“Countdown to Zero”: Hollywood movie promotes war on Iran
Rady Ananda | 06.08.2010 09:48 | Anti-militarism | Anti-racism | Culture | World
Seductive, fascinating and frightening, Countdown to Zero motivates the public to support complete nuclear disarmament and to fear Iran, which is conveniently the next country the US wants to invade. Framed in no-nuke rhetoric, Countdown to Zero is not-so-subtle agitprop. The film relies on conventional geopolitics to whip up conventional audiences into another conventional state of panic. Islamo-terrorists just can’t acquire this technology! This is painfully similar to what we were told prior to the invasion of Iraq.
Seductive, fascinating and frightening, Countdown to Zero motivates the public to support complete nuclear disarmament and to fear Iran, which is conveniently the next country the US wants to invade. Framed in no-nuke rhetoric, Countdown to Zero is not-so-subtle agitprop. The film relies on conventional geopolitics to whip up conventional audiences into another conventional state of panic. Islamo-terrorists just can’t acquire this technology! This is painfully similar to what we were told prior to the invasion of Iraq.
Director and writer: Lucy Walker
Producer: Lawrence Bender
Magnolia Pictures, Participant Media, The History Channel, World
Security Institute (89 mins.)
Website:
http://www.takepart.com/zero In 2002, Condoleezza Rice warned the world, “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” Invading forces never found weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq. They did find plenty of oil, though, which corporations seized for pennies on the dollar. [1] The same reason – WMDs – is now being used against Iran. When Zero mentions Islamo-terrorists seeking nuclear technology, it spotlights Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Repeatedly.
Zero features war hawks Tony Blair, Ronald Reagan, Zbigniew Brzezinski, James Baker, and Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf, as well as spies and analysts, including Valerie Plame. Past or current members of the Carlyle Group, the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations share the screen with well-financed groups ostensibly focused on nuclear nonproliferation.
Some of the film’s talking heads promoted, engaged in and/or profit from the “War on Terror,” which critics deem a euphemism for Western resource wars in the Middle East. James Baker, who served under both Bushes, makes a brief appearance. Until 2005, he legally represented the Carlyle Group, a private equity firm dominated by former heads of state who profit enormously on Middle East wars. [2]
Joe Cirincione of the Council on Foreign Relations (and of Ploughshares, a non-proliferation group) [3] delivers most of the Iran-is-bad message:
“Iran is the tip of the spear. It’s the big problem that we have to solve.”
This marks a 180-degree reversal from his position in 2007 when he described to Asia Times:
“ ‘a group of people inside the administration who view Iran as Nazi Germany’ and who are ‘constantly exaggerating’ the threat from Iran.” [4]
But that isn’t the only inconsistency.
Nine nations reportedly have nuclear weaponry: the US, Russia, the UK, France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea. Of these, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea are not current signatories to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). [5]
Leaving India and Israel free of criticism, Zero disparages nuclear members Pakistan and North Korea. Key information on these two nations presented in the film conflicts with other information publicly available – in some cases for over a decade.
First keep in mind that invading Iran is part of the “Long War” in which the US and its allies seek control of the entire region for access to its gas, oil and minerals. Long War proponent, Zbigniew Brzezinski, briefly appears in Zero. In 1997, he published The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives. [6] Among those imperatives is the need to control Iran, a “primarily important geopolitical pivot.” [p.47]
Iran stands in the way. India does not. Neither does Pakistan or Israel. Brzezinski writes of the Central Asian states:
“Moreover, they are of importance from the standpoint of security and historical ambitions to at least three of their most immediate and more powerful neighbors, namely Russia, Turkey and Iran, with China also signaling an increasing political interest in the region. But the Eurasian Balkans are infinitely more important as a potential economic prize: an enormous concentration of natural gas and oil reserves is located in the region, in addition to important minerals, including gold.” (p.124, emphasis added)
Johannes Koeppl, a former German defense ministry and NATO official, called Grand Chessboard “a blueprint for world dictatorship.” [7] Iran is pivotal in those plans; Zero demonizes Iran. This is precisely the same fear mongering elites used when leading us into war on Iraq.
Zero isn’t even wholly anti-nuke; it only condemns nuclear arms. The film spends time, for example, on the Reagan-Gorbachev nuclear disarmament talks without mentioning what drove Gorbachev to the table: the April 26, 1986 Chernobyl nuclear reactor explosion. [8] The Ukraine government reports that the explosion released 100 times more radiation than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. [9] But Zero doesn’t mention this or any other civilian nuclear accident. [10] The goal is not to ban all nuclear use, even though a nuclear power incident (by accident or sabotage) is just as deadly.
And, it presents absurdities. According to Zero, Osama bin Laden is alive and well and living in Pakistan, which Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also recently asserted. [11] Never mind that a dialysis-dependent man [12] on the run in rugged terrain for nine years would have likely died by now. [13] Elites refuse to give up their bogeyman.
A closer look into those nations that refuse to sign the NPT reveals different treatment by the US based on corporate investment deals. That difference is reflected in Zero. Though sanctions are applied against North Korea on the grounds it refuses to reach a nuclear accord, the U.S. trades nuclear technology with Israel, India and Pakistan, according to sources enumerated below.
A Look at India
It’s hard to take the nuclear powers seriously about disarmament, writes Russ Wellen in Foreign Policy in Focus. [14] India refused to sign not only the NPT, but also the Proliferation Security Initiative, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and the Missile Technology Control Regime. India is now gearing up its anti-satellite system for deployment by 2015.
In India’s Quest for Dual-Use Technology, [15] nuclear research scientist Matthew Hoey mentions an India defense paper “that demonstrated a clear interest within the Indian military of deploying not only a space-based [directed-energy] laser but also a hypersonic suborbital delivery system with global-strike capability.”
