Black Bird Press News & Review

Wednesday, March 23, 2016

Film review: My son the Fanatic


Monday, April 29, 2013

Marvin X reviews the film My Son the Fanatic


Understanding London--And Boston!


 

“If they are going to kill him. I don’t care. My oldest son is killed, so I don’t care. I don’t care if my youngest son is going to be killed today. I want the world to hear this. And, I don’t care if I am going to get killed too. And I will say Allahu Akbar!“--Mother of Boston Bombers
My Son the Fanatic
a film review
by 
Marvin X

In light of recent events in London (and now Boston), I thought it would be important for a clearer understanding of London's Muslim community (and America's) to resend this review of the film My Son The Fanatic. Most western politicians, media spooks and experts refuse to address the root cause of young men and women willing to self destruct as suicide bombers or why they choose to become fundamentalist Muslims. Westerners and the moderate Muslim experts continue in denial that white supremacy is the root cause of their former colonial subjects desire to remove the last vestiges of the disease of cultural imperialism.

White supremacy has spread hopelessness in young Muslims in Europe and cultural imperialism has spread it to the former colonies, now neo-colonial regimes best described by journalist Ayman Al Amir, who recently said, “Terrorism is the consequence of political ostracism, not religious fanaticism. It is fermented not in the mosques of Egypt or the madrassas of Pakistan but in solitary confinement cells, torture chambers, and the environment of fear wielded by dictatorial regimes.”

The film reveals that Muslims in Europe, and London in particular, are not only politically disenfranchised but culturally, economically, and spirituality alienated as well.

This alienation is simply the nature of the beast, the Mother Country, that devours the little people from the colonies who seek comfort in the Mother but are rejected for being less than human, thus in a twist of the Oedipus complex, they seek to destroy the Mother who has all but destroyed them, stunted their personalities and possibilities for human and spiritual development. (President Obama described the Boston bombers as stunted men!

The Review of the film My Son the Fanatic

…Essentially, it is about the colonized man, the colonized family and its attempt at de-colonization. Ironically, we are challenged to decide who is the fanatic, the father or the son, for both are battling their supposed demons. For the son, it is western culture—the father fights to escape eastern culture, i.e., his Pakistani roots. The son wants to return to his religious roots, Islamic fundamentalism. The father is fanatically in love with secularism—he is non-religious, in love with jazz, blues, alcohol and whores, one in particular.

What if Osama Bin Laden and his band of devils came to your house at the invitation of your son? When his son comes under the influence of fundamental Islam, he get his father to allow a Muslim teacher to visit from Lahore, Pakistan, turning the house into an Islamic center, which the father reluctantly allows because of his deep love for his son. Although he arranges for his son to marry a London policeman’s daughter, the son rejects his father’s request, opting for Islam, claiming the girl represents the worst of western culture. Couldn’t he see how the policeman abhorred him, the son asks the father.

The father is blind: his loveless job as a London taxi driver exposes him to street life and he succumbs, falling seriously in love with a whore, rejecting his homely wife who has failed to inspire him, perhaps because she doesn’t represent the decadent western culture he loves, symbolized and summarized in the whore. For him, the whore has life, love, tenderness, and freedom. Why can’t he get this at home? Is it because the wife represents the old world he rejects so totally?  …After his son and comrades attack the whores for being whores—the son actually attacks his father’s whore, spitting on her, and striking her in a violent anti-prostitution riot, forcing the father to expel the imam, with the son departing in disgust.
…In the German trick Mr. Schitz, we see the arrogance of western man who derides the father for being the “little man.” What can the little man from the East do with the white whore, the symbol of western civilization? The little man is inferior by nature, with defects, genetic of course, which disqualifies him from being on par with western man.

Mr. Schitz can pat the “little man” or eastern man on the head, kick him to the ground and apply any number of verbal insults, until eastern man finds a bat in the truck of his car and threatens to use it. Of course, this is the colonized man fighting back, regaining his manhood. The father fights on a personal level, the son on a politico-religious level, but both are fighting colonialism.

Their misunderstanding each other’s fight is symbolic of the tension between moderate and fundamental Muslims. We know we cannot go back to Islam of the Prophet’s day, but nor can we accept the passivity of the moderates. There is no excuse for one billion Muslims being humiliated by a few million Jews in Israel. This is not a question of hatred, but the result of political backwardness, the non-use of power. With Muslim unity, the Palestinian problem could be resolved tomorrow morning. 
Until contradictions between moderate and fundamental Muslims are resolved, eastern man will not be able to successfully challenge western man. This, of course, will necessitate revolution because moderate Muslims control most Islamic societies and have no plans to give up power without a struggle—those who struggle against them being described as terrorists to disqualify legitimate freedom fighters who will ultimately challenge the corrupt, undemocratic, secular Muslim nations.

The final question is what will be the nature of the new Nation of Islam. Can fundamentalism function in the modern era or is it antithetical? Will it be repressive, will it be democratic in any sense, not necessarily in the western democratic sense? Will Iran be an example? Tunisia? Turkey? For sure, the motion in the Muslim world will lead to a synthesis of the best of the old and the new. 

Let us understand clearly, if the reactionary secular regimes cannot or do not eradicate ignorance, poverty and disease, they will be replaced.

The father’s love of the whore was real. She represented the poor underclass that even the revolutionary son could not accept because of his moral myopia. If the father had married her (another wife being acceptable in Islam), perhaps the son would have respected him and the tension between the old and new would have eased, allowing the possibility of a better day.

