'Sicario'

Government By Assassination

Some of these films to do with the war on drugs across the US Mexico border are becoming more and more extreme in their moral relativism. While I'm not one of these people with moral absolutes, I tend to think that if the premise of the film is to do with law enforcement, a film should provide some kind of position on moral reasoning that involves the state. We relinquish capacity for a personal or private war in exchange for justice law and order. Ultimately films to do with law enforcement have to take a position about the operation of laws to ensure order or peace or whatever is the social consensus might be.

Then there is this film.
So here is the obligatory spoiler alert!


What's Good About It

This is tough. I'm not entirely sure I saw a lot that I liked in this film. There are some nice shots showing the Arizona landscape, horizon and sense of the land. The writings isn't witty or sharp (and you really notice this after watching a Woody Allen film), and the directing is pretty ordinary. The sound track is interesting. It's reminiscent of 'Jaws', what with its pounding bass notes.

The story boils down to a CIA black ops unit trying to insert an assassin into a difficult spot, but in order to operate in the USA they need n FBI agent to be there and rubber stamp the operation. The main character is chosen because she's effectively too junior to buck the system. It's good that a female character is doing this kind of role. God knows the film would have been 10 times more boring if it was another young guy again.

Emma Blunt delivers a scowling concerned performance that gives it a joyless reality. Josh Brolin turns in a performance you would expect from him. He is sort of cast-to-type.

What's Bad About It

The film meanders a lot. The action is meant to be driving the story but there's something perfunctory and ridiculous about the movements. Because Emma Blunt's character is kept in the dark for half the film, we as the audience are kept in the dark as well. Much of the time you're wondering what the hell is going on and if it is ever going to reveal something profound. It doesn't. It simply never gets there. The crucial central action of the film does not belong to Emma Blunt's character. It belongs to Benicio del Toro's character, who is as nihilistic as they come.

The nihilism is entirely self-defeating in this film. There is no existential crisis - it's just crisis of faith in the government, but it's not even well explained. You're left with the sense that maybe the film makers don't really care about the underlying social issues in Mexico. After seeing the first season of 'Narcos' and then coming to this movie, you really feel let down with its absence social insight. Lots of people are shown dying, getting shot. You get to glimpse one Mexican cop and his family, but it's probably the wrong story to have focused upon.

What's Interesting About It

That's the thing; it's really not all that interesting, in of itself. It's another film that depicts the war on drugs on the US Mexico border. Yes, it's endless, draining, with terrible human cost. The film simply posits that the state will move into a phase where it will make and act upon amoral judgments, simply to bypass due process.

You rarely see a film where the moral purpose of the action on the screen are not underpinned by something bigger than the individual. If it is a film about the law, then it usually revolves around the moral ramification of how justice is carried out, or the unintended consequences laws, or the practice of law. If it is about law enforcement, they usually mount an argument that lawfulness is goodness. This film says we shouldn't care, we should just do what it takes to get bad guys wherever they are, by any means necessary. The crazy thing about it is that it's not entirely clear how assassinations of drug lords actually helps in a war on drugs. Yet, it is asserted this is the future.

An Ugly Future Of Fighting Non-States

Yes, we're already underway in this horrible little process. Because states fail, like Rwanda and Somalia, they give rise to international players that do not adhere to protocols of a state but exert the kind power that a state might exercise. These independent players are complicating factors for diplomacy. An earlier example might have been the financial power f cocaine cartels in the 80s and 90s, or the Somali pirates in the early 2000s. Al Qaeda certainly fit that bill in as much as it was very interested in international terror, while the current ISIL is a similar entity with roots in terrorism but with aspirations to being an actual state.

When such players enter the international politics, they can be difficult to engage, especially when their intent is hostile and their rhetoric inflammatory. The American track record in recent years i.e. under Barack Obama, has been to hunt down the leadership and then use drone-strikes to kill them. Many people object to this modus operandi because - amongst other notable reasons like collateral damage - it leaves no space for negotiation for the enemy leadership and so the drone-strike program ensures there will be no dialogue.

The assassination plot carried out by Benicio del Toro's character is a direct extension of this program whereby the US Government is willing to kill the leadership of a Mexican drug cartel instead of bringing the man to justice. And this may very well be the protocol that will be used on coming years whereby if one is a Mexican drug lord, there will be no due process and basic rights under the law. The US Government is interested in eliminating such people, not arresting and trying them.
If the film is right, then we've entered a zone where conventional moral reasoning will be useless, and whatever moral reasoning we cobble together will either be inadequate, truncated, or ineffective. If that, is the future as stated in this film, then this film is a bleak film indeed.

Clearly America struggles greatly with this problem. There are no easy answers, although the legalisation and proper regulation of drugs would actually change the economic dynamics of this situation greatly. Just saying...