Yet, somehow, India escapes “rogue state” status, with its attendant economic sanctions. Wellen cites Hoey who reported that the Bush Administration lifted the 1998 sanctions against India for its nuclear tests, “and then progressively loosened export and commerce laws against India.” Going even further:
“[In 2008] the United States approached the Nuclear Suppliers Group … to grant a waiver to India to commence civilian nuclear trade.… The implementation of this waiver makes India the only known country with nuclear weapons which is not a party to the Non Proliferation Treaty … but is still allowed to carry out nuclear commerce with the rest of the world.” (emphasis added)
So why the focus on Iran in this film? Why no concern about India, with its internal “insurgencies” necessitating ‘Operation Green Hunt’ (as the natives call it)? Wellen explains:
“As Andrew Lichterman and M.V. Ramana write in Beyond Arms Control (2010, Critical Will), ‘… the nuclear deal is part of a broader set of [US-Indian] agreements [which] US-based multinationals are … hoping to use … as a wedge to further open India to foreign investment and sales.’ ”
Oh, corporate profits are at stake. Zero’s talking heads don’t condemn India for refusing to sign the NPT, likely because India has opened its tribal areas to multinational mining companies. [16] Once those pesky tribes are removed (via Operation Green Hunt), massive profits can be made in destroying ecosystems for the underlying minerals.
A Look at Pakistan
Nuclear member Pakistan also refused to sign the NPT, but its relationship with the US has been fitful. In 1979, President Carter suspended aid after discovering a nuclear enrichment facility. After the Soviets invaded Afghanistan later that year, aid resumed in 1981 under President Ronald Reagan. In 1990, President Bush suspended all aid after confirming that Pakistan had acquired a nuclear bomb. [17]
In good graces once again, Pakistan just learned it will receive $7.5 billion in aid from the US. [18] Since 2001, Pakistan has received at least $12 billion in aid and “military reimbursements” from the U.S.
While speaking at the Brecht Forum last year, [19] Noam Chomsky (not in the film) accused the US of facilitating both India and Pakistan’s development of nuclear weaponry.
“Pakistan’s nuclear arsenals were developed with Reagan’s crucial aid. And India’s nuclear weapons program got a major shot in the arm with the recent US-India nuclear agreement.”
Former CIA expert on Pakistan’s nuclear secrets, Richard Barlow, may be the source of Chomsky’s accusation. In the 1980s, Barlow blew the whistle “that senior officials in government were … breaking US and international non-proliferation protocols to … sell it banned WMD technology.” [20]
Zero makes no mention of US involvement in Pakistan acquiring nuclear capability. It tells us that China gave Pakistan a blueprint for a nuclear bomb, and that Pakistani nuclear weapons scientist, Abdul Qadeer Khan, provided the rest. We’re told that A.Q. Khan set up a “full service” nuclear trade “in the early 1980s.” CIA operative Valerie Plame then tells us that the US didn’t begin focusing on Khan “until the late 1990s,” long after Pakistan joined the nuclear club.
This is simply not plausible, even if Richard Barlow was not the expert on Pakistan nuclear secrets in the 1980s as he asserts. Someone in the US was watching Khan in the 1980s or Bush would not have had been inspired to suspend aid to Pakistan in 1990.
Another discrepancy between these two sources: Zero reports that Pakistan joined the nuclear club in 1990, whereas Barlow asserts it was in 1984, two years after Reagan renewed aid to the country. Regardless, US aid was not cut off until after Pakistan acquired the bomb.
A Look at Israel
Zero also does not condemn Israel for its nuclear program, despite its refusal to sign the NPT. The film asserts Israel has 80 nuclear weapons, which contradicts revelations made by nuclear technician, Mordechai Vanunu, in 1986. [21] An independent nuclear physicist examined Vanunu and his documents and reported that, in 1986, Israel had enough material for 150 nuclear bombs. [22]
Of note, Obama expanded nuclear trade with Israel last month. [23]
Another absurdity asserted by Valerie Plame in Zero is that “Hamas is a terrorist organization.” But, since when is defending your homeland from invasion an act of terrorism? Take a look at this map of Palestine lands seized by Israel over the past 60 years:
Plame won global sympathy when the Bush Administration outed her as a CIA spy. [24] Then, it was that Iraq had obtained yellowcake uranium from Nigeria, which her husband, former US Ambassador Joe Wilson, refuted in a New York Times piece in 2003. [25] For this, she was outed as a spy. How ironic that she would now help advance the cause of war today with terrorist fear mongering – the same propaganda that Bush used.
Why even mention Hamas? Gaza’s popularly elected government clearly has no capability of acquiring and deploying WMDs. It’s barely alive under Israel’s military strikes and continual (and deadly [26]) blockade of food, medicine and building materials.
That statement – ‘Hamas is a terrorist organization’ – stands alone in the film, with no further comment. It’s pure psyops. The U.S.’s unending support [27] of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Palestine [28] does more to create instability than it does to secure peace in the region.
A Look at North Korea
Zero mocks nuclear club member North Korea, using old black and white footage of a stern Kim Jong II, yet worries about its potential to trade nuclear secrets regionally. Its fears are realized as North Korea may be assisting Myanmar (Burma) in achieving nuclear capability, according to several sources reported in Bloomberg recently. [29]
Hillary Clinton just increased sanctions against North Korea for its continuing refusal to sign nuclear accords, but the US may have a tougher time in Myanmar, given Chevron’s lucrative arrangement with the military junta. [30] The Carlyle Group, with its many business interests in South Korea, [31] also held (and may still hold) business interests in Myanmar. [32]
Given US handling of India and Israel, and its massive infusion of cash into Pakistan, three states which have not signed the NPT, can we expect a similar pass on a nuclear Myanmar (but not North Korea) given corporate interests in that regime?
