The Clinton And The Trump Investigations And Impeachments: Both Following The Same Formula For Division And Subtraction By Distraction?

I don’t know about you, but I had a striking revelation: The Clinton and the Trump presidential impeachments and the theatrically dramatic investigations accompanying them were remarkably the same.  In each case, the news media and our congress obsessed and transfixed for months on an investigation that seemed giant, sensational, and exhaustive, yet in each case was focused on something largely irrelevant to what was actually there to be investigated.  Also, in each case, the relatively trivial offenses selected to be focused on were perfect to foment and stoke distracting Red Team/Blue Team division.

I first realized the strange kinship of the two impeachments/investigations when I was reading a Whitney Webb article.  It was the fourth article in Ms. Webb's MintPress News series on pedophile sex ring operator and apparent blackmailer Jeffrey Epstein.  This is the in depth, connect-the-dots series that has attracted Ms. Webb so much attention.  The series was extra-remarkable when it got started getting real attention because Ms. Webb started it before Epstein’s provocatively mysterious death.–   The fourth article in the series, the first written after Jeffrey Epstein’s death, had me thinking, “reeling” is a better word, about how there was so much about the Clintons, Bill and Hillary, that Whitney Webb was writing about that was never investigated, never surfaced as part of any formal investigation, stuff that obviously should have been investigated. . .  But I remembered the Ken Starr’s Whitewater investigation that turned into the Monica Lewinsky scandal based impeachment and trial of Clinton.  Hmm.
                                           
That’s when I first thought about the commonality of the Clinton and Trump impeachments/investigations.  I don’t know if it vexed you, but for me it was excruciating that there is so much to investigate about Trump, so much that he could be impeached for (violations of the emoluments clause in the running of his hotels and resorts, diverting money appropriated for other things into his “wall,” willful violations of international treaties, assassination of Soleimani, putting a fox in charge of the hen house of every government regulatory agency chartered to protect the public), and yet the Democrats ignored all the potentially strong bipartisan issues challenging Trump and they impeached him for something totally different. 

Ignoring strong potentially bipartisan grounds for impeaching Trump while going after Trump on weak ones, the Democrats weaken anyone’s future ability to impeach and convict Trump on the much stronger, valid grounds available; “What doesn’t kill him, makes him stronger.”  They probably weaken the ability of anyone to impeach and convict any president in the future.  Beforehand, the Democrats notably put their energy into a rather bogus “Russiagate” investigation.  That’s now morphed, somewhat seamlessly, into a Ukraingate investigation. Of all possible things, the Democrats decided to impeach Trump for steps Trump took to surface corrupt activities of Joe Biden and his son in the Ukraine.

Are you wondering about the probable depths of the Bidens’ Ukranian corruption?  If you're doubting that it’s a significant issue, I suspect that, unserved by corporate mass media, or at least the Blue media, there’s much you haven't yet paid attention to.  To catch up, I recommend to you some documentary segments “UkraineGate – Inconvenient Facts” (the first is “A Not So ‘Solid’ Prosecutor”) produced out of France.  It’s available through partnering work done with Consortium News, for anyone who wants to get extra educated as they indulge their wondering about whether the Bidens, father and son, behaved in a manner worthy of a corruption investigation that would look into how, when Joe Bidden was in charge of Ukrainian affairs for the Obama administration following the United States’ participation in the overthrow of the Ukrainian government, Hunter Bidden, his son, got a very hard-to-explain, almost insanely lucrative five-year appointment to Burisma Holdings, a huge Ukrainian natural gas company.  Joe Biden was thereafter, still theoretically working of the U.S. taxpayers, when he was involved in removing and replacing the Ukrainian prosecutor in charge of investigations of that gas company’s business.

