an autopsy could be done, is a damning piece of evidence in favor of a cover-up surrounding Casolaro’s death.

While Casolaro’s death is certainly pivotal regarding this story, it is also, in many ways, just a sideshow. The real story at the heart of it all is the Octopus he was uncovering.

The Octopus story began in the early 1980’s with a scandal involving a software company named Inslaw and its software PROMIS, which was being used by the Department of Justice to set up a massive database of criminal cases.

The Justice Department then defrauds Inslaw and steals their PROMIS software and distributed it to various other countries for nefarious means (more on that later). Inslaw goes into bankruptcy because the DOJ stole its software and so, led by its founder, William Hamilton, they take the DOJ to court. A federal bankruptcy judge ruled in 1988 that the DOJ had taken PROMIS through “trickery, fraud and deceit” and are liable to pay a massive million-dollar settlement.

The DOJ retaliates by replacing the judge who gave the favorable ruling with one of the DOJ lawyers who worked for the department on the Inslaw case, and then in 1991 they get the ruling overturned and thrown out of court.

This infuriated William Hamilton, and his lawyer, former Attorney general Eliot Richardson, who was astonished at the bold-faced corruption of it all. Eliot claimed this scandal was bigger than anything regarding Watergate…and he knows about Watergate since he resigned rather than fire the Watergate Special Prosecutor at the behest of Richard Nixon.

This is where Casolaro picks up the story and begins investigating it all. One of his primary sources is Hamilton, who guides him through the Inslaw end of things and points him towards various characters who are up to all sorts of no good. Casolaro then starts looking even deeper and finds even more remarkable criminality.

For example, the DOJ gave PROMIS to America’s allies across the globe, and used it to spy on them (a precursor to the modern-day Israeli-Pegasus spyware story).

The story doesn’t end there…as it ends up expanding to include the infamous “October Surprise” where during the 1980 presidential election candidate Ronald Reagan made a deal with Iran for them to refrain from releasing American hostages in order to hurt President Carter politically and thus help Reagan win the 1980 presidential election.

Then there’s the Cabazon Indian Reservation in California used as a CIA base for gun running and drug smuggling, under the direction of CIA cutout security firm Wackenhut. The Cabazon story is filled with multiple “unsolved” murders.

The Cabazon story also expands into Iran-Contra, as it was a way station/money laundering operation for weapons going to Central America and the Middle East, and drugs coming into America.

Casolaro got neck deep into this tangled web of intelligence agency nefariousness back in the early 90s, and Hansen follows in his footsteps in the last few years. Hansen even looks a bit like Casolaro and so he actually plays the role of Casolaro in recreations of his story.

There are lots of side characters in this conspiracy, some are well-known in the world of conspiracies – like Michael Riconoscuito, who is in federal prison on drug charges but who has strong ties to both organized crime and the intelligence community.

Riconoscuito is well-known to conspiracy theorists as being the guy who claimed to have designed a special type of bomb, and that this special type of bomb was used in the bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995. Most critically thinking conspiracy theorists believe the Riconoscuito Oklahoma City bomb story was a plant to obfuscate and distract from the actual conspiracy involving a second man working with Timothy McVeigh, and from McVeigh’s odd background and motivations. Regardless…Riconoscuito is one of those intelligence agency characters that tells just enough of the truth, and just enough of lies, to completely muddy any waters…as his role in The Octopus Murders shows.

All that said, I found American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders to be an interesting mini-series, but it is also predictably deceptive in how it presents itself.

There’s an investigative reporter featured late in the series whose work shadowed Casolaro’s back in the early 90’s, and she says she dropped the story because she “wanted to live a normal life, and have fun”. Oh…how noble.

For decades and decades, the standard approach for the corporate media was that conspiracy theories are for kooks, and conspiracy theorists are mentally ill. Of course, the establishment press do believe in conspiracies, just not the ones that threaten the establishment.

As a result, you can still count on at least one or two corporate press outlets putting out an article every year that declares that there’s a new study from some expert who found that people who believe in conspiracies are retarded narcissists who have small penises.

That said, a mild shift has been occurring in recent years. Too many conspiracies have proven to be obviously true of late and so the new approach by the gatekeepers is to say that conspiracy thinking is dangerous not only to the institutions accused of wrong-doing, but to the people doing the accusing.

The Octopus Murders uses this approach as it basically takes the position that yes there are obvious conspiracies that occurred back in the 1980s where dozens were murdered and where government agencies and officials lied and committed heinous crimes…but you’d be crazy to look into it…or more accurately, you’ll go crazy if you look into it.

Danny Casolaro looked into it and he went a little crazy and maybe, just maybe, killed himself. And if he didn’t kill himself then he was killed…which wouldn’t have happened if he just “lived a normal, happy life.”

The dramatic premise established at the beginning of this mini-series is that Christian Hansen is in great peril because he too, just like Danny Casolaro, is getting close to falling into the abyss that is The Octopus conspiracy.

Back in 2017-2018 there was a podcast called “The RFK Tapes”, where two hosts dive deep into the RFK assassination. It was an interesting podcast until, at the end, just as things are getting spicy, one of the hosts says that despite the evidence staring him in the face, he can’t accept a conspiracy regarding RFK’s assassination because only bad people like Alex Jones believe in conspiracies. So, this host shuts everything down and basically goes back to sleep so he doesn’t empower Alex Jones. How courageous.

In 2008, famous former prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi wrote a book about the JFK assassination titled Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy. I read this 1,600 page monstrosity and what was amusing about it, I mean besides the tortured reasoning and allergy to logic captured within it, was that Bugliosi concludes that Oswald acted alone in killing JFK…but more importantly, he also concludes that the case is so convoluted and crazy that readers should never even dare look into it. In other words, don’t worry your silly little heads about the JFK assassination…go back to sleep my little pets.

Bugliosi’s admonition to stay away from the JFK assassination is only made all the more delicious when you consider his nefarious behavior regarding the Manson murders and trial…all of which is gloriously laid out in Tom O’Neill’s wonder book Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties.

As a brief aside, go read O’Neill’s book and dive into the astonishing “coincidence” that is CIA psychologist Jolly West, the mastermind behind MKUltra, treating Charles Manson before his infamous killing spree, and Jack Ruby following his murder of Lee Harvey Oswald.

Conspiracies abound, and you don’t have to be some wild-eyed conspiracy theorist to see them clearly.

For example, the reality is that the Octopus Casolaro uncovered, is much bigger than he could ever know. One of his main targets in his investigation was George H.W. Bush, and Bush himself is a lynchpin when it comes to the Octopus and the conspiracy ocean it swims in.

For example, Bush, the former Director of the CIA, and eventual Vice President to Reagan, President of the U.S. and father to a President of the U.S., was integral in the October Surprise, and used the connections he developed with Iran to facilitate Iran-Contra as Vice President.

It should also be noted that Bush was knee deep in the JFK assassination as well. He had longtime ties to George de Mohrenshildt, Oswald’s handler in Dallas, and Zapata Offshore Company, one of Bush’s oil companies, was an asset for the Anti-Castro Cuban movement in laundering money and running guns into Cuba. Bush was alleged to have been in Dealey Plaza the day of the assassination and is also one of the very few people alive at the time who has no recollection of where he was the day JFK was killed.

Bush was also very close with the Hinckley family, whose son John shot Ronald Reagan in April of 1981. If Reagan had died Bush would’ve become president. Bush’s son Neil was scheduled to have dinner with John Hinckley’s brother Scott on the evening of the assassination. What a coincidence.

Speaking of coincidence, George H.W. Bush was at a Carlyle Group meeting in New York City on September 11, 2001. Also at this meeting was Osama Bin Laden’s older brother. Ummm…that’s a strange coincidence. George HW Bush is like the Zelig of intelligence agency shenanigans.

And of course, there’s the deep ties between the Saudi Royal Family and the Bush family, the same Saudi Royal Family which directly funded the 9/11 attackers.