A Well-Made Film
Put aside for the moment Islamo-terrorist bashing, elite plans for invading Iran, and the deadly hypocrisy of the US using depleted uranium in Iraq after finding it did not have its own WMDs. Watching war hawks demand complete nuclear disarmament is sobering.
Filmmaker Lucy Walker uses potent imagery, like the tennis ball representing how much highly enriched uranium is needed to destroy an entire city.
She also shows numerous accidents with planes carrying nuclear weapons. Citizens do need to be concerned that nuclear accidents are possible. This is one of the supporting themes of the film. “If the probability isn’t zero, it will happen,” warns nuclear physicist Frank von Hippel.
Mentioned in Zero under “Accidents” is the B-52 flight over the US in 2007, which carried six nuclear warheads. News reports in the film assert, “nobody knew – not the aircraft’s crew, not the commanders on the ground.” Six nuclear warheads could never be loaded onto a plane and flown 1,500 miles across the U.S. without anyone having a clue. This was no accident.
One unintended message may be that rogue forces within the US military are a threat. Indeed, former UN Ambassador Gordon Duff recently speculated about such a frightening scenario. [33] Decommissioning the US arsenal is just as important as all other nuclear arsenals. The US, in fact, is the only nation confirmed to have used all three WMDs: nuclear, biological and chemical. This is a claim that not even the immortal Osama bin Laden can make.
“Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Fallujah. And so it turns out that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, though not until we arrived and started using them.” Bob Koehler, “The suffering of Fallujah.” [34]
As presented, the history of nuclear proliferation is morbidly fascinating. Rare video footage offers a glimpse into the eyes of Robert Oppenheimer, the man who understood – and yet created – the means to end life on Planet Earth. He admits that the technology will spread; that it cannot be made secure.
Mikhail Gorbachev also appears, calling for complete nuclear disarmament. He put it most succinctly in a 2007 article: “It is becoming clearer that nuclear weapons are no longer a means of achieving security; in fact, with every passing year they make our security more precarious.” [35]
We can all agree on complete nuclear disarmament. We can all take Zero’s suggestion to pressure our public servants into bringing the number of nuclear weapons down to zero, a process begun in 1963.
But, let us also recognize war propaganda when it surfaces. The film’s sincerity in promoting complete nuclear disarmament is undermined by its transparent promotion of war on Iran and by its failure to condemn nuclear energy. By not condemning all nuclear power, Countdown to Zero misses a golden opportunity to unite peace activists with safe-energy ones to rid the world of such a dangerous, destructive technology. Nuclear fallout is deadly – whether from weapons or energy plants.
__________________
Notes
[1] Iraq Revenue Watch, “Iraqi Fire Sale: CPA Rushes to Give away Billions in Iraqi Oil Revenues,” June 2004.
http://www.iraqrevenuewatch.org/reports/061504.shtml Also see: Terry Macalister, “Iraqi government fuels ‘war for oil’ theories by putting reserves up for biggest ever sale,” The Guardian, 13 Oct 2008.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/oct/13/oil-iraq [2] Oliver Burkeman and Julian Borger, “The ex-presidents’ club,” The Guardian, 31 Oct 2001.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/oct/31/september11.usa4 See also: Dan Briody, “Carlyle’s Way,” Red Herring, 10 Dec 2001.
http://www.redherring.com/Home/6793 [3] SourceWatch, “Joseph Cirincione.” Accessed July 2010.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Joseph_Cirincione [4] Gareth Porter, “US frets at Iran’s ‘strategic dominance’” Asia Times, 28 Sep 2007.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/II28Ak01.html [5] Wikipedia, “Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.” Accessed July 2010.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Non-Proliferation_Treaty [6] Zbigniew Brzezinski, “The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives,” Basic Books, 1997.
http://sandiego.indymedia.org/media/2006/10/119973.pdf [7] Michael C. Ruppert, “A War in the Planning for Four Years” From the Wilderness, 7 Nov 2001.
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/zbig.html [8] Richard Rhodes, “Arsenals of Folly,” Knopf, 2007, as reviewed by Charles Matthews in “Life and death in the Bomb’s shadow,” The Houston Chronicle, 19 Oct 2007.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/life/books/reviews/5226743.html [9] Ukraine Chernobyl InterInform, “The explosion of the reactor,” n.d. Accessed July 2010. (The site is now being administered by the United Nations Development Programme.)
http://www.chernobyl.info/index.php?userhash=&navID=10&lID=2 [10] Wikipedia, “List of civilian nuclear accidents.” Accessed July 2010.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_civilian_nuclear_accidents [11] Regional Times, “US-Pak nuke deal unlikely without satisfying Int’l community: Hillary—Bin Laden & Mullah Omar are hiding in Pakistan,” 20 Jul 2010
http://regionaltimes.com/20jul2010/frontpagenews/uspak.htm [12] Adam Sage, “Ailing bin Laden ‘treated secretly for kidney disease,’” London Times, 1 Nov 2001. Reposted at
http://www.wanttoknow.info/011101londontimes [13] Lionel U. Mailloux, MD and William L. Henrich, MD, “Patient survival and maintenance dialysis,” 2010.
http://www.uptodate.com/patients/content/topic.do?topicKey=~s4PPbmdadYoEaMP [14] Russ Wellen, “Would You Trust a Country that Named Its First Nuke Test ‘Smiling Buddha’?” Foreign Policy in Focus, 28 Jun 2010.
http://www.fpif.org/blog/smiling_buddha [15] Matthew Hoey, “India’s Quest for Dual-Use Technology,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Sept-Oct, 2009.
http://cryptome.org/in-dual-tech.pdf [16] Arundhati Roy, “Walking with the Comrades,” Outlook India, 29 Mar 2010.
http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?264738 Also see Roy’s speech opposing Operation Green Hunt, India’s ongoing genocide of tribal people to seize their lands scheduled for mining, 2 Jun 2010. Video and transcript.
http://coto2.wordpress.com/2010/06/06/arundhati-roy-resists-operation-green-hunt-transcript-and-video/. [17] K. Alan Krondstadt, “U.S.-Pakistan Relations, Congressional Research Service, 6 Feb 2009.