It’s possible you’re a Blue-team loyal Democrat who is in line with the feeling that Trump should absolutely not have tried to surface matters for investigation about the Bidens– If so, I suggest you try turning these things around and imagine how a Red-team loyal Republican might scoff hearing about the refusal of Democrats to allow the Bidens to be called as witnesses concerning the corruption Trump says he wanted to surface.  If impeachment witnesses are, indeed, important, why not welcome these witnesses? . .   Or just imagine that it was a yet-to-take-office Democratic president trying to surface, for better investigation, matters involving corruption during a prior Republican administration, perhaps Trump’s family reaping spoils in a country where we helped depose the government.  That country could be Bolivia, which is another country with natural gas resources likely to now be privatized.  Or possibly it could be Venezuela, an oil rich country the Trump administration is making concerted attempts to overthrow.

The point is this: Was Trump’s interest in seeing the Biden’s Ukranian activities investigated strong grounds for impeachment, or just an issue guaranteed to cause people to divisively side more strongly with contradictory outrage being expressed, respectively, in turn by either the Blue Team or the Red Team?

Now let’s go back in time to the Clintons.

Reading the Whitney Webb article with so many unsavory facts and allegations about the Clintons in one place, made me think about how I felt when Ken Starr, having supposedly started with Whitewater, was relentless pursuing President Bill Clinton for not telling the frank truth about his philandering sex life.  I remember, at that time, honing in on the principle that you should investigate the crime, not investigate the man.  That’s because in this complicated world if you selectively devote enormous resources to investigate just about any single individual there is probably something you can find that that individual did wrong if that is your intent.  And it seemed that was exactly what Ken Starr was doing.

I remember how back at the time in the 1990s, I felt increasingly aligned with, and defensive of Bill Clinton, because I felt he was being persecuted not prosecuted.  At that time, it forced me to ask whether we needed to know about and judge peoples’ personal sex lives as a predicate for determining their suitability to hold a governing office.  My answer on this subject was basically, no, with some exceptions.  In particular, I felt those exceptions pertained to those individuals in politics who were hypocritically trying to dictate and moralize about the sex lives of others by holding up rules they didn’t follow themselves: I was keenly aware that top Republicans prosecuting the Clinton impeachment, including three Republican House Speakers at the time, Dennis Hastert, Newt Gingrich, Bob Livingston, were all involved in their own sex scandals.

I wasn’t the only one reacting to the Clinton impeachment this way.  Democrats picked up seats in Congress as the probable result of the impeachment.  The impeachment of Clinton launched MoveOn as an organization to raise money for candidates opposing Republicans.  Bill Clinton’s sex life and the potentially hypocrisy of some Democrats seeming to defend even its predatory aspects, helped build up both sides.  MSNBC, only a few year old at the time was able, as pointed out by Matt Taibbi, to build up a Blue-Team type audience reporting on the Clinton impeachment hearings– It was an alternative to Fox, which was relishing a semen-stained dress.  Matt Taibbi points out that, “Fox struck gold with the Lewinsky story and the Clinton impeachment.”  Both “sides” were inflamed to more Red Team/Blue Team rooting by the issue.

Similarly, today, even as Blue Team-rooting Democrats were cheering the Trump impeachment or coaxed to do so, indications are that the Democrat’s flailing impeachment of Trump is driving Trump’s ratings up.
    
Flash back to the Clintons: After the Ken Starr investigation of Bill and Hillary Clinton culminating in the targeting of Clinton for impeachment for quibbling about what “is” meant when he was uncomfortably being questioned about his sex life, I felt as if the Clintons had been thoroughly investigated.  They must have thoroughly investigated, or so it seemed.  Ken Starr spent massively on his investigation of the Clintons.  Starr is estimated to have spent between $70 million and $80 million on his investigation (with all Clinton investigations combined, it may have been $92 million), and didn’t it seem that Starr was obviously stretching to hit the Clintons with whatever he could dig up, even it was something flimsy about Clinton not honestly answering questions concerning his sex life?  To appreciate whether that was a lot of resources devoted to an investigation, consider that the entire 9/11 investigation, the investigation of the event that launched multiple wars and trillions in spending, was initially budgeted just $3 million. $11 to $15 million was what was finally spent on that investigation; it was obvious it was to keep it on a short leash.
                               