The Economics Of Narcotics

I might have mentioned this in some other random entry, but it comes down to the fact that narcotics are derived from plant growth. They're farmed. Of all the things that are farmed and collected and sold, the price for narcotics in fact far outstrips anything else. The only reason it gets so expensive is because there is significant demand that is made to struggle for a small supply. The small supply derives out of law enforcement agencies trying to confiscate the contraband. The high prices encourages farmers in impoverished places like Afghanistan or Central America to opt for growing narcotic agents instead of proper crops. As with the bootlegging during Prohibition, the harder the state tries to squeeze the supply, the more lucrative the trade becomes for more parties to enter into the narcotics business.

That's the operational truth of the drug trade. In reality, drug syndicates would be charging what the market will bear, so the pricing of narcotics is presumably at the high end of whatever that can be charged. In that context, every drug bust announced by the police effectively drives up the price per unit weight and this all goes into the drug lords' pockets as profits. Given the above, any film that argues assassinating the drug lords as we do Terror cell leaders is clearly ignoring the economics of the whole enterprise.

When you look at this film in context with other films and TV shows dealing with the influx of drugs over the border into the US, it is clear that the current legal paradigm of prohibition is not working. A lot more money is going to have to be spent on education and rehab programmes and medical processes to deal with addiction than simply rounding up users and dealers and incarcerating them.

Of course, the United States is probably not the likeliest of places for such a radical re-think. That being the case we're probably going to be subjected to ever more nihilistic pointless movies about busting drug lords whatever meaning there waist the enterprise has evaporated out of the topic. There's just a fascist will to prosecute the war on drugs regardless of casualties or meaning.

Torture Is Condoned In American Films

One last thing I want to point out about this miserable film is how the drug lord's brother is tortured for information. The torture is done on US soil, but by Benicio del Toro's character who is amped for vengeance. Taken together with the torture scene at the start of 'Zero Dark Thirty', it appears that while we vocally denounce torture in the West, we're quite okay for it in our fiction. And this hypocrisy is reflected by the state.

It's actually the same old hypocritical split that was pointed out in 'A Few Good Men' whereby the state is happy to appoint a figure to do its dirty work, while claiming the highest of ethical standards for itself. Once again, the split manifests itself with the CIA black ops willing to do the dirty work on the one hand, and the FBI agents wanting to follow the book of the law, finding it hard to condone the CIA tactics. It's the reflected image of 'Homeland', where the FBI are made to look like chumps.

This hypocritical split is not new. When Allende fell in 1973 in Chile, CIA operatives were in there torturing people for information. We might put this down to statecraft, but we've become too accepting that this stuff happens. When it is in our fiction as a readily accepted given, we really ought to be thinking a bit harder about what our politicians are doing on our behalf. The most gruesome part of this film might be its hideous implied politics.

News That's Fit To Punt - 23/Dec/2014

Zero Dark'n' Dirty

I didn't want to bang on about politics this week, what with 2 days to go to Christmas, but I figured it's worth bring up this stuff because I still think we're all collectively numbed to the notion that troops and agents representing our government and therefore by extension us, are doing torture. We're so inured to this fact that we consume movies like 'Zero Dark Thirty' without really challenging the premise that torture got us the information that led to finding where Osama bin Laden was holed up.

Anyway, this week saw the cover blown on the agent upon whom the character Maya was based. Yes, the agent who allegedly tracked down Osama bin Laden's whereabout was also known as the Queen of Torture, and her name is now out in public.

I'm not going to name the officer here because frankly I don't know where that puts me legally. But you can find out her name if you follow that link.

What's interesting is that amongst other things she:

• was amongst other things, responsible for missing the 9/11 threat, bungling the sharing of information.
• misled congress about the Agency's use of torture.
• participated in the torture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
• witnessed the waterboarding of terror suspect Abu Zubaydah
• misrepresented intelligence in such as ways to send the agency on a wild goose chase in Montana
• over saw a three month rendition of another detainee whose detention was case of mistaken identity. 

She sounds like a real piece of work. She sounds like a sadistic psychopath who has found her dream job. The Intercept is leaking her name because it says otherwise the wider community won't be able to put 2 and 2 together to understand just want is going on and who is doing it. Sounds like she's the CIA torture mistress of your BDSM nightmares.

Get Dorky

The New York Times is saying the USA should prosecute the likes of Dick Cheney and the others the GW Bush administration who condoned torture.

Americans have known about many of these acts for years, but the 524-page executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report erases any lingering doubt about their depravity and illegality: In addition to new revelations of sadistic tactics like “rectal feeding,” scores of detainees were waterboarded, hung by their wrists, confined in coffins, sleep-deprived, threatened with death or brutally beaten. In November 2002, one detainee who was chained to a concrete floor died of “suspected hypothermia.” 

These are, simply, crimes. They are prohibited by federal law, which defines torture as the intentional infliction of “severe physical or mental pain or suffering.” They are also banned by the Convention Against Torture, the international treaty that the United States ratified in 1994 and that requires prosecution of any acts of torture. 

So it is no wonder that today’s blinkered apologists are desperate to call these acts anything but torture, which they clearly were. As the report reveals, these claims fail for a simple reason: C.I.A. officials admitted at the time that what they intended to do was illegal. 