After the present convolutions, look for a marriage between old Islam and the new, between East and West. We will either come together or go to hell together. For all his attempts to claim allegiance to the Islamic past, Osama Bin Laden is the most modern of men, using modern technology, modern weapons, modern financial systems, and modern media techniques to the best of his ability.
*   *   *   *   *
This film review appears in Marvin X's book of essays, In the Crazy House Called America, Black Bird Press, 2002. 
posted 5 August 2005


1 comment:

Marvin X. JackmonApril 29, 2013 at 4:12 PM
Sam Hamod
good review, marvin. but, as u point out, the west doesn't want to listen or to learn. just today, peter king, the idiot congressman and dual citizenship (usa and israel)is preaching Hitler tactics, forgetting what hitler did to the jews, but he obviously wants to copy hitler! king wants us to deal with muslims as america did with the japanese, to start keeping us all under surveillance. it seems he's unaware that there are more "terrorist acts" done by good ol' boys, and anglos than muslims, and that more zionists have betrayed america than any other group. ellison of minnesota answered him, but king and wolf blitzer didn't want to hear that it was nonsense, so wolf (who was born and raised in israel and brought to CNN, ousting other anchors in a split second)blitzer said he'd have king on again at 5 pm est, 4.29.13 to continue his lying and race and religion baiting. down with king, down with blitzer, as well as senator graham, the senile john mc cain and the ignorant john bolton (bosom and drinking buddy of gw bush)!
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Thursday, March 17, 2016

Too Funky in here



ain't no cult leader
manson type
jim jones
don't follow me
I follow you
how dat dare?
go to alley
right behind
on yo ass
no tricks
go head me
lead way
down fada down
solid
don't bend
solid
don't bend!
youngsters say
solid
don't bend
I'm woke!
I'm woke!
I'm woke!
too funky in here
what dat dare?
too funky funky.
--Marvin X
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Same lover same/different name same lover same


 
The poet and his Muse
Marvin X and Fahizah

Can you forget the angel in the night
rocked your world by day
shaking foundations of heart
how could she do this 
angel in the night
slipping up with love beyond love
never imagined 
ignorant love
not ready 
scared love
run
no hiding  
flee where
new lover same
new lover different name
name name
same lover same
no gain no gain
rain rain rain
same lover same
different lover same
different name same.
--Marvin X/El Muhajir
3/17/16

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BA RA KA Blessed


Blessed
BA RA KA
I fly
Upper Room
transcending you
most of all
you
ignorance of you
pissed off bout nothin
you
trippin you
high you
slide on by you
fuck you
bye bye bye
black bird
you
blessed
BA RA KA
in the upper room.
--El Muhajir
3/17/16

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Sunday, March 13, 2016

Marvin X poem: Beyond love, beyond hate, beyond mother-in-laws



Life has made us beyond just friends
Charlie Parker With Strings
Milford Graves said Charlie didn't want no strings
but had to eat feed his habit
Charlie just wanted to blow his horn 
wild as the wind
Sonny said My Brother the Wind
X said I am the Wind
a pleasure to my people
I am the sun
a pleasure to my people

Ra Ra
our love
blood mixed with love
beyond physical
love deeper than love
we don't even understand
deeper than Nancy/ Ronnie
Elijah/Clara
Malcolm/Betty
Amiri/Amina
deeper still
Martin/Coretta
go deeper nigguh
deep down to the purple funk of love


love mama taught
transcend  human
divine love
we deny exists
in our terribleness 
Baraka said

let me hold you
Like Verdia held her husband
when he returned for love
she awaited him
arms wide as the sky
embracing  sins
she care nothing about
love is greater than sin
sin is a foolish thing
confounding simple minds
minds of fools
fools rush beyond love to nothingness and dread
what is sin but the beginning of love
love is  drama
the joy and pain of love
sunshine and rain 
Franky B said
no matter 
love came upon us that day
will you deny
miss wonderful
black and beautiful
sucking my soul into yours
when you walked upon me
outside Dwindell Hall
black and beautiful
coming down the hill
a bird in flight to love
and here we are
decades later
still friends
in spite of it all
what power is greater
God is Love

life is simply wonderful.
Think about it, my dear.
Think about the love of Verdia
who taught us both how to love
did we learn the lesson
from the Master Teacher?
think about Verdia
no shame in her love
pure simple straight no chaser
tell me lies all night son in law
spit in my face all night tellin lies
son in law
drink that plum wine and lie
while I tell you the truth of my heart
my life

you real a real nigguh X son
solid don't break solid don't break
youngsters say
solid. don't break.


--MarvinX
3,12,16
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America's Angry White Men


What if white men, not black women, were caricatured as ‘angry’?

