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

Crack: Cocaine, Corruption and Conspiracy - A Review

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. Although the film features some compelling talking heads, its thesis is too shallow and one note to compulsory viewing.

The new Netflix documentary ‘Crack: Cocaine, Corruption and Conspiracy’ pulls its conspiratorial punches in favor of the establishment friendly route of blaming racism

 The documentary lacks insight and profundity because it studiously avoids the hard questions in favor of easy answers.

Crack: Cocaine, corruption and conspiracy, directed by Stanley Nelson, recounts the rise of crack cocaine in the 1980’s and the calamitous War on Drugs unleashed in response to it.

Cocaine, corruption and conspiracy are three things I can’t get enough of, so when this documentary was released on Netflix January 11th, I dove right in. The movie certainly lives up to its name as it does chronicle cocaine and corruption, but when it tries to tackle conspiracy it stumbles noticeably.

The film opens strongly with a chapter titled “Greed is Good” that highlights the ties between the muscular American capitalism of the Reagan revolution of the 1980’s and the explosion of the drug trade in America’s inner cities. 

The drug dealer as a black market, underclass extension of the archetypal American entrepreneur, is a compelling idea, but unfortunately, the film quickly eschews such high-minded observations and devolves into purely race-based analysis.

The film’s thesis is that crack, the media and political response to it, and the War on Drugs, were a function of racism.

The documentary repeatedly makes this assertion and assumes it to be true but unfortunately never actually proves it. In fact, the movie is often at cross-purposes with itself over its race-based contention.

For instance, the film claims that due to racism, law enforcement originally didn’t police black neighborhoods and therefore let drugs flourish. When black communities demanded aggressive police action to combat crack and officials responded with increased policing of black neighborhoods, that’s deemed racism too.

The documentary is chock full of this sort of circular logic, confirmation bias and shirking of responsibility.

Another racial argument is that the government’s amenable response to the opioid crisis, which affects more white people, as opposed to its draconian response to the crack epidemic, which affected poor black neighborhoods, is proof of racism.

This ignores a fact that the film details extensively, that the crack epidemic was accompanied by massive gun violence, something that hasn’t occurred with heroin.

Drug gangs selling crack engaged in gun battles over territory that resulted in many deaths, but it wasn’t just drug users and dealers that were dying, it was civilians caught in the crossfire too. This led to much public outcry and government officials resolving to stop the bloodshed.

As Sam Quinones reports in his 2015 book Dreamland, Mexican heroin dealers in the U.S. use a very different approach than violent crack dealers. To avoid police attention, these dealers don’t carry guns or use violence, and target smaller cities with a customer friendly approach that includes phone orders and direct delivery. In essence, these dealers have become like the Big Pharma companies that pushed the scourge of opioids onto the American public with the blessing of the government and medical establishment in the first place.

The documentary ignores these facts in favor of reducing everything to simple racism.

As for the “conspiracy” in the film’s title, the movie raises but then refuses to answer whether the CIA smuggled cocaine into the U.S. from Central America (thus creating the crack epidemic) during the Iran-Contra affair.

This “conspiracy” is referenced numerous times but while never refuted, it’s also never endorsed. The furthest the film goes is to say that it’s understandable that black people believe in this conspiracy since they’ve been so victimized by the government and the war on drugs.

There is compelling evidence that the CIA did smuggle cocaine into the country and were responsible for the explosion of crack and guns in inner city neighborhoods.

Gary Webb famously wrote about this in 1996 for The Mercury News and in his 1998 book, Dark Alliance.  In response, the mainstream media quickly jumped to the defense of the CIA and pilloried Webb, essentially ending his career. Webb ended up “committing suicide” in 2004 by shooting himself twice in the head.

An Inspector-General’s report later verified much of what Webb claimed according to journalist and Webb biographer Nick Schou who wrote, "The CIA conducted an internal investigation that acknowledged in March 1998 that the agency had covered up Contra drug trafficking for more than a decade."

The CIA is ruthless and amoral, so their use of the drug trade as a social destabilizer and off the books income source shouldn’t be shocking.