In July 2002, C.I.A. lawyers told the Justice Department that the agency needed to use “more aggressive methods” of interrogation that would “otherwise be prohibited by the torture statute.” They asked the department to promise not to prosecute those who used these methods. When the department refused, they shopped around for the answer they wanted. They got it from the ideologically driven lawyers in the Office of Legal Counsel, who wrote memos fabricating a legal foundation for the methods. Government officials now rely on the memos as proof that they sought and received legal clearance for their actions. But the report changes the game: We now know that this reliance was not made in good faith. 

No amount of legal pretzel logic can justify the behavior detailed in the report. Indeed, it is impossible to read it and conclude that no one can be held accountable. At the very least, Mr. Obama needs to authorize a full and independent criminal investigation.

Amen to that. Now we'll see if they have the balls to follow through. They need to get Cheney in the dock. It's nice that all this stuff is out there for once and not covered by official secrecy acts and the such. 

Spiritual Alzheimers

In other more delightful news, the Pope of Rome took the Curia to task for being greedy scheming careerists with 'Spiritual Alzheimers'. I don't quite know how that disease works, but it sounds pretty bad. The affairs of the Catholic Church are really none of my business but this is the sort of thing that makes you take up and notice. This Pope is trying to make a difference. In the scheme of things, it's not totally insignificant that he wants to effect a change of culture within the Church. After all, there's still too much Alexander VI and the Borgias about the Vatican and its politics. 

Still, it wasn't what the Curia were expecting. That's pretty impressive to go off script and put the boot in that hard.

John Robertson Falls On His Sword

Never has there been an ALP politician so happily seen off since, ...oh I don't know..., Kristina Kenneally? Anyway, it turned out John Robertson signed some document for Man Haron Monis. And that was all (s)he wrote, so to speak. Is this bad luck? Is this bad judgment? Is this a bad break? Is it just good fortune that John Robertson managed to crash his career on the name of the man who carried out the Martin Place Siege? Really, who'd a' thunk it? 

Anyway, the man variously described in the most negative ways by his own party - and given the leadership after the landslide election defeat because they couldn't stand him and wanted him to fail - has miraculously crashed out of being the Opposition Leader in NSW with only 3months to go to an election. Was this fair? He might even ask that himself but one thing's for certain in NSW politics: fair's got nothing to do with it (an invective otherwise known as "Suck Shit And Die"). 

The ALP in NSW have a long l-o-o-o-ong way back from the depths of reputation damage inflicted by Morbid Obeidity, and Joe Tripodi and the rest of the Terigals. The brand value of NSW ALP is about as good as Nickelback (maybe even worse). Finally being rid of Robertson at the helm might be the first step in rehabilitation. 

The CIA And Its Torture Record

Where Does The Buck Stop With Torture? 

It's always bothered me that the Abu Ghraib prison mess ended up with Lynndie England going to prison and the CIA handlers of the torture got away scot free. If you can't remember, Lynndie England was the poor sod left holding the leash in the photo of some Iraqi prisoner being tortured in Abu Ghraib prison. The way the trial concluded, it essentially placed all the culpability on a PFC with  less than average intelligence. As if it was all her idea.

The hypocrisy of the US Army and government satisfying itself with this outcome and shoving the whole issue under the carpet was one of the horrible little spectacles of the 2000s. Now we're finding out that the US government is atlas willing to form a commission to say the truth - that the CIA regularly tortured people, that the torture did not yield significant information and people responsible for these crimes against humanity have essentially walked free. Rank Hath Its Privileges and all that operating from top to bottom, which dovetails with the way PFC England's trial went.

Even the legal loophole that placed the Guantanamo Bay prisoners out of reach of US civilian courts, or the way 'renditions' were carried out so that the torture took place on foreign soil where torture was accepted indicates a a kind of ethical vacuum where hypocrisy played fast and loose papered over scrutiny and objection. Even now, republican politicians are saying the 'enhanced interrogations' were fruitful and necessary, and that the report is 'hooey'. Is 'hooey' even a proper refutation of anything?

"I declare your augment 'hooey'"
"Well good sir, I guess you got me a good one. Your call of 'hooey' renders all the facts and evidence presented before us meaningless now."
I don't think so Dick.

In light of all that, it's refreshing to see people want those in the highest offices be held accountable for those acts. It would be hard to see the likes of GW Bush, Dick Cheney, Condy Rice and Donald Rumsfeld brought to account for their part in this horrifying chapter in the War Against Terror. The problem is that it is aways so hard to wage a War Against Error. If there were any justice in any of this, the Bush Administration cabal of politicians would land in the dock for their part in presiding over this stuff. The cynic in me doubts it would happen. President Obama is speaking in a neutral tone trying to douse that flame. I guess he's got drone strikes on his record to worry about.