09/21/14 07:26 PM—Updated 09/21/14 07:41 PM

By Melissa Harris-Perry
By now, you’ve likely heard about the New York Times piece about the new ABC series “How to Get Away with Murder.” Written by Alessandra Stanley, the article purports to offer an analysis of the new Shonda Rhimes production that will premiere this week.
Shonda Rhimes in 2013.
Ron Sachs
Titled “Wrought in Their Creator’s Image,” it begins:
When Shonda Rhimes writes her autobiography, it should be called “How to Get Away With Being an Angry Black Woman.”
From there, it gets worse. The article has prompted many smart and careful responses, including Kara Brown’s on the feminist site Jezebel. She writes,
It’s just boggling that a New York Times television critic is unable to write about black women without calling upon three of the oldest racist stereotypes about black women.
And Margaret Lyons at Vulture, who reminds us there are just so many things wrong with the New York Times’ Shonda Rhimes article. Lyons goes on to carefully enumerate each of them.
And of course, Ms. Rhimes herself, who seemed more bewildered than enraged when she took to Twitter to fact-check the Times.
Confused why @nytimes critic doesn’t know identity of CREATOR of show she’s reviewing. @petenowa  did u know u were “an angry black woman”?
Yep, Rhimes is not, as Stanley asserts, the angry black woman creator of Annalise Keating. That honor belongs to Pete Nowalk, a white guy! Which is why Rhimes was clearly cracking herself up with this tweet:
Apparently we can be ‘angry black women’ together, because I didn’t know I was one either! @petenowa #LearnSomethingNewEveryday
With so many smart responses already recorded, I thought it might be valuable to try something different. What if we rewrote part of Stanley’s article–nearly word-for-word–about another hotly-anticipated show in the fall lineup.
Imagine this.
Wrought in Their Creator’s Image
When Aaron Sorkin writes his autobiography, it should be called “How to Get Away With Being an Angry White Man.” This week, HBO announced that Mr. Sorkin’s “The Newsroom” will return for its third and final season on November 9.
It is yet another series from Sorkin that showcases a powerful, intimidating white man. This one is Will McAvoy, a blustering, monologue-prone, workplace bully played by Jeff Daniels, who won an Emmy for the role in 2013. And that clinches it: Mr. Sorkin, who wrought Dan Rydell on “Sports Night” and Toby Ziegler on “The West Wing”  has done more to reset the image of white men on television than anyone since… Dr Phil.
Jeff Daniels, Aaron Sorkin
Jeff Daniels, right, a cast member in “The Newsroom,” poses with creator/executive producer Aaron Sorkin at the season 2 premiere of the HBO series at the…
Chris Pizzello
Be it Jeff Daniels on “Newsroom” or Martin Sheen on “The West Wing,” Sorkin’s white men can and do get angry. Although not written for TV, one of the more volcanic on-screen meltdowns in history belongs to a Sorkin white man: “You can’t handle the truth!”, from the Col. Nathan Jessup character played by Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men.
 Mr. Sorkin has embraced the trite-but-persistent caricature of the Angry White Man, recast it in his own image and made it enviable. His are not like the bossy, mouthy, salt-of-the-earth working-class men who have been scolding and fuming on-screen ever since Carroll O’Connor played Archie Bunker on “All in the Family.” They certainly are not as benign and reassuring as Chris Traeger, the athletic and energetic bureaucrat on “Parks and Recreation.”  Just think of how Traeger was literally laying the foundation for the vice-presidential campaign of Paul Ryan!

As Will McAvoy, actor Jeff Daniels, 59, is sexual–even sexy–in a slightly menacing way. But the actor doesn’t look at all like the typical star of a network drama. Ignoring the narrow beauty standards some white men are held to, Mr. Sorkin chose a performer who is older, paunchier and less classically beautiful than say, Patrick Dempsey of “Grey’s Anatomy,” or Scott Foley, who plays Jake on “Scandal.” 

Nobody thinks Aaron Sorkin is holding back. He, and his characters, are walking and talking all over the place.

I’m just hoping they encounter some angry black women in the corridors. Now that would make for good TV.

... angry white men from getting in, a poll released on Monday shows 

America's Angry White Men

11/01/2013 07:52 am ET | Updated Jan 23, 2014

  • Michael Kimmel Author
Remember Howard Beale? Played by Peter Finch in the movie Network (1976), the deranged former TV news anchor Beale tries to generate a social movement by admonishing viewers with a simple sentiment: "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!" Three decades later, there are still a host of Americans who feel mad as hell, and who are refusing to take it anymore.

Like Beale, a lot of them feel blindsided by history, and their rage is turned outwards, towards scapegoats and unseen forces, but rarely, as in the film, at the cynical elites who profit from Beale's descent into madeness.

And, like Beale, a lot of the current crop of the outraged are a lot of white men. Not all of them, of course. There are plenty of angry men of color and plenty of angry white women. Just look at those Tea Party rallies! But as a political movement, as the rank and file of America's fulminators -- whether the Tea Party or organizations on the extreme right wing, or the guys, always guys, who open fire on their classmates at school or their co-workers and colleagues at work, or the men, almost always men, who beat and murder those they claim to love, or the young men, always young men, who walk into movie theaters of places of worship with guns blazing -- well it's pretty hard to deny that they're virtually all white men. (And let us be clear: just because virtually all these cases are middle- and lower-middle class white men, does not for a nanosecond mean that all white men are crazed killers or white supremacists. All members of the Mafia may be Italian, but not all Italians are members of the Mafia.)

Yet deny it we do, often by assuming that these outbursts are motivated by anything at all -- mental illness, access to guns, video games, whatever -- other than gender. We'd notice, of course, if it were poor black girls pulling the triggers in school shootings, or women who walked into their workplaces with semi-automatic guns firing, or all Asians or Jews or Latinos who were shooting up our movie theaters and political rallies. But white men? Must be some other factor.

It seems so obvious, and yet so startling to see middle-class white American men, arguably the most privileged human beings on the planet (excluding, of course, hereditary aristocracies and the upper classes) fuming with such self-righteous outrage. (The comedian Louis CK gets this sense of privilege: "I'm a white man," he says, "How many advantages can one persona have?"
So, to research my book, Angry White Men, I traveled the country and interviewed scores of these guys -- from "men's rights" activists who think white men are the victims of the new discrimination, to the "white wing" on the rightward fringes of the American political spectrum, who believe they are watching "our" country being snatched away from them.

What unites them, I came to understand, was a sentiment I called "aggrieved entitlement." Raised to believe that this was "their" country, simply by being born white and male, they were entitled to a good job by which they could support a family as sole breadwinners, and to deference at home from adoring wives and obedient children. And not only do their kids and their wives have ideas of their own; not only is the competition for those jobs increasingly ferocious; they've also been slammed by predatory lenders, corporate moguls, Wall Street short-sellers betting against their own companies and manipulated by cynical elites into believing that their adversaries were not the ones downsizing, outsourcing and cutting their jobs, but those assorted others -- women, immigrants, gays, black people -- who were asserting their claims for a piece of the pie. The middle class white American man expected to be more Don Draper, all self-made , in control, and upwardly mobile. Instead he's more like William Foster, another fictional character who's fallen off the cliff into that dark abyss of despair, violence and madness.