Alexander Cockburn details the intelligence community’s history of llegal drug operations in his 2014 book Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press. According to Cockburn the CIA was testing LSD on unsuspecting civilians in San Francisco and smuggling heroin from Vietnam in the 60’s, running cocaine and guns from Central and South America in the 80’s, and restarted the opium trade in Afghanistan after the U.S. invasion in 2001.

The documentary dutifully ignores Webb and Cockburn’s conspiratorial context, and its cowardly agnostic approach make the film seem like controlled opposition, as it simply recycles establishment sanctioned talking points around the war on drugs and uses racism as a shield to avoid bigger questions. In other words, the movie is just another opiate for the myopic mainstream masses.

Racism and a CIA conspiracy can both be, and probably are, major contributors to the moral atrocity and social calamity that is the War on Drugs, but shouting one and tap dancing around the other turn Crack into just another documentary that would rather tell people what they want to hear, rather than tell them the whole uncomfortable truth.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Sicario : A Review and Reports From Down the Rabbit Hole of the Drug War

*** WARNING: THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS!!! CONSIDER THIS YOUR OFFICIAL SPOILER ALERT!!!***

MY RATING : SEE IT IN THE THEATRE!!

Sicario, written by Taylor Sheridan and directed by Denis Villeneuve, is a taut and tense drama that tells the story of FBI Special Weapons and Tactics Team Agent Kate Macer and her descent into the murky world of the international Drug War. The film stars Emily Blunt as Agent Macer, with supporting turns by Benicio Del Toro and Josh Brolin.

As Sicario opens, we see Blunt's Macer in full tactical gear riding with her team to raid a house. The cookie cutter house is in the Arizona suburbs, but it could be any house, in any suburban neighborhood, in any state in America. The house, like the film, looks like one thing on the surface, but the deeper you look into it, the more shocking, complicated and dangerous realities it reveals. That house, symbolic of the American dream, reveals the violence, the corruption, the peril and the cancer that is the American Drug War. Sicario teaches us that not only won't Macer leave that house the way she went in, but America won't leave the Drug War the same way it went in either.

After the raid on the house, Macer is approached to be a part of a mysterious special task force headed by Matt Garver (Josh Brolin) who wants to find those responsible for the horrors found in that suburban Arizona home. Macer rightly senses that she doesn't know the whole story of the mission or who, exactly, this unkempt, flip-flop wearing Garber guy works for, but she agrees to work with him anyway. She then follows Garber, and his partner Alejandro Gillick (Benicio del Toro) down into the rabbit hole of the Drug War, where friend is foe and foe is friend, sometimes all at once.

Garber and Gillick lead Macer on a journey into the heart of darkness, with pit stops in Juarez, Tuscon and a honky-tonk bar. By the end of the journey, Macer will have been nearly choked to death, shot and betrayed by friend and enemy alike. Macer learns the hard way that nothing and no one is what they seem to be in the Drug War.

Along with Emily Blunt's very solid acting work, both Josh Brolin and Benicio del Toro give quality performances. Del Toro is particularly captivating as the enigmatic Gillick. Del Toro gives Gillick an internally vibrant wound that makes the character pulsate with a subtly menacing righteousness and magnetism. Brolin is terrific as the morally and ethically vacuous CIA agent who doesn't care who wins the drug war, just that there is one.

To go along with the quality acting in Sicario, director Denis Villeneuve, cinematographer Roger Deakins and composer Johan Johansson all do magnificent work. Villenueve deftly creates a heightened and palpable tension throughout the film that is mesmerizing. Even as the first opening credits roll, a faint yet ominously unsettling deep tone from composer Johan Johansson can be heard rumbling just beneath the surface. It sets the tone for the underlying danger that permeates the entire movie, adroitly heightened by Johannson's work. The only other film of director Villeneuve's I have seen is Prisoners which I found to be very disappointing. With Sicario, Villeneuve has made a quantum leap in his filmmaking, showing a depth and level of craft that is striking. 

While Sicario is a drama and not an action film, it's exhilarating action sequences are exquisitely directed and shot.  Master cinematographer Roger Deakins work, is, as always, glorious, and well worth the price of admission alone. From the opening house raid sequence to the later raid of a drug tunnel, Deakins cinematography is sublime. His ability to propel and add depth to the narrative all while creating a masterpiece with every frame, is unparalleled.

