Category Archives: Documentaries and Film

The War You Don’t See (2010)

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John Pilger’s ‘The War You Don’t See’ (2011) is a powerful and timely investigation into the media’s role in war, tracing the history of ’embedded’ and independent reporting from the carnage of World War One to the destruction of Hiroshima, and from the invasion of Vietnam to the current war in Afghanistan and disaster in Iraq. As weapons and propaganda become even more sophisticated, the nature of war is developing into an ‘electronic battlefield’ in which journalists play a key role, and civilians are the victims. But who is the real enemy?

The War You Don’t See from John Pilger on Vimeo.

What I’ve Learned

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“What I’ve Learned About American Foreign Policy”

Frank Dorrel:

“I’ve put together this 2-hour video called ‘What I’ve Learned About U.S. Foreign Policy’. The basic message being that the CIA, the military-industrial-complex, the Pentagon, the multinational corporations, the media and the government of the United States are responsible for the deaths of millions of people in the third world, not to mention the poverty and oppression of millions more. We support, arm, and train dictators and militaries that do these evil actions to their own people. All of this is to ensure that we control the natural resources of these countries and their market place, use the people for cheap labor and keep the business of war (which is our biggest business) ongoing.

The CIA has also done business with international drug dealers, allowing heroin and cocaine to enter the U.S., using the enormous profits to fund more covert operations. Since WWII the US has bombed Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Guatemala, El Salvador, Panama, Iraq, Somalia, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and now currently Iraq, once again killing millions of innocent people! The [corporate media] will not tell these truths because it is owned by the very corporations who benefit from all of this.

When it comes to foreign policy, the [media] gets its stories straight from the Pentagon and the CIA. We have been taught all our lives that the US fights for freedom and democracy, that we are the good guys. And since so many people in America are doing well, do have freedom, opportunity and wealth, or are just trying to get by, there is very little motivation to look into the things being said on this tape. I believe that Americans are living in a state of mass denial, kind of a mass hypnosis. It is the BIG LIE! […] The people who are attempting to get this message out are labeled as crackpots, radicals, subversives, or worse, and are not given the opportunity to be heard in the mainstream media. […]The first step is to understand that this is really happening. We have been lied to! I believe the people on this video are telling the truth and it’s absolutely frightening.”

SEGMENT 1
1. Martin Luther King, Jr.,
(segment 2:55) read segment

He was not only a civil rights advocate, he also spoke out against the U.S. war in Vietnam. Some people feel he was assassinated after he criticized our involvement there and other regions of the world. “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

SEGMENT 2
2. John Stockwell, former C.I.A. Station Chief
(segment 6:14) read segment

Former CIA Station Chief in Angola 1975, working for then Director of the CIA, George Bush. A 13 year veteran of the agency, Stockwell provides a short history of the CIA, estimating 6 million people have died as a direct consequence of the agency’s covert operations since its inception in 1947. This talk was given in the late 1980’s.

SEGMENT 3
3. Coverup: Behind the Iran-Contra Affair
(segment 19:34) read segment

This investigative documentary has been seen in theaters worldwide. Directed by Barbara Trent of the Empowerment Project. The Iran-Contra scandal is not an aberration of U.S. foreign policy. It has been estimated that between 20 to 30,000 Nicaraguan men, women and children were killed in U.S. sponsored terror conducted by the CIA backed right-wing Contra forces.

Elizabeth Montgomery narrates. Includes a short history of CIA covert operations by Peter Dale Scott

This segment comes from the full-length documentary ‘CoverUp: Behind the Iran-Contra Affair’ available from The Empowerment Project

SEGMENT 4
4. School of Assassins
(segment 13:25) read segment

The School of the Americas, located at Fort Benning, Georgia – our own terrorist training school right here in the United States. This documentary is narrated by Susan Sarandon and features Father Roy Bourgeois talking about this U.S. Army school where soldiers from Central and South America are trained in the art of torture, terrorism, and assassination. This school has since officially been renamed “Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.”

This film was directed and produced by Robert Richter of Maryknoll World Productions.

This segment comes from the documentary “School of Assassins” available from the School of the Americas Watch web site.

SEGMENT 5
5. Genocide by Sanctions
(segment 12:58) read segment

Produced and directed by Gloria La Riva in 1998 (long before the current war in Iraq), this film features former Attorney General of the United States, Ramsey Clark, as he shows the terrible conditions the Iraqi’s were suffering from due to the first U.S. war on Iraq. UNICEF, the International Red Cross and other world organizations estimate around 5,000 children were dying every month in Iraq after that war and the imposition of sanctions placed on that country.