The Euphemisms Suck

Speaking of which... 'Enhanced Interrogation' is one of these euphemisms that make you wonder how much people are willing to screw with words in order to hide meaning. Calling torture 'Enhanced Interrogation' is like describing rape as 'Enhanced Seduction'. The impulse to substitute Latinate words over old Anglo-Saxon ones goes a long way towards making things sound more official and legitimate.

They do this in Asia too, whereby if you want something to sound more official, you dig up ever more obscure Chinese characters to describe things. So it's not a phenomenon unique to English. As a writer of some experience, it's easy to spot that the same trick is being used exactly to enhance authority and enhance legitimacy on something that is at its deepest core dodgy and suspect.

David Hicks Rears His Ugly Head

It didn't take long before the Guantanamo Bay returnee piped up and made himself visible as the victim of torture at Gitmo. After all these years I still find it difficult to be sympathetic, but I do take his point that if they wanted to know if people got tortured by the CIA, they need not have looked too much further than the inmates at Guantanamo Bay base. I didn't believe him when he said he was an accidental bystander, but I did believe him when he said they tortured him and others down in Gitmo.

I've been pondering from where this belief came, and I have to say it seemed obvious that the US Marines might not take too kindly to enemy captives who were suspected terrorists, in the wake of 9/11. It seemed far more unbelievable that such captives wouldn't be tortured in Gitmo. I would even posit and say the least surprising thing is to find confirmation that the CIA used renditions to torture prisoners in third-party nations, during the years straight after 9/11.

All the same I have mixed emotions about David Hicks turning up to confront the world with his experience of torture. Yes torture is bad and never justified, so I'm not going to say he deserved the torture he got but there's still a cloud over how and why Hicks ended up in a war zone with the Taliban to begin with. Most of us who witnessed the Twin Towers come down that day still went to work and we did our thing, discharged our duties and lived proper civilised lives. He - feeling inspired - went to fight with the Taliban (a fact he has tried to downplay since his return).

The disquiet I've always felt with David Hicks is that he won't come clean about that bit, so it's really hard for me to give him a whole lot of moral high ground just because he got captured, sent to Guantanamo Bay and got tortured. Sure torture is a terrible thing and it sucks that it happened to him. Be that as it may, there's a very good reason the vast majority of humanity didn't end up in Camp X-Ray with him - what ever it was that he did that led him to Gitmo, it was an asshole thing to do; and I am a cynic, doing my best not to get fooled again.

News That's Fit To Punt - 19/Feb/2013

Just For The Record On Prisoner X

A couple of days ago, I posted up the notion that the Rudd Removal by the faction bosses might have been linked to Prisoner X more than the bad polls surrounding the Mining Tax at the time. That is to say, Kevin Rudd looking in to the passport used in the Dubai Hit may have triggered a sequence of events that led to Mark Arbib being activated as a CIA asset.

I admit, I don't really know that to be true or even likely. For all we know the CIA paid Mark Arbib to tell them which brand of socks Kevin Rudd likes to wear. We'll never know unless we beat the truth out of Mark Arbib, but we don't really support torture do we? Or do we?

Anyway, here's something that fits the jigsaw a bit more today:

Australian Jewish community leaders were privately highly critical of what they considered to be an overreaction by former prime minister Kevin Rudd and then foreign minister Stephen Smith to allegations that Israeli intelligence used Australian passports in an operation to assassinate a militant Hamas leader in Dubai in January 2010.

Following the Government's decision to expel a senior Israeli intelligence officer from Israel's embassy in Canberra in May 2010, Mr Rudd and Mr Smith attempted to defuse tension by inviting six Jewish community representatives, including then Executive Council of Australian Jewry president Robert Goot, for discussions at a private kosher dinner at The Lodge. The meeting was also attended by Labor MPs Michael Danby and Mark Dreyfus.

So Kevin Rudd and company weren't fooling around. They were really looking into it and rattling cages. That this might have been uncomfortable for some (or many) espionage agencies is not that much of a leap. The Jewish community leaders of Australia were unhappy about it - Imagine how Mossad felt about it.

What would they have said to the Prime Minster? "be careful what you go looking for Mr. Rudd"...maybe? While this doesn't prove anything, you can chalk it up as another piece of the jigsaw.

Is The Jig Up For Julia?

The polls were indeed terrible, and suddenly there's a tidal wave of opinion consigning her to the dustbin of history. It's one bad poll, people! Except that's all it took to remove Kevin Rudd, so you wonder why the Caucus drags its heel to what was blindingly obvious one year ago.

Most senior ministers contacted on Monday appeared to be sticking with the Prime Minister but many said the numbers in the poll could not be ignored.
''It's simple arithmetic,'' said one. ''We can't go to an election with these numbers.''

Asked if the situation would come to a head when Parliament resumed, one minister responded: ''I don't see how it can't''.
He said he remained loyal to Ms Gillard but conceded there had been a discernible shift in momentum towards Mr Rudd in the past fortnight.

