Trailer For Scahill's Theatrical Doc Film "Dirty Wars"

[8bitagent]

Damn...this looks like quite a doozy. I was worried this would just end up being a straight to dvd thing, but virtually every movie site/youtube channel I check out
is featuring the trailer so it should get some sort of limited release. If Fahrenheit 9/11 exposed the Bush era war crimes to a mainstream audience, hopefully
this will expose the Obama era war crimes

[Luther Blissett]

Just saw Scahill speak last night to a standing-room only crowd. This film will be playing at an independent theater here and opening June 21.

He covered the usual bases - Abdulrahman, how we treat the least of our people and how we judge societies. Some of the parallels to concepts kicked around here was chilling to the point where I was considering confirmation bias. Then I asked myself, "Who are the best investigative journalists in the world? Would I fundamentally 'agree' with most of them?"

The two discernible solutions were: a destruction from the top-down of campaign finance and most of the power elite's inherent protections embedded in the electoral process; and, bolstering and strengthening third parties starting with local elections.

[MinM]

@jeremyscahill: Well this ended up to be an interesting night:

@jakefoglenest: @jeremyscahill This is the most dangerous situation you've gotten yourself into yet!

https://twitter.com/jeremyscahill/statu ... 5673022467

@DirtyWars: Scahill piece MT @thenation How three US citizens were killed by their own govt in the space of one month in 2011

https://twitter.com/DirtyWars/status/337355136764620801

@DirtyWars: @jeremyscahill: The White House "is criminalizing journalism" - talking about Rosen, FOX News, et al. LIVE: http://mediasanctuary.org

https://twitter.com/DirtyWars/status/337365713608114176

“Obama is not the lesser of two evils, he is the more effective of two evils… Obama is getting away with things that no white president could get away with .. .those who have orchestrated his two terms are well aware of that.” -Jared Ball, crediting Glen Ford.

[Wombaticus Rex]

Wild: Jay Leno threatened him, and he knew it.

[MinM]

@jeremyscahill: Finally saw The Reluctant Fundamentalist last night. Great movie and amazing performance by @rizmc

@jeremyscahill: On Wednesday night, I'm hosting a screening and discussion of Three Days of the Condor at @IFCCenter in NYC

viewtopic.php?p=346807#p346807

[MinM]

Douglas Valentine's scathing review of Scahill's "Dirty Wars"...

Dirty wars and Scahill’s cinema of self-indulgence
By Douglas Valentine
Posted on June 13, 2013

Let me begin with some background not covered in the film. Dirty War derives from La Sale Guerre, the term the French applied to their counter-terror campaign in Algeria, circa 1954–1961. Algeria wanted independence, and France resisted.

Like subject people everywhere, the Algerians were badly outgunned and resorted to guerrilla tactics including “selective terrorism,” a hallmark of the Viet Minh, who fought the French until 1954, when America claimed Vietnam as its rightful property. Viet Minh tactics were derived largely from Mao’s precepts for fighting a People’s War.

Selective terrorism meant the murder of low-ranking officials—collaborators—who worked closely with the people; policemen, mailmen, teachers, etc. The murders were gruesome—a bullet in the belly or a grenade lobbed into a café—designed to achieve maximum publicity and demonstrate to the people the power of the nationalists to strike crippling blows against their oppressors.

Whether the Great White Fathers are French or American or English, they agree that putting down a People’s War means torturing and slaughtering the people—despite the fact that most people are not engaged in terrorism or guerrilla action and have no blood on their hands.

As John Stockwell taught us years ago, Dirty War means destabilizing a targeted nation through covert methods, the type the CIA has practiced around the world for 66 years. Destabilizing means “hiring agents to tear apart the social and economic fabric of the country.

“What we’re talking about is going in and deliberately creating conditions where the farmer can’t get his produce to market; where children can’t go to school; where women are terrified inside their homes as well as outside; where government administered programs grind to a complete halt; where the hospitals are treating wounded people instead of sick people; where international capital is scared away and the country goes bankrupt.”

Economic warfare—strangling nations like Cuba, Iraq and Iran in Medieval fashion—is a type of Dirty Warfare beloved by the Great White Fathers who control the world’s finances. Though no less deadly than atomic bombs, or firebombing Dresden, it is easier to sell to the bourgeoisie.

You’ll hear no mention of this in Scahill’s film, nor will you hear any references to Phil Agee, or the countless others who have explained Dirty War to each generation of Americans since World War Two.

You will not hear about psychological warfare, the essence of Dirty War.

America’s first terror guru was Ed Lansdale, the advertising executive who made Levi’s blue jeans a national craze in the 1930s. He applied his sales skills to propaganda in the OSS and after WW II, concocted a new generation of psywar tactics as an agent of the Office of Policy Coordination assigned to the Philippines under military cover. Lansdale’s bottomless black bag of dirty tricks included a “skull squadron” death squad that roamed the countryside, torturing and murdering Communist terrorists.