What I liked the most about Sicario is that it shows us the reality that the "War on Drugs" has morphed into the "Drug War". This war has nothing to do with the saving of America's soul from the scourge of drug use, instead it has to do with America selling it's soul in order to wage continual war. Like the War on Terror, the Drug War is a war with no end game. Perpetual war is good for business, if your business is the military industrial complex. And if you add the prison/law enforcement industrial complex in with the military industrial complex, you have a lot of people making a lot of money making sure the drug war continues to be waged and is never won…or never declared lost.

A brief glance at the history of America's intelligence services shows us that they have consistently used illicit drugs in order to raise money and weapons for various covert operations. Be it the CIA's opium growing and smuggling business during the Vietnam War, or their cocaine trafficking into U.S. cities from Central America in the 1980's in order to support and supply the Contras and other groups in Central America, or their operations to return opium production to Afghanistan after the 2001 invasion. The key to these CIA drug operations succeeding is that drugs must be kept illegal, so that intelligence services can prosper from their sale and keep the profits off the books and away from prying eyes of oversight committees and journalists. If legalization of all illicit drugs were to happen, the CIA would find itself in quite a bind in terms of paying for all of it's nefarious activities. (I strongly encourage you to read the book, "Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press" by Alexander Cockburn, for more on this topic)

The U.S. likes to think of itself as the good guys, always with noble intentions. That is the narrative that is sold to us and that we willingly buy and struggle to question. Yet the Drug War is glaring proof that things are not always what we want them to be, or what they seem.

In the 1980's, the CIA was running cocaine from South and Central America into the inner cities of the U.S., which, oddly enough, was when the crack cocaine epidemic started. As Nancy Reagan was telling us to "Just Say No!", her husband Ronald's administration was enabling drug trafficking into the U.S. in order to illegally raise money and arms for the Contras in Nicaragua in their fight against the Sandinistas. Remember the Iran-Contra scandal…well this is the dark shadow of that scandal that no "serious" person wants to talk about. Journalist Gary Webb wrote about it, and that didn't end well for him at all. He was publicly and professionally crucified by the "establishment media" and ended up with two bullet holes in his head for his trouble. In perfect Hegelian dialectic problem-reaction-solution fashion, the CIA was funneling drugs into the heart of the U.S. in order to destroy those inner cities with drugs, weapons and violence, all the while empowering domestic law enforcement with expanded powers and dismantling the Bill of Rights in order to keep the frightened populace "safe" and their political power intact. Then they sent that money to the Contras and right wing groups in El Salvador and Honduras, where they paid for death squads, torture and assassinations, all in the name of fighting "communism" so as to re-open Central America to American business interests. (I highly recommend Gary Webb's book "Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras and the Crack Cocaine Explosion", along with Nick Shou's book "Kill the Messenger" which tells the tale of what happened to Gary Webb for writing about the CIA-Contra-Cocaine connection.)

Afghanistan is another perfect example of the U.S. being at cross purposes with itself in the War on Drugs. Most everyone thinks that the Taliban are a horrendous group of people, and that our war on them was righteous. But the closer you look at it, the less clear that becomes. For instance, the reason we invaded was because Bin Laden had been hiding in Afghanistan allegedly under Taliban protection. Before the invasion the Taliban asked the U.S. to show evidence of Bin Laden's guilt in regards to 9-11 and they would turn him over. For some reason, the U.S. refused, and invaded anyway. No one cared much because the Taliban were such loathsome people due to their horrific treatment of woman. 

A closer look at the situation in Afghanistan reveals some surprising things that complicate the narrative we as a country tell ourselves. For instance, during the reign of the Taliban, the opium business which had, with the help of the CIA during the Afghan-Soviet war, once been thriving in the Afghanistan, was shut down entirely. Under the Taliban, Afghanistan was a no-go zone for opium growing. But then something strange happened after the U.S. invasion and occupation, the opium business not only came back, it grew to previously unseen heights. Opium production in Afghanistan is now at all time highs (pardon the pun). That is certainly a strange turn of events considering the country that invaded, the U.S., is the main force behind the War on Drugs across the globe. 