This so called momentum shift is pretty stupid and late in the game. The opportunity to fix this was March last year. Instead they trashed Kevin Rudd and hobbled any notion of riding his popularity to the polls. He's saying now he's out - which doesn't mean much in politics except he does seem to mean it - so I don't really know how they think they're going to swing a Rudd return.

Best guess is they'll attempt a Crean return or they'll draft Bill Shorten - anything but Rudd, they'll say - and watch the polls continue to suck for the ALP because "not-Julia-Gillard" isn't going to get it done for the electorate if they want to retain office. At this point in time, the question isn't if they've screwed the pooch, but how many more times will they get to screw the pooch before 14th September when we'll be mercifully rid of these bastards.  This is going to be a new kind of social torture, all the way down to the bottom of the metaphorical hill with the light at the top, where there's probably a cesspit of corruption and backstabbing; and you couldn't say they didn't have it coming.

Things are so bad I think we deserve to be punished by a Tony Abbott Government. And I'm still going to donkey vote.

Politics Of Weird

When The Going Gets Weird, The Weird Turn Pro

That's of course according to the late Hunter S. Thompson. Today, billionaire coal magnate Clive Palmer accused the Greens and Greenpeace of being funded by the CIA via the Rockefeller Foundation.

While brandishing a copy of the report this afternoon, Mr Palmer said it was the result of a CIA conspiracy involving the US-based Rockefeller Foundation.
"This is funded by the CIA," he said.
"You only have to go back and read ... the report to the US Congress that sets up the Rockefeller Foundation as a conduit of CIA funding.
"You only have to look at the secret budget which was passed by Congress last year - bigger than our whole national economy - with the CIA to ensure that.
"You only have to read the reports to US Congress where the CIA reported to the president that their role was to ensure the US competitive advantage - that's how you know it's funded by the CIA."

The Greens and Greenpeace both denied these outlandish allegations vigorously. Let's face it, you wouldn't credit it all given that it's coming from Clive Palmer's paranoid little mind, but they had to defend it because well, Clive's sort of in politics advising Campbell Newman. One imagines that is a bit like being advised by your paranoid conspiracy theorist super-wealthy uncle. And Queensland is looking like it's going to elect this Newman-led LNP, so all I can say is good luck with that boys & girls of Queensland!

Yowza.

Just for kicks I googled the document Mr. Palmer was brandishing and got this one.  I guess if one were a coal mining magnate, one would feel fear and loathing with a good dose of fury at reading it, but I just can't find the bit where it says Rockefeller Foundation. And I sure as heck don't know how he got the CIA out of the un-mentioned Rockefeller Foundation so colour me sceptical.As far as theories go, there are too many plausible deniability stops along the way.
Still, I found it interesting that Clive Palmer came across as so paranoid and nutty. The more he speaks in public, the more he comes across as sort of unhinged.

 

From The Pleiades Mailbag 22/04/09

Columbine Still Bowling

Here's an article about how schools are run along the lines of prisons since the Columbine shootings.

Based on the assumption that schools are rife with crime and fueled by the emergence of a number of state and federal laws, mandatory sentencing legislation, and the popular “three strikes and you’re out” policy, many educators first invoked zero tolerance rules against kids who brought firearms to schools. In the aftermath of Columbine, exacerbated by a number of high-profile school shootings in last decade, and an increase in the climate of fear, the assumption that schools were dealing with a new breed of student—violent, amoral, and apathetic—began to take hold in the public imagination.  Moreover, as school safety become a top educational priority, zero tolerance policies were broadened and now include a range of behavioral infractions that encompass everything from possessing drugs or weapons to threatening other students—all broadly conceived. Under zero tolerance policies, forms of punishments that were once applied to adults now applied to first graders.  The punitive nature such policies are  on display in a number of cases where students have had to face harsh penalties that defy human compassion and reason. For example, an 8-year-old boy in the first grade at a Miami Elementary School took a table knife to his school, using it to rob a classmate of $1 in lunch money. School officials claimed he was facing “possible expulsion and charges of armed robbery.”

In another instance that took place in December 2004, “Porsche, a fourth-grade student at a Philadelphia, PA, elementary school, was yanked out of class, handcuffed, taken to the police station and held for eight hours for bringing a pair of 8-inch scissors to school. She had been using the scissors to work on a school project at home. School district officials acknowledged that the young girl was not using the scissors as a weapon or threatening anyone with them, but scissors qualified as a potential weapon under state law.”

Time to break out the old copies of 'The Wall, I think. If this kind of thing is going to be education, then they sure as hell don't need this kind of treatment. If you read on it gets worse. 7 year old forced to the ground and the numbers of suspensions doled out are ridiculous. You sort of wonder what will happen to kids who grow through this and come to think of it as normal.

Bush Torture Memos

For some reason the much ballyhooed Bush Torture Memos have been made into pdfs where people can send around. I must be on the 6th degree of Kevin Bacon from the first person to send it out to the world, but somehow I've managed to get it thanks to Pleiades. I don't think I even asked for it, but bang, there it is.