Today's Angry White Men look backward, nostalgically at the world they have lost. Some organize politically to restore "their" country; some descend into madness; others lash out violently at a host of scapegoats. Theirs is a fight to restore, to reclaim more than just what they feel entitled to socially or economically -- it's also to restore their sense of manhood, to reclaim that sense of dominance and power to which they also feel entitled. They don't get mad, they want to get even -- but with whom?
Alas, that multicultural, democratic train has long ago left the station; it's impossible to imagine America rolling back the gains made by women, LGBT people, immigrants, people of color. Angry White Men may still strew some obstacles on that global path to greater equality, making the road bumpier. But its direction is clear. And the loudest screams are coming not from those whose fortunes are rising, but from those over whom the engines locomotives of history are rolling.

Here, then, is a gallery of some of the more prominent angry white men, both real and fictional. Each represents a different expression of that aggrieved entitlement; they are not a coherent and unified movement, and most of these men do not know each other nor recognize the others as fellow travelers. They are, instead, isolated Howard Beales, some with huge followings, to be sure, shouting into a strong headwind. The past may have been theirs, but the future belongs to others.

Angry White Men

Posted by www.blackbirdpressnews.blogspot.com at March 13, 2016 No comments:
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Friday, March 11, 2016

Nancy said No, Ronnie said yes, send Crack to the ghetto, guns to Contras, nuts to San Francisco


While Nancey said no at the front door of the White House, Ronnie said yes to Crack at the back door. Send Crack to the Negroes, buys guns with money, send guns to Contras in Nicaragua.

Dark Alliance



3 decades later, a mixed legacy for 'Just Say No'




By GENE JOHNSON March 8, 2016 6:09 PM




FILE - In this Nov. 18, 1988 file photo, former President Ronald Reagan hands a pen to then first lady Nancy Reagan after he signed a major anti-drug bill at a White House East Room ceremony in Washington. Reagan dedicated the bill to Nancy, who has led a "Just Say No" campaign among America's youth, and gave her the pen he used to sign the bill with. Nancy Reagan, who died Sunday, March 6, 2016, is perhaps best known for her "Just Say No" to drugs and alcohol campaign. Three decades after the campaign's heyday, prevention experts credit it with spawning a new generation of research into the best ways of reducing drug abuse. But they also say that many of the fear-based tactics it embraced didn't work.  (AP Photo/Ron Edmonds, File)
.
SEATTLE (AP) — For a generation of Americans, first lady Nancy Reagan was most closely associated with a single phrase: "Just Say No."

Three decades after the anti-drug campaign's heyday, its legacy is mixed. Experts say the slogan brought new attention to drug abuse and helped focus research on how to prevent it. But the motto was also part of a larger escalation of the drug war that relied on fear-based rhetoric, public moralizing and skyrocketing incarceration rates.

"Overall the larger prevention community is thankful for large campaigns like 'Just Say No,' for the broad, population-level awareness they raise," said Derek Franklin, who heads the Washington Association for Substance Abuse and Violence Prevention. "However, the sort of shaming attitude and questionable moral divide it created was something we wouldn't do today."

Further evidence of changing attitudes can be found in the movement to legalize marijuana, which is now permitted for medical use in 23 states and for recreational use in Colorado, Washington State, Oregon, Alaska and Washington, D.C.

Reagan, who died Sunday at 94, made "Just Say No" the hallmark of her tenure in the White House. She said she first became aware of the drug problem when she learned that the children of some of her friends were using drugs. Her own daughter, Patti Davis, later wrote of experimenting with pills and cocaine.

As Reagan once recalled, the idea emerged during a visit with schoolchildren in 1982 in Oakland, California. "A little girl raised her hand and said, 'Mrs. Reagan, what do you do if somebody offers you drugs?' And I said, 'Well, you just say no.' And there it was born."


 
FILE - In this Feb. 14, 1984 file photo, first lady …

FILE - In this Feb. 14, 1984 file photo, first lady Nancy Reagan sits with fourth- and fifth-graders …
At the time, Allan Cohen was the executive director of the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation, which had a federal contract to help states and local communities develop drug-abuse prevention programs. Cohen's organization had promoted and adopted the program the first lady visited in Oakland, called Oakland Parents in Action, which taught children skills for refusing drugs offered by their peers.
The message instantly resonated. By 1988, there were more than 12,000 "Just Say No" clubs around the country. Most were at least loosely based on the ideas developed in Oakland, Cohen said.
One of them was at Clyde Riggs Elementary in Portland, Tennessee. Helen Berry, the mother of a student there, was volunteering to help assemble a bulletin board one day in 1985 when a teacher showed her some "Just Say No" pamphlets.
"It was like a light bulb came on," Berry recalled. "I said, 'Wow, this is really important.'"
She went on to lead the school's "Just Say No" club for 25 years, bringing in emphysema patients to warn about the dangers of smoking and quizzing pupils about how long marijuana can stay in the body.

View gallery
FILE - In this Oct. 2, 1988 file photo, Washington …

FILE - In this Oct. 2, 1988 file photo, Washington Redskins injured starting quarterback Doug Williams
"I just thought it was an outstanding program for kids to see what drugs can do," Berry said. "I've had kids come up to me today who are in their 30s and say, 'Mrs. Berry, I want you to know I never touched a cigarette.'"

Many researchers remain skeptical of the campaign's effectiveness, associating it with the first lady's calls to be intolerant of drug users or with the famous television commercial that featured an actor dropping an egg into a frying pan and saying, "This is your brain on drugs. Any questions?"
It's apparent now that efforts to scare people into abstaining from drugs failed, they said.

"You think of 'Just Say No,' you think of eggs in a frying pan," said Caleb Banta-Green, a researcher at the University of Washington's Alcohol and Drug Abuse Institute. "Just because you remember it doesn't mean it worked. Addiction is a medical condition, but we still have a fundamental misunderstanding of what addiction is, and 'Just Say No' spread that misunderstanding."

Michelle Miller-Day, a professor at Chapman University in California, said the refrain might have been a simplistic message, but its popularity also focused the attention of researchers on the social context of drug use and on developing programs that would help youngsters refuse drugs or at least delay experimentation.