Besides the Bush storyline there’s also the banking scandals, which include but are not limited to BCCI, the Savings and Loan scandal, the 2007/2008 financial collapse and a bevy of banks laundering drug money for cartels over the years.

The point I’m trying to make is that American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders, is a nice little primer despite its flawed and tainted thinking regarding “conspiracies” and how they are dangerous to mental health.

And also that the Octopus isn’t some relic from the remote past, it is alive and well and bigger than ever and feeding off of the misery in the world while lining its pockets and filling in graves.

The Octopus today runs the show – the whole show. It doesn’t matter if Biden or Trump or Obama or Bush are President, because the Octopus is the one pulling the strings.

The Octopus ran a coup in Ukraine and started a war there so it could have a massive money laundering and gun running operation in full effect. The Octopus started a war in Afghanistan for the same purposes and also got the added benefit of an endless supply of drugs to flood into the West…which gave us the Opioid epidemic.

JFK, RFK, MLK, Malcolm X and Fred Hampton were killed by the Octopus. Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Congo, Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Bosnia, Chechnya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iraq again, Syria, Ukraine and a host of other wars, coups and slaughters were initiated by the Octopus. BCCI, S&L, Tech Bubble, Housing Bubble and Crash, Bank fraud and drug cartel money laundering, were all Octopus operations. Jeffrey Epstein, the Franklin Affair, Johnny Gosch and all the rest of the sex trafficking and child sex trafficking operations are run by the Octopus.

The Octopus has been doing this and a whole bunch of other insidious and nefarious shit time immemorial, and they’ll continue to do it, and those who point it out will be ridiculed, blacklisted or much much worse. Julian Assange is dying in prison because he exposed the Octopus. Danny Casolaro was killed by the Octopus. Gary Webb was killed by the Octopus.

The bottom line is that American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders is a teardrop in an ocean of misery, and its biggest flaw is that it tells you not to dive in because the waters are treacherous.

I agree that the waters are treacherous, but Truth is the only thing that matters, so grow a pair of balls, gird your loins and dive in…the water is fine.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2024

Leave the World Behind (Netflix): A Review - It's the End of the World as We Know It...and Obama Feels Fine

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. This film never lives up to its potential but it does feature some impressive cinematography and a tantalizing and unnerving narrative. It isn’t a great movie but it does make for a good conversation/thought piece.

Leave the World Behind, written and directed by Sam Esmail, is a dystopian, apocalyptic, psychological thriller produced by Barrack and Michelle Obama now streaming on Netflix.

The film, which stars Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke and Mahershala Ali, is based on the novel of the same name by Ruuman Alam, and it tells the story of the Sanford and Scott families as they navigate an unfolding cataclysm across the U.S. from a tony neighborhood on Long Island.

The Sanford’s, a white family from Park Slope-adjacent Brooklyn, made up of the ornery Amanda (Julia Roberts), her easy-going husband Clay (Ethan Hawke), and their teenage children Archie (Charlie Evans), who is obsessed with girls, and Rose (Farrah McKenzie), who is obsessed with 90s pop culture – like Friends and The West Wing, rent a beautiful home at the beach on Long Island for a week.

In the middle of their first night, there’s a knock at the door, and two black people, G.H. (Mahershala Ali) and Ruth (Myha’la), appear. The story between the Sanfords and the Scotts go from there but I won’t get any more in-depth on it in order to avoid spoilers.

The rest of the plot revolves around mysterious events that are happening in the U.S., specifically in relation to the Sanfords and Scotts, in New York City.

Technology, such as cell phones, the internet and cable television, stop working, leaving the protagonists in an information and communication blackout, which allows chaos and paranoia to flourish.

Once again, in order to avoid spoilers, I will refrain from delving much deeper into the plot than that.

The film’s director, Sam Esmail, is best known for creating the tv series Mr. Robot, but this is just his second feature film, and despite some very bright spots, at times it shows.

To Esmail’s great credit, he creates some very vivid and stunning images in Leave the World Behind, that rattle viewers to the core. Visually the film never fails to unnerve with one apocalyptic nightmare visual after another, like luxurious paintings hanging in a dystopian art gallery.

Esmail and cinematographer Tod Campbell use an often swirling, spinning, panning, zooming and rotating camera to make the viewer just as discombobulated and disoriented as the characters portrayed on-screen. All this camera movement isn’t just directorial masturbation, but instead is very cinematically effective and done with an admirable amount of precision and creative dexterity. As the character’s go through their strange journey, Esmail’s camera leaves viewers in a world where up is down, and left is right…literally.

The same is true of the camera framing, as things are often shot from odd angles, and despite the visuals being crisp and amid razor-sharp straight lines, everything is framed off-kilter and off-center, to great affect.

Unfortunately, as much as I loved the look of the film, the story it shows and the drama it reveals are often sorely lacking.

The biggest issue with Leave the World Behind is that it is bursting with a cavalcade of dramatic potential, but is never able to fully realize it.

The greatest obstacle to the film’s dramatic success is that it gives us one-dimensional, unreal characters, places them in an extreme yet compelling and entirely believable situation, and then has them behave in the most inane, counter-intuitive and annoying ways imaginable.

I can’t give too much away in regards to specifics, but things happen, and characters behave, in ways, both big and small, that are just ridiculous beyond belief and it frankly ruins the film as the tension and drama are undermined by these egregious plot and character improbabilities and decisions.

There’s a bit at the end which is meant to be poignant, and could have been really terrific, but is ultimately neutered by a failure of Esmail to thoroughly impress upon the audience, through repetition or targeted intensity, the crucial pieces involved. (Again, I am being intentionally vague to avoid spoilers.)

As for the cast, they do the best they can with the rather shallow characters they’ve been given.

Julia Roberts’ Amanda is basically an upper-middle class, left-of-center Karen, exercising her mid-life crisis muscles by being an irritable bitch for reasons she will never even try to understand. Roberts is a steady screen presence but she has never brought much of interest to the table and Leave the World Behind is no exception.

Ethan Hawke has matured into a solid actor and his good-natured Clay is a passable and likable attempt at an everyman – if ‘everyman’ were a college professor of English and Media Studies. It’s the character of Clay that is much more troubling than the actor portraying him, as Clay is the clueless, sack-less white man incapable of not only defending himself but of mustering the courage to even attempt it.

Charlie Evans and Farrah Mackenzie play the teens Archie and Rose respectively, and there isn’t much to the characters or the actor’s performances. Neither of them jumps off the screen or generates the least bit of magnetism.

Mahershala Ali is, as always, a strong presence on-screen, but his character G.H., is an absurd stand-in for the film’s producer Barrack Obama. G.H. is impeccable. He is unfailingly good, smarter than everyone and entirely incapable of cowardice. He is principled, moral, ethical, noble, brave and above all…correct. Yawn. The truth is that there were twists and turns that could’ve occurred with G.H. to make him more interesting, but they never happen and so we are left with little more than a cardboard cutout of the man that Barrack Obama, and his slavish sycophants, thinks he is - paging Dr. Freud…narcissism alert!

Myha’la as Ruth Scott is fine, I guess, but again, she doesn’t have much with which to work. Ruth is, like G.H., better than everyone else…I suppose simply because of her immutable characteristics…namely that she is black and a woman. Like Roberts’ Amanda, Ruth is an incorrigible bitch but it’s ok because she’s just speaking her truth…or something like that.

The genuine drama between Ruth and G.H., and between the Sanfords and the Scotts, is eschewed in favor of a rather tepid, embarrassingly trite, middle-of-the-road, decidedly elitist and liberal, high school freshman level identity/race politics that feels forced and obscenely phony, which is very unfortunate.

Speaking of politics, the fact that the Obamas produced this movie, the first non-documentary film they’ve produced, is both telling and, frankly, quite unnerving.

The apocalyptic, dystopian, and totally believable plot of Leave the World Behind, and Obama’s insider status among the power elite, makes it feel like this movie isn’t a piece of fiction but rather a piece of predictive programming…or enlightened prophecy, as to what awaits us.

