Running Around In Circles

Conditions: What comes after Cats and Dogs?


Backslidin’

This week saw America take up station yet again, cowering fearfully under the bed. What is it this time, you ask? Gitmo prisoners. The guys illegally thrown into a stateless prison camp in Cuba and tortured for about seven years. President Obama made a promise to close the camp down, which means moving the inmates somewhere, and this week America got really scared about where.

Senators on Wednesday followed through with their vow to deny the Obama administration the necessary money to close the US prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Voting 90-6, the Senate stripped $80 million from a supplemental military funding bill, $50 million of which was designated to close the controversial prison and $30 million for a Justice Department investigation into interrogation techniques used there.

The amendment by Appropriations Committee Chairman Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) and Oklahoma Republican James Inhofe - both of whom have personally toured the prison - actually goes beyond the military supplemental to deny the administration any past money it could use to close the prison and transfer the prisoners into the United States.

The language reads, "None of the funds appropriated or otherwise made available by this Act or any prior Act may be used to transfer, release or incarcerate any individual who was detained as of May 19, 2009 at Naval Station, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to or within the United States."

Inouye was emphatic that Democrats still believe the prison should close, and that his amendment is only a "reality check" on the administration's intent to close it without a plan for the detainees being held there.

"This amendment is not a referendum on closing Guantanamo," Inouye said. "Instead, it should serve as a reality check since at this time the administration has not yet forwarded a coherent plan on foreclosing this prison."

- http://www.truthout.org/052009R

Well, you say that, but then:

Washington - A federal judge says the United States can continue to hold some prisoners at Guantanamo Bay indefinitely without any charges.

U.S. District Judge John Bates' opinion issued Tuesday night limited the Obama administration's definition of who can be held. But he said Congress in the days after Sept. 11, 2001 gave the president the authority to hold anyone involved in planning, aiding or carrying out the terrorist attacks.

- http://www.truthout.org/052109K

So not only do Americans not want detainees put into American prisons, there’s also the fact that they apparently can be left right where they are. So where is this coming from?

One of the main arguments put forward by Obama's critics is that the U.S. prison system can't handle terrorist detainees. On CNN yesterday, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) said that he didn't think that U.S. prison facilities "could keep some of these detainees secure, at the same time, protecting the surrounding communities."

So the feeling is that America’s prisons aren’t good enough to keep the Cuban detainees locked up. But that doesn’t make any sense at all.

As Durbin pointed out, the U.S. prison system is currently holding hundreds of convicted terrorists "including the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the shoe bomber, the Unibomber, and many others." Indeed, terrorists such as the Blind Sheikh and Zacarias Moussaoui were convicted and sentenced to life in prison at the Colorado Supermax. Additionally, the high-security wing of the naval brig in Charleston, SC, confined Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri for more than five years. The New Yorker's Jane Mayer has noted that, "[u]nlike the staff at Abu Ghraib, the brig staff had been trained for the job. Their mission, as they saw it, was to run a safe, professional, and humane prison, regardless of who was held there."

- alternet.org/

If there’s one thing America can do, it’s put people in jail, and keep them there. And of course if the detainees actually get to an America jail there’s the chance, remote but possible, that they may get some kind of access to the mythical American Justice System. Whoa, what a crazy idea that is. No wonder everyone's scared.



Spotlight on: Michael Biehn

Any film that has Michael Biehn in it is a good one, the man knows how to bring a fully-formed character and presence to the screen. Sadly, though, he seems to have been overlooked in recent years for actors who are frankly shallower. Well this sucks, and it's my pleasure to link to a great article that restates the greatness of Michael.

Michael Biehn is not only a great actor but a master of understatement whose acting style can be likened to Alec Guinness. Give that statement some thought before disregarding an action star. Biehn made the films he appeared in all the richer for his presence. Today he is still working, but relegated to crappy films (with the exception of Planet Terror), hardly the equal of his epochal triumphs.

The argument for Biehn’s greatness is in his natural style and relative restraint, which in hyperkinetic action films functions as a grounding influence, or a calm amidst the storm. His two greatest achievements are two of the greatest films of all time: Aliens and The Terminator. If you say Citizen Kane and Vertigo are greater, bear in mind you have seen Aliens about twenty times, and fell asleep during Citizen Kane. Twice.

