Idiots & incompetents Wanted: Probe finds NYC jail guards hired despite arrests, gang ties

Aljazeera

More than one-third of jail guards recently hired by the New York City Department of Correction (DOC) had previous gang affiliations, criminal histories or significant psychological problems, the city Department of Investigation (DOI) said on Thursday.

Investigators randomly pulled 153 application files of guards hired last year and found that 54 — or 35 percent — "presented significant red flags that should have either precluded their hiring outright or required further follow-up."

The probe found 79 hired officers admitted having friends or family members who were inmates — including one with nine relatives who had served time in Rikers Island jail complex. Ten new hires had been arrested more than once, and another 12 had been rejected by the significantly higher standards of the New York Police Department, including six for psychological reasons and one who failed a drug test.

To become a correction officer, candidates who take a civil service exam are vetted by jail application investigators, who conduct background checks, psychological screenings and other evaluations. A jail official then recommends an applicant be accepted or rejected, but the deputy commissioner in charge of hiring can override that decision.

Jails Commissioner Joseph Ponte, who has pledged to reform the troubled correction department, said in a statement he was committed to "improving staff recruitment, training and retention" and would implement many of the investigators' recommendations, automatically disqualifying applicants who had been fired from a public agency or had any felony convictions in the past five years.

All of the applicants reviewed in the DOI report were hired before Ponte took office in April 2014.

Among other findings, there was no evidence applicants had been screened for gang affiliation, even though the jails' own intelligence officers rank it as the top threat to safety. It wasn't until after probe began that the jails began taking photos of applicants' tattoos to check for possible gang ties.

Following the investigation, three of the problem hires have already been fired for misconduct, including one who had an "unduly familiar" relationship with an inmate later arrested in a murder-for-hire plot. Two of the hires resigned.

For the poor in Haiti, government shutdown has little effect

Aljazeera

For some Haitians, the legislative and constitutional crisis paralyzing this Caribbean country seems planets away. Despite the street protests calling for the president to step down and a political crisis unlike any the country had seen in years, most Haitians watch from the sidelines. In areas like Canaan, the government has little impact on people’s lives. Residents remain preoccupied with the continuing fallout of the earthquake and nonexistent state services, and they are disillusioned after years of political impasse and broken promises.

The 2010 earthquake, which killed more than 200,000 people and upended the lives of millions, had a devastating impact on the government’s ability to function. Some 17 percent of Haiti’s civil service was killed. The presidential palace, the parliament building and 28 of the 29 ministry buildings in the capital were damaged beyond repair.

Five years on, there are some clear signs of progress. Rubble that once littered the streets has been cleared. Many of the hundreds of thousands of displaced people, who once sheltered in makeshift camps across the city, have moved to more permanent housing. Government buildings, including a new Supreme Court, are being constructed.

But progress has been slow and uneven. In the past few years, tens of thousands of people were forcefully evicted from camps and pushed further into poverty and insecurity, according to Amnesty International. The United Nations estimates that at least 85,000 people still live in camps. Many of the promises made after the earthquake, including new jobs, the construction of tens of thousands of homes and other projects under the objective of helping the country build back better have been slow to realize.

“People live in precarious conditions,” said Nixon Boumba, a community organizer from the Mouvman Demokratik Popilè, a local civil society organization. “They are more and more interested in satisfying their immediate needs.”

The controversial 2010 elections, held shortly after the earthquake, left the government on an unstable footing. Martelly, who entered office in 2011, has not called for legislative elections for three years. Opposition lawmakers have also blocked steps toward a vote, saying he has taken a series of unconstitutional steps that would allow him unfair influence over any elections.

With no decision between the legislative and executive branches over elections, on Monday the terms of a third of Haiti’s Senate and those of the entire House of Deputies expired, leaving the president to rule by decree. Opposition organizers vowed to step up their efforts, calling it the final stage of Operation Burkina Faso, named after the popular uprising that in October 2014 toppled a president who had ruled for 27 years in the West African country.

Despite the lack of governance and rule of law reaching a new low in Haiti, in many locales, the government shutdown has not yet been widely felt. Haiti has the second-largest income disparity in the world, according to the World Bank. In such conditions, along with the political impasse and slow distribution of aid, some say the state’s impact on some disenfranchised populations has been minimal.

Ebola: New vaccine trial begins

BlackListed News

The trial involves volunteers receiving an additional booster dose one or two months after the initial injection. Scientists at Oxford University have begun immunising healthy volunteers with a new Ebola vaccine. In September last year a separate trial of another Ebola vaccine got under way in the city.