That may sound irrational, or like “conspiratorial thinking” – something that is lambasted in the film as being unserious despite it being proven correct in the story (and more and more often in real life), but whether conscious or unconscious, artists and art often have a way of showing us the catastrophe that is right around the corner. 9/11 is a recent example of this.

The film is marinated in an establishment politics that is entirely rigid, center-left and upper-class. This elitist, left-liberal orthodoxy is so deeply ingrained in the movie that most-mainstream, establishment indoctrinated viewers won’t even recognize, and if they did they wouldn’t see it as political.

I’ll write a much more in-depth, political, psychological analysis of the film in the coming days, but will state here only that this movie is riddled with as much insidious propaganda as anything I’ve seen in any feature film in recent times.

Whether it be subtle, or not-so-subtle, attacks on libertarians, right-wingers, white people, conspiracies, and even Elon Musk, or anything else that isn’t establishment approved, the film never fails to be in complete lockstep with mainstream orthodoxy as designed by the aristocracy and oligarchy.

In this way the film, despite its attempt to present itself as edgy and politically avant-garde/revolutionary, is, at its heart, an intellectually and dramatically flaccid but ideologically faithful homage to the status quo….just like the former President who produced it.

In conclusion, Leave the World Behind is chock full of dramatic potential but is never able to fully realize it. Despite some compelling visuals and sequences, the film’s dramatic and narrative failures ultimately leave it an unsatisfying viewing experience.

Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

November 2023 Propaganda Report: 60 Minutes Strikes Again...and Again...and Again!

Now that I’ve begun to dip my toes back into the cesspool of propaganda, I’m once again coming to the grim realization that I don’t have to walk far to find those putrid waters.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how I stumbled upon an episode of the CBS dinosaur 60 Minutes and was shocked/amused at how shamelessly it peddled propaganda against Russia, China and Iran, no doubt in the hopes of convincing gullible Americans into believing some Manichean ideal about us being the good guys, and them being the bad guys, and how we must righteously annihilate them in a world war.

In the weeks that followed, 60 Minutes has kept up its relentless propaganda pace with astounding consistency. In fact, since 60 Minutes started its 56th season on September 17, 2023, over the course of eleven episodes the show has run an astonishing twelve segments either directly or tangentially accusing Russia, China and/or Iran of various evils and nefariousness. This relentless cavalcade of propaganda pieces has been entirely devoid of nuance or journalistic integrity, filled with false assumptions, decidedly one-sided, egregiously vacuous and transparently contrived.

The 60 Minutes episode from November 12th is a perfect example of the type of vapid-to-the-point-of-inane propaganda now common place in American media. The topic on this episode was…shock of shocks…the evil of those nefarious Iranians and Russians!! How original.

The first segment was about an alleged Iranian government program to kill or kidnap American officials, citizens and Iranian dissidents on U.S. soil, which is a nmcie companion piece to the 60 Minutes segment I previously wrote about which dealt with an Iranian-American arrested for espionage in Iran, who was eventually part of a recent prisoner swap.

Leslie Stahl, sporting her trademark physics-defying hairstyle that is best described as Andy Warhol run through a nuclear Cuisinart and a turbo wind tunnel, started off the festivities by reading a list of U.S. officials allegedly targeted. The list included such world-class asshats as Mike Esper, Mike Pompeo and to top it all off, John fucking Bolton.

Bolton and Stahl sat down for one of the more contrived sequences in 60 Minutes history, which is quite an accomplishment, and Bolton, as is his wont, talked tough while looking like a constipated Seussian character. Bolton is one of the more blood-thirsty and maniacal hawks in recent U.S. history, again…quite an accomplishment, and he is completely devoid of any credibility on issues revolving around Iran, Russia, China, the Middle East, Europe, Asia or anywhere else in the world, but Stahl, of course, lapped up his braggadocio bullshit and never once pushed back against his false bravado or his claims…nor did she…you know…show any actual evidence to back up the FBI’s claims of an Iranian kidnap/assassination program.

Stahl then interviewed Masi Alinejad, an Iranian dissident woman living in Brooklyn whom the FBI claims was targeted by this Iranian kidnapping/assassination plot.

Alinejad came to the U.S. fourteen years ago and has been an outspoken advocate for women in Iran, and routinely confers with women in Iran and posts videos online of them not wearing a headscarf in defiance of Iranian religious law.

To be kind, Alinejad comes across as absolutely batshit crazy. She is hyper emotional and seems like the type of person you’d see wandering the streets of Brooklyn talking to neighborhood squirrels while wearing an ornate Kentucky Derby hat and a vintage wedding dress.

Alinejad shared her story of how Iran hired an Azerbaijani man in New York to buy a gun and track down Alinejad, then kidnap her and take her to Iran for trial.

Stahl’s reaction to this story is as revealing as it is pretty funny, as she says it “sounds implausible”. No shit Leslie…maybe it “sounds implausible” because it is, in fact, implausible.

Apparently, the kidnap plot against Alinejad crumbles and so the Iranians pivoted and told this criminal from Azerbaijan to skip the kidnapping and just kill her. The criminal allegedly stalks her, then goes up to her front door and “tries to get in” her house.

What’s weird about this claim of this guy trying to break in to Alinejad’s house is that 60 Minutes shows door cam footage of him on her porch meant to prove the claim, but the video doesn’t show him actually trying to get in to her house at all…in fact he never touches the door. He wanders back on forth on the porch looking at his phone, like a delivery man wondering if he has the wrong address. If there was footage of him actually trying to break in, which would be pretty damning…60 Minutes would’ve shown it. But apparently, they don’t because they didn’t.

According to the story, the alleged assassin then leaves…apparently because he couldn’t get in the house – no doubt held back by the fact that he never touched the door, and then is pulled over by cops for “running a stop sign”, and the police find a rifle in the trunk of his car.

Let’s unpack this shall we…the guy has a weapon, which the FBI alleges he was going to use to kill Alinejad at the behest of Iran, but for some inexplicable reason he decides not to take the weapon with him when he goes to kill her and ends up just standing around like a dope on her porch. What was he going to do, meet her, introduce himself and then tell her to hold on while he runs to his car and gets his rifle?

Also, never believe coincidences in cases like this. This guy wasn’t pulled over by the cops by happenstance…he was marked and everyone knew what he was doing. A strong indicator of this is that if you or I run a stop sign, the police are not going to search the trunk of our car. They will give you a ticket and that will be that. This is why I assume that this alleged assassin from Azerbaijan was actually either an intelligence agency asset or an informant of some kind, and that the entire plot was manufactured by the feds.

Now why would I assert such a crazy thing? Well because this 60 Minutes story also reveals that the man who allegedly wanted to kidnap or kill John Bolton hired a hitman online (yeah…ok) and that hitman wasn’t really a hitman…he was…you guessed it…an FBI informant.

The FBI has lots of informants and they get up to lots of nefarious stuff for their fed paymasters. For example, that 2020 kidnap plot against Michigan governor Whitmer…the vast majority of people involved were actually working for the FBI. If you look at many big-name cases, particularly in the wake of 9-11, the same is true. Hell, at the very least two of the 9-11 hijackers were living with an FBI informant in San Diego right before the attacks.

So, take all of this nonsense from the FBI and 60 Minutes about a vast Iranian assassination/kidnap plot with a gigantic grain of salt.

That said, governments and their intelligence agencies do kidnap and kill citizens of other countries. You know how I know that? Because 60 Minutes unironically shows a video in this segment where an Iranian citizen confesses to assisting the Iranian Revolutionary Guard with their kidnapping and assassination program. The Iranian man, a smuggler who was allegedly given carte blanch in his illegal business if he cooperated with the Revolutionary Guard, confesses in a video MADE BY ISRAELI INTELLIGENCE AGENTS IN THE BACK OF A CAR AFTER THESE SAME ISRAELI INTELLIGENCE AGENTS KIDNAPPED AND FORCEFULLY INTERROGATED THE GUY. Ms. Stahl fails to recognize the irony of using a confession video obtained through an Israeli kidnapping plot to prove the villainy of Iranians for their kidnapping plots.