One of Lansdale’s counter-terror “psywar” tactics was to string a captured Communist guerrilla upside down from a tree, stab him in the neck with a stiletto, and drain his blood. The terrorized Commies fled the area and the terrified villagers, who believed in vampires, begged the government for protection.

Lansdale referred to his sadism as “low humor,” an excuse borrowed liberally by American officialdom during the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.

Lansdale formalized “black propaganda” practices to vilify the Communists: one of his Filipino commando units would dress as rebels and commit atrocities, and then another unit would arrive with cameras to record the staged scenes and chase the “terrorists” away.

Lansdale brought his black propaganda and passion for atrocity to Saigon in 1954, along with a goon squad of Filipinos mercenaries packaged as “Freedom Company.”

Under Lansdale’s guidance, Freedom Company sent Vietnamese commandoes into North Vietnam, under cover as relief workers, to activate stay-behind agent nets and conduct all manner of sabotage and subversion. Disinformation was a Lansdale specialty, and his agents spread lurid tales of Viet Minh soldiers disemboweling pregnant Catholic women, castrating priests, and sticking bamboo slivers in the ears of children so they could not hear the Word of God.

In the South, with the help of the American media, Lansdale rebranded the heroic Viet Minh as the beastly Viet Cong.

Lansdale’s greatest innovation, still used today, was to conduct all manner of espionage and terror under cover of “civic action.” As a way of attacking Viet Minh agents in the South, Lansdale launched “Operation Brotherhood,” a Filipino paramedical team patterned on the typical Special Forces A team. With CIA money, Operation Brotherhood built medical dispensaries that the CIA used as cover for terror operations, as depicted in the book and movie The Quiet American...


http://www.intrepidreport.com/archives/9895

[Bruce Dazzling]

Damn...this looks like quite a doozy. I was worried this would just end up being a straight to dvd thing, but virtually every movie site/youtube channel I check out
is featuring the trailer so it should get some sort of limited release. If Fahrenheit 9/11 exposed the Bush era war crimes to a mainstream audience, hopefully
this will expose the Obama era war crimes

49% of the population won't like this film because they're testosterone-fueled, war-mongering nitwits. A different 49% won't like it because it's ultimately a criticism of the Peace Laureate's murderous policies, and for fuck's sake, we can't criticize him! After all, you don't want one of those testosterone-fueled war-mongering nitwits to be the next President, do you!?!?!

Well played, two-party system. Well played.

[Wombaticus Rex]

I think Douglas Valentine's essay was too long, too angry, and really damn necessary.

Watched "Dirty Wars" over the weekend and it was like Michael Moore taking over a promising episode of Frontline. I don't think it's uncharitable or inaccurate, although Scahill is clearly the better writer of the two.

Like any Michael Moore production, though, the narrator is so central to the film he is essentially the real subject of the movie.

Also: the film relies on sentimental tropes for emotional impact, which gets old fast. Here is how you should feel, here is what you should think.

This film was a comprehensively doomed project, but I'm betting the book is far better and looking forward to tearing into it soon.

Of course, I respect the argument that what Scahill did was necessary to bring these war crimes to the attention of the American public. I just don't agree. Throughout the film I found myself wishing Scahill would get off camera and dig deeper into the facts, not "the story" of his journey, his reactions, his emotions.

[Bruce Dazzling]

I didn't realize it was a Michael Moore production. That's unfortunate.

Apparently it grossed $63,504 on it's opening w/e. I'm not really good at math, but I think that means about 19 people saw it. Twenty if we include Wombat.

[Wombaticus Rex]

The film was not a Michael Moore production, I just felt the comparison was too strong to avoid.

Unfortunately for whoever produced that, I watched "Dirty Wars" in a friend's lavish home theater, a mountain venue that was probably screening an unauthorized copy. I should really be more careful about that sort of terrorism.

Director was activist cinema auteur Rick Rowley ==> http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0746823/?ref_=tt_ov_dr

Production credits go to Zinn collaborators Anthony Arnove & Brenda Coughlin.

[slimmouse]

49% of the population won't like this film because they're testosterone-fueled, war-mongering nitwits. A different 49% won't like it because it's ultimately a criticism of the Peace Laureate's murderous policies, and for fuck's sake, we can't criticize him! After all, you don't want one of those testosterone-fueled war-mongering nitwits to be the next President, do you!?!?!

Well played, two-party system. Well played.