Fast forward to find we have Trump in office.  We have another investigation that involves headlines awesomely plastered everywhere, Mueller’s “Russiagate” investigation.  Again we sense that enormous resources are being devoted to the delving.  This time though the investigation actually costs the taxpayers a little less.  Although Trump tweets and Giuliani as his lawyer asserts that the Mueller’s “Russiagate” investigation is costing $40 or more, the actual cost of it, coming out gradually, over time is probably in the mid-30s.  But then, of course, the “Russiagate” investigation is followed up with Ukraingate from which its is financially distinct, although they get thematically linked ('election help for Trump from foreign governments that use Cyrillic alphabets').  While we had the spectacle of what was referred to as the Trump-accusing “whistleblower” in Ukraingate (probably not an individual, but a CIA team effort), which must have involved some inevitable investigative followup, there are no figures yet offered for the cost of the impeachment investigation to add to the perhaps $35 million Mueller spent on Russiagate.

Certainly, from all the headlines and the leaks reported by Rachel Maddow, the New York Times, et al, there again had to be a feeling engendered that the investigation of Trump was thorough. Furthermore, the mainstream press assured us ahead of time that Robert Mueller could be relied upon for a credible investigation. As just a sample, the New York Times said Mueller was “a former federal prosecutor with an unblemished reputation” whose appointment would “alleviate uncertainty about the government’s ability to investigate the questions surrounding the Trump campaign and the Russians,” that he was “hailed by Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill, who view him as one of the most credible law enforcement officials in the country.”  We were told Mr. Mueller’s “record, character, and trustworthiness have been lauded for decades by Republicans and Democrats alike.”

Accepting any assurance of the expected validity of any of Mueller’s investigations is ill advised . . .  While the Times was writing about about Mueller’s “unblemished reputation” and sterling qualifications to be the Russiagate Special Prosecutor on May 17, 2017, just four years prior, May 9, 2013, you would have been reading in the Times the prediction that Mueller’s legacy would be unforgettably besmirched by Mueller’s botched investigation of tips the FBI was given ahead of time concerning the Boston Marathon Bombing.

If you review the entirety of Mueller’s career, you will find that Mueller’s forte is, in fact, craftily botching investigations to reach incorrect and misleading results.  The investigations he is involved in regularly focus on, pursue, and indict the wrong people for the wrong things.  Researching and writing about his record, I discovered over a dozen extraordinarily high profile cases and investigations (BCCI, Iragate, Iran-Contra, Anthrax, Enron, Pan Am Flight 103 Lockerbie, Whitey Bulger, Khobar Towers Bombing, Timothy J. McVeigh, 9/11, etc.) running from the 1990s consistently to the present where his results were conspicuously suspect.  At one time or another the inadequacy of various investigations were all covered by the mainstream corporate media, but the media usually has a conveniently short memory when they want to report about Mueller’s record.  The actual facts are that Mueller doesn’t seem to have very much in his record to boast of where the results of his investigations, when examined, did not seem to involve misdirection.

There was, of course, at the end, the publicly conducted jousting of Mueller William Barr that grabbed extra attention.  That jousting made Mueller’s Russiagate investigation efforts to `nail’ Trump seem sincere, but it helps to set aside that distraction if you know that Mueller and Barr are actually good friends who have worked together, often closely, on many of Mueller’s misdirecting investigations in the past.

As for Ken Starr, the Clinton Special Prosecutor, Starr just showed up as part of Trump’s legal impeachment defense team to make news by not-so-adroitly reversing himself on the subject of whether the country should pursue “divisive” impeachments. Should we consider Starr’s investigation of Clinton any more credible in terms of it's being on target in terms of what really needed to be investigated?   Starr is also very good at ignoring things and not investigating what needs to be investigated.  In 2016 Starr was fired from his job as president of Baylor University, accused of ignoring a fairly massive scandal about sexual assaults on his campus.  How ironic, after going after Clinton for sexual conduct issues.  Ironic too that the president Starr would choose to defend is the pussy-grabbing Trump . . .