Under Obama Administration More Killed People [all non-white] with Drones than Died On 9/11

BlackListedNews

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reports that up to 4,404 people have been killed – just in Pakistan and Yemen alone – between 2004 and 2014. While it’s hard to estimate how many additional people have been killed by drone in Iraq and Afghanistan, a December 2012 report by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism found that US and UK forces had carried out over 1,000 drone strikes in Afghanistan over the previous five years. Given thatnumerous people are often killed by each drone strike, it is reasonable to assume that several thousand people have been killed by drone in that country.

Racist Israel to ask US Congress to halt aid to Palestinian Authority

CLG

Move follows freeze on millions in tax revenues after ICC bid; Palestinians looking to resubmit statehood bid. Israel was weighing its options Sunday for further punishing the Palestinians after freezing millions in tax revenues as a first response to their bid to join the International Criminal Court. A senior Israeli said Jerusalem would lobby pro-Israel members of the US Congress to enforce a law that would halt $400 million in annual American aid to the Palestinian Authority, Israeli daily Haaretz reported. [MORE]

O'Reilly Hosts Former KKK Leader David Duke To Defend GOP Rep. For Speaking To White Supremacist Group

MediaMatters

Bill O'Reilly interviewed former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke about GOP Rep. Steve Scalise's address to a white supremacist group in a segment Duke turned into a bizarre defense of his reputation.

Scalise, who has a leadership position in the GOP as the House Majority Whip, has apologized for speaking to a white supremacist conference in 2002. Conservative media are divided on whether Scalise is a victim of the media, or made a mistake serious enough for him to resign his leadership post.

During his January 5 Fox News appearance, Duke denied he was ever a white supremacist, insisting that his organization, the European-American Unity and Rights Organization (EURO), was "a chartered human rights organization," and described affirmative action programs as racially discriminatory. Duke gave cover to Scalise, insisting that he can't be sure if Scalise ever addressed his organization. O'Reilly pushed back against Duke's insistence that he was never a white supremacist, saying "don't sit here and tell me that you're not trying to promote the cause of the white people, because you are."

As the interview ended, Duke held up a picture of President Obama labeled "Communist Terrorist Murderer." 

Duke also appeared on CNN on January 3, where Michael Smerconish pressed him to acknowledge that the Holocaust occurred.

New York City Sends $30 Million a Year to School With History of Giving Kids Electric Shocks

Propublica

The Judge Rotenberg Center, a Boston-area school for kids with severe developmental disabilities and behavior disorders, has earned national notoriety for a long record of brutal techniques to keep children in line.

Electric shocks. Restraints. Hunger.

Federal and state authorities have repeatedly scrutinized the school. Even the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on torture has chimed in.

But New York City kids are still being sent there. Indeed, nearly 90 percent of the school’s students — 121 of 137 kids — are from New York City, including 29 who enrolled this year. New York’s taxpayers send the Center $30 million a year.

The flow has continued despite records obtained by ProPublica showing the Center has repeatedly violated New York state rules, including by tying children down with leg and waist straps to punish them. The Center has received a string of warning letters from New York State and has been subject to two state inquiries over the past five years — neither of them previously disclosed to the public.

City education officials insist they never recommend the school and fight requests by parents to place children there. Families simply enroll their kids and then take the city to court to force it to pay tuition, officials say.

But Judge Rotenberg officials told ProPublica that Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration has made it easier for New York City kids to go to school at the Center.

Number of Districts with Currently Open Desegregation Orders

Propublica

Across the United States, some school districts are bound by orders to increase the racial integration of black and Latino students and improve their educational opportunities. Some of the orders are mandated by federal courts. Others resulted from voluntary agreements between school districts or other educational institutions and the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights. Over the last 15 years, many orders have been lifted. This has left many communities uncertain of whether orders still exist and hobbled efforts to ensure they are being followed. The map and tables below are the most comprehensive record of these orders, including never-before-released data on ongoing voluntary desegregation agreements from the Department of Education. [MORE]

NAACP Legal Defense Fund asks Missouri Judge to Re-open Ferguson Case based on Prosecutorial Misconduct

ThinkProgress

The NAACP Legal Defense Fund* wrote an open letter to Missouri Judge Maura McShane asking her to investigate Ferguson prosecutor Bob McCulloch and his team for misconduct. The NAACP notes that, under Missouri law, McShane has the authority to investigate McCulloch and appoint a new special prosecutor to handle the case against Darren Wilson. Such a move would effectively restart the case against Wilson for killing Michael Brown, after no charges were filed against Wilson during last year’s grand jury proceeding.