Speaking of other governments kidnapping people…that sounds sort of like…I don’t know… the U.S. government rendition program under the Bush regime.

And speaking of assassinations of other country’s government officials…that sounds a lot like the U.S. assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani in 2020. Not to mention the cavalcade of scientists assassinated in Iran by Israeli intelligence in the last decade.

Stahl does bring up the Soleimani assassination but fails to see any similarities as the Iranian General was a “terrorism mastermind”. As always, terrorism is in the eye of the beholder, as U.S. foreign policy over the last 75 years has killed and terrorized infinitely more people, especially Iranian people, than the “terrorist” Soleimani could ever dream of matching. Bolton, Pompeo and the entirety of the George W. Bush administration are at a minimum, equals to Soleimani on the terrorism chart.

Speaking of dead Iranians…does anybody remember the 290 Iranian murdered by the U.S. in 1988 when the U.S.S. Vincennes shot down Iranian Air flight 655 over Iranian airspace? Well…I’m sure Iranians do, and they probably think of it as a terror attack. The George H.W. Bush was president at the time and he refused to apologize to Iran because America never apologizes….typical terrorists behavior.

Stahl goes on to recount the FBI allegations against Iran saying that in order to keep a legal distance, Iran uses “proxies” from the criminal world to do their dirty work.

This sounds quite similar to how the U.S. intelligence community uses criminals to run guns and drugs into the U.S. from Central and South America in order to fund their black budget projects…like, ironically enough, Iran-Contra.

It is also similar to how prior to the war in Afghanistan, poppy production in that country under Taliban rule had fallen to nearly zero…but after we went on the hunt for Bin Laden by starting a war there, poppy production skyrocketed, followed by a flood of heroin into the U.S. and Europe. The same thing happened during Vietnam, when the CIA would run heroin from Thailand through Vietnam and into the U.S. Not surprisingly, Leslie Stahl didn’t bring any of this uncomfortableness up.

Also not surprisingly, when Stahl spoke of Iran using proxies like Hamas and Hezbollah to fight their wars and foment dissent in other countries, she failed to mention how the U.S. has famously used such stand-up good guys as Al Qaeda and ISIS as proxies in the Middle East against various enemies, such as the old Soviet Union and modern-day Syria.

60 Minutes’ allergy to the truth and addiction to establishment propaganda didn’t stop with the inane Iranian kidnapping story. Up next on the same episode was even more WWIII drum banging in the form of a story about Russia’s “cultural genocide” in Ukraine.

In a previous episode, 60 Minutes did a segment about Russia’s “quiet invasion” in Georgia and now they’re doing a segment on Russia’s “cultural genocide”…how sneaky of those Russians to do “quiet” invasions and “cultural” genocides, instead of those noisy invasions and actual genocides like Israel is doing in Gaza.

The main thrust of this segment was that Russia is targeting Ukrainian churches, libraries and museums in order to wipe out Ukrainian culture and identity.

The specifics of the charges against Russia in this case are…well…almost irrelevant considering the dubious sources with incentive to manufacture any story they want with no journalistic resistance to it. That said, I don't doubt in the least that churches, libraries and museums have been destroyed in Ukraine.

What I find fascinating though is that as this story aired another war is raging…this time in Gaza, and lots of churches, including the third oldest Christian church in the world, St. Porphyrius, and hospitals too, have been deliberately targeted, as have civilians.

You can bet your ass that 60 Minutes will not run a story on the cultural genocide of Christians by Israel…and that’s because when Israel commits cultural genocide, or any other kind of genocide, it’s good, but when Russia does it, it’s bad.

To be fair, it isn’t just Israel that gets a free pass…we give a free pass to ourselves as well. Remember when the Iraqi museum under U.S. military control was looted during the Iraq War, and Donald Rumsfeld’s response was to scoff at the charges and then to declare that “stuff happens”?

I certainly do not condone Russia’s military destroying Ukrainian churches, museums and libraries, nor do I condone their alleged looting. But I must say that these charges would be more impactful if western media outlets hadn’t already run with vacuous accusations of Russian rape camps and massacres, both of which have been shown to be scurrilous charges and empty propaganda talking points.

What I find so deplorable about establishment media’s modern war coverage is, whether it be in Ukraine, Syria, or Israel, the manufacturing and hyping of false atrocity stories.

War is bad enough as it is that you don’t need to gin up phony furor over fake rape camps or beheaded babies and the like. War is an atrocity all its own, it doesn’t need any help. And frankly, these stories only further to coarsen and dehumanize the public…which is already pretty coarse and inhumane.

The following Sunday, November 19th, 60 Minutes kept the propaganda train rolling with a segment titled “The Disappeared”, which was a shameless appeal to emotion that was so devoid of journalistic integrity as to be egregious.

The segment told the story of how Russia is “abducting” Ukrainian children from Ukraine and taking them into Russia. 60 Minutes reports that according to the Ukrainian government, the “official” number of children “abducted” by Russia is 19,000 but that they think the “real” number is 300,000…that’s quite a range…one might even say it is “highly improbable”. Just so everyone knows, 60 Minutes makes abundantly clear throughout the segment that all of this “abducting” is a “war crime”.

The story follows a “brave” Ukrainian grandmother, named Paulina, as she “rescues” her nine-year-old grandson Nikita who was “abducted” by the Russians. This story is…ummm…complicated to say the least.

So, Paulina’s grandson Nikita has special needs and was attending a boarding school for disabled students in Ukraine. His parents are completely out of the picture, but why that is, is never revealed in the story, we only learn that the grandmother is “in the process of filing for guardianship of her grandson”. Curious considering that Nikita was “abducted” nearly 8 months ago…which indicates he had no family member as his guardian prior to the “abduction”.  

Also curious is that Paulina lives far away (in Poland) from Nikita, as she works and has to pay for the boarding school….or so 60 Minutes tells us. The reality is that Paulina hasn’t seen Nikita in a long time and it has nothing to do with the Russians. In fact, she is in such close contact with Nikita that she only finds out he has been “abducted” by the Russians, when his picture is posted on social media by a Ukrainian activist group.

The host of the segment, Cecilia Vega, then informs us that over the seven months Nikita was “held captive”, the Russians played a “cruel game of hide and seek”, moving the child three times in eight months.

In an attempt to expose the villainy of the Russians, a digital map is used to show the long journey Nikita was taken on “post-abduction”. First, he is taken out of Ukraine to Crimea, then to Russia proper – but still close to the border, and then…astonishingly…he is taken back to Ukraine not all that far from where he was originally “abducted”. Cecilia Vega’s voice-over sums up this journey by simply declaring that the child was taken “deep into Russian-held territory”.

Paulina then works with an activist group in Ukraine dedicated to “rescuing” the children “abducted” by Russia, and they hatch a plot to get Paulina to Nikita.

We are told by a former Ukrainian politician who now runs the non-profit activist organization that “rescues” these children, that each child who returns to Ukraine is :a witness to a war crime”…which is a strange thing to say since it will just signal to Russia not to release any more children…right? Ms. Vega never asks that question because it would complicate the shallow sound-bite she is so eager to get and the Manichean narrative she has pledged to uphold and propagate.

Then we hear about Vlad, a 16-year-old Ukrainian boy, who recounts his tale of being taken from his home in Ukraine by Russian soldiers and put in a “camp”, which sounds an awful lot like a school. Among the tortures he endures are that he has to say the Russian national anthem every morning (the horror!!).

Vlad also tells us that speaking Ukrainian was forbidden in the “camp”, which means he got to experience exactly what every ethnic Russian Ukrainian citizen experienced after the U.S.-led coup in 2014 in Ukraine. The post-coup government banned the Russian language, Russian media outlets, opposition political parties and even Russian Orthodox Churches…and some Ukrainian ones too.