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/RL33498.pdf [18] Matthew Lee, “Clinton cajoles Pakistan on security, offers $7.5-billion in aid,” Associated Press, 19 Jul 2010.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/asia-pacific/clinton-cajoles-pakistan-on-security-offers-75-billion-in-aid/article1644492/ [19] Noam Chomsky, “Crisis and Hope: Theirs and Ours” speaking at Riverside Church in Harlem 12 Jun 2009. Transcript by Democracy Now!
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/7/3/noam_chomsky_on_crisis_and_hope [20] Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark, “The man who knew too much,” The Guardian, 13 Oct 2007.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/oct/13/usa.pakistan [21] The Sunday Times, “Revealed – the secrets of Israel’s nuclear arsenal/ Atomic technician Mordechai Vanunu reveals secret weapons production,” 5 Oct 1986, web posted 21 Apr 2004 at
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/article830147.ece [22] Charles F. Barnaby, Ph.D., “Expert Opinion of Charles Frank Barnaby in the Matter of Mordechai Vanunu,” Federation of American Scientists, 14 Jun 2004.
http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/israel/barnaby.pdf [23] Haaretz Service, Barak Ravid, Reuters, “Report: Secret document affirms U.S.-Israel nuclear partnership” Haaretz, 07 Jul 2010.
http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/report-secret-document-affirms-u-s-israel-nuclear-partnership-1.300554 [24] SourceWatch, “Valerie Plame.” Accessed July 2010.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Valerie_Plame [25] Joseph C. Wilson, “What I Didn’t Find in Africa.” New York Times, 6 Jul 2003.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/06/opinion/06WILS.html?pagewanted=all [26] Cultures of Resistance, “Israeli Navy Attacks Gaza Freedom Flotilla,” 11 Jun 2010.
http://www.culturesofresistance.org/gaza-freedom-flotilla [27] 111th U.S. Congress, “House Resolution 867: Calling on the President and the Secretary of State to oppose unequivocally any endorsement or further consideration of the ‘Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict’ in multilateral fora.” Passed 3 Nov 2009.
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=hr111-867 [28] United Nations, “Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict,” UN Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, 15 Sep 2009.
http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/specialsession/9/docs/UNFFMGC_Report.pdf [29] Peter S. Green, “Myanmar Nuclear Weapon Program Claims Supported by Photos, Jane’s Reports,” Bloomberg, 21 Jul 2010.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-07-21/myanmar-nuclear-weapon-program-claims-supported-by-photos-jane-s-reports.html [30] Gemma Richardson, “Corporations in Burma: Companies Operating in Myanmar Profit at the Expense of the People,” Social Corporate Responsibility, 22 Mar 2009.
http://social-corporate-responsibility.suite101.com/article.cfm/corporations_in_burma [31] Moon Ihlwan, et al., “Carlyle Group’s Asian Invasion,” Bloomberg, 14 Feb 2005.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_07/b3920143_mz035.htm Also see: Ellen Sheng, “Carlyle Group Invests US$140 Mln in Four Asian Companies,” Wall Street Journal, 7 Jun 2010.
http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20100607-700192.html [32] Norwatch, “Drilling for the Burmese Junta,” 7 July 2006, translated into English at Business and Human Rights Resource Centre,
http://www.business-humanrights.org/Categories/Individualcompanies/C/CarlyleGroup [33] Gordon Duff, “Did the Military Stop Cheney from Destroying the World?” Veterans Today, 7 Jul 2010.
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2010/07/07/gordon-duff-did-the-military-stop-cheney-from-destroying-the-world/ [34] Robert C. Koehler, “The Suffering of Fallujah,” 29 Jul 2010.
http://coto2.wordpress.com/2010/07/29/the-suffering-of-fallujah/ [35] Mikhail Gorbachev, “The Nuclear Threat,” Wall Street Journal, 4 Jan 2007, reposted at
http://www.wagingpeace.org/articles/2007/01/31_gorbachev_nuclearthreat.htm
Rady Ananda
Homepage:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=20484
Comments
Hide the following 11 comments
CND? More like CIA!
06.08.2010 16:27
These black-hearted militarists are combinging "we will transfrom your coutnry into a sea of fire" type tirades with pseudo-peacenik anti-nuke rhetoric while all the time intending to keep the bomb for themselves. They would be well advised to behave with discretion!
I agree
These conspiracy theories get more and more bizarre
06.08.2010 17:18
That makes absolutely no sense at all to me.
Surely the fewer nukes we have lying around, the better?
I guess CND was/is run by the reptilian aliens who were responsible for 9/11 and run our global banking system too?
More likely these theories are put out by US right wing warmongers who want the US to keep its nukes, and know that there are a lot of conspiracy theorists out there who are gullible enough to believe any far-fetched bullshit they feed them.
confused
FFSakes
06.08.2010 19:57
I can't believe what i'm reading. This person actually wants Iran to have nuclear weapons just because Israel has got them. THis argument is like it is some game of cricket where it "isn't fair" that Iran doesn't have any yet everyone else has.