It makes for chilling reading. The details found within are pretty bluntly put so there is no mistaking that the degree to which they had permission to hurt and coere people for information was delineated. It's not a bright moment in the history of the United States. Naturally,one imagines the Repuablicans are very updeat that the Obama administration let these documents out into the public domain, but tha's the funny thing. There's no mistaking that yes, they said yes to torture, and the language isn't even velied with bureaucrat-ese.

Here's an article about all this in Time.

Many Democrats and human-rights activists see the memos as damning evidence that the U.S. violated international law, and that officials should be held accountable. Many Republicans and national-security experts are dismayed at the decision to air the dirty laundry, claiming the revelations weaken the country's intelligence gathering capabilities and give an misleading picture of the efficacy of such interrogation tactics. (Read how waterboarding got out of control.)

The Obama Administration has already ruled out the prosecution of those who actually carried out the harsh interrogations, so long as they complied with the government-approved guidelines. And Obama treaded carefully on Tuesday, stressing to reporters, at the end of his Tuesday meeting with Jordan's King Abdullah, that he did "not want to prejudge" the outcome of the Justice Department's inquiry into the policy's legal underpinnings and that he would not want any inquiry to turn into a partisan witch hunt. "I do worry about this getting so politicized that we cannot function effectively and it hampers out our ability to carry out critical national security operations," he said. But at that point it was too late. By not entirely ruling out the authors' prosecution — as his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, had appeared to do over the weekend — the President had effectively unleashed the hounds.

What a drag. It's as if these people who okayed this stuff thought they were going to get away with it by dint of September 11. Who needs terrorism and terrorists when the CIA is given carte blanche to torture?

Movie Doubes

The CIA Edition
You never get your ducks to line up this nicely. Well, hardly ever anyway. Watched two films in a row at he cinemas featuring the CIA as the centre-piece setting.

'Burn After Reading' and 'Body of Lies' are both high in star power and marquee directors taking on the rather difficult topic of espionage. 'Body of Lies' directed by Ridley Scott moves headlong into the all-serious terrain of tracking down terrorists in the middle east. Leonardo DiCaprio stars as a modern day American Lawrence of Arabia who goes almost native in trying to ferret out the enemies of the USA. Russell Crow plays the CIA analyst who guides him deeper into trouble, if not betrays him to the worst enemies through excessive abstraction and detachment. It's an action packed film with very grey moral areas explored in a frenzied, confused manner.

'Burn After Reading' is a Coen Brothers vehicle that explores the messy lives of people living in Washington DC, which naturally (rather than tangentially) intersects with the day-to-day business of the CIA and surveillance. It's a very black comedy that revolves around the idea of known-unknowns and unknown-unknowns. In this film, the CIA fail to learn anything of value because all the action we see on the screen is inscrutable to the CIA in terms of national importance - it's not but it's deeply personally important to all the players involved.

The CIA On Screen

The more recent incarnations of the CIA on screen have not been positive. This is most probably a reflection of the Bush year policies which have left the American public apopleptic in a kind of ethical aphasia. What can you say about the failures of intelligence that led to things like 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq? Films such as 'The Good Shepherd' have sought to shed light on the organisational culture of the CIA while films such as 'Rendition' have sought to highlight the issue of torture as subcontracted out by the CIA to other nations.

In any case, movie-land seems to have decided that the CIA is fair game. This is possibly a reaction to the 1990s where the FBI seemed to be fair game in films such as 'Silence of the Lambs' and the endless (interminable) 'X-files' franchise of TV shows and movies. I guess the perennial villain has moved on from the inscrutable serial killer in the American landscape to the inscrutable terrorist in the middle eastern landscape.

The CIA we see on 'BoL' is every bit as Machiavellian and self-serving as the previous films have portrayed, but it paints its picture boldly as if to say, if you do enough bad things for the state, then the state looks the other way. One has to decide to abandon everyday morality to root for these characters who are working at the extremity of state control. They're all in the zone where Jack Nicholson's Colonel Jessep lived in 'A Few Good Men', and we'd better be up to handling this truth or we're just munchkins. Terrible things are done to people in the name of intelligence, including torture and framing an innocent man who gets killed by the bad guys. There's something incredibly ironic going on with 'BoL' where the tactics of the CIA men are almost indistinguishable from those of the Terrorists. It's only that the terrorists explode a bombs in public spaces killing ordinary people that keeps them a little more morally culpable than the CIA, but it's really not by that much more.

In turn, with 'BAR', the Coen Brothers do not spare the rod as they depict the CIA as a sort of club of white guys who all went to Ivy League universities and are in most part, snarky, petty bureaucrats with too much time and not enough vision or imagination. The way Langley appears in this film is as a series of cold, echoing interiors punctuated by air-conditioned quiet rooms where people hold meetings over seemingly trivial details, far away from the maddening crowd. The very orderliness and quietness of the Langley office seems to incapacitate the intelligence apparatus from getting real. Instead, the world appears to them as trivial reports spoken i such rooms. In 'BoL' such trivia is the vital source of clues - in 'BAR', it becomes the cypher of confusion. One can't help but think that Intelligence is the industrialisation of the game 'Chinese Whispers'.

