Labels: "It's called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it" - George Carlin, adam curtis, cia, culture industry, it felt like a kiss, Pop Culture, US imperialism

In like Flint posted by Richard Seymour

This is a remarkable article. On the one hand, it contain a shocking revelation - that Slobodan Milosevic's intelligence chief was also a CIA spy. (Actually, the revelation itself is some weeks old, and it is now alleged that he also worked for Russian intelligence, which is not mentioned in the Herald article). This is not the first time that the CIA has been found to have high-level involvement in the former Yugoslavia. Their involvement in training KLA militias in 1998-99, while working as OSCE officers, was revealed in 2000. Still, the implications of this are obviously sweeping. It would suggest that the US government not only had some unseen leverage in the war on the Serbian side, but that it had insight that enabled it to decisively influence negotiations at key points with a reasonable expectation as to the outcome. So, if Zimmerman told Izetbegovic to scuttle the Lisbon agreement, he probably had reason to know that it would lead to years of war. It means that when the Serbian Ministry of Internal Affairs was supporting militias such as Arkan's Tigers or the Red Berets, the US government knew before anyone else did. What did it do with this information? On the other hand, the article is so full of inaccuracies and absurdities that it is hard to take it seriously.

First of all, Jovica Stanisic is not facing charges at the International Criminal Court, but at the ICTY. There is a huge difference in terms of the standing and legitimacy of each court. Secondly, even the ICTY does not charge that genocide took place in Croatia, or Kosovo, or anywhere outside Srebrenica, and even then it doesn't say that it was driven by Slobodan Milosevic. Yet, the reporter just keeps repeating 'genocide' as if this is supposed to have a hypnotic effect on the reader. What the indictment [pdf] actually alleges is an ethnic cleansing campaign in Krajina, and BiH. And at this point the key word remains 'alleges'. I don't doubt that substantial portions of the indictment are accurate, by the way, or that they would be shown to be such even in a court that wasn't as ridiculously biased as the ICTY. But that is hardly the point. The point of these falsehoods is to convey yet again that the fall of Yugoslavia is essentially a narrative of Greater Serbian expansionism checked only by exiguous 'peacekeeping' constraints, and that the current judicial process has more legitimacy than it actually possesses.

The story also asks us to believe that the CIA's influence was entirely benign, that it sought only to attenuate the causes of war, and that it used Stanisic to do so. This is because the CIA has taken the step of submitting classified documents to the ICTY to, er, 'clear up' their role in this affair. Obviously, we are not going to be told the truth either by the CIA, or by Stanisic in the context of a plea-bargain. But is a sign of the CIA's successful management of the news agenda that the revelation has produced not radical questioning but a further regurgitation of the propaganda memes of the 1990s, in a way that pro-actively whitewashes the CIA. The only question that the reporters asks is whether the US let the world down by being so 'equitable' to the Serbs at Dayton, as if that was the major problem with that lousy settlement. Should the US not have "unmasked" Karadzic and Milosevic and "demanded their surrender"? This would, of course, have entailed an invasion, and potentially quite a bloody one - but implicitly it would only have added to America's righteousness.

Labels: 'genocide', bosnia, cia, racism, US imperialism, war crimes, yugoslavia

In the gulag for reading satire posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: 'war on terror', bagram, cia, guantanamo, rendition, torture

CIA Aesthetics posted by Richard Seymour

Not until 1996 did the CIA announce, with little fanfare, that it had established an Entertainment Liaison Office, which would collaborate in a strictly advisory capacity with film-makers. Heading up the office was Chase Brandon, who had served for 25 years in the agency's elite clandestine services division, as an undercover operations officer. A PR man he isn't, though he does have Hollywood connections: he's a cousin of Tommy Lee Jones.

But the past 12 years of semi-acknowledged collaboration were preceded by decades in which the CIA maintained a deep-rooted but invisible influence of Hollywood. How could it be otherwise? As the former CIA man Bob Baer - whose books on his time with the agency were the basis for Syriana - told us: "All these people that run studios - they go to Washington, they hang around with senators, they hang around with CIA directors, and everybody's on board."

There is documentary evidence for his claims. Luigi Luraschi was the head of foreign and domestic censorship for Paramount in the early 1950s. And, it was recently discovered, he was also working for the CIA, sending in reports about how film censorship was being employed to boost the image of the US in movies that would be seen abroad. Luraschi's reports also revealed that he had persuaded several film-makers to plant "negroes" who were "well-dressed" in their movies, to counter Soviet propaganda about poor race relations in the States. The Soviet version was rather nearer the truth.

Luraschi's activities were merely the tip of the iceberg. Graham Greene, for example, disowned the 1958 adapatation of his Vietnam-set novel The Quiet American, describing it as a "propaganda film for America". In the title role, Audie Murphy played not Greene's dangerously ambiguous figure - whose belief in the justice of American foreign policy allows him to ignore the appalling consequences of his actions - but a simple hero. The cynical British journalist, played by Michael Redgrave, is instead the man whose moral compass has gone awry. Greene's American had been based in part on the legendary CIA operative in Vietnam, Colonel Edward Lansdale. How apt, then, that it should have been Lansdale who persuaded director Joseph Mankewiecz to change the script to suit his own ends.

The CIA didn't just offer guidance to film-makers, however. It even offered money. In 1950, the agency bought the rights to George Orwell's Animal Farm, and then funded the 1954 British animated version of the film. Its involvement had long been rumoured, but only in the past decade have those rumours been substantiated, and the tale of the CIA's role told in Daniel Leab's book Orwell Subverted.

The most common way for the CIA to exert influence in Hollywood nowadays is not through anything as direct as funding, or rewriting scripts, but offering to help with matters of verisimilitude. That is done by having serving or former CIA agents acting as advisers on the film, though some might wonder whether there is ever really such a thing a "former agent". As ex-CIA agent Lindsay Moran, the author of Blowing My Cover, has noted, the CIA often calls on former officers to perform tasks for their old employer.

Labels: cia, hollywood, movies, propaganda

Chavez loses referendum posted by Richard Seymour

in relation to the 2006 presidential elections, the opposition has only increased less than 100,000 votes (thought this is not yet 100% count), while Chávez loses 2.8 million which go to abstention.

Labels: chavez, cia, socialism, venezuela