The war against Afghanistan, once thought so morally clear and simple, becomes even more complicated when you take into account the practice of "bacha bazi", which literally means, "boy play", in which powerful Afghan men keep pre-pubescent boys as sex slaves. The Taliban outlawed bacha bazi, and executed anyone who practiced it. Since the U.S. invaded, bacha bazi has come roaring back, and U.S. service members have been told by their commanders to not intervene if they come across the practice. There are even stories of young boys being raped on U.S. bases by Afghan warlords, and U.S. soldiers hearing it happen but not being allowed to stop it, and being court martialed if they do intervene. When one hears these sorts of things, the question becomes, what the hell are we doing over there? What sort of twisted moral compass are we working with in that war? (Please read this disturbing NY Times piece on Bacha bazi and the U.S. ignoring it.)

Which brings us back to another war with a twisted moral compass, the Drug War. The Drug War, by every measure, has been an absolute and utter failure. Billions, if not trillions, of dollars have been wasted, and millions of lives lost, in a war that serves no purpose but to assure it's own continuance. Heroin, once the scourge of the inner city, is now epidemic in the once thought safe suburbs of America (please read Sam Quinones book "Dreamland" for more on this topic). America isn't losing it's soul in the Drug War, it has already lost it. We imprison the poor and addicted and enrich and empower the tyrannical impulse at the heart of every police officer, district attorney and politician. We as a populace don't just allow, but demand the dismantling of the rights and liberties this country was founded on. We demand a militarized police force and their "no knock" raids in the middle of the night, illegal searches and seizures, asset forfeiture and mandatory minimums, all in the name of the "War on Drugs" and our own self proclaimed moral purity. This is no "War on Drugs", drugs aren't at war with us, we are at war with ourselves. Until we can be honest about what the Drug War really is, and the powerful people really behind it, playing both sides of it and prospering from it, people will continue to be senselessly killed and die in it's name. And America will continue to sell it's soul and spiral down deeper and deeper into more circles of hell, one more heinous than the next.

When Sicario began my first thoughts were that Emily Blunt may have been miscast as the FBI SWAT team agent. Blunt is an exceedingly beautiful, almost waif-ish actress, especially compared to the monstrous Delta Force brutes she is working alongside. It even looks as if her weapon may be too heavy for her to carry in the opening sequence of the movie. As the film went on though, I came to the realization that Emily Blunt was a superb choice to play Macer. Not only is she a terrific actress, and her work in Sicario is as good as she has ever been, but she is a wonderful representation of the vital yet fragile legal structures that once made America the land of the free. In other words, Emily Blunt's Macer is a representation of the United States Constitution, or to put it in more flowery terms, Macer is Lady Liberty. What Macer is put through in Sicario is the test our rule of law and liberties have gone through in the drug war. And as del Toro's Gillick says to Macer at the end of the film, "now is a time for wolves", and Macer/Lady Liberty is just not big or strong enough to run with the big, bad, lawless wolves, otherwise known as the dogs of war. Gillick finishes by telling her she should "move to a small town somewhere, where the rule of law still exists", but as that quaint suburban Arizona house that ends up being a house of horrors proves, there is no escaping the dogs of war once they are unleashed, even in small town America.

In the first part of Sicario, there is a hauntingly effective sequence where the camera lingers in a close up on the face of a dead person in a see-through plastic bag. We can't make out whether the person is a man or woman, or how they were killed, only that they are dead and are now an anonymous statistic in the Drug War. A few moments later in the film, Macer washes the blood and mire from the Arizona house raid off in her shower, then stands post-shower in front of a steamed up mirror where her face is obscured by the condensation. It is ominously reminiscent of the anonymous Drug War victim we saw only a few shots before and foreshadows what is to come for Macer, Lady Liberty, and the rest of us, at the end of her, and our, Drug War journey.

Do yourself a favor and go see Sicario in the theatre, it is well worth your time and hard-earned money. It is not only a truly terrific film, but it will also give you a much needed glimpse into the reality just below the surface of the Drug War that our nation continues to wage. You may not like what you see in Sicario, being honest with ourselves is seldom easy. But just remember, honesty is the first step on the long journey toward sobriety, and out of our heart of darkness.

©2015

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