 
FILE - In this March 25, 1988 file photo, then first …

FILE - In this March 25, 1988 file photo, then first lady Nancy Reagan kicks off the NHL's " …
She worked with a colleague from Penn State University, Michael Hecht, to develop "Keepin' It REAL" — for Refuse, Explain, Avoid and Leave, a research-validated curriculum that the popular anti-drug program DARE adopted in 2009 as it was under fire about its effectiveness.

Cohen said there's no way to quantify the impact of "Just Say No," but it's unfair to conflate the campaign — a prevention effort aimed at middle or elementary school children — with criticism of the larger drug war or mass incarceration. And while the message may have seemed simple, the Oakland-developed curriculum was actually comprehensive, he said.

The issues "of criminal justice overreach or overstatement of the moral horrors of drug use were not much related to what the first lady was doing," Cohen said. "The greatest legacy was the promotion of preventive approaches, which at that point had almost been totally ignored."

These days, researchers have come up with better prevention programs, said Christopher Ringwalt, a prevention researcher at the University of North Carolina. But schools aren't necessarily using them. An emphasis on testing has squeezed prevention education out of many classrooms, he said.
"It's frustrating for people like me," Ringwalt said. "Attention has turned elsewhere."

Dark Alliance
AdChoices

Key Figures In CIA-Crack Cocaine Scandal Begin To Come Forward

  Oct 10, 2014

LOS ANGELES -- With the public in the U.S. and Latin America becoming increasingly skeptical of the war on drugs, key figures in a scandal that once rocked the Central Intelligence Agency are coming forward to tell their stories in a new documentary and in a series of interviews with The Huffington Post.

More than 18 years have passed since Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Gary Webb stunned the world with his “Dark Alliance” newspaper series investigating the connections between the CIA, a crack cocaine explosion in the predominantly African-American neighborhoods of South Los Angeles, and the Nicaraguan Contra fighters -- scandalous implications that outraged LA’s black community, severely damaged the intelligence agency's reputation and launched a number of federal investigations.

It did not end well for Webb, however. Major media, led by The New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, worked to discredit his story. Under intense pressure, Webb's top editor abandoned him. Webb was drummed out of journalism. One LA Times reporter recently apologized for his leading role in the assault on Webb, but it came too late. Webb died in 2004 from an apparent suicide. Obituaries referred to his investigation as "discredited."

Now, Webb’s bombshell expose is being explored anew in a documentary, “Freeway: Crack in the System,” directed by Marc Levin, which tells the story of “Freeway” Rick Ross, who created a crack empire in LA during the 1980s and is a key figure in Webb’s “Dark Alliance” narrative. The documentary is being released after the major motion picture “Kill The Messenger,” which features Jeremy Renner in the role of Webb and hits theaters on Friday.

Webb's investigation was published in the summer of 1996 in the San Jose Mercury News. In it, he reported that a drug ring that sold millions of dollars worth of cocaine in Los Angeles was funneling its profits to the CIA’s army in Nicaragua, known as the Contras.

Webb’s original anonymous source for his series was Coral Baca, a confidante of Nicaraguan dealer Rafael Cornejo. Baca, Ross and members of his “Freeway boys” crew; cocaine importer and distributor Danilo Blandon; and LA Sheriff's Deputy Robert Juarez all were interviewed for Levin's film.

The dual release of the feature film and the documentary, along with the willingness of long-hesitant sources to come forward, suggests that Webb may have the last word after all.
* * * * *
Webb’s entry point into the sordid tale of corruption was through Baca, a ghostlike figure in the Contra-cocaine narrative who has given precious few interviews over the decades. Her name was revealed in Webb's 1998 book on the scandal, but was removed at her request in the paperback edition. Levin connected HuffPost with Baca and she agreed to an interview at a cafe in San Francisco. She said that she and Webb didn’t speak for years after he revealed her name, in betrayal of the conditions under which they spoke. He eventually apologized, said Baca, who is played by Paz Vega in “Kill The Messenger."


The major media that worked to undermine Webb's investigation acknowledged that Blandon was a major drug-runner as well as a Contra supporter, and that Ross was a leading distributor. But those reports questioned how much drug money Blandon and his boss Norwin Meneses turned over to the Contras, and whether the Contras were aware of the source of the funds.

During her interview with HuffPost, Baca recounted meeting Contra leader Adolfo Calero multiple times in the 1980s at Contra fundraisers in the San Francisco Bay Area. He would personally pick up duffel bags full of drug money, she said, which it was her job to count for Cornejo. There was no question, she said, that Calero knew precisely how the money had been earned. Meneses' nickname, after all, was El Rey De Las Drogas -- The King of Drugs.

"If he was stupid and had a lobotomy," he might not have known it was drug money, Baca said. "He knew exactly what it was. He didn't care. He was there to fund the Contras, period." (Baca made a similar charge confidentially to the Department of Justice for its 1997 review of Webb's allegations, as well as further allegations the investigators rejected.)

Indeed, though the mainstream media at the time worked to poke holes in Webb's findings, believing that the Contra operation was not involved with drug-running takes an enormous suspension of disbelief. Even before Webb’s series was published, numerous government investigations and news reports had linked America's support for the Nicaraguan rebels with drug trafficking.

After The Associated Press reported on these connections in 1985, for example, more than a decade before Webb, then-Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) launched a congressional investigation. In 1989, Kerry released a detailed report claiming that not only was there “considerable evidence” linking the Contra effort to trafficking of drugs and weapons, but that the U.S. government knew about it.

According to the report, many of the pilots ferrying weapons and supplies south for the CIA were known to have backgrounds in drug trafficking. Kerry's investigation cited SETCO Aviation, the company the U.S. had contracted to handle many of the flights, as an example of CIA complicity in the drug trade. According to a 1983 Customs Service report, SETCO was “headed by Juan Ramon Matta Ballesteros, a class I DEA violator.”
Two years before the Iran-Contra scandal would begin to bubble up in the Reagan White House, pilot William Robert “Tosh” Plumlee revealed to then-Sen. Gary Hart (D-Colo.) that planes would routinely transport cocaine back to the U.S. after dropping off arms for the Nicaraguan rebels. Plumlee has since spoken in detail about the flights in media interviews.
 