The group of experts assembled by the NAACP to review the grand jury transcripts “were struck by the deeply unfair manner in which the proceedings were conducted.” The NAACP cites three areas of particular concern.

1. McCulloch and his team “knowingly presented false witness testimony to the grand jury.” McCulloch admitted this on a radio interview on December 19. The NAACP notes this is likely a violation of the Missouri Rules of Professional Conduct. Specifically, McCulloch allowed a woman to testify as an eyewitness who he knew was not at the scene of the incident and had a history of “racially-charged rants about the incident on the internet.”

2. McCulloch and his team “presented incorrect and misleading statements of law to the grand jury and sanctioned unlawful juror practices.” Specifically, Assistant Prosecuting Attorney Kathi Alizadeh distributed copies of a Missouri statute that was contravened by a Supreme Court decision 30 years earlier. When Alizadeh addressed the issue weeks later she said that the statute was “not entirely incorrect or inaccurate” but the grand jury should “disregard” it. At other times, Ms. Alizadeh seems genuinely confused about what legal standards were at issue and shared her confusion with the grand jury, including this remarkable exchange:

CREDIT: NAACP

The NAACP notes that the prosecutors also encourage the grand jury to conduct their own internet research on the case, despite explicit instructions from the judge not to do so:

CREDIT: NAACP

Overall the NAACP finds that there are “fundamental questions about the competency of the prosecutors in this case to conduct the proceedings and the fairness of the proceedings overall.”

3. McCulloch and his team “provided favorable treatment to the target of the grand jury proceedings.” McCulloch, at the outset of the case, told the grand jury that the case was “special.” As the case progressed “the questioning of witnesses often appeared to advocate for defendant Wilson’s version of the shooting.” When the prosecutors questioned Wilson they asked him: “[I]f we are sort of done with your questioning, is there anything that we have not asked you that you want us to know or you think it is important for the jurors to consider regarding this incident?”

The NAACP concludes that the entire process “leaves deeply troubling doubts about whether about whether justice was administered in a fair, impartial and competent manner.” The NAACP encourages Judge McShane to consider “remedial action — through a new grand jury, appointment of a new special prosecutor, or other means.”

In a footnote, the NAACP cites the law — Missouri Statute 56.110 — that gives Judge McShane the power to restart the case against Wilson.

*The NAACP Legal Defense Fund is formally a different organization than the NAACP.

US police brutality protests hit home with Palestinian prisoners

ElectronicIntifada

In a letter written from an Israeli jail cell, Palestinian political prisoner Ameer Makhoul sends his salutations to African Americans protesting the police killing of unarmed Black men, women and youths.

“Even within Israeli jail, very much far away from you, we are mourning your beloved,” writes Makhoul in his 9 December letter.

Makhoul’s letter, which can be read in full at the bottom of this page, emphasizes the universality of the protests in the United States.

“Such racist official violence exasperates the conscience of all, and of course all 7,000 [Palestinian political prisoners] in Israel jail who seek freedom, liberty and justice for themselves as well as for their people of Palestine,” Makhoul states.

“Your cause is touching hearts everywhere,” he adds. “Your protest is on behalf of all humanity. Your voice is our voice … the voice of all free people.”

Makhoul underlines that like in Palestine, white settler-colonial racism is at the root of state violence in the US.

“The real sniper is the rooted racism which targets African-Americans because they are African-American,” Makhoul writes.

“Be sure that you are not alone, neither in the USA nor worldwide,” he adds. “Palestine backs your struggle.”

“I wish you a Merry Christmas and happy New Year, [in which] liberation from colonial racism and occupation become closer,” Makhoul concludes.

Ferguson and Palestine

Connections to repression in Palestine were expressed in the protests following the killing of unarmed Black teenager Michael Brown by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, last August.

Gaza in particular became a metaphor for state violence in Ferguson. Israel’s mass slaughter was still wiping out entire Palestinian families there when the protests erupted after Brown’s slaying.

“Will we as a people rise up like the people of Gaza? Will our community be bombed like last night with tear gas?” one Ferguson protester is quoted saying in an article titled “Michael Brown’s Hometown is Under Occupation,” published by The Daily Beast.

The “military-style crackdown by a squadron of local police departments dressed like combat soldiers … prompted residents to liken the conditions on the ground in Ferguson to the Israeli military occupation of Palestine,” The Electronic Intifada’s Rania Khalek wrote at the time.

