A powerful punch in a small package

I’ve always been a sucker for movies – they are such a vibrant art form, engaging so many of the senses. I’m a big reader, but I sheepishly admit that a movie telling the same story does have a number of advantages. One is that a viewer doesn’t have to work as hard as a reader, or spend as much time. The producer has already made those hard artistic choices, and the result is shorter and already partially digested. (You could argue that this is a downside to movies, but I am focusing here on the positive aspects.)

A movie has the ability to pull us down into the rabbit hole of the producer’s creation. I personally understand the power of film, as the documentary Invisible Ballots launched my initial leap into activism through my lending library project. Almost 3,200 copies later, I’m definitely sold on a film’s ability to make a case.

While the natural human fascination with gossip and backbiting among our rulers guarantees media coverage and best-seller status for George Tenet's new memoir, the former CIA director cannot achieve absolution in print or on television. His clumsy attempts to shift the blame to Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and their rebuttals are titillating but ultimately pointless. He is right about them, of course, but they are right about him, too.

            History will absolve none of them. With thousands of Americans and Iraqis dead and national honor permanently tarnished, there is more than enough blame to go around.

            As a group of former intelligence officers observed in a letter they sent to Tenet upon the publication of "At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA," his outrage over the misleading propaganda that led to the war is belated and utterly self-serving. During the critical months between September 2002 and March 2003, in the midst of that White House campaign, he was nothing but the useful tool of those he now criticizes.

Bobby

Bobby is an ensemble film about the disparate characters at the Los Angeles Ambassador Hotel during the events leading up to Robert Kennedy's assassination there in June, 1968. Directed by actor Emilio Estevez, the film portrays various racial and class conflicts among the characters. They include a retired doorman, a soldier to be and his fiancée, an aging alcoholic singer and her miserable musician husband, two campaign workers who drop acid with a hippie, a Czech reporter who tries to get an interview with Kennedy, only to be rebuffed by a campaign official, to name a few characters.

From the new updated and expanded paperback edition of the bestseller Armed Madhouse in stores now.

Since the initial release of Armed Madhouse in June 2006, much has changed in America.

The Department of Homeland Security, after a five-year hunt for Osama, finally brought charges against... Greg Palast.

As America crawled toward the fifth anniversary of the September 11 attack, Homeland Security charged me and my US producer Matt Pascarella with violating the anti-terror laws.

Don't you feel safer?

And I confess: we're guilty.

On August 22, 2006, we were videotaping Katrina evacuees still held behind barbed wire in a trailer park encampment a hundred miles from New Orleans. It had been a year since the hurricane and 73,000 POW's (Prisoners of Dubya) were still in mobile home Gulags. I arranged a surreptitious visit with Pamela Lewis, one of the unwilling guests of George Bush's Guantanamo on wheels. She told me, "It's a prison set-up" - except there are no home furloughs for these inmates because they no longer have homes.

Before President Bush fired his sorry ass, US Attorney David Iglesias of New Mexico, in a last sad attempt to suck up to his Republican padrones, allowed his chief mouthpiece, Norm Cairns, to speak with me. He shouldn’t have.

That was two years back, while I was investigating strange doings in New Mexico and Arizona, where, simultaneously, state legislators, Republicans all, claimed they had evidence of “voter fraud.” Psychiatrists call this kind of mutual delusional behavior folie a deux. I suspected something else: I smelled Karl Rove.

In the New Mexico legislature, a suburban Albuquerque political hackette, Justine Fox-Young (her real name), claimed to have “several” specific cases of vote identity rustling. Like Joe McCarthy waving his list of “Communists,” she waived documents of “evidence” of illegal voting on the floor of the Legislature. I called Ms. Fox-Young and asked her to send me the papers.

The “evidence” never arrived. Maybe her fax machine was broken. I called Justine.

Q. Justine, you’ve uncovered criminals! Did you turn their names over to the US Attorney?

A. Well, no, but someone did.