FFS. Nuclear weapons aren't some kind of toy or human right.
Questions:
Why the fuck should we let Iran have nuclear weapons?
What is in it for us? How is letting Iran having nukes going to improve my life?
I can't think of any advantages to letting Iran have nukes.
I can only think of disadvantages.
omg
Islamic rules is barbaric and horrific when rules the society ,
06.08.2010 20:52
Stop killing , stop execution of progresive people
I have no doubt the person who published the article has sympathy with islamic law or maybe works for pressTV ;)
blo ody islamic regime is just backed by bunch of loo,,ney and fo,, uking fanatic islamic losers :)))))))
• But hay,,, bl,,dy Loo,,neys and Moo,,sies
• Bl,,dy imperialism once decided to bring Islmic regime in to power against USSR and counter revelation aginst anti-capitalist
• now Imperialism doesn't need a Islamic regime; so wants to gets rid of them by war
• But that doesn't have anything to do with workers a progressive struggle against islamic barbaric law
• so you could just go to mosqe or church , pray to save barbaric islamic law :))) :))))) :)))
anti-barbaric law
Homepage:
http://anti-religion@anit-capitalist.com
You don't get it do you
07.08.2010 10:29
I still agree
Flashback: Humanitarian imperialism: Using human rights to sell war
07.08.2010 11:04
from the archives:
Humanitarian imperialism: Using human rights to sell war
by Daniel Luban, 8 August 2007
Since the end of the Cold War, the idea of human rights has been made into a justification for intervention by the world's leading economic and military powers - above all, the United States - in countries that are vulnerable to their attacks.
The criteria for such intervention have become more arbitrary and self-serving, and their form more destructive, from Yugoslavia to Afghanistan to Iraq.
Until the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the large parts of the left was often complicit in this ideology of intervention-discovering new “Hitlers” as the need arose, and denouncing antiwar arguments as appeasement on the model of Munich in 1938.
Jean Bricmont’s Humanitarian Imperialism is both a historical account of this development and a powerful political and moral critique.
It seeks to restore the critique of imperialism to its rightful place in the defense of human rights.
It describes the leading role of the United States in initiating military and other interventions, but also on the obvious support given to it by European powers and NATO.
It outlines an alternative approach to the question of human rights, based on the genuine recognition of the equal rights of people in poor and wealthy countries.
Timely, topical, and rigorously argued, Jean Bricmont’s book establishes a firm basis for resistance to global war with no end in sight.
When the "Good Fight" Is Anything But
As the U.S. invasion of Iraq got underway in 2003, anti-interventionists on both the left and right were blasted by the pro-war establishment as callous isolationists indifferent to the suffering of Iraqis under Saddam Hussein.
There seemed to be little space for anti-interventionism in the new foreign policy consensus that stretched from liberal humanitarians like Michael Ignatieff and Michael Walzer to neoconservative hawks like William Kristol and Charles Krauthammer.
Four years later, the course of the Iraq war has led to increased introspection by former "humanitarian hawks", and has opened new political space for members of both the anti-imperialist left and isolationist right.
It is with Iraq squarely in mind that Jean Bricmont, a French theoretical physicist who made his name as a critic of postmodern theory, takes aim at the doctrines of humanitarian intervention that rose to the fore during the 1990s debates over Rwanda and Kosovo.
His latest book, Humanitarian Imperialism: Using Human Rights to Sell War, is a provocative indictment of the ways in which human rights rhetoric feeds into a militarism that ends up damaging the cause of human rights worldwide.
Bricmont begins with the sensible observation that nearly every regime claims altruistic motives for its actions, however self-interested or malicious they may be, and therefore that using a regime's humanitarian rhetoric to judge its intentions is close to useless.
He goes on to provide a damning account of the anti-democratic violence that has been perpetrated by the United States under the rhetoric of "spreading freedom", ranging from the CIA-backed coups in Iran and Guatemala in the 1950s to the funding of the Nicaraguan Contras 30 years later.
These examples and others effectively make the point that the United States and other Western powers have always deployed human rights rhetoric in a selective and self-serving manner, ignoring their own abuses and those of allies while using the wrongdoing of unfriendly regimes as an excuse to justify intervention.
What is surprising is not that regimes have falsely claimed altruistic motives for their military actions, but that self-described humanitarians so often believe them.
Particularly, Bricmont shows, the fact that so many of the Iraq war's architects had previously supported gross violations of human rights in Latin America and elsewhere should have been a warning sign to liberal humanitarians.
One of the book's particular insights is its portrayal of a sort of interventionist "ratchet effect".
Often, Bricmont notes, the failure of one form of Western intervention creates a humanitarian crisis that the West takes as evidence that an even more extensive intervention is needed.
Rarely do foreign policy analysts step back and take the lesson from these crises that the wisest solution would have been to avoid interfering in the first place.
Foremost among the safeguards against interventionist militarism, Bricmont argues, is international law, and he sets out a defence of international law against the doctrine that human rights violations annul national sovereignty.
He demonstrates the almost unconscious sense of U.S. exceptionalism that underlies this doctrine with a few simple yet effective counterfactuals.
How would the U.S. respond, he asks, if Brazil were to unilaterally invade Iraq to install a democracy?
Or if India were to respond to terrorist attacks by taking it upon itself to "liberate" the populations that produced the terrorists?
Bricmont also gives a good account of some of the pathologies that have driven the interventionist urge, particularly the fixation on fascism and the Second World War to the exclusion of all other history.