In either case I can't imagine the actual workers at CIA would take kindly to either film. Not that I care because what they do for a living should be just as subject to critique as the next job.

Surveillance As A Way of Life

The Coen brothers have been poking fun at various parts of the USA for their cultural mores in succession. 'O Brother Where Art Thou' lampooned the South; 'Fargo' poked fun at the Mid-West; 'The Big Lebowski' dismantled LA pretensions; 'No Country for Old Men' ripped into Texan mores; and now we have a film about Washington DC. They've been very good and 'BAR' does not disappoint.

The people in Washington DC, if this film is to be believed, are incredibly savvy about surveillance and espionage, but they have no common sense. Harry, played by George Clooney used to be in 'Personal protection' but now works for the State Department. He is acutely aware that somebody is following him and his assumption is that it is an espionage organ. When he finally manages to confront one of his tails,he finds out it is a man from a detective agency hired to get divorce proceedings details against him.

When Chad, played by Brad Pitt, finds dates and numbers on a file on a CD-R, he doesn't think it is somebody's banking account details - he immediately leaps to the conclusion it is espionage material. His first plan is to track down who the disc might belong to, and then try to organise an exchange. His partner in crime Linda, played by Frances McDormand is equally savvy about espionage, if a little out-dated. When the American 'agent' fails to play ball, her immediate reaction is to drive to the Russian embassy in the hopes of securing a sale there.

The point, is, these are not the thoughts people would ordinarily have, given the evidence. The whys and wherefores of the story are totally distorted by the heightened assumptions about espionage. Maybe it is true, and that the very proximity of Langley in Virginia makes people in Washington DC assume the most espionage-ridden paranoiac scenarios in their lives. It's hard to tell from Sydney.

Both films feature satellite surveillance images. It is how the film begins and ends in 'BAR', giving the impression that what we are seeing, is one big surveillance recording that we are watching. It's not necessarily true, but what the beginning and the ending shots signify is pretty simple. The signified blinks at us more surprised.

Satellite surveillance is also how the centre stays in touch with field agents in 'BoL'. There have been a whole bunch of movies depicting this process, from 'Enemy of the State' (directed by Ridley's brother Tony) to 'Patriot Games' directed by Phil Noyce back in the 1990s when the CIA didn't look so vulnerable. When Phil Noyce did it, it seemed it was a device to send the violence peripheral to the story, so that the characters got detached from the violence. In Ridley Scott's version, it seems the CIA handlers in Langley are far more emotionally engaged in the process as if they are playing one big PS3 shoot'em up game, but with real people.

It was Hitchcok who showed us that there was a fine line between surveillance and voyeurism in 'Rear Window', but cinema in the 2000s has hit the point where voyeurism is a legitimate state tool. It's kind of creepy we've come this far in this direction so fast. That is to say, for a business filled with death, there seems to be a lot of libido invested in to it by the characters of both films. Espionage is in a sense how love is made and how ordinary people get fucked up.

In any case, with both films, the surveillance is not the point. They are both trying to explain how it is that the CIA has a vast apparatus for surveillance and still can't seem to get their man Osama bin Laden. Why is this so? If one were to believe the 'BoL' version, it is because they rely too heavily on technological solutions when in fact it needs very messy, untidy, difficult human solutions -all of which requires patience and silence and proper watching. The film tacitly implies that the Americans have lost the ability to wait out an opponent, and instead wants to solve it all with one big machine that solves problems through Satellites and airplanes and high tech toys.
If one were to believe the 'BAR' version, it's because the world they are practicing their surveillance upon moves too quickly and is so complicated that the men doing the surveillance cannot draw proper conclusions from what they are seeing. The ending is gut-busting ly hilarious, but when reflected upon, it's a chilling insight.

Of course a third answer would be that they just don't want to find bin Laden alive because of what he might say in the lime light of the world media. Neither film states this, but after watching both, you start to consider this as a real possibility. I mean, the CIA can't be this dumb, right? There must be a better reason!

Directors Revisiting Their Old Films

If you do enough stuff, you find you do some things over and over again in your work. Sometimes it's intentional, other times, it's not. Each time it surfaces, you say to yourself "Oh dear". I've played similar passages in my guitar breaks, and I've even shot the same spiral staircase in 2 different films. You don't want to do it, but sometimes, the options narrow down to one and it's where you've been before. Most of the time it happens because you run out of time and you just revert to something you know will work, but when a big time Hollywood film director does it, you have to ask,"What' going on here?"
It's the moment you've inadvertently established a signature moment of your own work.

Without a doubt, Ridley Scott's most important film is 'Blade Runner'. Ever since that film, we've seen him re-do moments from that film. For instance, in 'Black Rain' Michael Douglas finds evidence in a bathtub, much like Harrison Ford's Deckard does in a hotel room. In 'Gladiator', the deep structure of the family is recycled from Blade Runner: A father with two sons - one good, one bad, one spiritual, one by biology, - and a daughter. In 'BoL', it is Leo DiCaprio's character getting two fingers broken by the villain which references Roy Batty breaking Deckard's fingers in the climactic confrontation in 'BR'.