“In March, 1983, Plumlee contacted my Denver Senate Office and … raised several issues including that covert U.S. intelligence agencies were directly involved in the smuggling and distribution of drugs to raise funds for covert military operations against the government of Nicaragua,” a copy of a 1991 letter from Hart to Kerry reads. (Hart told HuffPost he recalls receiving Plumlee's letter and finding his allegations worthy of follow-up.)

Plumlee flew weapons into Latin America for decades for the CIA. When the Contra revolution took off in the 1980s, Plumlee says he continued to transport arms south for the spy agency and bring cocaine back with him, with the blessing of the U.S. government.

The Calero transactions Baca says she witnessed would have been no surprise to the Reagan White House. On April 15, 1985, around the time Baca says she saw Calero accepting bags of cash, Oliver North, the White House National Security Counsel official in charge of the Contra operation, was notified in a memo that Calero’s deputies were involved in the drug business. Robert Owen, North’s top staffer in Central America, warned that Jose Robelo had “potential involvement with drug-running and the sale of goods provided by the [U.S. government]” and that Sebastian Gonzalez was “now involved in drug-running out of Panama.”


North’s own diary, originally uncovered by the National Security Archive, is a rich source of evidence as well. “Honduran DC-6 which is being used for runs out of New Orleans is probably being used for drug runs into the U.S.,” reads an entry for Aug. 9, 1985, reflecting a conversation North had with Owen about Mario Calero, Adolfo’s brother.

An entry from July 12, 1985 relates that “14 million to finance [an arms depot] came from drugs” and another references a trip to Bolivia to pick up “paste.” (Paste is slang term for a crude cocaine derivative product comprised of coca leaves grown in the Andes as well as processing chemicals used during the cocaine manufacturing process.)

Celerino Castillo, a top DEA agent in El Salvador, investigated the Contras' drug-running in the 1980s and repeatedly warned superiors, according to a Justice Department investigation into the matter. Castillo “believes that North and the Contras’ resupply operation at Ilopango were running drugs for the Contras,” Mike Foster, an FBI agent who worked for the Iran-Contra independent counsel Lawrence Walsh, reported in 1991 after meeting with Castillo, who later wrote the book Powderburns about his efforts to expose the drug-running.

* * * * *
Webb's investigation sent the CIA into a panic. A recently declassified article titled “Managing A Nightmare: CIA Public Affairs and the Drug Conspiracy Story,” from the agency’s internal journal, “Studies In Intelligence,” shows that the spy agency was reeling in the weeks that followed.

“The charges could hardly be worse,” the article opens. “A widely read newspaper series leads many Americans to believe CIA is guilty of at least complicity, if not conspiracy, in the outbreak of crack cocaine in America’s inner cities. In more extreme versions of the story circulating on talk radio and the Internet, the Agency was the instrument of a consistent strategy by the US Government to destroy the black community and to keep black Americans from advancing. Denunciations of CIA -- reminiscent of the 1970s -- abound. Investigations are demanded and initiated. The Congress gets involved.”

The emergence of Webb’s story “posed a genuine public relations crisis for the Agency,” writes the CIA Directorate of Intelligence staffer, whose name is redacted.

In December 1997, CIA sources helped advance that narrative, telling reporters that an internal inspector general report sparked by Webb's investigation had exonerated the agency.

Yet the report itself, quietly released several weeks later, was actually deeply damaging to the CIA.
“In 1984, CIA received allegations that five individuals associated with the Democratic Revolutionary Alliance (ARDE)/Sandino Revolutionary Front (FRS) were engaged in a drug trafficking conspiracy with a known narcotics trafficker, Jorge Morales,” the report found. “CIA broke off contact with ARDE in October 1984, but continued to have contact through 1986-87 with four of the individuals involved with Morales.”

It also found that in October 1982, an immigration officer reported that, according to an informant in the Nicaraguan exile community in the Bay Area, “there are indications of links between [a specific U.S.-based religious organization] and two Nicaraguan counter-revolutionary groups. These links involve an exchange in [the United States] of narcotics for arms, which then are shipped to Nicaragua. A meeting on this matter is scheduled to be held in Costa Rica ‘within one month.’ Two names the informant has associated with this matter are Bergman Arguello, a UDN member and exile living in San Francisco, and Chicano Cardenal, resident of Nicaragua."

The inspector general is clear that in some cases “CIA knowledge of allegations or information indicating that organizations or individuals had been involved in drug trafficking did not deter their use by CIA.” In other cases, “CIA did not act to verify drug trafficking allegations or information even when it had the opportunity to do so.”

“Let me be frank about what we are finding,” the CIA’s inspector general, Frederick Hitz, said in congressional testimony in March 1998. “There are instances where CIA did not, in an expeditious or consistent fashion, cut off relationships with individuals supporting the Contra program who were alleged to have engaged in drug trafficking activity or take action to resolve the allegations.”
* * * * *
One of the keys to Webb's story was testimony from Danilo Blandon, who the Department of Justice once described as one of the most significant Nicaraguan drug importers in the 1980s.
“You were running the LA operation, is that correct?” Blandon, who was serving as a government witness in the 1990s, was asked by Alan Fenster, attorney representing Rick Ross, in 1996.

“Yes. But remember, we were running, just -- whatever we were running in LA, it goes, the profit, it was going to the Contra revolution,” Blandon said.

Levin, the documentary filmmaker, tracked down Blandon in Managua.
“Gary Webb tried to find me, Congresswoman Maxine Waters tried to find me, Oliver Stone tried to find me. You found me,” Blandon told Levin, according to notes from the interview the director provided to HuffPost.