- ruthlessreviews.com/

Film Review: Angels and Demons

Don’t tell anyone, but I kinda liked The Da Vinci Code. It wasn’t a great film, in fact it wasn’t really a film at all, more like a conspiracy-theory ice cream dipped in a thin coating of thriller-movie chocolate. But at least said conspiracy theory got a good airing out. The sequel, Angels and Demons, is more like an empty cone. Robert Langdon, the famous symbioligist, returns and is thrown into what appears to be a religious high-brow version of Die Hard 3. Yes, again with the Die Hard 3. It's Die Hard on a Pope. In Vatican city, during the election of a new pope, some guy has kidnapped four cardinals and rigged a bomb to explode at midnight. The only one who can stop it is a New York detec.... wait, no, it’s Tom Hanks. Here’s the difference between John McLane and Robert Langdon: While John would steal a taxi cab and charge through central park in order to jump onto a speeding subway car, Langdon’s first move is to get the local police to drive him to... the library. See, the Illuminati are fingered, and Robert figures out a trail of ancient breadcrumbs across Rome that will lead us ultimately to the bomb.

Which is really all a way of saying this movie is a chance to tourist our way through Rome and Vatican city without having to get on an airplane. And while the idea of the Illuminati trying to have their revenge on the Catholic church is interesting, ultimately the idea is given absolutely no development whatsoever. All we end up knowing about the Illuminati is what Robert tells us at the start. He’s too busy running from statue to statue, identifying markers and looking at maps. It’s a shame because I figured the idea behind these films was to make up for the lack of action sequences with some interesting historical revelations. Instead, we get some fairly pointless twists. Because there has to be big twists in this sort of thing. Everyone thinks this is going on here, and in fact it’s something else over here. Ewan Macgregor plays a very repressed priest and kind of gets lost among the fancy outfits and large sets.

Of course Da Vinci code was a film that was fairly hard on religion, and it almost seems Angels and Demons is trying desperately to make up for it. Robert himself is being told by the catholics in many spots to have respect and to take it easy, and there’s certainly a sense of giving importance and respect to the whole religion thing. Which harms the plot, because it means we can’t have any juicy flashbacks of all the apparent repression and violence inflicted on the scientists of the Illuminati by the Catholics in previous centuries. But in the end the Illuminati have nothing to do with it, and the film bumbles to a conclusion. Two Old Statues out of Five.


- Peace out

Back Again, Involuntarily

Conditions: Warm! Sunny! Dry!


He Said What?

At the dawn of the Obama administration, we were reassured that things would be different. That the old way of skulduggery and shadows would be over. That the legacy of keeping everything a dark and sinister secret had ended.

Washington - President Barack Obama will try to block the court-ordered release of hundreds of photos showing U.S. troops allegedly abusing prisoners, reversing his position after military commanders warned the graphic images could stoke anti-American sentiment and endanger soldiers.

And so the inevitable slide into the shoes of the previous tyrant begins. The America Obama represented when he was running for president was unafraid of the outcomes of truth, that truth itself was worth anything, any cost it could bring. And that crucially the only way to fix the moral hole America had dug itself was to remove the blindfolds that had enabled the hole to be dug in the first place.

Word of Obama's decision on Wednesday came after top military commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan expressed fears that publicizing the pictures could put their troops in danger. When the Abu Ghraib photos emerged in 2004 of grinning U.S. soldiers posing with detainees, some naked, some being held on leashes, they caused a huge anti-American backlash around the globe, particularly in the Muslim world.

Obama decided he did not feel comfortable with the photos' release, and was concerned it would inflame tensions in Iraq and Afghanistan, put U.S. soldiers at higher risk and make the U.S. mission in those two wars more difficult, according to White House officials.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters that the president was concerned that the photos' release would pose a national security threat, an argument the administration has not made yet in the courts.

"The president does not believe that the strongest case regarding the release of these photos was presented to the court and that was a case based on his concern about what the release would do to our national security," Gibbs said.

What happened to America the brave? What happened to Obama the strong? How did we end up right back in this position? And does anyone really think these photos aren’t going to eventually be released to the public, that eventually they’ll get out somehow? And are people going to be more or less mad when they do so unofficially?

The new case is a contrast to Obama's decision last month to release documents that documents that detailed brutal interrogation techniques used by the CIA against terror suspects. Those also came out in response to an ACLU lawsuit.

A military group said it was relieved Obama would fight the photos' release, adding that soldiers' lives could otherwise be put at risk. Brian Wise, executive Director of Military Families United, said the pictures "will only serve as propaganda to our enemies who will use the images as a recruitment tool to enlist terrorists."