Vlad, being a teenager, lashes out at these ridiculous restrictions and tears down a Russian flag in anger. He is then put in the detention facility part of the “camp” and is held in “isolation”. 60 Minutes acts like this is the most barbaric thing to have ever occurred, and I concur, that children, even 16-year-olds, should not be put in isolation. Unfortunately, in the U.S. 35% of all prisoners held in youth detention facility are held in isolation at one point during their incarceration. Celia Vega never mentions that fact.

Vega did mention that the Russians were “indoctrinating” children in these “camps” by telling them “repeated lies” like “Ukraine lost the war”. By all observable metrics, Ukraine has lost the war though, and the indoctrination charge is pretty rich coming from 60 Minutes – which does nothing more than indoctrinate its viewers with the most pernicious of propaganda.

As for Vlad, his story is a sad one, but he did get back home, so Russia’s “abduction” campaign seems very, very ineffective. Considering that the Ukrainian military routinely “abducts” teens and old men off the street and uses them as forced conscripts, which they then throw into the meat grinder at the front line to be slaughtered, it’s safe to say that Vlad was lucky to be in a Russian school instead.

And that is really the point of all this. The notion that Russia is moving children out of a war zone for the safety of the children is only absurd and ridiculous if you have a cartoonish and comic book understanding of Russia and Russians. You don’t have to think Russians are the good guys to believe that they don’t want to massacre children.

And considering the fact that Israel has slaughtered more civilians and children in just over a month of war in Gaza, than Russia has in two years in Ukraine, speaks to this reality.

Another piece of evidence backing this notion is that Paulina makes it to the school where Nikita is living under Russian control. Despite the fact that she has no legal guardianship of Nikita, Russian officials, including Maria Mlova-Balova – the woman who is “accused of war crimes” by Ukraine (and 60 Minutes) for her work running Russia’s Child Services, Paulina is allowed to leave with Nikita.

Mlova-Belova, or as 60 Minutes identifies her “the accused war criminal”, tears up with joy at the reunion of Paulina and Nikita. Mlova-Belova – “the accused war criminal”, then gives gifts to Nikita and says to Paulina, “would like you like to stay in the Russian Federation with us maybe? We can give you some money, maybe a car?”

Paulina declines, as Mlova-Belova calls the reunion a “joy” and wishes Paulina and Nikita a “happy life”. Paulina and Nikita then leave for the long journey back to Poland.

Just think about this for a moment…Mlova-Belova –“the accused war criminal”, greets a Ukrainian grandmother with gifts and an offer of citizenship and financial aid, and then allows her to come take her grandson and leave, despite the fact that the Ukrainian government official running the rescue operation says every returned child is a witness to a war crime, and this “war criminal” woman puts the entire interaction on video and shares it with the world.

Does this sound like some nefarious, child-stealing enterprise being run by a “war criminal”? Does Maria Mlova-Belova sound like a monster who wants to harm Ukrainian children? In addition to that, is a nine-year-old boy with special needs some great prized possession or piece of war booty the Russians covet? Or is the more likely scenario that Mlova-Belova is a Russian bureaucrat doing her best to find a safe place or safe home for children in great peril in a very complex and difficult situation? We know what 60 Minutes wants you to think, but the facts of this scenario speak to a much more nuanced and complicated situation.

(This is not to even mention the fact that as this story ran, Israel is waging war in Gaza and making no effort to avoid killing many, many children – according to some reports, over 5,500. It would seem Russia is doing a much more humane thing by removing children from an active war zone. I’ll let you decide.)

On Sunday, November 26th, 60 Minutes ran yet another propaganda segment titled “Rise”, which was about a former American Marine Corps officer who runs a program which brings Ukrainian war widows and their children to the Swiss Alps for a week in order to climb mountains and confront their psychological trauma of having lost a husband/father.

The segment was hosted by a weepy, teary-eyed Scott Pelley, who introduced us to Nathan Schmidt, the former Marine who served three brutal tours in Iraq and has the psychological scars to prove it.

Pelley repeats the terms “Putin’s invasion” and “Putin’s unprovoked invasion” like mindless mantras throughout the segment, just so everyone knows that subtlety and nuance are not welcome on 60 Minutes, despite those declarative condemnations being, at best, disputed. To state aloud that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was “unprovoked” is to prove yourself uninformed to the point of illiteracy in the recent history of Ukraine and America’s involvement.

There is a certain irony in the fact that Schmidt, who is so obviously torn up about what he witnessed and experienced in Iraq, helping Ukrainians heal from the psychological wounds of war, when the Iraqis, whose country he invaded, are apparently left to fend for themselves when it comes to dealing with the immense trauma, he and his nation inflicted upon them.

When hearing the very sad stories of the Ukrainian war widows and their children, I couldn’t help but wonder…where are the ethnic Russian Ukrainians who lived in the Donbas who were left widowed and orphaned by the Ukrainian government’s bombardment of thei towns and villages post the 2014 coup – a coup which was instigated and sponsored by the U.S.? Ukraine killed 14,000 ethnic Russians in the Donbas…so there are lots of war widows and orphans to choose from for a healing mountain climb. Why weren’t they invited?

And where is the healing mountain climbing for the relatives of the 48 ethnic Russian Ukrainian citizens who were burned alive in the union house in Odessa in 2014 by Ukrainians and backed by the U.S. installed Ukrainian government? I’m sure they’d like to climb a mountain and forget their troubles too.

This 60 Minutes segment is the heartstrings portion of the propaganda program, similar to the previous segment on the “disappeared” children. It is meant to overwhelm you with raw emotion, which will short circuit your brain and your critical thinking ability. Facts? We don‘t need facts! We need feelings!!

The thing that bothers me the most about this wave of 60 Minutes propaganda pieces is not the shamelessness, but the obvious venality, vacuity and malignant intent of it all.

This 60 Minutes anti-Russian/China/Iran propaganda isn’t meant to inform, it is meant to inflame. Its goal is to misinform, disinform and blind the populace to reality and dull their ability to think critically while aggravating their emotions, all in the hopes of ginning up support for a massive war against the new Axis of Evil.

War is undoubtedly a racket, and 60 Minutes is a critical part of that racket’s infrastructure. The dupes and dopes who buy into the bullshit that 60 Minutes and the neo-con American government are peddling, will ride the wave of their incuriosity and righteousness, and flag-wave us into a world war and our own annihilation.

I know Quixotically waving my red warning flags will make no difference in the long run and will do nothing to stop the inevitable, but at least it gives me something to do while the dogs of war howl louder and louder and 60 Minutes keeps the beat by incessantly banging their war drums.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

Amsterdam: A Review – Fascists, Coups and Assassinations...Oh My!

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 1/2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Awful. Awful. Awful. Just an amateurish, dreadful, no-good piece of moviemaking. Go read Smedley Butler’s “War is a Racket” instead.

Amsterdam, written and directed by five-time Oscar nominee David O. Russell and starring Christian Bale, Margot Robbie and John David Washington, hit theatres with a resounding thud back in October, and is now streaming on HBO Max…and I just had the great displeasure of watching it.

The film, which describes itself as a “period comedy thriller” but feels more like a comedy thriller on its period, follows the travails of three old friends who met in World War I, Burt Berendsen (Christian Bale), Valeria Bandenberg (Margot Robbie) and Harold Woodman (John David Washington), as they uncover a coup plot in America in the 1930’s and try to thwart it.

The coup plot in the film is based on the real-life 1933 Business Plot, where American oligarchs, like JP Morgan, Irenee DuPont, Prescott Bush – banker and future father and grandfather to two U.S. presidents, Robert Singer Clark – heir to the Singer Corporation fortune, and banker Robert Clark among many others, plotted to overthrow President Roosevelt and install a fascist military dictatorship here in America.