Meanwhile, Palestinians and Palestine solidarity groups put out their own message of support and solidarity following the slaying of Michael Brown. [MORE]

Palestine files 'Israeli war crimes' probe request with accession letter to ICC - report

CLG

Along with the letters of accession to the ICC, Palestine has reportedly filed a request to the Hague to investigate Israeli war crimes during the 50-day war in Gaza last summer. Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas signed the request to probe IDF's use of force starting June 13, 2014, along with the letters of accession to the International Criminal court on Wednesday night, an unnamed NGO worker told Haaretz. On Friday the batch of newly signed documents and the petition are expected to be received by the UN Secretary-General.

CIA has to approve every script for spy drama 'The Americans'

CLG

The Cold War TV spy drama The Americans is a fictional account of two Soviet spies living in the United States. It may be fiction, but that doesn't stop American intelligence agencies from being concerned about the show's content. In fact, the CIA has to approve every script before it's even shot. The Americans was created by Joe Weisberg, a former CIA agent. And since he knows all kinds of stuff that the CIA would like to keep secret, they've reserved the right to censor anything they don't like on the show. This isn't really that unusual for many TV and movie scripts. In fact, the FBI has an entire unit devoted to making sure it's viewed in the best possible light.

Iraq death toll doubles to 15,538 in 2014, the worst in seven years, says government

CLG

Violence in Iraq caused the deaths of more than 15,000 civilians and security personnel in 2014, government figures show, making it one of the deadliest years since the 2003 US-led invasion. Last year's toll of 15,538 was more than double the 6,522 people killed in 2013. It was the worst in seven years, the Iraqi government said, almost reaching the toll of 17,956 during the height of 'Sunni-Shiite' sectarian killings in 2007. The UN put the number of civilians killed in Iraq during 2014 at 12,282.

Obama's Lists: A Dubious History of Targeted Killings in Afghanistan

CLG

The child and his father are two of the many victims of the dirty secret operations that NATO conducted for years in Afghanistan. Their fate is described in secret documents to which SPIEGEL was given access. Some of the documents concerning the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and the NSA and GCHQ intelligence services are from the archive of whistleblower Edward Snowden. Included is the first known complete list of the Western alliance's "targeted killings" in Afghanistan. The documents show that the deadly missions were not just viewed as a last resort to prevent attacks, but were in fact part of everyday life in the guerilla war in Afghanistan. The list, which included up to 750 people at times, proves for the first time that NATO didn't just target the Taliban leadership, but also eliminated mid- and lower-level members of the group on a large scale.

Voters Sue Texas Town For Diluting Hispanic Vote

Think Progress

A group of Hispanic residents have filed a lawsuit against the town of Pasadena, Texas alleging that a recently passed measure to change the makeup of the city council is discriminatory and does not provide equal representation for the town’s 43 percent Hispanic voters.

The lawsuit accuses the working-class Houston suburb of violating the Voting Rights Act by allowing a measure to pass that will replace two city council seats with at-large seats, which are elected by the city as a whole instead of by individual districts. Since 1992, the city had been divided into eight districts, four of which were predominantly Hispanic and elected Latino candidates of choice.

While less than half of the voting age population of Pasadena is Latino, the town is actually more than 60 percent Hispanic and many residents are under the voting age or are not legal citizens.

Pasadena’s white mayor, Johnny Isbell proposed the measure just one month after the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013, ruling that southern states no longer need federal approval to issue changes to their election laws. “The justice department can no longer tell us what to do,” Isbell said when proposing the measure. The mayor also told voters before the election that the change would give everyone in the city more representation because they could elect three city council representatives instead of just one.

Nina Perales, lead counsel on the case and an attorney with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund — the same group that recently challenged Texas’ voter ID law — told ThinkProgress the mayor decided to change the electoral system at a time when the Latino voting population is rapidly expanding and right before a fifth district which is almost 46 percent Hispanic could gain a majority.

“It was starting to look like very soon Latino candidates of choice would be a majority on the council,” Perales said. “And that’s the point at which the mayor announces following the Shelby decision, let’s change these seats back to at-large. The timing is not coincidental.”

If five districts were Hispanic-controlled, the mayor would no longer be a tie-breaking vote on issues which polarize the Latino and Anglo voters of Pasadena including the investment of community resources, Perales said. But with the change to an at-large system, Latinos get outvoted in every election.