The yearning to experience the internationalist heroism of the "good fight" against fascism, as he documents, has led leftists like Christopher Hitchens and Nick Cohen to back policies a long way removed from the anti-imperialism of their hero, George Orwell.
"Humanitarian Imperialism" thus demonstrates the hypocrisy behind the U.S.'s self-image as a champion of human rights, and offers a convincing argument that nations often deploy human rights as a smokescreen to conceal self-interest and militarism.
Daniel Luban
e-mail:
Daniel Luban@IPS
Homepage:
http://edstrong.blog-city.com/using_humanitarian_intervention_to_justify_imperial_wars.htm
so-called human rights are still a smokescreen.
07.08.2010 13:44
I think we should have a new campaign under the slogan
"Repeal the hypocritical "human rights" act!"
and
"While the State kills, nobody has "human rights!""
Only when the idea of human rights is dead and buried will we be able to fight for true human rights, the right of self determination and dignity of nations.
annie
Flashback: Lights, Camera… Covert Action: The Deep Politics of Hollywood
08.08.2010 01:43
from the archives:
Lights, camera… covert action: The deep politics of Hollywood
by Matthew Alford and Robbie Graham, 21 January 2009
Here we build a prima facae case supporting the idea that Hollywood continues to be a target for infiltration and subversion by a variety of state agencies, in particular the CIA. Academic debates on cinematic propaganda are almost entirely retrospective, and whilst a number of commentators have drawn attention to Hollywood’s longstanding and open relationship with the Pentagon, little of substance has been written about the more clandestine influences working through Hollywood in the post-9/11 world. As such, our work delves into the field of what Peter Dale Scott calls "deep politics"; namely, activities which cannot currently be fully understood due to the covert influence of shadowy power players.
The Latest Picture
A variety of state agencies have liaison offices in Hollywood today, from the FBI, to NASA and the Secret Service. Few of these agencies, though, have much to offer in exchange for favourable storylines, and so their influence in Hollywood is minimal. The major exception here is the Department of Defense, which has an ‘open’ but barely publicized relationship with Tinsel Town, whereby, in exchange for advice, men and invaluable equipment, such as aircraft carriers and helicopters, the Pentagon routinely demands flattering script alterations. Examples of this policy include changing the true identity of a heroic military character in Black Hawk Down (2001) due to his real-life status as a child rapist; the removal of a joke about "losing Vietnam" from the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), and cutting images of Marines taking gold teeth from dead Japanese soldiers in Windtalkers (2002). Instances such as these are innumerable, and the Pentagon has granted its coveted "full cooperation" to a long list of contemporary pictures including Top Gun (1986), True Lies (1994), Executive Decision (1996), Air Force One (1997), The Sum of All Fears (2002), Transformers (2007), Iron Man (2008), as well as TV series such as JAG (1995-2005).
Such government activity, whilst morally dubious and barely advertised, has at least occurred within the public domain. This much cannot be said of the CIA’s dealings with Hollywood, which, until recently, went largely unacknowledged by the Agency. In 1996, the CIA announced with little fanfare the dry remit of its newly established Media Liaison Office, headed by veteran operative Chase Brandon. As part of its new stance, the CIA would now openly collaborate on Hollywood productions, supposedly in a strictly ‘advisory’ capacity.
The Agency’s decision to work publicly with Hollywood was preceded by the 1991 "Task Force Report on Greater CIA Openness," compiled by CIA Director Robert Gates’ newly appointed ‘Openness Task Force,’ which secretly debated –ironically– whether the Agency should be less secretive. The report acknowledges that the CIA "now has relationships with reporters from every major wire service, newspaper, news weekly, and television network in the nation," and the authors of the report note that this helped them "turn some ‘intelligence failure’ stories into ‘intelligence success’ stories, and has contributed to the accuracy of countless others." It goes on to reveal that the CIA has in the past "persuaded reporters to postpone, change, hold, or even scrap stories that could have adversely affected national security interests…"
These admissions add weight to several reports and Congressional hearings from the 1970s which indicated that the CIA once maintained a deep-rooted and covert presence in national and international media, informally dubbed "Operation Mockingbird." In its 1991 report, the CIA acknowledged that it had, in fact, "reviewed some film scripts about the Agency, documentary and fictional, at the request of filmmakers seeking guidance on accuracy and authenticity." But the report is at pains to state that, although the CIA has "facilitated the filming of a few scenes on Agency premises," it does "not seek to play a role in filmmaking ventures." But it seems highly implausible that the CIA, whilst maintaining a decades-long presence in media and academia, would have shown no interest in the hugely influential Cinema industry.
Indeed, it should come as no surprise that the CIA has been involved in a number of recent blockbusters and TV series. The 2001 CBS TV series, The Agency, executive produced by Wolfgang Petersen (Das Boot, Air Force One) was actually co-written by ex-CIA agent and Marine Bazzel Baz, with additional ex-CIA agents working as consultants. The CIA gladly opened its doors to the production, and facilitated both external and internal shots of its Langley headquarters as the camera gazed lovingly at the CIA seal. This arrangement was comparable to the Feds’ efforts on the popular TV series The FBI (1965-74) which was shaped by the Bureau in cooperation with ABC and which thanked J. Edgar Hoover in the credits of each episode. Similarly, The Agency glorified the actions of US spooks as they fought predictable villains including the Russian military, Arab and German terrorists, Columbian drug dealers, and Iraqis. One episode even shows the CIA saving the life of Fidel Castro; ironically, since the CIA in real life had made repeated attempts to assassinate the Cuban President. Promos for the show traded on 9/11, which had occurred just prior to its premiere, with tag lines like "Now, more than ever, we need the CIA."