The real-life Business Plot was thwarted by General Smedley Butler (in the film the character is named Gil Dillenbeck and is portrayed by Robert DeNiro), one of America’s greatest but least known heroes, but was successfully covered up, disparaged and then memory-holed by the powers that be who control the media.

In real-life the Business Plot’s failure was only temporary though because in the long term it’s been a smashing success. Over the years the “Business Plot” simply morphed into other forms and used other tactics to find success.

The most obvious was when, thirty years after the Business Plot was thwarted, President John F. Kennedy, who had promised to “splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the wind”, got his brains splintered into a thousand pieces and scattered to the wind in Dealey Plaza by the the oligarch’s intelligence/muscle division - the CIA…oops, I mean by a “lone nut” (wink-wink)…all because Kennedy wasn’t going to make the villainous vampire class gobs of money by greenlighting the war in Vietnam, among a myriad of other reasons.

Prescott Bush (who, along with many of his Business Plot co-conspirators, supported the Nazis before and during World War II) had a son, George HW Bush – who later become the Director of the CIA, as well as Vice President and eventually President, he earned his stripes by being an integral part of the plot against JFK.

Nearly twenty years later in 1981, George HW Bush was Vice President to Ronald Reagan when The Gipper had the great misfortune of getting shot just months after his inauguration by…you guessed it…another “lone nut” (wink-wink), this one named John Hinckley.

If Reagan had died Bush would’ve inherit the throne – and would have been eligible to be president for nearly 12 years (nearly three full terms) since Reagan had just started his presidency…which makes the fact that the Bush family had deep connections to John Hinckley’s family, so deep in fact that Scott Hinckley (John Hinckley’s brother) was scheduled to have dinner at Neil Bush’s (HW Bush’s son) home the week of the assassination attempt, a very uncomfortable “coincidence” (wink-wink).

Since the assassination/execution of JFK, we’ve had a succession of fascist monsters from both political parties occupying the White House and ruling the land, most notably, but not exclusively, the aforementioned George HW Bush, as well as his diabolical son George W. Bush.

George W. Bush, you may recall, was president when 9/11 occurred and the War on Terror and War in Iraq were launched and ultimately failed, the torture and surveillance regime became mainstream, and the big money interests raped and pillaged America and gutted the working class…again…and then got “bailed out” by their cronies.

9/11 is another of those unfortunate Bush family coincidences (wink-wink), because on the morning of the attack George W. Bush, former President and father of the then current President, was at the D.C. Ritz-Carlton as a representative for the Carlyle Group meeting with the brother of Osama bin Laden – the CIA asset the CIA claimed perpetrated the 9/11 attack, sort of like how CIA asset Lee Harvey Oswald committed the JFK assassination. I’d wink again but I’m fresh out of winks.

As much as I’d like to ignore the abominable cinematic calamity of Amsterdam and dive deep into the rabbit hole and talk about the machinations of the wicked witches and warlocks ruling this country, I simply must, for the moment, return to this shit sandwich of a movie.

I suppose it is to Amsterdam’s credit that it even dares to bring up the Business Plot, something of which most people are completely unaware, but the movie is so cinematically repulsive and artistically repugnant that one must seriously consider that it’s an intentional piece of counter-intelligence propaganda meant to trigger audience revulsion at the mere mention of the Business Plot because it’s connected with this odious movie.

David O. Russell has always been an abysmal filmmaker, but Amsterdam is such a poorly made and dreadfully written, directed and acted film that it’s like Russell’s shitty filmmaking machine went into hyper-drive. The notion that Russell intentionally scuttled the production by imposing an astounding level of his fecal filmmaking flair in order to…I don’t know… appease some higher ups in the ruling class food chain in the hopes that his recent “troubles” – which include sexually harassing his transgender teenage niece/nephew, becomes less insane than it obviously sounds.

Whatever the reason, Amsterdam is sufficiently heinous enough that the Business Plot now has zero chance of becoming well-known amongst the piss-ants, proles and plebes of the general population.

Amsterdam has rightfully, and in my case righteously, been savaged by critics and lost nearly a $100 million at the box office, so congrats David O. Russell and your oligarchical overlords, your secret is safe as no studio executive will touch a Business Plot movie for at least the next 1,000 years, then it’ll be the problem of the next Reich, which by my calculations will be the Fifth, to put the fix in.

From a cinematic perspective, Amsterdam’s failure is no fluke as the script is an incomprehensible abomination that features a plot that’s so convoluted and so tonally incoherent as to be egregiously abrasive.  

Russell’s amateurish, heavy-handed and heinous direction is laughable, if not criminal. The reality is that Russell has always been a cinematic charlatan. Always. His movies, like The Fighter, Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle, have generated some broad-based appeal but they have been, for the most part, vacuous, vapid and venal piles of shit.

Russell’s movie Three Kings was his most interesting but…that’s not saying much. And just a reminder, Three Kings, which was about the first Gulf War, wasn’t an anti-war film at all but was actually advocating for MORE war…and magically the war it hoped for came to be a few years later in the wake of 9-11. Yay!

Russell makes the bizarre choice in Amsterdam to shoot a bevy of scenes where the characters are talking directly to the camera while in conversation with each other. This is so absurd as to be distracting, if not maddening. These conversations are sometimes between three or four people, and no one’s eye line matches, so it’s like Russell is cutting between characters talking in opposite directions. I get why he did it – Russell is playing the Hollywood political card and having the characters talk directly to us because they’re not-so-subtly warning us about the peril facing our democracy right now because of Trump…blah blah blah…but this sort of myopic Rachel Maddow-inspired nonsense ignores the fact that our democracy died a long, long time ago…also it’s so cinematically disjointed and disordered as to be catastrophic.

Russell’s continued focus on eyes in Amsterdam, whether they be Mike Myers weird blue ones, or Ed Begley Jr’s unblinking ones, or Christian Bale’s glass one, or the eyes of the actors speaking directly into the camera during scenes, is inanely ham-handed. Look (“see” what I did there?), we get it…the brave artist David O. Russell is trying to use his egregiously shitty movie to get us to see the Truth of our own world – but it’s so poorly done and so politically vacant it made me roll my eyes so far in the back of my head I nearly had a seizure.

As for the all-star cast…hoo-boy.

Christian Bale is a good actor and he does his best here but goodness gracious it’s like watching a man piss into hurricane-force winds and wonder why he gets wet. Bale’s Dr. Burt Berendson has a glass eye…reminiscent of the actor’s role in The Big Short…a far-superior film that should be connected to Amsterdam due to the sub-text and text of corrupt elites rigging the system but Amsterdam sucks so bad that connection is completely lost.

Margot Robbie, who plays nurse Valerie Vandenberg, is a luminous beauty, but her old timey New Yawk accent which she seems to fall back into in nearly every role, has become extremely tiresome. Robbie is a big movie star but the more you see her the less you think of her.

John David Washington, who I thought was so good in BlacKKKlansman, is so bad in this movie, and in his last bunch of movies, I can confidently declare he must have had quadruple charisma bypass surgery. Washington is simply dead behind the eyes and brings nothing to this role, so much so I could swear I hear a sucking sound every time he’s on screen.

Rami Malek has a supporting role and confirms what has become very apparent in recent years…Rami Malek is officially an awful actor. Chris Rock too has a supporting role that would have been better served if it never existed, and Taylor Swift has a supporting role and is remarkably successful in proving she’s not an actress. Good for you Taylor!

The bottom line is that the Business Plot is an important piece of history that has successfully been banished from our collective consciousness, and Amsterdam is such a God-awful, disaster of a movie that this crucial, treasonous event will only be further flushed down the memory hole and forever forgotten. Which is a shame since people should be aware that we live in a fascist, corporate hellscape ruled by cruel, vicious, blood-thirsty oligarchs just like the ones who tried to overthrow FDR, and who very successfully overthrew JFK.

This begs the question, where’s our Smedley Butler? And where’s the great Smedley Butler bio-pic or prestige TV series we so desperately need?