“Any seat you convert to at-large will then be subject to the dilution of Latino voting strength,” Perales said. “Latinos are not the majority of voters in Pasadena so if you move that seat back over to at-large, [Latino-preferred candidates] are going to lose.”

The ballot initiative to change the electoral system to a mixed system narrowly passed in November 2013 by a margin of 79 votes out of 6,429 votes cast, according to the complaint which said that voting on the proposition was polarized along racial lines. The average voter turn-out in majority Hispanic precincts was just 9 percent, compared to twelve percent in the others.

“Clearly it was racism,” Pasadena Councilman Ornaldo Ybarra, one of two Hispanics on Pasadena’s eight-member council, told the AP about the electoral changes.

The suit names five Hispanic Pasadena residents as plaintiffs and asks for an injunction prohibiting future Pasadena City Council elections under the “hybrid election system.” The next city council election is scheduled for May.

In the year and a half since the Supreme Court ruling, a number of southern states have used the new freedom to pass discriminatory voting measures including additions at-large council seats, voter ID laws and changes to early voting and voter registration periods.

Other lawsuits across the country have targeted voting changes which have turned seats normally elected by minorities into at-large seats. The American Civil Liberties Union filed a similar suit last month accusing the Ferguson-Florissant School District, the district that includes Ferguson, Missouri, of discriminating against African American students by holding at-large elections in which the district’s entire population votes on each board member, so whites can out-vote African Americans in every election.

Both the Ferguson and Pasadena lawsuits challenge the changes under Section 2 of the VRA, which survived the Supreme Court’s decision throwing away many of the legislation’s provisions. Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act prohibits election rules that “result in denial or abridgment of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.”

Voters in the town of Beaumont, Texas also narrowly approved a ballot initiative to change the electoral system to a mixed system using five single-member districts and two at-large districts in 2011. Initially, the U.S. Department of Justice was able to step in before the Shelby decision and rejected the changes. But after the Supreme Court took away the DOJ’s preclearance, non-African American voters in the town moved forward and were able to change the city council to include two at-large members.

South Carolina lawmakers propose bill to pay college athletes

[JURIST]

A bill (S.171) [text] that has been pre-filed in the South Carolina Senate [official website] would make certain state colleges pay their student basketball and football players if the bill becomes law. The bill was proposed December 3 by Senator Marlon Kimpson [official profile], who argues that student athletes should be compensated when universities benefit financially from the use of the name, image and likeness of the students. The bill would mandate annual stipends be given to each basketball...

A State of Self Defense: Dallas Black Panthers Educate Community about their Gun Rights to Counteract Police Murder of Black & Brown People

BlackListed News

Former Army Rangers and other citizens have donned their military attire and assault-rifles in response to police brutality.

The Black panthers have organized a paramilitary group in Dallas which states its goal of “going into our communities and educating our people on federal, state, and local gun laws. We want to stop fratricide, genocide—all the ‘cides.”

“A knife changes the whole game,” one of the ‘drill sergeants tells Vice.com as ‘troops’ are training how to perform slash and stab maneuvers.

The group is structured and behaves like a military outfit, only their cadences are slightly different.

“I used to salute the fucking flag!” the cadets chant. “Now I use it for a rag!” as they run with weight bags and simulate knife fights with dull machetes.

Their vegan co-founder, Charles Goodson, 31, united five different local black and brown paramilitary organizations to form the Huey P. Newton Gun Club.

The group has been more active in the recent months in response to the high profile police killings from around the nation.

According to the report by Vice.com the group is adamant about asserting their rights.

“This is perfectly legal!” the leader bellowed. “Justice for Michael Brown! Justice for Eric Garner!” came the hoarse cries from the formation. “No longer will we let the pigs slaughter our brothers and sisters and not say a damn thing about it,” the leader answered back. “Black power! Black power! Black power! Black power!”

This is hardly a ragtag group, they have been receiving donations from all across the county. Russell Wilson, the Dallas County District Attorney’s Bureau Chief has even expressed his support for the group.

“They have an absolute right to do what they do,” he told Vice.com. He believes they may be “restoring some people’s confidence and saying, ‘We’re not going to keep getting pushed around here.'”

Aptly named after the co-founder of the Black Panther Party, The Huey P. Newton Gun Club was founded to advocate gun rights and bring an end to violence against communities of color.

Their mission is clear.