Over 1.5 million Iraqi’s died as a result of the sanctions alone. Ramsey Clark goes into the hospitals and talks with Iraqi doctors, who say many of these deaths could have been prevented if they had medicine to give to the children. The United States bombed out their way of life; their water treatment facilities, food delivery systems, sewage treatment facilities, electrical systems, their mass communication facilities and more. And American’s were lead to believe that this was a good thing.

This segment comes from the documentary ‘Genocide By Sanctions.’ Check out the Left Books web site for more info.

SEGMENT 6
6. Philip Agee, former C.I.A. Case Officer
(segment 22:08) read segment

Philip Agee spent 13 years in the C.I.A. before resigning in 1969. His book “Inside the Company: C.I.A. Diary” was first published in 1975 and has been translated in to 27 languages. It was a best seller world-wide. His autobiography, “On The Run” was published in 1987.

In this speech given in 1991 after the first Gulf War, Agee analyzes why the U.S. invaded Iraq. He also describes “the war against the third world” as being fought for the natural resources, the labor and the markets of these third world countries the United States invaded either overtly or covertly since the end of World War II.

SEGMENT 7
7. Amy Goodman, host of Democracy Now!
(segment 5:12) read segment

Journalist and host of Democracy Now!, a daily radio and TV news program on over 400 stations. Amy is the best at what she does! On this segment, Amy talks about two genocides Indonesia committed, first against its own people in 1965 and then against the people of East Timor in 1975. Both of these mass slaughters were sanctioned by the United States government and aided by the C.I.A. Includes scenes from “Bitter Paradise,” a video by Elaine Briere. Amy Goodman was filmed by Ralph Cole of Justice Vision.

SEGMENT 8
8. The Panama Deception
(segment 22:10) read segment

Won the 1993 Academy Award for Best Documentary. Directed by Barbara Trent of the Empowerment Project. This film documents the untold story of the December 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama. The United States military deliberately attacked and destroyed primarily residential neighborhoods, killing an estimated 3 to 4 thousand people in the process. This segment exposes the role the U.S. government and the mainstream media play in suppressing information about U.S. foreign policy. Includes never before seen footage of this invasion. Narrated by (actress) Elizabeth Montgomery

This segment comes from the feature-length documentary ‘The Panama Deception’ available from The Empowerment Project

SEGMENT 9
9. Ramsey Clark, former U.S. Attorney General
(segment 7:58) read segment

Former Attorney General of the United States speaking in 1998 in Los Angeles. I was there that night and it was a very memorable evening called “Save the Iraqi Children.” Ramsey’s talk is very powerful as he conveys the sorry truth about U.S. foreign policy. He quotes Martin Luther King Jr. saying, “The greatest purveyor of violence on the earth is my own government.” The entire evening’s event was filmed by Ralph Cole of Justice Vision.

 

SEGMENT 10
10. S. Brian Willson, Vietnam Veteran and Peace Activist
(segment 8:45) read segment

Brian is the Vietnam veteran who, in 1987, lost both his legs when run over by a munitions train at the Concord Naval Weapons Station, located in California. The bombs and munitions aboard this train were bound for Central America. Brian is one of the most spiritual, courageous and honest activists who Wages Peace against our violent foreign policies. He is a hero in Central America where the people understand that he has stood up for their rights as equal human beings. Brian says that he doesnât want mothers and fathers and children to be killed and maimed in our name with our tax money!

In Solitary Episcopal Witness

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The following was written by Rev. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy.

****

Friends,

I hope you will be able to find the time to view this short documentary, In Solitary Episcopal Witness, on Bishop John Botean’s 2003 Pastoral Letter morally denouncing the War on Iraq as gravely evil. Bishop Botean, being a summa cum laude graduate in philosophy from the Catholic University of America, being an award-winning musician and being multi-lingual is as cognitively capable as any other Catholic bishop or priest. Yet, it is he alone who on March 7, AD 2003, less than two weeks before the government of the United States launched its invasion of Iraq on March 19, 2003, wrote a Pastoral Letter to the people of his diocese which was publicly read from every pulpit in every Romanian Catholic Church in the U.S. on Sunday, March 9, 2003.

In it Bishop Botean communicated to the people in his pastoral care that participation in the coming U.S. War against the people of Iraq would be participating in an unjust war, that is, in an intrinsically grave evil, by all the traditional moral standards of the Catholic Church. No other sitting Catholic Bishop of a diocese in the United States told his people before, or even during this decade long war, that this was by the standards of Jesus and Catholic moral theology an unjust war, and that therefore the killing and maiming done by those directly participating in it at any level was participation in unjustified homicide, which is always and under all circumstances gravely intrinsically evil and never morally permissible.