I’ll tell you where they are…they’re strangled in the crib by the ruthless ruling elites who use their lap dog media to stifle the truth of their tyranny and treason, ensuring it never sees the light of day and even if it did it would never be believed by the misinformed masses.

In conclusion, in case you haven’t figured it out yet, I hated Amsterdam and implore you not to waste your time watching. The truth is I watched it so you don’t have to…and boy oh boy…you really don’t have to.

Follow me on Twitter: Michael McCaffrey @MPMActingCo

©2023

The Forever Prisoner: A Documentary Review

My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. Documentarian Alex Gibney once again expertly exposes the origins of the U.S. torture program, although he doesn’t adequately shame the ruling elites responsible for the moral and ethical atrocity of torture.

 Watching the new HBO documentary, The Forever Prisoner, by Academy Award winning filmmaker Alex Gibney now available on HBO Max, is an at times infuriating experience.

 The film isn’t infuriating because it’s a flawed but damning reminder of America’s hypocrisy and brutality as it examines the birth of the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program and the death of the delusion of American ideals. No, it’s infuriating because you know no one of any consequence will be held accountable for the gruesome crime being exposed in heinous detail before you.

‘The Forever Prisoner’ of the title is Abu Zubaydah, the alleged terrorist mastermind captured in Pakistan in 2002 who was savagely tortured by the CIA for months and now resides in an endless legal limbo in Guantanamo Bay.

 Zubaydah’s torture, which included isolation, sleep deprivation, freezing, beatings, stress positions, and 83 water boarding sessions, is shown to have been the blueprint for CIA and U.S. military torture programs from Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan to Abu Ghraib in Iraq to Guantanamo Bay in the War on Terror.

Zubaydah was no innocent, but he also wasn’t the al Qaeda heavy hitter that the CIA claimed him to be. That said, he was a useful asset, as FBI agent Ali Soufan was able to extract vital information from him during the early, pre-torture days of his interrogation.

As Soufan explains, it was non-torture interrogation techniques that got Zubaydah to identify Khalid Sheikh Muhammed as an al Qaeda leader and mastermind of 9/11.

But when word got back to CIA director George Tenet that it was FBI agents getting info from Zubaydah and not the CIA, the ever-territorial Tenet went ballistic.

So, FBI agent Soufan was out and after a 47-day isolation period where Zubaydah saw and spoke to no one – a clear indication that the ticking time bomb scenario so often used to justify torture was invalid, the insidious clown show that was the CIA took over and the torture program kicked off.

The CIA man who developed the torture regime used on Zubaydah which became the playbook for America’s torture program, James Mitchell, is featured in The Forever Prisoner and vociferously but poorly defends himself and his work.

As the film shows, the CIA were so desperate to create an “enhanced interrogation” system they chose the eager Mitchell with virtually no vetting and despite the fact that he had no experience in actual interrogation.

Mitchell and his partner Dr. Bruce Jensen’s only remotely relevant experience was in working with the SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Extraction) program which teaches U.S. military personnel how to avoid being captured and how to resist torture techniques.

The CIA reverse engineering SERE to create an interrogation program creates obvious legal and operational contradictions as the SERE program clearly states that torture techniques only extract false confessions and empty propaganda victories.

Not surprisingly, Mitchell and Jensen’s immoral and unethical torture program was also ineffective, as it failed miserably to garner any useful intelligence, but despite their abysmal failure they were paid by the CIA an astonishing $81 million as torture teachers.

The man who led the CIA torture program and signed those checks was Director of the CIA Counterterrorism Center, Jose Rodriguez, and he knew the evil and illegality he was perpetrating, as evidenced by his telling his subordinates, “Do not put your legal concerns in writing. Not helpful.”

Rodriguez and his Chief of Staff, Gina Haspel, were also the ones who illegally destroyed the videotapes of the Zubaydah torture sessions, against the advice of legal counsel.

Haspel and Rodriguez never faced any legal recourse for their part in the torture program or for destroying evidence. In fact, Haspel later became Director of the CIA and then Director of National Intelligence, while Rodriguez became wealthy as a consultant with an impressive car collection.

Deep State darlings like General Michael Hayden and John Brennan avoided consequences as well, as they’re now warmly welcomed on CNN and MSNBC and even get fellated by Bill Maher for being “heroes”.

Of course, George W. Bush was never held to account for his torture program, and liberals now adore him because he once gave a candy to Michelle Obama.

President Obama too gets a pass for his complicity after the fact regarding the torture program, as he refused to investigate or prosecute any of these war criminals, instead only admitting that “we tortured some folks”, but then calling the torturers “real patriots”. I suppose that just as one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, one man’s war criminal is another man’s “real patriot”.

Zubaydah has never been charged for a crime but he still may very well deserve his lifetime imprisonment in Guantanamo Bay. But also deserving of that dismal fate are the Washington ghouls like Bush, Cheney, Brennan, Hayden, Haspel, and Obama who were either directly responsible, complicit or aided and abetted some of the worst war crimes of the War on Terror era.

While The Forever Prisoner viscerally recounts the crimes committed upon Abu Zubaydah, often using his own drawings as a visual guide, like the establishment media, it unfortunately doesn’t do enough to shame the murderer’s row of Washington war criminals listed above.

Like Gibney’s Oscar winning film, Taxi to the Dark Side, The Forever Prisoner dutifully and skillfully exposes the depravity unleashed by the U.S. in the wake of 9/11, but it’s ultimately a frustrating film because it fails to adequately target the brutal and barbaric elites that conjured the evil of torture and yet managed to maintain their reputations despite the blood on their hands.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

NYC Epicenters 9/11 - 2021 1/2: Documentary Review and Commentary

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Never before has a nearly 8-hour documentary talked so much but said so little. Spike Lee marinates 9/11 and Covid in unrelenting identity politics resulting in a documentary that is a tedious, tangled mess of misinformation.

Spike Lee’s new four-part HBO documentary series, NYC Epicenters 9/11-2021 ½ caused controversy when critics pre-screened it because the series finale spent time focusing on the conspiracy theories of the group Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth.

Lee, who openly disbelieves the official 9/11 story and in 2006 featured conspiracies regarding the intentional flooding of black neighborhoods in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina in his HBO documentary When the Levees Broke, is usually an unrepentant firebrand, but under pressure the Brooklyn-based blowhard folded like a cheap suit and cut the entire controversial thirty-minute segment from the project prior to it airing.

I wasn’t granted access to the original version, but after having watched the edited, seven and a half-hour, uneven slog of a series that came to a close Saturday night on the 20th anniversary of 9/11, I can report that if truth and accuracy are of prime concern then there’s about six and a half more hours that needed to be cut from the series, which abounds with disinformation, misinformation and propaganda, none of which has anything to do with 9/11.

NYC Epicenters is broken down into four episodes, with the first two episodes focusing on a myriad of more current events and the last two on 9/11 itself. Not surprisingly since this is a “Spike Lee joint”, every topic tackled, and there are a lot of them, is deeply marinated in a manufactured racial resentment.

In episodes one and two the story zigs and zags from Covid in China and New York, to Trump’s birtherism, to Covid’s impact on education and restaurants, to Black Lives Matter, to Trump’s charges of election fraud, to “kids in cages”, to black vaccine hesitancy, to January 6th and beyond. Spike’s approach to this dizzying array of topics isn’t chronological, rendering it virtually incomprehensible.

Watching episodes one and two is like a Bataan death march where every few steps Spike Lee shouts the phrase “disproportionately affects black and brown people” into your ear for no discernible or coherent reason.

These two episodes are entirely devoid of insights, and are like the scattershot, rancid remnants of a social justice binge barfed into an incoherent hodge-podge of alarmist headlines.

Adding to the egregiousness, Spike interjects himself throughout to a remarkably annoying degree by constantly interrupting his subjects and yelling at them to “say it again” when they’ve made a point with which he agrees.