If you were to list the number one scam that the elite have played on the proles over the centuries, then along with the organised religion scam, the democracy con has to be a major contender. Democracy in the modern age, probably did exist for a fleeting moment, but that was truly all it was when you start to go behind the whole deal, like we at RI enjoy doing

To be fair to all former victims of these centrally organised cons, and unlike ourselves, our generation are for the first time privy to seriously informed and almost instantly accessible sources .

Which probably explains why a potentially game-changing number of people are suddenly coming to understand both the con and the conpersons, particularlly when we throw in the the latest banking con, which has just reared its head to the masses by way of "austerity". In so doing it reveals itself as simply another head of the same hydra.

"may you live in interesting times"

Where do we go from here? I mean , how it is now is no fucking good at all really, is it?

Oh, and the topic ( sorry folks).

I like how the consequences of the thinking of the likes of Lansdale and his superiors is brought to life in the narrative of Valentine.

[Luther Blissett]

Scahill is doing an AMA on reddit right now, and there are still relatively few questions, so take this opportunity to ask:
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1 ... _security/

[stillrobertpaulsen]

Looks like Sibel Edmonds and James Corbett share Doug Valentine's perspective on this subject.

The EyeOpener Report- Secrets of the Dirty Wars: What Jeremy Scahill Doesn’t Tell You

Tuesday, 18. June 2013

BFP Video
Dirty Wars is the title of a new fluff documentary film released earlier this month, claiming to document the covert US actions in Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, and elsewhere in the name of the phoney “War on Terror.”

The documentary has already won raves, predictably enough, from Scahill’s colleagues at the Nation and Democracy Now, as well as other sympathetic mainstream “progressive” outlets. It has even brought Scahill himself a certain level of celebrity in mainstream circles. His mainstream pop culture icon status was cemented during his recent appearance on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno.

But is Scahill’s documentary worthy of the endless praise that is being heaped on it? Is mainstream media’s new favorite, Scahill, deliberately dumbing down the movie? What is Scahill aiming at by focusing on interminable close-ups of himself and using emotional manipulation to “grip” the audience, pretending to not know about the existence of JSOC? Why does the CIA—the organization that has been the lynchpin of all such operations in the past and has a documented history of military assets for plausible deniability in denying involvement in such actions—get off scot-free in this 90 minute “exposé” of the war on terror?

Join us for this revelatory examination of the mainstream-backed pseudo-documentary titled ‘Dirty Wars’ at Boiling Frogs Post EyeOpener Video Report.

Watch the Preview Here:

[MinM]

Looks like Sibel Edmonds and James Corbett share Doug Valentine's perspective on this subject.

I notice that even amongst the alternative to the mainstream left(your Greenwalds, Cenks, Scahills, etc) that even hinting at foul play in accidents/suicides/etc is taboo.

I'm extremely disappointed in that development. Larisa Alexandrovna Horton, who while working at The Raw Story was bold enough to write pieces documenting attempts by Task Force 20 in Iraq to have WMDs planted for them to find, recently responded to the death of Michael Hastings on Facebook demanding "Internet loons" stop emailing theories of his death to her. She followed that up by stating, "In the U.S. journalists are not killed. They are discredited." Right. I'm sure that Jim Koethe and Bill Hunter, as well as Dorothy Kilgallen might beg to differ. Oh, but that was so long ago, that sort of thing can't happen in 21st century America, right?!

what you don't know is how spooked a given person may or may not be, it's easy to be brave when it's all an abstract unlikely possibility and/or you have no life at stake but ones own.

That's possible. Hastings was, by her own words, friends with her husband, Scott Horton. So that could be a factor. I'm not sure if her statements are a defense mechanism or if some annoying nut just got under their skins. But US journalists not killed here? Patent falsehood. And I'm not even one of those guys who thinks the CIA offed Gary Webb, I buy Michael Ruppert's explanation that it was indeed suicide. But I don't think the outfit that silenced the aforementioned Koethe, Hunter and Kilgallen just closed shop once the JFK case was swept under the rug.

viewtopic.php?p=508985#p508985

It's @ 01:19:00 where he gets into Scahill's "Smoke Screen" .. Over the protestations of Scott Horton by the way.

Mountain's critique is very much in line with Douglas Valentine's. Although with Valentine the main objection centered around the hijacking/whitewashing of the term "Dirty Wars."

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=36596

It's interesting to see how these reporters diverge and 'evolve' depending on the issue and over time...

Larisa Alexandrovna @ RawStory, along with Maureen Farrell @ Buzzflash and Larry Chin @ Online Journal, was one my must reads back in the day. Kurt Nimmo @ Another Day in the Empire was another good one before he drank the Alex Jonestown koolaid.

[8bitagent]

What if, and bare with me...what if there are elements within the government that gladly source the Scahills of the world with information. Kind of bragging rights, a controlled left?
I believe Scahill is sincere, but how does he have so much access? Hastings seems like he was even more hard hitting.