 . . Starr was also part of the legal defense team for pedophile sex ring operator and apparent blackmailer Jeffrey Epstein, which brings up back around to uninvestigated cover-ups.  It also bring us back around to that fourth article in Whitney Webb’s Jeffrey Epstein series that laid out so much damaging information about the Clintons in relation thereto.
   
That then is what I believe deserves noticing: The Trump and the Clinton presidential impeachments and related investigations resemble each other so closely, that it is almost as if the Clinton impeachment and investigation was used as the playbook for what we just witnessed with Trump.  It’s the same subtraction, division, distraction formula with the same results:

    •    Start with important serious complex matters worth investigating, that would need to be investigated in order to hold the powerful to account.
    •    Subtract out for investigation only some things that are trivial and not worthy grounds for impeaching a president.
    •    Have those things that you investigate be sensational and controversial to ensure escalating division of the populace from differing Red Team/Blue Team perspectives.
    •    Have a big showy investigation where it looks like all the stops have being pulled out and the investigators are really anxious to “get” the president any way they can.

And what you get is:

    •    A more divided populace, pushed more into the deepest corners of the Red Team/Blue Team factionalism that helps ensure, fuel, finance and perpetuate the duopoly that traps and controls the electorate.  In this regard it is important to note that factionalism pushing people into rooting emotionally for the Red Team or the Blue Team, respectively, turns off critical thinking and analysis.  Additionally, it causes people not to think in terms of the many common interests they share would otherwise naturally prevail.
    •    A public misguided by its strong impression that everything that needed to be investigated has been delved into deeply and relentlessly, that no stone has been left unturned.  The public thinks that, like in a court of law, there has been a contest that ensures this, not that it amounts to a certain form of collusion.
    •    A government that is even less subject to being held to account than it was before.

List of Craftily Botched Mueller Investigations

In September I finished a three-part series of National Notice articles (including also a significant postscript follow-up)-- The articles were all about whether Robert Mueller and his Russiagate investigation could be trusted.  The short definitive answer is absolutely not.  That series of articles has been largely ignored, although I think all the articles were revelatory in important, often startling ways, particularly for those absorbing and surfing what today's Trump era news mostly has to offer.  The articles were all written in long form.  That meant they provided extensive links and documentation pulling from what has been available about Mueller over the decades of his career.--   The articles took the time and lingered to provide some analysis.

As the articles have been ignored (should I blame Google?- They are hard to find when searching), I figured it would be worthwhile to at least provide, a short form reference, an index to much of what can be found in those articles concerning the major takeaway they provide.  The major takeaway of those articles, which was easy to infer from the pattern of facts that kept repeating, is that Mueller’s forte is craftily botching investigations to reach incorrect and misleading results.  The investigations in which he has been involved regularly focus on, pursue, and indict the wrong people for the wrong things.

Researching and writing about Mueller's record, I discovered more than a dozen extraordinarily high profile cases and investigations running from the 1990s consistently to the present where his results were conspicuously suspect.  At one time or another the inadequacy of all these various investigations were all covered by the mainstream corporate media, but the media usually has a conveniently short memory when they want to report about Mueller’s record.  When you come right down to it, Mueller sadly doesn’t seem to have very much in his record to boast of where the results of his investigations, when examined, do not seem to involve misdirection.

Also worth noting: Mueller has often worked with William Barr in his a career.  Notwithstanding what looked like public jousting between those two men over Russiagate, they are reportedly well known to be good friends.

Before listing the many investigations with odd results that Mueller has been involved in, it is worth noting that Mueller has significant family connections that go back and link him to the intelligence community.  He is related to two of the three top men that President Kennedy fired from the CIA when Kennedy cleaned house in the fall of 1961.

Here then is a list of botched Mueller Investigations, and since there are repeating patterns to the botching and the botches often look like they align with certain purposes we might attribute a certain amount of craft and intentionality to the botches:

•    Anthrax Investigation.  Mueller micromanaged and conspicuously bungled the anthrax letter investigations that left hanging the question so vital to answer of who within in our government sent the letters (originally blamed on Iraq) that, one week after 9/11, threatened the press and particular leaders in Congress as the Bush administration was pressing to pass the PATRIOT Act.