In the past twelve years, the Dallas Police have shot and killed over seventy unarmed individuals. Those victims are primarily Black and Hispanic, as indicated by research released last week, with 2014 shootings on track to reach a record high. The Dallas Police who perpetrated these crimes against the people have sailed through a white-washed Internal Affairs and Grand Jury process, designed specifically to maintain the status quo: the murder of individuals based on race.

This deeply unjust process has resulted in zero indictments against police officers for the murder of unarmed individuals since 1973. These violent crimes will continue to occur unless the culture of violence against communities of color is ended.

Vice.com reports that the club was also formed partially as a response to the grass roots gun-advocacy group, Open Carry Texas. Since Texas is one of only six states which bans the open carrying of handguns, they are working to change this, and actually are.

Legislation is currently being proposed in the Texas House, that could allow for the open carrying of hand guns.

This type of militant reaction to government violence is hardly a new concept. The militia stems back to the founding of America. Ever hear of the “minute men”?

Reaction to state violence is simply self-defense. The Huey P. Newton Gun Club is not initiating unprovoked violence, nor are they attacking anyone. They are simply exercising the right from which all other rights are derived, self-defense.

As John Locke stated, self-defense is the first law of nature. Each person owns his or her own life and no other person has a right to take that life.

If the government is fearful or threatened by this reaction from its citizens, they should stop taking so many lives.

The Hollywood ‘Demonization Script”: “The Interview” and U.S. Regime-Change Policy Toward North Korea

4th Media

“And if it does start a war, hopefully people will say, ‘You know what? It was worth it. It was a good movie!’” —Seth Rogen

“Wacky dictators sell newspapers, and magazines—for example, the 2003 Newsweek cover depicting Kim [Jong Il] in dark sunglasses over a cover line that read ‘Dr. Evil.’ …But demonization, and ridicule, can be dangerous. At its worst, dehumanizing the other side helps to lay the groundwork for war.” —Donald Macintyre

Representations of North Korea as a buffoon, a menace, or both on the American big screen are at least as old and arguably as tired as the George W. Bush-era phrase, “the axis of evil.”

Along with the figure of the Muslim “terrorist,” hackneyed Hollywood constructions of the “ronery” or diabolical Dr. Evil-like North Korean leader bent on world domination, the sinister race-bending North Korean spy, the robotic North Korean commando, and other post-Cold War Red/Yellow Peril bogeymen have functioned as go-to enemies for the commercial film industry’s geopolitical and racist fantasies. Explaining why the North Korean leader was the default choice for the villain in his 2014 regime-change comedy, The Interview, Seth Rogen has stated,

“It’s not that controversial to label [North Korea] as bad. It’s as bad as it could be.”¹ Indeed, one-dimensional caricatures of North Korea flourish in the Western media in no small part because “[w]acky dictators sell.”² Yet when it comes to Hollywood’s North Korean regime-change narratives, the line between fact and fiction, not to mention the distinction between freedom of expression and government propaganda, is revealingly thin. Whether in Hollywood or Washington, the only permissible narrative for North Korea is what Donald Macintyre, former Seoul bureau chief for Time magazine, has called “the demonization script.”³

Not only have the dream machines of the entertainment industry long played an instrumental role within American theaters of war, but also, U.S. officials and political commentators often marshal the language of entertainment—for example, the description of U.S.-South Korea combined military exercises as “war games” and the Obama administration’s references to the Pentagon’s “playbook” with regard to North Korea—when describing U.S. military maneuvers on and around the Korean peninsula.

Beyond the American entertainment industry’s insatiable appetite for evildoers, how might we account for the anachronistic place of North Korea as a Cold War foe that outlasted the end of the Cold War within Hollywood’s post-9/11 rogues’ gallery?

With the eyes of the world trained on various flashpoints in the Middle East, what mileage of any kind can be gotten from the North Korean “bad guy” in Hollywood?

If American moviegoers might be depended on to possess a vague awareness of geopolitical context, perhaps even to have some sense of the history of U.S. “hot” involvement subtending Hollywood’s latest Islamophobic interventionist adventure, by contrast, North Korea, routinely depicted in the U.S. media as shrouded in mystery and beyond comprehension, can be counted on to draw a complete blank.

Truth, we are often told, is wilder than our wildest imaginings in North Korea, therefore the rule-of-thumb when it comes to representing North Korea in Hollywood appears to be that anything goes—even films featuring Kim Jong Un’s head deconstructing and bursting into flames. [MORE]

Here is a list of 127 detainees currently held at Guantánamo

Miami herald

Gus T. Renegade Talks with NycResistance about NYPD False Flags, Racism & Terrorism

Nycresistance