war on terror

We Are Change

There are conflicting accounts regarding how many people died in yesterday’s MOAB (Mother of all Bombs) bombing in Afghanistan. This was the first time this non-nuclear bomb was used in combat, marking a turning point in the War on Terror. Since U.S. reports suggest that offensive operations will continue against ISIS in Afghanistan, this may be just the first escalation in an evolving conflict.

In this month's subscriber-only podcast Pearse and I discuss the 1986 TV movie Under Siege. Co-written by former Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward on the surface this is a liberal take on the Reagan White House, but underneath is a profoundly neoconservative film.

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Julian of The Mind Renewed invited me back onto his show to discuss the link between false flag terrorism and training exercises. While this is usually talked about in a very simplistic and historically ignorant way, the method of using a drill or training exercise to cover for a black operation is a real tactic.

This week I joined Pearse to talk about the beginning of the new season of Homeland, and how it isn't quite what we expected. The entire 6th season is set between the US presidential election and inauguration day and while the president-elect is female, she is no Hitlery Clinton. Instead she is a peacenik who wants to withdraw from Syria, and believes the domestic terrorist threat is overblown.

Spies is the 'new' game show from Channel 4. I say 'new' because it's a blow-for-blow remake of the 2004 BBC series Spy, which also took a small group of members of the public and had three former spooks put them through their paces via a series of tests and training exercises.

United 93 was the first and - to date - the only major movie to depict what happened in the skies over the US on the morning of the 9/11 attacks. The film-makers intended it to be as accurate and realistic as possible, so they reached out to the Pentagon and the US Air Force in particular for assistance.

Charlie Wilson's War reduces nearly 10 years of the Soviet-Afghan War into an hour and forty minutes of Sorkin-scribed witty dialogue focusing almost entirely on how one alcoholic, womanising congressman helped to raise the billions of dollars that were given to the mujahideen to fight the godless Commie invaders.

Today we welcome back Robbie Martin of Media Roots and A Very Heavy Agenda to discuss the psychological impact of the most fierce and fearful US election in recent memory.

Today we take a look at the documentary series A Very Heavy Agenda by Robbie Martin, which I reviewed a few weeks ago.

The Battle of Algiers was a groundbreaking film when it came out in 1966, not just for its depiction of the Algerian War against French occupation but for its quasi-documentary realism and its morally neutral approach, showing both sides committing atrocities.

Robbie Martin is our final guest for this season as we dissect the 2012 docudrama Zero Dark Thirty. We discussed the difficulty in defining what kind of film this is - somewhere between a spy thriller, a documentary and a dry European art house movie.

The Department of Defense maintains a database summarising its collaboration with Hollywood productions. The master list for this database was released to me two years ago as the DOD Film List and since then I have obtained a handful of entries.

One of the most prominent influences of pop culture on government and on the deep state is in the use of code names. From the capture of Saddam Hussein to a counter-smuggling helicopter unit in Hawaii, from a mass surveillance program named after Blazing Saddles to Secret Service and MI5 code names taken from cartoon characters, this is a widespread and frequent phenomenon.

“Roof-knocking” warning missiles led to civilian deaths in Gaza. Now US is using them in Iraq.

Continuing our exploration into the origins and development of false flag operations, this week we look at World War 2 and the British Double Cross System. Run by an Oxford academic, this system was set up to detect Nazi agents as they landed in Britain and turn them into double agents working for the British.

This week I present a mini-documentary on the rise of the neocons in the 1970s and how they turned Cold War paranoia into War on Terror paranoia. I look at the people and organisations involved: Henry Jackson and the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, Richard Pipes and Team B, the reformed Committee on the Present Danger and how this all ties in with the Jerusalem Conference on International Terrorism in 1979.

In the first of a three-part series I look into the 1979 Jerusalem Conference on International Terrorism, where the ideology of the current War on Terror was conceived. I focus in on Benjamin Netanyahu, who hosted the conference and later wrote a book on all the major speeches and discussion. I round off by tracing the legacy of this conference via the example of the original Mohammed cartoons controversy in 2005.

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Guillermo Jimenez Presents Douglas Valentine

On this edition of De-Manufacturing Consent: Guillermo is joined by CIA expert and author of The Phoenix Program, Douglas Valentine. Douglas explains how the CIA’s proposed “sweeping organizational changes,” as reported in the Washington Post, are the natural evolution of a process that began in 1967 with the Phoenix Program in Vietnam.

Kenya Wildlife Service rangers with carcass of elephant. Photo by AFP.

Elephant poaching in Africa is now on the radar of the American security apparatus.