A TV movie, In the Company of Spies (1999) starring Tom Berenger depicted a retired CIA operative returning to duty to save captured Agency officers held by North Korea. The CIA was so enthusiastic about this product that it hosted its presentation, cooperated during production, facilitated filming at Langley, and provided fifty off-duty officers as extras, according to its website.
Espionage novelist Tom Clancy has enjoyed an especially close relationship with the CIA. In 1984, Clancy was invited to Langley after writing The Hunt for Red October, which was later turned into the 1990 film. The Agency invited him again when he was working on Patriot Games (1992), and the movie adaptation was, in turn, granted access to Langley facilities. More recently, The Sum of All Fears (2002) depicted the CIA as tracking down terrorists who detonate a nuclear weapon on US soil. For this production, CIA director George Tenet gave the filmmakers a personal tour of the Langley HQ; the film’s star, Ben Affleck also consulted with Agency analysts, and Chase Brandon served as on-set advisor.
Media sources indicate that the CIA also worked on the Anthony Hopkins/Chris Rock feature Bad Company (2002) and the Jerry Bruckheimer blockbuster Enemy of the State (2001). However, no details whatsoever about these appear to be in the public domain. Similarly, Spy Game director Tony Scott’s DVD commentary for said film indicates that he visited Langley whilst in pre-production but, according to one report, endorsement appeared to have been withheld after Chase Brandon read the final draft of the script.
More details than usual emerged about CIA involvement in the Tom Hanks movie Charlie Wilsons War (2007) and Robert De Niro’s The Good Shepherd (2006) – but not many. Milt Beardon had traveled to the Moscow Film Festival with De Niro and claims the pair then "disappeared and hung out with the mob and KGB crowd for a while. I introduced him to generals and colonels, the old guys I had been locked with for so many years." De Niro later tagged along with Beardon to Pakistan. "We wandered around the North-West Frontier Province," Bearden recalls, "crossed the bridge [to Afghanistan] I built years ago, hung out with a bunch of guys firing off machine guns and drinking tea." Still, The Good Shepherd didn’t fulfill the CIA’s earnest hopes of being the CIA equivalent of Flags of Our Fathers (2006), which the Agency’s official historian says it should have been – all in the interests of what he calls a "culture of truth."
Charlie Wilson’s War depicted the United States’ covert efforts to supply arms to Afghanistan to fight the Soviet Union in the 1980s which had the real-life consequence of America’s old ally turned against it in the form of al-Qaeda (as Crile explains in the book of the film). However, Beardon, who was the CIA agent who supplied the weapons, worked as consultant on the film and said prior to its release that it "will put aside the notion that because we did that, we had 9/11." CIA involvement in the film therefore appears to have paid dividends.
The real reasons for the CIA adopting an "advisory" role on all of these productions are thrown into sharp relief by a solitary comment from former Associate General Counsel to the CIA, Paul Kelbaugh. In 2007, whilst at a College in Virginia, Kelbaugh delivered a lecture on the CIA’s relationship with Hollywood, at which a local journalist was present. The journalist (who now wishes to remain anonymous) wrote a review of the lecture which related Kelbaugh’s discussion of the 2003 thriller The Recruit, starring Al Pacino. The review noted that, according to Kelbaugh, a CIA agent was on set for the duration of the shoot under the guise of a consultant, but that his real job was to misdirect the filmmakers: "We didn’t want Hollywood getting too close to the truth," the journalist quoted Kelbaugh as saying.
Peculiarly, in a strongly-worded email to the authors, Kelbaugh emphatically denied having made the public statement and claimed that he remembered "very specific discussions with senior [CIA] management that no one was ever to misrepresent to affect [film] content – EVER." The journalist considers Kelbaugh’s denial "weird," and told us that "after the story came out, he [Kelbaugh] emailed me and loved it… I think maybe it’s just that because [the lecture] was ‘just in Lynchburg’ he was okay with it – you know, like, no one in Lynchburg is really going to pay much attention to it, I guess. Maybe that’s why he said it, and maybe that’s why he’s denying it now." The journalist stands by the original report, and Kelbaugh has pointedly refused to engage us in further discussion on the matter.
Early Screening
Clandestine agencies have a long history of interference in the cinema industry. Letters discovered in the Eisenhower Presidential Library from the secret agent Luigi G. Luraschi (identified by British academic John Eldridge), the Paramount executive who worked for the CIA’s Psychological Strategy Board (PSB), reveal just how far the CIA was able to reach into the film industry in the early days of the Cold War, despite its claims that it sought no such influence. For instance, Luraschi reported that he had secured the agreement of several casting directors to subtly plant "well dressed negroes" into films, including "a dignified negro butler" who has lines "indicating he is a free man" in Sangaree (1953) and in a golf club scene in the Dean Martin/Jerry Lewis vehicle The Caddy (1953). Elsewhere, CIA arranged the removal of key scenes from the film Arrowhead (1953), which questioned America’s treatment of Apache Indians, including a sequence where a tribe is forcibly shipped and tagged by the US Army. Such changes were not part of a ham-fisted campaign to instill what we now call "political correctness" in the populace. Rather, they were specifically enacted to hamper the Soviets’ ability to exploit its enemy’s poor record in race relations and served to create a peculiarly anodyne impression of America, which was, at that time, still mired in an era of racial segregation.
Other efforts were made. The PSB tried –unsuccessfully– to commission Frank Capra to direct Why We Fight the Cold War and to provide details to filmmakers about conditions in the USSR in the hope that they would use them in their movies. More successfully, in 1950, the CIA –along with other secretive organizations like the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) and aided by the PSB– bought the rights to and invested in the cartoon of George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1954), which was given an anti-Soviet spin to satisfy its covert investors. Author Daniel Leab has pointed to the fact it took decades for the rumours about CIA involvement in Animal Farm to be properly documented; this, he observes, "Speaks volumes about the ability of a government agency to keep its activities covert."