This mini-documentary, In Solitary Episcopal Witness, on Bishop John Botean and the source of his decision to publicly morally condemn the War on Iraq, is so titled as an allusion to Gordon Zahn’s seminal biography on Blessed Franz Jagerstatter, which is titled In Solitary Witness. The title was chosen not only because Bishop Botean is the only Catholic Bishop, who is the Ordinary of a diocese in the U.S., who so spoke about U.S. Catholic participation in the War in Iraq, but also, because like the decision of Blessed Franz Jagerstatter to reject Hitler’s call to arms, Bishop Botean’s Pastoral Letter on this matter did not find much support from many quarters from which vigorous support would have normally been expected. I suspect part of the reason for this is that in our gong-booming, cymbal-clashing, hyper-partisan politicized secular and religious society, Bishop Botean’s Pastoral Letter morally denouncing the War against Iraq finds little to nothing of its source, purpose, motivation or end in the world of governmental politics. Hence, liberal Catholic and Christian professional and amateur politicos and mass media pundits, and conservative Catholic and Christian politicos and mass media pundits—minus a few exceptions here and there—relegated this unique episcopal document in the history of the American Catholic Church to the “not-in-our-interests bin.”

Maybe this thirty-minute documentary can help make a bit clearer the whys and wherefores of Bishop Botean’s Pastoral Letter. And, maybe with such awareness it might be transferred to the “urgently-in-our-interests bin.”

There is much, much to ponder, personally and as Church, in this short video-documentary on the writing of a Pastoral Letter. I hope you will ponder it, share it and dialogue on it in light of the millions of human beings killed and maimed in Iraq since the day this Pastoral Letter was read from all the pulpits of one diocese in the United States. I hope you will do this because in the end this Pastoral and video are not exclusively, or even primarily, about a war or war. They are about the salvation of souls, the redemption of all humanity, by the only means by which the Nonviolent Jesus of the Gospels taught that humanity could be redeemed: love, love as He, who is the visible image of the invisible God, loved us.

***

 

Battlefields to Farmfields

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Good for these veterans. From the website groundoperations.net:

Our warriors are coming home from battle. They face a daunting transition back to civilian life, marked by unemployment, prescription drug addiction and astronomical suicide rates. They need a new mission.  Simultaneously, we are losing half of American farmers to retirement and the USDA is calling for one million new farmers to fill the gap.  Agriculture’s problem is the veterans’ solution. 

“Ground Operations: Battlefields to Farmfields” champions combat vets who are rebuilding their own lives as organic farmers & ranchers and revitalizing their communities with access to local, affordable, fresh, healthy food. These heroes blow the lid off stereotypes and you’ll be rooting for them all the way to your farmers market.

America needs a million new farmers. Veterans want the job!

On Company Business (1982)

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“This country has had a secret foreign policy since the end of the second World War. One of the essential instruments has been the Central Intelligence Agency…You have the U.S. govt making great moral pronouncements and statements while it’s using this instrument to penetrate, infiltrate and destroy anything which gets in the way of what they define as the interests of the U.S. If you look at the historical record you find that the operations they conduct…They haven’t bothered asking us if we feel threatened by this that or the other thing…and often they are economic interests that they are defending. As a matter of fact I would say almost always. Entities in this country don’t care whether an American worker has a job or not, and are doing everything they can to destroy the capability of anybody in these other countries controlling their own destiny.” — Alan Francovich, filmmaker

 

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Above is the documentary. Below is an interview with the filmmaker.

Alan Francovich is producer and director of the most definitive film on the CIA–the acclaimed three-hour documentary (Inside the CIA: On Company Business, 1980) –which took five years to make and required massive, world-wide research. The movie has won prizes at international film festivals and has been shown in over 30 countries. Francovich tells how the US government and the CIA have harassed him and have applied pressure to restrict the movie’s distribution. Francovich also relates some new information about the CIA and analyzes contemporary world events in light of this evidence.

The Houses are Full of Smoke

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This is volume 1 of a three-part documentary series released in 1987.

Series Synopsis (from VHS box):

A chilling documentary on U.S. policy in Central America, this three volume series, which took six years to make, was researched and filmed by Allan Francovich, best known for his award winning film about the CIA, On Company Business.

An astonishing range of characters tell their stories, from soon-to-be-assassinated Archbishop Oscar Romero to Salvadoran right wing leader Robert D’Aubuisson; from three then-Presidents of the three republics to Guatemala’s impoverished indigenous peoples; from ousted American Ambassador Robert White, CIA operatives, and National Security officials to the founder of El Salvador’s secret police, who speaks directly of the rape and murder of four American missionary women there, from the top death squad officials to remorseful triggermen whose gruesome accounts of kidnapping, torture and killing lend compelling moral urgency to the case against right-wing dogma.