•    Iran-Contra investigation.  Mueller worked with William Barr and advised him about handling the Iran-Contra investigation being conducted by Independent Counsel Lawrence E. Walsh concerning misconduct by the CIA and intelligence community.  Barr, who previously worked for the CIA, is notorious for the way he is considered to have helped "cover up," an investigation leading perhaps as high up as former CIA head and Vice President George H. W. Bush, when he advised Bush on Bush's 1992 pardons of the key players in the scandal.  Afterwards, George H. W. Bush, was able to become the first U.S. president known to come with a CIA background.

•    BCCI (Bank of Credit and Commerce International) investigation.  Mueller and Barr were accused of coverup activity in the investigation of two other scandals that tied in with Iran-Contra.  One was the BCCI (Bank of Credit and Commerce International) investigation.

•    Iraqgate.  The other banking scandal was "Iraqgate." Among other things, both of those scandals also involved covert U.S. government funding of weapons acquisitions by Saddam Hussein's Iraq.  (And Saddam Hussein's weapons in Iraq were why Mueller later testified we should invade Iraq!)

•    Timothy J. McVeigh Oklahoma City Bombing Case.  Mueller was involved in how documents were withheld in the Timothy J. McVeigh Oklahoma City Bombing Case.  Thousands of pages of investigative report documents concerning the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing were turned over to Timothy J. McVeigh’s defense lawyers as they should have been.  It was shortly before Mueller was nominated to be appointed FBI Director.  It was considered that it could have affected that appointment. There were questions about Mueller's failure to inform Ashcroft, President George W. Bush and top White House aides about the documents that were withheld.

•     Pan Am Flight 103 Lockerbie, Scotland Crash.  The investigation and prosecution of the Pan Am Flight 103 Lockerbie, Scotland crash for which Mueller was responsible produced very unsatisfactory results.- The case concluded in February 2001, not that very long before Mueller was being discussed for appointment to the FBI.  Lockerbie may have helped set Mueller up for getting that promotion.  The Lockerbie case raises questions about whether people were framed and facts manipulated by those eager to go to war with Libya.  In connection therewith, a very strange article about Mueller's Lockerbie case appeared in the New York Times that presaged 9/11 as an excuse to change models and handle such investigations "extra-judicially" in order to move away from the justice system's "reliance on forensic evidence and the standards of criminal law."  Read what I wrote then to hear how William Barr chimed in with his opinion in the article.

•    Whitey Bulger.  In Boston, when Mueller was in charge at the Justice Department there (and had specific responsibility regarding "public corruption," he was involved in the FBI scandal and embarrassment respecting Whitey Bulger, "America's Most Wanted Gangster."  Mr. Bulger was charged with complicity in 19 murders, racketeering, extortion, money laundering and other crimes.  A former federal prosecutor who investigated said,  "This was the worst case of corruption in the history of the F.B.I., . .  It was a multigenerational, systematic alliance with organized crime, where the F.B.I. was actively participating in the murders of government witnesses, or at least allowing them to occur."  With FBI participation, four men were framed and kept in prison for a murder they did not commit to keep Bugler and his partner out on the streets.  Mueller, first as an assistant US attorney, then as the acting US attorney in Boston wrote multiple letters to the parole and pardons board to keep the framed men in prison.  Richard Stearns, the judge hearing the Bulger case, a close friend of Mueller's, was forced to step aside by an appeals court because of his conflicts of interest.  Whitey Bulger was killed in prison, shortly after the federal government moved him to a new penitentiary, in what the New York Times says may have been "a hit."