Additionally, the production of the Michael Redgrave feature Nineteen-Eighty Four (1956) was in turn overseen by the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, which was supervised by the CIA. Key points in the movie were altered to demonise the Soviets.
The CIA also tampered with the 1958 film version of The Quiet American, provoking the author, Graham Greene, to denounce the film. US Air Force Colonel Edward Lansdale, the CIA operative behind Operation Mongoose (the CIA sabotage and assassination campaign against Cuba) had entered into production correspondence with director Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who accepted his ideas. These included a change to the final scene in which we learn that Redgrave’s anti-hero has been hoodwinked by the Communists into murdering the suspicious American, who turns out not to be a bomb-maker as we had been led to believe, but instead a manufacturer of children’s toys.
Behind the Scenes
It would be a mistake to regard the CIA as unique in its involvement in Hollywood. The industry is in fact fundamentally open to manipulation by a range of state agencies. In 2000, it emerged that the White House’s drug war officers had spent tens of millions of dollars paying the major US networks to inject anti-drug plots into the scripts of primetime series such as ER, The Practice, Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Chicago Hope. Despite criticism for this blatant propagandizing, the government continued to employ this method of spreading its message on drugs.
The White House went to Tinsel Town again the following year when, on November 11, 2001 a meeting was held in Hollywood between President Bush’s then Deputy Chief of Staff, Karl Rove, and representatives of each of the major Hollywood studios to discuss how the film industry might contribute to the ‘War on Terror.’ Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association of America said with a straight face that, "content was off the table", but Rove had clearly outlined a series of requests. It is hard to gauge the consequences of the meeting, but a Rambo sequel, for instance, was certainly discussed, and duly produced. Similarly, several series with national security themes emerged within a short time of the meeting including She Spies (2002-2004) and Threat Matrix (2003).
The meeting was, in fact, just one in a series between Hollywood and the White House from October to December, 2001. On October 17, in response to 9/11, the White House announced the formation of its "Arts and Entertainment Task Force," and by November, Valenti had assumed leadership of Hollywood’s new role in the ‘War on Terror’. As a direct result of meetings, Congress sought advice from Hollywood insiders on how to shape an effective wartime message to America and to the world. In November 2001, John Romano, writer-producer of the popular US TV series Third Watch, advised the House International Relations Committee that the content of Hollywood productions was a key part of shaping foreign perceptions of America.
On December 5, 2001, the powerful Academy of Television Arts & Sciences convened its own panel entitled "Hollywood Goes to War?" to discuss what the industry might do in response to 9/11. Representing the government at the meeting were Mark McKinnon, a White House advisor, and the Pentagon’s chief entertainment liaison, Phil Strub. Also in attendance, among others, were Jeff Zucker, President of NBC Entertainment, and Aaron Sorkin, creator and writer of the White House drama The West Wing (1999-2006). Immediately after, Sorkin and his team set about producing a special episode of the show dealing with a massive terrorist threat to America entitled "Isaac and Ishmael". The episode was given top priority and was successfully completed and aired within just ten days of the meeting. The product championed the superiority of American values whilst brimming with rage against the Islamist jihadists.
The interlocking of Hollywood and national security apparatuses remains as tight as ever: ex-CIA agent Bob Baer told us, "There’s a symbiosis between the CIA and Hollywood" and revealed that former CIA director George Tenet is currently, "out in Hollywood, talking to studios." Baer’s claims are given weight by the Sun Valley meetings, annual get-togethers in Idaho’s Sun Valley in which several hundred of the biggest names in American media –including every major Hollywood studio executive– convene to discuss collective media strategy for the coming year. Against the idyllic backdrop of expansive golf courses, pine forests and clear fishing lakes, deals are struck, contracts are signed, and the face of the American media is quietly altered. The press has yet to be granted permission to report on these corporate media gatherings and so the exact nature of what is discussed at the events has never been publicly disclosed. It is known, however, that Tenet was keynote speaker at Sun Valley in 2003 (whilst still CIA head) and again in 2005.
Conclusions
Many would recoil at the thought of modern Hollywood cinema being used as a propagandist tool, but the facts seem to speak for themselves. Do agencies such as the CIA have the power, like the Pentagon, to affect movie content by providing much-sought-after expertise, locations and other benefits? Or are they able to affect script changes through simple persuasion, or even coercion? Do they continue to carry out covert actions in Hollywood as they did so extensively in the 1950s, and, beyond cinema, might covert government influence play some part in the creation of national security messages in TV series such as 24 and Alias (the star of the latter, Jennifer Garner, even made an unpaid recruitment video for the CIA)? The notion that covert agencies aspire to be more open is hard to take seriously when they provide such scant information about their role within the media, even regarding activities from decades past. The spy may have come in from the cold, but he continues to shelter in the shadows of the movie theatre.
* Matthew Alford (PhD: University of Bath) lectures on Film and Television at the University of Bristol and is currently writing a book about propaganda in Hollywood. Robbie Graham is Associate Lecturer in Media at Stafford College. They can be contacted at:
Matthew Alford and Robbie Graham
Homepage:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=11921
Hide Flashback spam please
08.08.2010 09:30
And to the Flashback spammer: just put a fucking link to the article instead of cutting and pasting the whole fucking lot here!
anon
doling out the dollars
08.08.2010 12:51
annie
racist and paranoid too ...
08.08.2010 13:10
Might it ever cross your tiny little mind that not everyone who believes exactly what you believe is not necessarily in the pay of some foreign power?
annie get your gun