Waters, a congresswoman from Los Angeles, had followed Webb’s investigation with one of her own.

In the interview notes with filmmaker Levin, Blandon confirms his support of the Contras and his role in drug trafficking, but downplays his significance. "The big lie is that we started it all -- the crack epidemic -- we were just a small part. There were the Torres [brothers], the Colombians, and others," he says. "We were a little marble, pebble, rock and [people are] acting like we're big boulder."
kill
The Managua lumberyard where Levin tracked down Blandon.

Webb’s series connected the Contras' drug-running directly to the growth of crack in the U.S., and it was this connection that faced the most pushback from critics. While Blandon may have been operating on behalf of the Contras early in his career, they charged, he later broke off on his own. But an October 1986 arrest warrant for Blandon indicates that the LA County Sheriff's Department at the time had other information.

“Blandon is in charge of a sophisticated cocaine smuggling and distribution organization operating in southern California,” the warrant reads, according to Webb's orginal report. “The monies gained through the sales of cocaine are transported to Florida and laundered through Orlando Murillo who is a high-ranking officer in a chain of banks in Florida. … From this bank the monies are filtered to the Contra rebels to buy arms in the war in Nicaragua.”

Blandon's number-one client was “Freeway” Rick Ross, whose name has since been usurped by the rapper William Leonard Roberts, better known by his stage name “Rick Ross” (an indignity that plays a major role in the film). The original Ross, who was arrested in 1995 and freed from prison in 2009, told Webb in "Dark Alliance" that the prices and quantity Blandon was offering transformed him from a small-time dealer into what prosecutors would later describe as the most significant crack cocaine merchant in Los Angeles, if not the country.

His empire -- once dubbed the “Walmart” of crack cocaine -- expanded east from LA to major cities throughout the Midwest before he was eventually taken down during a DEA sting his old supplier and friend Blandon helped set up.
Levin's film not only explores the corrupt foundations of the drug war itself, but also calls into question the draconian jail sentences the U.S. justice system meted out to a mostly minority population, while the country's own foreign policy abetted the drug trade.
“I knew that these laws were a mistake when we were writing them," says Eric Sterling, who was counsel to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee in the 1980s and a key contributor to the passage of mandatory-minimum sentencing laws, in the documentary.
In 1980, there were roughly 40,000 drug offenders in U.S. prisons, according to research from The Sentencing Project, a prison sentencing reform group. By 2011, the number of drug offenders serving prison sentences ballooned to more than 500,000 -- most of whom are not high-level operators and are without prior criminal records.
"There is no question that there are tens of thousands of black people in prison serving sentences that are decades excessive,” Sterling says. “Their families have been destroyed because of laws I played a central role in writing.”
The height of the drug war in the 1980s also saw the beginning of the militarization of local law enforcement, the tentacles of which are seen to this day, most recently in Ferguson, Missouri.
In an interview with The Huffington Post, former LA County Sheriff's Deputy Robert Juarez, who served with the department from 1976 to 1991 and was later convicted along with several other deputies in 1992 during a federal investigation of sheriff officers stealing seized drug money, described a drug war culture that frequently put law enforcement officers into morally questionable situations that were difficult to navigate.
kill
The hunter and the hunted: A Los Angeles detective finally meets the kingpin he'd pursued.
“We all started getting weapons,” said Juarez, who served five years in prison for skimming drug-bust money. “We were hitting houses coming up with Uzis, AK-47s, and we’re walking in with a six-shooter and a shotgun. So guys started saying, 'I’m going to get me a semi-automatic and the crooks are paying for it.' So that’s how it started.”
But Juarez, who served in the LA County Sheriff’s narcotics division for nearly a decade, explained that what started as a way for some officers to pay for extra weapons and informants to aid in investigations quickly devolved into greed. Since asset forfeiture laws at the time allowed the county to keep all cash seized during a drug bust, Juarez says tactics changed.
“It got to where we were more tax collectors than we were dope cops,” Juarez recalled. “Everything seized was coming right back to the county. We turned into the same kind of crooks we’d been following around ... moving evidence around to make sure the asshole goes to jail; backing up other deputies regardless of what it was. Everyone, to use a drug dealer's term, everyone was taking a taste.”
* * * * *
Between 1982 and 1984, Congress restricted funding for the Contras, and by 1985 cut it off entirely. The Reagan administration, undeterred, conspired to sell arms to Iran in exchange for hostages, using some of the proceeds to illegally fund the Contras. The scandal became known as Iran-Contra.

Drug trafficking was a much less convoluted method of skirting the congressional ban on funding the Contras, and the CIA's inspector general found that in the early years after Congress cut off Contra funding, the CIA had alerted Congress about the allegations of drug trafficking. But while the ban was in effect, the CIA went largely silent on the issue.

“CIA did not inform Congress of all allegations or information it received indicating that Contra-related organizations or individuals were involved in drug trafficking,” the inspector general's report found. “During the period in which the FY 1987 statutory prohibition was in effect, for example, no information has been found to indicate that CIA informed Congress of eight of the ten Contra-related individuals concerning whom CIA had received drug trafficking allegations or information.”
This complicity of the CIA in drug trafficking is at the heart of Webb’s explosive expose -- a point Webb makes himself in archival interview footage that appears in Levin’s documentary.
“It’s not a situation where the government or the CIA sat down and said, 'Okay, let’s invent crack, let’s sell it in black neighborhoods, let’s decimate black America,’” Webb says. “It was a situation where, 'We need money for a covert operation, the quickest way to raise it is sell cocaine, you guys go sell it somewhere, we don’t want to know anything about it.'"



glad I heard Farrakhan; I stopped taking the pill… | Brother ...
Gary Webb and Sacramento Bee writer Fahizah Alim. She interviewed Gary before his "suicide" in Sacramento.
Posted by www.blackbirdpressnews.blogspot.com at March 11, 2016 No comments:
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Thursday, March 10, 2016

Who Needs Voters? The Sea Island Conspiracy

WHO NEEDS VOTERS?