"The president has said that he wants to improve the image of America throughout the world," Wise said in a statement. "This is not the way to accomplish that. These photos represent isolated incidents where the offending servicemen and women have already been prosecuted. There is no good that can come from releasing these photos."

- truthout.org/

What about truth? What about justice? Are these no good anymore? Is that the lesson we’re meant to take away from this decision.

Well frankly, yes. Yes it is.



Film Review: Star Trek 11

Well, here we are. After a number of disappointing attempts by the Next Generation crew to make a decent movie, Paramount has finally pulled the plug and gone back to the well, one more time, So, they’re back. Kirk, Spock, McCoy, etc are back on screen again. As a prequel, obviously, given the age and lack of life, in some cases, of the original actors. So a prequel they have made, in yet another attempt to reboot the franchise, and what better way to reboot the franchise than by having the bad guy travel through time and rewrite history. So now it’s all on, all of the previous films and T.V shows are rendered moot and assigned to a different reality, and we can boldly start again afresh.

Despite this, and because of the large cast of known characters, the film is a series of massive coincidences where future Enterprise crew-members keep bumping into each other. This is annoying, but tolerable. The casting mostly works, Zachary Quinto being the toughest sell. Due to his time playing a psycho on television you can never really erase that from his performance, despite the ears. McCoy however is brought back to life brilliantly by Karl Urban, doing a bang-on job and injecting some well-needed cantankerousness into proceedings. Kirk is fairly, grudgingly, well done. Played as impulsive, plucky and arrogant, childish and without the more calmer tinge Shatner and Shatner’s age brought to the role. But it does mostly work, despite me not wanting it to. Frankly, I’m uneasy about this idea. I prefer a character to belong to an actor, not get passed on like a quality suit. But that’s immature, good roles are immortal, and it seems the crew of the Enterprise may qualify.

They all need something better to do, though. The plot is ridiculous. Near the end we find out that the planet Romulus was somehow surprised by an exploding star and destroyed, despite Spock’s best efforts to stop it. So a surviving Romulan (Eric Bana: wasted) then somehow travels back in time in a mining ship, with Spock (who is, by far, the scariest-looking thing in the film. Lord I hope that was make up), in order to destroy the planet Vulcan. The Enterprise can’t do a thing to stop any of it. All they can do in the end, as Earth is threatened yet again, is just transport Kirk and (young) Spock aboard by themselves who proceed to shoot up the joint, transporting out at the last second. Relying on the transporter to save the day is starting to get a little old. In fact, it’s starting to get a lot old. Director JJ Abrams shakes the camera around for all he’s worth to try and wring some suspense out of a film where, despite all the apparent danger, no one can actually die. Pity, because the sequences looked as though they might have been quite good if we could have seen them.

So, to sum up, it’s a stupid, well acted film, populated with great characters that’s a desperate attempt to restart a franchise yet again. Furthermore, does this film really deserve any credit when it’s simply using characters and their implied chemistry that was forged by other people decades ago? And looking ahead to the next film in 2011, how can you have legacy and familiarity, the things that made the original movies work, when the crew are all kids again? A grudging Three and a Half stars out of Five.


- Peace out

Lessons in Futility

Conditions: Soaking wet.


Finding The Turd Of Truth

This week some airstrikes in Afghanistan, targeted against Taleban, killed a number of civilians. Which tragically, is nothing new. But what is a little new is the response of the Afghani president.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai has called on the US to halt air strikes in his country, following an attack that reportedly killed scores of civilians.

Mr Karzai, who is in Washington, told CNN air strikes were "not acceptable".

Afghan officials say more than 100 civilians died when US jets attacked targets in the western Farah province.

The incident overshadowed a summit on Wednesday between the President Barack Obama, Mr Karzai, and his Pakistani counterpart Asif Ali Zardari.

"We demand an end to these operations... an end to air strikes," Mr Karzai told CNN.

He said the deaths were "definitely" the result of US air strikes and not Taleban militants, as some US military officials had suggested.

"We believe strongly that air strikes are not an effective way of fighting terrorism, that air strikes rather cause civilian casualties and does not do good for the US, does not do good for Afghanistan," he said.

- news.bbc.co.uk/

Yes! Fighting terrorists with air strikes is like treating sunburn with limb-removal. Not helping. Surely this will force the Americans to re-think their operations in the already-ravaged country.

