Foundation Film With Fog of War, Wal-Mart, and The Corporation,
High points of this video:
1) General and President Eisenhower's son says on camara that his dad told him he wished we had never invented the nuclear bomb, when Truman used it it made him feel “low.”
2) Growing gap between the elite and the public. Still a general assumption by the public that the govenrment knows more than they do about the reasons for going to war.
3) Too many accept the premise that democracy can be imposed at gunpoint, and do not realize (see my review of book “The End of Faith”) that religious fanatism must be repressed before secular democracy can be adopted.
4) Huge segment on how the draft was our best defense against being manipulated, how the volunteer Army makes it possible for the elite to use the military for the wrong reasons while lying to the public.
5) Good references to how the rest of the world sees us as practicing economic colonialism combined with unilateral militarism.
6) Oil, oil, oil and lies, lies, lies.
7) Elite lesson from Viet-Nam was that death cannot be seen in US living rooms. The embedded media, far from being more useful is being distracted at the tactical level, and kept from focusing on the strategic question of “is this war necessary?”
8) Senator Byrd is featured as the lone adult voice against the war. Congress is widely perceived as having failed in every possible way because it is both beholden to the military-industrial complex and its bribes, and has (see my review of book “The Broken Branch”) abdicated its role as the “first” branch of government and accepted a subordinate role as “footsoldiers of the President.”
9) Perhaps most useful, as more and more voices call for the impeachment of Bush and Cheney, is the clips of the lies told to us on television by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice, interspersed with interviews of military and other intelligence analysts who now can speak of the truth as it was known then. This DVD could be “Exhibit A” in any impeachment trial.
10) Hottest quote: “A terrible thing when Americans can't trust their President….the government exploited (my emotions and trust after 9/11)”.
11) Those interviews believe that we had no exit strategy from Iraq precisely because Cheney and Rumsfeld did not plan to leave, and they cite as proof the fact that 14 permanent installations have been built in Iraq, instead of the reconstruction and stabilization of the civil sector that would normally be the priority in an exit strategy.
This is a compelling objective film. Those who demean it by associating it with the Oliver Stone JFK conspiracy documentary are doing Amazon readers and the DVD a great dis-service.