•    Investigation and Prosecutions In Enron Case.  It does not appear anywhere on Mueller's Wikipedia page, but the New York Times  credits and highly praises Mueller for "overseeing the task force that investigated one of the biggest fraud cases in American history: the collapse of the energy giant Enron."  What about involvement of top federal government officials?  The involvement of people like Donald Rumsfeld and his wife or Karl Rove?   Fourteen of the top 100 officials in the Bush administration owned stock in Enron.  What about President George W. Bush's close relationship with Enron's chairman, Kenneth L. Lay?  Dick Cheney's Halliburton built Enron's baseball stadium.  Did any government officials go to jail?  Enron was treated as a  business scandal, not a political one; it was investigated and prosecuted accordingly, with only non-government officials pursued. Did the convictions hold up?  Things worked out rather oddly with the timing of Ken Lay's death (at 64 about six weeks after his conviction) and how Lay's wife benefitted.  Hale and Dorr, Mueller's law firm when Mueller's revolving door revolves, was special counsel to Enron during the bankruptcy and it is credited with being the "driving force in the investigation of crimes" influentially guiding everyone.  Documents were destroyed as the SEC was investigating accounting fraud at Enron when Enron's accountants at Arthur Anderson shredded them.  Coincidentally, there were complaints of SEC legal investigation documents being lost, just weeks before the Anderson shredding, on 9/11 when Building 7 collapsed.  (An investigation-driving report similar to the one by Hale and Dorr for Enron was done for the Worldcom scandal by the firm that merged with Hale and Dorr in 2004.)

•    The Boston Marathon Bombing.   Mueller's role in the Boston Marathon bombing, and specifically his failure to follow up on tips the FBI was given ahead of time (it occurred at the end of his terms as head of the FBI) was said to have been so badly botched that the New York Times predicted with apparent confidence that Mueller’s legacy would be unforgettably besmirched.  That was May 9, 2013.  Just four years later, May 17, 2017, the Times was writing about Mueller’s “unblemished reputation” and sterling qualifications to be the Russiagate Special Prosecutor.

•    Khobar Towers Apartment Complex Bombing.   Mueller, as deputy attorney general, was the one who directed 1996 Khobar Towers Apartment Complex Bombing investigation to James Comey, for prosecution in Virginia.  The apartment complex in the city of Khobar, Saudi Arabia provided housing used living quarters for coalition forces who working on a U.S. Defense Department operation in Iraq. The investigation of the bombing and ensuing prosecution continued well into the era that Mueller was head of the FBI (a judge ruled in the case in 2006). There was top-level FBI coordination (FBI Director Louis Freeh) with top Saudis in shaping the investigation and the official story.  That official story, seeming to go out of its way to ignore facts, was apparently shaped to blame Iran in order to stymie  possibilities of U.S. rapprochement and more peaceful relations with Iran.  Worse, there was reportedly, in the background, a contingency plan for the U.S. to attack Iran.  Those who were more likely responsible for the bombing were native Saudis, all Sunni Muslims, with no outside connections to either Iran or Iraq.  And those individuals who the FBI, veering far afield in its investigation, did not pursue may have had connections with . . . ?

•    Investigation of Poisoned Ricin Letters.   Under Mueller two theatrically back-to-back incidents of poisoned ricin letters were investigated.   It's another investigation where, attracting a lot of press attention, the wrong man was arrested.  This was all happening in a time period that overlapped with the Snowden revelations about secret illegal government surveillance that the Obama then had to acknowledge and which Mueller, before leaving office, recommended be continued without cutting back.

•    The After-The-Fact Investigation of 9/11.  Mueller covered up FBI mishandling of 9/11. Not only that, he promoted those responsible for such failures.– According to papers filed by the 9/11 families in their court proceedings, Mueller threw up roadblocks in the path of his own investigators working the 9/11 case, while making it easier for Saudi suspects to escape questioning.  The legal filings say that Mueller was not appropriately interested in investigating “multiple, systemic efforts by the Saudi government to assist the hijackers in the lead-up to the 9/11 attacks,” that Mueller covered up evidence pointing to Saudi government involvement, deep-sixed evidence his agents managed to uncover, and that Mueller may have lied to Congress. 

