Stand Down! || Charlie Wilson's War

Charlie Wilson's War

By Hidari, Section Propaganda and media manipulation
Posted on Sun Jan 13, 2008 at 04:58:26 AM EST

To be repeated over and over again, by all voters in all of the 'Western' 'democracies': The media is (sic) not your friend. The media is not your friend. The media is not your friend.

The other main thing to bear in mind when considering any given media story is to ask oneself, NOT if it's 'true', but instead: 'Who would benefit if it was widely believed that this was true?'. Cui bono is, unfortunately, as relevant as it ever was.

Which brings us to the ridiculous new Hollywood movie, Charlie Wilson's War.

As Tom Engelhardt writes: 'Open Steve Coll's aptly titled book, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001, at almost any page and you're likely to find something that makes a mockery of the film Charlie Wilson's War. There, on p. 90, for instance, is the larger-than-life CIA director of the era, William Casey, the "Catholic Knight of Malta educated by Jesuits," who "believed fervently that by spreading the Catholic Church's reach and power he could contain Communism's advance, or reverse it." And, if you couldn't have the Church do it, as in Afghanistan in the 1980s, then second best, Casey believed, were the Islamic warriors of jihad, the more extreme the better, with whom, in his religio-anticommunism, he believed himself to have much in common. (The enemy of my enemy is my friend, after all.) Casey was, in fact, an American jihadi, eager in the 1980s not just to defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan, but to push "the Afghan jihad into the Soviet Union itself." His CIA, while funding activities like translating the Koran into Uzbek (Uzbekistan being, then, an SSR of the Soviet Union), was also, through Pakistan's intelligence service, funneling a vast flow of advanced weaponry regularly to the most extreme (and, even then, anti-American) of Afghan jihadis.'

As Chalmers Johnson writes in the same article, this 'boring' film 'makes the U.S. government look like it is populated by a bunch of whoring, drunken sleazebags, so in that sense it's accurate enough.'

However, accurate enough doesn't quite mean wholly accurate.

'"For the CIA legally to carry out a covert action, the president must sign off on--that is, authorize--a document called a 'finding.' Crile repeatedly says that President Carter signed such a finding ordering the CIA to provide covert backing to the mujahideen after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan on December 24, 1979. The truth of the matter is that Carter signed the finding on July 3, 1979, six months before the Soviet invasion, and he did so on the advice of his national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, in order to try to provoke a Russian incursion. Brzezinski has confirmed this sequence of events in an interview with a French newspaper, and former CIA Director [today Secretary of Defense] Robert Gates says so explicitly in his 1996 memoirs. It may surprise Charlie Wilson to learn that his heroic mujahideen were manipulated by Washington like so much cannon fodder in order to give the USSR its own Vietnam. The mujahideen did the job but as subsequent events have made clear, they may not be all that grateful to the United States."' (Note: this is all you need to know about 'our' 'heroic' adventure in Afghanistan).

Johnson continues: 'Which brings us back to the movie and its reception here. (It has been banned in Afghanistan.)' (this last is presumably part of the 'good news' that we are continually told by the extreme right is being withheld from us by the left wing media. I'm not joking here. I wish it was banned in my country).

Johnson sums up (after an eye opening series of quotes from the mainstream critics who praised the movie):

'My own view is that if Charlie Wilson's War is a comedy, it's the kind that goes over well with a roomful of louts in a college fraternity house. Simply put, it is imperialist propaganda and the tragedy is that four-and-a-half years after we invaded Iraq and destroyed it, such dangerously misleading nonsense is still being offered to a gullible public. The most accurate review so far is James Rocchi's summing-up for Cinematical: "Charlie Wilson's War isn't just bad history; it feels even more malign, like a conscious attempt to induce amnesia."'

This is entirely accurate, but misses out that the key task of almost all the mainstream media is to induce amnesia.

Charlie Wilson's War

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