Lee also peppers the program with Spike-isms, like calling ground zero “Da Pile” and Brooklyn “Da People’s Republic of Brooklyn” and referring to Obama as President Barrack “Bruddah Man” Obama and Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as “Papa Joe” and “Sistah Kamala”. He also dubs Trump “Agent Orange” or “Der Fuhrer and Il Duce”. I’m a native-born son of “Da People’s Republic of Brooklyn” and loathe “Agent Orange” more than most, but even I found the Mussolini and Hitler comparisons sophomoric and shallow.

With help from his friends in the mainstream media, like Van Jones and Al Sharpton, Spike also vomits out the usual vacuous establishment talking points, like blaming Trump for the moral atrocity of “kids in cages” at the border while ignoring “Bruddah Man” Obama’s complicity in that crime.

He also blames anti-Asian violence on white supremacy and Trump’s rhetoric, even going so far as to show a white man assault an Asian woman, and putting up the white man’s mug shot, but then without explanation or identification of the race of the assailant, shows a series of murky videos where black people assault Asians.

Spike also regurgitates the MSM’s misinformation about the “Central Park Karen” story. That story is told by Christopher Cooper, the black bird watcher in Central Park who videotaped a white woman calling the cops on him. The media destroyed this woman, Amy Cooper (no relation), dubbing her the Central Park Karen. Spike does the same, intentionally ignoring much deeper reporting that puts some desperately-needed context and nuance into the situation.

Spike also declares that all the violence and looting at Black Lives Matter protests was a result of outside “instigators”. And yet, he holds up the alleged plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Whitmer by militia men as proof of right-wing, white supremacist nefariousness, while ignoring the fact that the FBI were so deeply involved in the inception of that kidnap plot as to have potentially “instigated” it.

Lee’s rabid partisanship blinds him to the obvious, that “instigators” may very well have sabotaged both BLM protests AND right-wing protests.

This possibility also never occurs to Spike regarding January 6th either, which he obscenely labels as being equivalent to Pearl Harbor and 9/11. Using a deceptive graphic of those “killed by the Insurrection” is the piece de resistance of deceptive propaganda.

As for the last two episodes of the series, they’re rather standard and occasionally effective 9/11 reminiscences, but they too are peppered with a tedious hyper-racialism.

It’s unfortunate that even when finally focusing on 9/11, racial grievances are given the spotlight when the cataclysmic wars and the rescue workers stricken by deadly cancer post-9/11 are given short shrift.

The bottom line is that this nearly eight-hour, ego-driven extravaganza could’ve and should’ve been whittled down to a taut one hour, stripped of its incorrigible identity politics and solely focused on 9/11, with all of the modern-day political pandering, posturing and propagandizing left on the cutting room floor. But if that were to happen, then it wouldn’t be a “Spike Lee joint”…we should be so lucky.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Chris Evans goes full Captain America, assembling a cavalcade of warmongering Washington avengers to discuss the Middle East

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 47 seconds

The gullible Hollywood star exposes himself to be a useful idiot for the military/intelligence industrial complex by producing a blindly orthodox new six-part discussion series on Yemen, Iran, Palestine, Syria and Saudi Arabia.

As the U.S. limps out of Afghanistan with its tail between its legs, and millions suffer and die under the most brutal of American-induced maladies from Syria to Palestine to Yemen and across the Middle East, I implore you to fear not as Captain America is now on the case.

Chris Evans, the movie star best known for playing the patriotic leader of the Avengers, Steve Rogers, in the multi-billion-dollar Marvel Cinematic Universe, is out to solve the world’s problems and has set his dazzling blue eyes and decidedly empty-head on the mess that is the Middle East.

In 2017, the dreamy Evans founded a civic media organization titled “A Starting Point” which he unironically claims is “non-partisan”. Thankfully for humanity, on August 31st, A Starting Point will air a new six-part series titled “Influence and Power in the Middle East” where “experts” discuss Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran and Palestine.

I was hoping that this series would feature such Captain America adjacent luminaries as Iron Man, Spider-Man, Thor and The Hulk, but unfortunately the line-up of speakers is considerably less impressive.

“Influence and Power in the Middle East” features a cavalcade of archaic establishment asses like George W. Bush’s National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haass, former Secretary of Defense and CIA director Leon Panetta, and everybody’s favorite raving lunatic and former Trump National Security Adviser John Bolton.

This is literally a murderer’s row of Washington warmongers, nefarious neo-cons and CIA criminals who have raped and pillaged the Middle East for the entirety of their kiss up-kick down careers. This is the equivalent of having Ted Bundy on a dating podcast to share his insights about women.

In addition, apparently former CIA operative Will Hurd is going to “host” these discussions, one could only hope that his experience “hosting” detainees during torture sessions in Afghanistan and Pakistan would be replicated with these vile villains.

If I wanted to see Hadley, Haass, Panetta, Bolton and a cavalcade of National Security lackeys and CIA shills spout their obscene and absurd military/intelligence industrial propaganda, I’d just turn on cable news, as CNN, MSNBC and Fox seem to exist solely to platform and/or employ these types of repugnant reprobates.

Speaking of the mainstream media, it’s nice to see Chris Evans, one of those hopeless Hollywood fools who endlessly espouses diversity in movie casting, emulate media business-as-usual with his A Starting Point charade by casting only people slavishly addicted to establishment orthodoxy for these discussions…no diversity of opinion here!

For example, Richard Haas and Dr. Jon Alterman, two pro-Israel shills, will discuss Palestine. I’m sure that will be immensely enlightening.

Another example is having Leon Panetta and John Bolton tackle Iran. Bolton is the John Bonham of banging the drum for war with Iran. You know what won’t get mentioned in that stultifying, establishment-friendly discussion? The U.S. shooting down of Iran Air flight 655, a civilian airliner, over Iranian airspace in 1988, killing all 290 men, women and children aboard.

What would be considerably more useful, noble and interesting would be if Chris Evans had used his oversized public stature to actually feature diverse opinions from diverse people, like…I don’t know…maybe have actual Palestinians discuss Palestine, and Iranians discuss Iran, and Syrians discuss Syria and Yemenis discuss Yemen. You know, platform people who never ever get a platform in American media.

And if Captain America really had a pair, he’d have Jamal Khashoggi’s widow and 9-11 victims’ family members come and discuss Saudi Arabia.

But we all know that Chris Evans is entirely devoid of not only testicular fortitude, but of brains.

Evans is such a moron that in 2016 he actually flew into a rage because he believed that Marlon Brando had literally anally raped his co-star Maria Schneider on camera at the behest of director Bernardo Bertolucci while filming Last Tango in Paris in 1971. Think about how breathtakingly ridiculous that is for a moment.

To be clear, Brando did not actually rape Schneider or have any genital/sexual contact with her while filming Last of Tango in Paris, any more than Clint Eastwood really shot people while filming The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. The sex between Brando and Schneider was entirely simulated, but when the egregiously gullible Evans read about a mis-informed rumor that the Brando story was true, he donned his white knight savior costume and valiantly tweeted.

“Wow. I will never look at this film, Bertolucci or Brando the same way again. This is beyond disgusting. I feel rage."

He followed that gem up by tweeting, “They should be in jail." The punchline being that Evans was unaware that Marlon Brando had been dead for a decade by the time Captain America courageously hit send on that tweet.

The reality is that Evans isn’t just an empty-headed imbecile but also a shameless establishment shill. This buff buffoon is no doubt great at doing pull-ups, but he has the intellect of a toddler in pull-ups.

Chris “Captain America” Evans obviously set out to prove with his ‘serious’ A Starting Point venture that he wasn’t just another vacuous but impossibly handsome Hollywood pretty boy, but by the looks of the “Influence and Power in the Middle East” guest list, I can confidently declare “Mission Not Accomplished!”, as he’s only proven himself to be just another useful idiot for the money-hungry and bloodthirsty military/industrial complex and corrupt Washington establishment.

Captain America famously said: “I don’t like bullies. I don’t care where they’re from. “ However, it would appear Chris does like bullies, especially if they’re from Washington.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021