The Sea Island Conspiracy

Pat Buchanan tells of anti-Trump meeting 'where oligarchs colluded with Beltway elites'


author-image  
Patrick J. Buchanan 
Pat Buchanan was twice a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination and the Reform Party's candidate in 2000. He is also a founder and editor of The American Conservative. Buchanan served three presidents in the White House, was a founding panelist of three national TV shows, and is the author of 10 books. His latest book is "The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon Rose From Defeat to Create the New Majority."

Over the long weekend before the Mississippi and Michigan primaries, the sky above Sea Island was black with corporate jets.

Apple’s Tim Cook, Google’s Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, Napster’s Sean Parker, Tesla Motors’ Elon Musk and other members of the super-rich were jetting in to the exclusive Georgia resort, ostensibly to participate in the annual World Forum of the American Enterprise Institute.
Among the advertised topics of discussion: “Millennials: How Much Do They Matter and What Do They Want?”

That was the cover story.

As revealed by the Huffington Post, Sea Island last weekend was host to a secret conclave at the Cloisters where oligarchs colluded with Beltway elites to reverse the democratic decisions of millions of voters and abort the candidacy of Donald Trump.

Among the journalists at Sea Island were Rich Lowry of National Review, which just devoted an entire issue to the topic “Against Trump,” and Arthur Sulzberger, publisher of the Trumphobic New York Times.

Bush guru Karl Rove of Fox News was on hand, as were Speaker Paul Ryan, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Sen. Lindsey Graham, dispatched by Trump in New Hampshire and a berserker on the subject of the Donald.

So, too, was William Kristol, editor of the rabidly anti-Trump Weekly Standard, who reported back to comrades: “The key task now, to … paraphrase Karl Marx, is less to understand Trump than to stop him.”

Kristol earlier tweeted that the Sea Island conclave is “off the record, so please do consider my tweets from there off the record.”

Redeeming itself for relegating Trump to its entertainment pages, the Huffington Post did the nation a service in lifting the rug on “something rotten in the state.”

What we see at Sea Island is that, despite all their babble about bringing the blessings of “democracy” to the world’s benighted, AEI, Neocon Central, believes less in democracy than in perpetual control of the American nation by the ruling Beltway elites.

If an outsider like Trump imperils that control, democracy be damned. The elites will come together to bring him down, because, behind party ties, they are soul brothers in the pursuit of power.
Something else was revealed by the Huffington Post – a deeply embedded corruption that permeates this capital city.

The American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research is a 501(c)(3) under IRS rules, an organization exempt from U.S. taxation.

Million-dollar corporate contributions to AEI are tax-deductible.

This special privilege, this freedom from taxation, is accorded to organizations established for purposes such as “religious, educational, charitable, scientific, literary … or the prevention of cruelty to children or animals.”

What the co-conspirators of Sea Island were up to at the Cloisters was about as religious as what the Bolsheviks at that girls school known as the Smolny Institute were up to in Petrograd in 1917.
From what has been reported, it would not be extreme to say this was a conspiracy of oligarchs, War Party neocons and face-card Republicans to reverse the results of the primaries and impose upon the party, against its expressed will, a nominee responsive to the elites’ agenda.

And this taxpayer-subsidized “Dump Trump” camarilla raises even larger issues.
Now America is not Russia or Egypt or China.

But all those countries are now moving purposefully to expose U.S. ties to nongovernmental organizations set up and operating in their capital cities.

Many of those NGOs have had funds funneled to them from U.S. agencies such as the National Endowment for Democracy, which has backed “color-coded revolutions” credited with dumping over regimes in Serbia, Ukraine and Georgia.

Like the reporting you see here? Sign up for free news alerts from WND.com, America’s independent news network.

In the early 1950s, in Iran and Guatemala, the CIA of the Dulles brothers did this work.
Whatever ones thinks of Vladimir Putin, can anyone blame him for not wanting U.S. agencies backing NGOs in Moscow, whose unstated goal is to see him and his regime overthrown?
And whatever one thinks of NED and its subsidiaries, it is time Americans took a hard look at the tax-exempt foundations, think tanks and public policy institutes operating in our capital city.
How many are like AEI, scheming to predetermine the outcome of presidential elections while enjoying tax exemptions and posturing as benign assemblages of disinterested scholars and seekers of truth?

How many of these tax-exempt think tanks are fronts and propaganda organs of transnational corporations that are sustained with tax-deductible dollars, until their “resident scholars” can move into government offices and do the work for which they have been paid handsomely in advance?
How many of these think tanks take foreign money to advance the interests of foreign regimes in America’s capital?

We talk about the “deep state” in Turkey and Egypt, the unseen regimes that exist beneath the public regime and rule the nation no matter the president or prime minister.
What about the “deep state” that rules us, of which we caught a glimpse at Sea Island?
A diligent legislature of a democratic republic would have long since dragged America’s deep state out into the sunlight.

Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2016/03/the-sea-island-conspiracy/#7IFLktwvBkzxrvRt.99
Posted by www.blackbirdpressnews.blogspot.com at March 10, 2016 No comments:
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Wednesday, March 9, 2016

Amiri Baraka vs Connie Chung - CNN, October 2002

Posted by www.blackbirdpressnews.blogspot.com at March 09, 2016 No comments:
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"It's Nation Time"

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Farrakhan on Hillary Clinton: 'That's a Wicked Woman"

Posted by www.blackbirdpressnews.blogspot.com at March 09, 2016 No comments:
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Marvin has been ignored and silenced,like Malcolm would be ignored and silenced if he had lived on into the Now. He's one of the most extraordinary, exciting black intellectuals living today --Rudolph Lewis, Chickenbones.
Truth will not make you rich, but it will make you free.
--Francis Bacon
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