Tag Archive: CIA


HOMELAND – TURN AND TURN AGAIN

Filed under: Fiction, Gender, Politics, Television — Leave a comment
May 7, 2012

Carrie and Brody lost in the maze on Homeland’s opening credits.

As the weeks have gone by, I’ve become more and more hooked on the TV series Homeland. and the final episode ,aired on Channel 4 on Sunday night , was so tense and gripping it left me drained.

What made (makes) this drama so absorbing is that all the main characters have secrets and issues with CIA agent Carrie and Sergeant Brody (Damian Lewis) having more than their fair share.

Carrie, brilliantly played by Claire Danes, is  a cocktail of positive and negative attributes – reckless, professional, brave, lonely, erratic, intuitive, manic, sexy and impulsive. Knowing that she’s a big fan of Jazz alerts us to the fact that she is no conventional heroine. Continue reading →

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SIEGE MENTALITY

Filed under: Movies, Politics — Leave a comment
October 23, 2011

THE SIEGE directed by Edward Zwick (1998).

"Who the fuck is supposed to be in charge here anyway?"

One of the most common reactions to 9/11 was that the events looked like they could have been staged by Hollywood.

One of the movies people may have had in mind was The Siege which was made in 1998 and anticipated the horror that was to strike NYC with scary accuracy.

This otherwise godawful film is proof of what Mike Davies wrote in his collection of essays,  ‘Dead Cities And Other Tales’: “It is important to recall the already fraught collective condition before Real Terror arrived in a fleet of hijacked airliners. [The 1990s] was an age of inexplicable anxiety”.  

Those terrible events of 2001 did not come out of a clear blue sky.

Arabs and Muslims were understandably enraged by being portrayed on-screen as terrorist monsters, calling Zwick’s movie “beyond offensive”. But Americans themselves are not portrayed in a particularly flattering light either. What begins as a standard thriller with the FBI on the trail of the ‘enemy within’ turns in to a dystopian nightmare in which the nation’s leaders and their appointed protectors have as much the dignity and organisation as a brood of headless chickens. Continue reading →

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Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine

Filed under: Books, Politics — 2 Comments
January 31, 2008

‘The Shock Book coverDoctrine – The Rise of Disaster Capitalism’ by Naomi Klein is a must read for anyone who still believes that the economic policies of the free market are concerned to give personal liberty for all.

Klein uses torture as a metaphor to show that the barbaric techniques used in what, in Orwellian language,the CIA call “coercive interrogation” have a parallel with the distorted thinking behind laissez-faire economics which she views as “different manifestations of the same terrifying logic“. Continue reading →

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