Pentagon officials believe that about 12 civilians were killed in U.S. airstrikes this week in Afghanistan, far fewer than numbers cited by Afghan provincial officials and the Red Cross.

Provincial officials said as many as 147 people were killed in fighting between insurgents and Afghan soldiers backed by U.S. forces. The International Committee of the Red Cross also has said there was a high civilian death toll.

Officials of the U.S.-led military command planned a news conference in Afghanistan today to discuss the incident.

The airstrikes on Monday, in the western province of Farah, were requested by Afghan army and police forces in the midst of battle against Taliban fighters and also killed an estimated 30 militants, Pentagon officials said.

A senior U.S. military official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Friday that American officials believed the civilian toll was grossly exaggerated as part of a public relations war.

"We are just too slow to get our message out on this. It has to be instant," the official said.

- latimes.com/

Oh. Oh, I see. So according to the Afghani officials, air strikes are a really stupid way to try and get terrorists. And according to the American officials, the priority is to do a better job of counting the number of civilians who get killed.

Sigh.



Film Review: Wolverine.

Question: What’s more frustrating than a revenge film that doesn’t have any revenge? Answer: A revengeless revenge film that’s also a prequel. Yes, despite it’s abundance of claws, fangs, and a great deal of rage, Wolverine turns out to be a bloodless, unfulfilling, waste of time. Set before the three X-Men films, it is therefore assured that the Wolverine himself will survive. And Sabertooth, Stryker, Cyclops, Gambit and all the other X-Men characters will also soldier through in order to keep their appointments in the set future. So nothing can really happen that we didn’t already know would happen. No one can even get hurt, especially since the two leads are essentially invulnerable. And that pisses me off.

The one thing that everyone truly understands is a ripping good revenge story, and it appears that Wolverine gives us a doozy. Our hero and his equally mutant brother, Vincent, run away from home and spend the next 100-odd years fighting various wars. They end up in an elite unit of other mutants just in time for Wolverine to decide he doesn’t want to fight anymore, so he quits. Which pisses off Vincent. Time passes, Wolverine has a nice life and a nice wife, and before you can say “huh?”, Vincent kills the wife for, well, no reason at all. So Wolverine wants revenge, and Stryker steps out of the blue to offer to help him by turning him into a weapon. Although odd, it does finally lead us up to a confrontation, only to get it all sucked away like oxygen out an air lock. See, the wife isn't dead at all, she was in on the plan from the beginning. - You know, the plan to turn Wolverine into an invulnerable weapon, that then runs amok. Sorry, but, is there any part of this plan that makes sense? By revealing the wife is not dead, and is part of the plan, the whole point, the entire central core of the film is lost. Now Wolverine doesn’t want to fight anymore, although he and his brother are forced to battle some crazy last-minute mutant experiment in order to use up the last of the effects budget. And everyone walks away sad. Except the wife, who accidentally gets shot. But it’s OK because by then Wolverine has had his memory wiped. I wish I could say the same.

This is ridiculous. It’s the most bloodless, unfocused, defused revenge story in the history of cinema. What is the freaking point? That Wolverine has anger issues? That his skeleton has metal grafted to it? That mutants is scary? We already know all that! Despite the point that the film has been shot fairly well, the entire thing is just an aimless wander through the X-men universe, leading us right back to where we started from. Some stories shouldn’t be told. One and a half drills to the face out of Five.



- Peace out

Another Year. Another ...Year

Conditions: Sunny.


Scuttle Scuttle.

Ahhh, torture. For years the dirty little secret of the American government. Now out in the cold sterile open. It skitters across our conscience like a cockroach on a kitchen floor, desperate to escape. Who will bring down the frying pan of justice?

Washington - President Barack Obama said Wednesday night that waterboarding authorized by former President George W. Bush was torture, and the information gained from terror suspects through its use could have been obtained by other means. "In some cases it may be harder," he conceded at a White House news conference marking a whirlwind first 100 days in office.

Well okay, then. Obama himself decrees that torture was going on. Whhaaap!, in other words.

Obama also said he was "absolutely convinced" he had acted correctly in banning waterboarding, an interrogation technique that simulates drowning, and approved making public the Bush administration memos detailing its use as well as other harsh methods used on terrorist suspects. "Not because there might not have been information that was yielded by these various detainees ... but because we could have gotten this information in other ways, in ways that were consistent with our values, in ways that were consistent with who we are."

- truthout.org/

So who dares cheer the cockroach now?