It was a little awkward watching the moment because I instantly knew there would be two, after the first hammer strike. I don't know why he couldn't have thought of something else, but perhaps it is a signature moment he wanted to insert as a nudge and a wink to us 'BR' fans. We still love your work, Ridley.

The Coen brothers also were working to rework some of their tropes. The sequence with Tilda Swinton's Dr. Cox with the Divorce lawyer is a reworking of 'Intolerable Cruelty', but inverted because the lawyer is anything but suave and Swinton is a cold fish; she's anything but pyronic unlike Catherin Zeta-Jones in 'IC'. George Clooney's endless patter about being some kind of security specialist reminds us of his excellent turn in 'O Brother' but it is somehow deformed into an unseemly obfuscation and dissembling by a serial adulterer. Frances McDormand's Linda also seem to reprise the single minded pursuit of her her character in Fargo, but this time it's inverted to being a kind of monomania about plastic surgery rather than simply finding the truth. The moment Clooney's Harry confronts the private eye tailing him echoes of a similar moment in 'The Big Lebowski'.

All of these instances don't mean much in of themselves except when viewed against the rest of their work. Perhaps the Coen Brothers are working on their own version of conceptual continuity. If so, it is admirable.

Black Comedy Is Never Understood

It's one thing to say people don't get irony; it's a whole new dimension of misunderstanding when it comes to black comedies. Some people just don't like them, saying they're misanthropic. I actually don't see what's wrong with a bit of misanthropic fiction. 'Wuthering Heights' for instance isn't exactly full of philanthropic impulses, and neither is the narrative voice undertaken by Jane Austen in her more famous novels. If there's one thing that makes me shudder, it's that tone of Jane Austen's incipient class-snobbery; so it's not like great fiction can't come out of such misanthropy. The other camp of critics just don't get it. Richard Corliss of 'Time' magazine wrote that he just doesn't see the point of the Coen brothers making 'BAR'.

To me, it's self explanatory. There are a lot of stupid people around, and should there be a confluence (or a perfect storm) such stupidity could multiply into what J.K. Simmons' character calls a 'cluster-fuck'. There's no damn mystery, and it's not that misanthropic to write about the foibles of stupid people going wrong - it's common fair in comedy except writers work hard to add lovable features to these characters. That's how sit-coms work. The characters are stupid and do stupid things, but we are sentimentally invested in them, for reasons we're not entirely sure. It's not misanthropic or cynical. In fact it would be more cynical to write 'Forrest Gump', but of course then we'd be back to the Tropic-Thunder-"don't play the full retard" discourse so we'll skip that today.

The point is, even masterful black comedy specialists such as the Coen brothers can make a film where the film critic of 'Time' Magazine just doesn't *get* it. What chance have I got when I, a total unknown to the world, go and make 'Key Psycho'?
Not even my friends get that one, but fans of black comedy roll around the floor laughing. Which is to say, there are few extreme misanthropic black comedy specialists working in fiction such as myself, because the market is a lot smaller and a lot less inspired than you would hope. I like doing them but I just can't justify continuing to do them. I am sick of this wall of misunderstanding. Nonetheless I like my coffee, comedy and US Presdient black, okay?

A Quick Note About Brad Pitt's Chad
This guy just keeps amazing me. His turn as Chad in 'BAR' is wonderfully nunanced and is a fine misture of neurosis and hyperactivity. It's charming as well as comic. In a sense his performance holds the film together. Across the two films, if I had to pick one performance that I thought was a standout, it was this one. I had to work really hard to recall Tyler Durden after this turn. The man is under-rated.

A Quick Note About George Clooney's Harry
George Clooney's performance in this film wouldn't be so ironic if he hadn't done 'Syrianna', donning a similar beard. I laughed at his stuff because ll I could think of was how serious he was in 'Syrianna' and how trivial his concerns were in 'BAR'. It's a great bit of casting that worked to subvert a star's own buggage.
Also, appearing with Tilda Swinton as his lover also echoed 'Michael Clayton' which was funny, as well as the moment he accidentally kills Bard Pitt's Chad, after all the 'Ocean's 11' movies.

A Quick Note About Leo DiCaprio
My partner says she likes watching any film where Leo DiCaprio looks tense like he's under a lot of stress. That's a lot of films. So I have seen a lot of Leo DiCaprio in the lst 5 years. He's very good but he's getting to be a little Johnny-one-note.

A Quick Note About Russell Crow
I don't know how to say this, but while he's not doing the 'full retard', he does seem to be doing the 'full fat'. He looked uncomfortably corpulent and on his way to late-Elvis-dom. A bit of a worry there. He sure didn't look much like Maximus, which makes him a great actor in part, but also, he did look like he's letting himself go.