Topic: Dissent
Some things prove to be correct - and some notes on dealing with that.
Sometimes you have to ask the right questions, directly.
Eric Alterman does so at his MSNBC site "Altercation" -
And here I reformat for emphasis - one paragraph becomes many ...
As they say on the infomercials for kitchen gadgets, it's all this, and more!It's hard to say which is the best representation of what this war is doing to and has done to this country.
Is it the lies that were told to get us into it?
Is the fact that we are picking up innocent people off the street and torturing them?
Is it that we have suspended the most basic civil liberties in our own country?
Is it that the work of professional intelligence agencies has been corrupted?
Is it that we have drawn resources away from the fight against Al Qaida which has completely regrouped?
Is it that we are creating more terrorists?
Is it that more than seven hundred Americans have been killed and thousands have been seriously injured?
Is it that thousands of Iraqis have been killed but nobody is keeping an account of the numbers of their deaths?
Is it that we are now more hated around the world than we have ever been?
Is it that we have spent hundreds of billions of dollars while actually decreasing our security?
Is it that we are doing all this while starving the most crucial homeland security programs?
Is it that everyone who told the truth about what was being planned has been dismissed and seen their characters attacked?
Then Alterman links to an article by Mark Follman in salon.com - an interview and book review - regarding Thomas Powers and his views. Thomas Powers wrote Intelligence Wars: American Secret History From Hitler to Al Qaeda - and that book claims that "that the Bush administration is responsible for what is perhaps the greatest disaster in the history of U.S. intelligence."
The article is available only through subscription, but you get the idea. (And if you don't really care that much about copyright laws, the article is reprinted here in full: ... the Bush administration "correctly read how the various institutions of our government could be used to stage a kind of temporary coup on a single issue: Whether or not to go to war with Iraq.")
Out here in La-La Land, Tim Rutten of the Los Angeles Times explained a few weeks ago that this is quite an accomplishment -
And screwing up with Iraq, from the WMD business to maybe Chalabi being in bed with the mullahs running Iraq, is worse than all this?As Thomas Powers, one of America's foremost scholars of intelligence and the author of the forthcoming "Intelligence Wars: American Secret History From Hitler to Al-Qaeda," recently wrote, "In its first half-century the CIA got lots of things wrong.... In 1950 it failed to foresee intervention by the Chinese in the Korean War, a mistake that almost resulted in American armies being driven entirely from the peninsula. In 1968 the agency was surprised by the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, a failure repeated in 1979 when the agency failed to predict the Russian invasion of Afghanistan.
"Ten years after that the [CIA] estimators continued to issue new alarms about Soviet power and intentions almost until the very moment the Berlin Wall came down, signaling the true end of the cold war, an event soon followed by a still greater astonishment -- the actual collapse and breakup of the Soviet Union itself."
Maybe so. We got a whole lot of things quite wrong. But we meant well. We always mean well.
Alterman, above, says that everyone who told the truth about what was being planned has been dismissed and seen their characters attacked.
Oh heck. We need an example of that.
Scanning This Modern World one finds such an example.
There you will find a link to Move Forward America, which seems to be a Republican group mounting a grass-roots effort to pressure individual theatres and theater chains to not, under any circumstances, screen this film - or suffer the wrath of the right, or righteous, or whatever. The do provide a list of email addresses for major theatre chains and some individual theaters.
Ah, but that can be turned the other way. You, or anyone else, could go to the site and send emails saying that these folks SHOULD show the damned movie.
For starters I recommend dropping a line to these folks. When I lived there I used to patronize this place.
But you can look for movie houses in your own town.The Little Theatre
240 East Avenue Rochester, NY 14604
Phone: 585-232-3906
Email: info@little-theatre.com or marketing@little-theatre.com
Of course, viewing will be restricted even if the film is screened.
See Ratings row over Moore Iraq film
BBC, Monday, 14 June, 2004, 10:20 GMT 11:20 UK
If it is overturned, or not, it really doesn't matter. Any twelve-year-old knows how to get into an R-rated screening.The US distributors of Michael Moore's controversial documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 are to appeal a decision by US censors to give it a restrictive rating.
The Motion Picture Association Of America (MPAA) has rated the film R, meaning nobody under 17 can see it unless accompanied by an adult.
Moore has attacked the decision, saying that teenagers should be allowed to see the film unaccompanied.
... Lions Gate, one of two companies releasing the film in the US, called the decision "totally unjustified". The MPAA said that the rating was given for "violent and disturbing images and for language".
... Moore said: "It is sadly very possible that many 15- and 16-year-olds will be asked and recruited to serve in Iraq in the next couple of years. If they are old enough to be recruited and capable of being in combat and risking their lives, they certainly deserve the right to see what is going on in Iraq."
... IFC Entertainment, which is jointly distributing the film in the US along with Lions Gate, said it was confident the decision would be overturned.
Moore may be dismissed, and attacked, as Alterman suggests. But we will be able to see his film.
___
(By the way, This Modern World also provides a link to the background of those running Move Forward America - the organization trying to stop Michael Moore. Just your normal Republicans.)
Tip of the hat on this Moore thing to the cartoonist Tom Tomorrow of This Modern World. Great name.
Posted by Alan at 17:34 PDT
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Updated: Tuesday, 15 June 2004 10:06 PDT
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