President Obama's vow to keep Americans safe is in conflict with his decision to limit interrogation techniques to the Army Field Manual, opponents of his anti-terror policies say.

The Army Field Manual, which includes interrogation methods intended for captured soldiers rather than hardened terrorists, is "not useful at all," David Rivkin, a former official in the Bush Justice Department, told FOX News. "In fact, the Army Field Manual is, let's say, so anemic, that it goes below the level of coercion associated with police station level of interrogation."

For instance, the time-honored technique of "good cop, bad cop" is in question because insults are not allowed.

Michael Scheuer, a former CIA employee wonders how far Obama would go if the U.S. captured a terrorist who said nuclear weapons were set to go off in some American cities but refused to say which ones.

"What do you do in that case?" Scheuer said. "Is the president's moral repulsion about techniques that have protected America more important that actually going after an attempt to use a nuclear device in the United States."

- foxnews.com/politics/

Fox News, always reliably batshit insane. So, the ticking timebomb scenario so favoured by the fiction-writers. Is that the back-of-the-refrigerator safe haven the cockroach of torture can escape to?

As soon as Bybee [Judge Bybee, on the U.S court of appeals] gave the green light, torture followed: Zubaydah was waterboarded at least 83 times in August 2002, according to another of the newly released memos. Unsurprisingly, it appears that no significant intelligence was gained by torturing this mentally ill Qaeda functionary. So why the overkill? Bybee's memo invoked a ticking time bomb: "There is currently a level of 'chatter' equal to that which preceded the September 11 attacks."
[...]

The report found that Maj. Paul Burney, a United States Army psychiatrist assigned to interrogations in Guantnamo Bay that summer of 2002, told Army investigators of another White House imperative: "A large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful." As higher-ups got more "frustrated" at the inability to prove this connection, the major said, "there was more and more pressure to resort to measures" that might produce that intelligence.

In other words, the ticking time bomb was not another potential Qaeda attack on America but the Bush administration's ticking timetable for selling a war in Iraq; it wanted to pressure Congress to pass a war resolution before the 2002 midterm elections. Bybee's memo was written the week after the then-secret (and subsequently leaked) "Downing Street memo," in which the head of British intelligence informed Tony Blair that the Bush White House was so determined to go to war in Iraq that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." A month after Bybee's memo, on Sept. 8, 2002, Cheney would make his infamous appearance on "Meet the Press," hyping both Saddam's W.M.D.s and the "number of contacts over the years" between Al Qaeda and Iraq. If only 9/11 could somehow be pinned on Iraq, the case for war would be a slamdunk.

But there were no links between 9/11 and Iraq, and the White House knew it. Torture may have been the last hope for coercing such bogus "intelligence" from detainees who would be tempted to say anything to stop the waterboarding.

- alternet.org/rights/

Denied! See, the thing about Jack Bauer electrocuting some asshole in order to find out where the next attack is about to take place is that: it’s bullshit! Life doesn’t work like that. And all the deluded assholes who’ve spent the last however many years torturing people in the belief of the ticking-bomb deserve to get thrown in jail, for their own benefit as well as the rest of us: Because they clearly need help to come back and live in the real world with the rest of us.



Film Review: The International.

Banks have been getting some bad publicity lately, so it’s not surprising the latest big Hollywood thriller is about an evil bank that has it’s fingers in everybody’s pies and only a few good people are trying to stop it. Clive Owen stars as, essentially, James Bond Lite, operating out of Interpol. He travels from city to city, all around the world, gradually pulling together the pieces of just how evil the IBBC bank is. Turns out financing international arms deals that develop into civil wars can create debt schemes that turn into nice earners for banks. Of course anyone who might give away the secret, or get in the way, has to be eliminated, which is what causes all the trouble.

Despite the gunfight in the Guggenheim museum, this is really a talkie, in the style of Michael Clayton. We get a glimpse of how ruthless the men of power behind the large organizations really are, and we watch an honest guy try to take them down. Unlike Michael Clayton, however, this film shows us that organizations like banks are larger than just their boards of directors. The company takes on a life of it’s own, and conducts business irregardless of the problems of individuals. These leaves the audience feeling a little hollow, not much is done, and not much can be done to stop large corporations from conducting immoral business practices.

It’s a well-made film, very international in scope, well paced and well acted by all. Clive grimaces his way toward a bitter ending while Naomi Watts and Armin Mueller-Stahl provide some interesting characters. Three and a Half Locations out of Five.


- Peace out