“The issue is really whether the U.S. government instigated, trained and has direct knowledge regarding a whole series of murders – including American citizens plus hundreds of thousands of local people – and has covered it up. What people know about the world is controlled. These issues are crucial to democracy: without information you can’t expect the population to make decisions knowingly.” – Allan Francovich

“An eye-opening documentary about the Central American wars … the film’s most frightening sequences are bloodless interviews with right-wing vigilantes – self-possessed men of power who suavely deny their responsibility for crimes attributed to them by human rights organizations … a formidable work of investigative cinema.” – San Francisco Examiner

“Not to be destined a favorite in the White House screening room.” – The Washington Post

Youtube links:
Vol. 1 – Guatemala http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EIn2ev6sDk
Vol. 2 – El Salvador http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mev5jwfQdN4
Vol. 3 – Nicaragua http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7RD7DYomVw

Among the Righteous (2010)

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I found this PBS documentary just a bit hard to follow, but it is unique in that it focuses on the plight of Jews in North Africa during the Holocaust and tells the story of Arabs who rescued them or hid them. You can rent Among the Righteous on Amazon or watch it free here.   

 

Left: Si Ali Sakkat; Middle: Khaled Abdul Wahab; Right: Hamza Abdul Jalil

Left: Si Ali Sakkat; Middle: Khaled Abdul Wahab; Right: Hamza Abdul Jalil

A quick search of “Catholic” in the Righteous Among the Nations database appears to yield thousands of results. I believe it was when he was visiting the Garden of the Righteous Among the Nations in Israel when Robert Satloff recognized that there was not one Arab listed among the righteous. He found this conspicuous and set off to find the stories that he knew must be out there but must have remained hidden, for one reason or another, all this time.

Dirty Wars (2013) — Now on Netflix!

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This is one of the most thoughtful, poignant, and insightful documentaries I’ve ever seen about the War on Terror. “We” started with a kill list of 7 when “we” invaded Afghanistan. Then “we” had a kill list of about 50 in Iraq, all represented on a deck of cards. Now: thousands. It will never end. The War on Terror creates the enemies it was supposed to eliminate, like a perpetual motion machine.

Jeremy Scahill investigates the covert operations of JSOC, the Joint Special Operations Command, the paramilitary branch of the executive office that operates outside the traditional military, in secret, and is not subject to oversight or, apparently, the law.

One quote that stands out to me from the film, which was nominated in 2013 for an Academy Award, is when Scahill is interviewing a local warlord that JSOC has “outsourced” their killings to in Somalia, or Mali — I don’t know, one of those countries where “we” haven’t declared war, yet “we” are killing people anyway, routinely. When asked how he knows what to do, the local warlord says:

“Americans know war. They are masters of war. They are teachers. They are great teachers.”

 

No ROTC and JROTC at Catholic schools!

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***The following was written by Rev. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy***

Pope Francis could not be more correct: “the spirit of war comes from our own hearts* Indeed, “the wars, the hatred, the hostility aren’t products we buy at the market: they’re right here, in our hearts.” But, how does such a spirit get into our hearts? Does it come from being exposed to Christlike love as the most important, honorable, noble, heroic and valuable act that a person—young or old, male or female—can desire, imitate, choose and participate in with others?

 

and

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, as the old saw goes. With his Petrine faculty of universal jurisdiction, Pope Francis  could end tomorrow the terrible child abuse, mind manipulation and anti-mind of Christ practice in Catholic universities and high schools of recruiting and training Christian young men and women for war, that is, he could terminate all ROTC and JROTC programs at all Catholic educational institutions—starting, for the sake of good example, with his own Jesuit community’s educational facilities which are mired in these anti-Gospel change of heart, change of mind, pedagogical operations. It is not God or Jesus or the Holy Spirit that puts the spirit of war into the hearts of Christians. Si vis pacem, para bellum, “If you want peace, prepare for war,” is not the teaching of Jesus. This is contrary to the teaching of Jesus. For a Catholic high school or university to entice young men and women into that spirit or to foster that spirit under the auspices of Christian symbols, liturgy, sacramentals, authorities figures, etc. is blasphemous. Such a school, or Church drives the spirit war like a stake deep into the Sacred Heart of Jesus which the person received at his or her Baptism into Christ.

-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy

*Psychic activity is usually associated in the Bible with various organs. The chief of these is the heart. The Biblical idiom differs from the modern idiom in considering the heart as the seat of intelligence and decision, whereas today we would use mind and will. In the Biblical idiom the heart is the source of thoughts, desires and deeds. Thus a man is what his heart is. “The spirit of war which comes from our own hearts” is not only a personal spiritual problem for the individual Christian, it is equally, perhaps primarily, an institutional Church problem.

Dictionary of the Bible, ‘Heart’, Rev. John L. McKenzie