•    Russiagate investigation.  Mueller's Russiagate investigation is replete with a number of conspicuous problems that undermine the credibility of many of its key points.  That includes how the investigation was apparently calibrated to distract the public and how, even though it did not find any of Trump's people involved, Mueller's investigation found that the Russians had interfered to influence the 2016 election when that was essentially bogus.

•    Non-Investigation of White Collar Crime.  Should we count "non-investigations" when we are compiling a list of Mueller's "investigations"?  Given that Mueller's great skill is avoiding investigation of what he ought to investigate when given assignments, this is probably highly appropriate.  Nor is it completely oxymoronic.  Mueller officially started as head of the FBI one week to the day before 9/11.  As the head of the FBI, with 9/11 as an excuse, Mueller's shifted more than half of the FBI's resources away from white collar crime.  This certainly meant that white collar crimes that had not yet been investigated or not yet uncovered when investigated went uninvestigated.  It also meant that the FBI must have had to pull back from white collar crime investigations that were already underway and that selections would need to have been made when doing so.  We have already mentioned, as a specific investigation, the Enron investigation involving events that happened before 9/11 then came to light contemporaneously, and which were investigated after 9/11.  That's why it's not completely oxymoronic to include such "non-investigations"  in the list of investigation handled by Mueller.  Anyone tracking Mueller's career activities should rightly wonder about how Mueller exercised his discretion at this time when white collar and Wall Street criminals seem to have benefitted because of 9/11.  Mostly, coverage of Mueller's cutback on white collar crime investigation has been viewed as a general boon to Wall Street and misbehaving mortgage lending banks that could have been prosecuted as a result of the 2008 financial crisis.  There seems to have been no analysis offered about how Mueller may have exercised discretion in specific cases.  

•    Panama Invasion- Noriega Drug Trafficking Investigation.  I mentioned above Mueller's involvement with the investigation of Whitey Bulger, "America's Most Wanted Gangster."  That investigation involved investigating Bulger and his associates for ongoing crimes they were committing, and as noted, in some cases, a misdirection to charge others with the crimes of Bulger and his associates.   Normally, an investigation of someone is for the purpose of charging them with their crimes.  With Bulger it was trickier. Because Bulger was being treated as an "asset" by law enforcement officials, it was incumbent upon law enforcement officials to be investigatively aware of Bulger's activities to keep him on a short enough leash to justify the tolerance extended to him.  Bulger's case involved another investigative side: That was all the investigation necessary and appropriate to discover how the FBI's own conduct had, itself, crossed the line into inexcusable corruption.  In the longer form article I wrote I noted that Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega, the president of Panama, was analogous to Bulger.  The U.S. had a long-standing and close alliance with Noriega who was on the CIA Payroll, including when George H. W. Bush was CIA director.  Bush had to have known that.  Further, Noriega was a key asset in Iran-Contra.  Noriega had connections with drug running, murders, and deep involvement in narcotrafficking.   Noriega apparently went from being a CIA asset to being a liability just as the whole Iran-Contra scandal began to come to light.  George H. W. Bush sent American troops in to remove Noriega in his first year in office.  Robert Mueller and William Barr were both involved in paving the way for the invasion of Panama by furnishing opinions and advice that the actions being taken were legal.  Mueller, privy to whatever facts concerning the investigation he apparently thought were necessary, provided assurances for President G. H. W. Bush that the drug trafficking case against Noriega was solid and would stand up.  It's another instance where Mueller's involvement assessing an investigation paved the way for the U.S. to go to war.

•    2003 Iraq Invasion- Weapons of Mass Destruction.  Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction?: Is that something that should have been "investigated"; can we properly consider that this should be another on the list of "investigations" in which Mueller participated?  In the run up to the Iraq War evidence was supposedly presented, matters were supposedly being looked into and evaluated.  Mueller helped sell the Iraq War with lies to Congress about weapons of mass destruction and links to Al-Qaed.  Maybe, instead of putting this formally on the list of "investigations" which Mueller was involved with, we should simply treat it as another example of how willing Mueller is to engage in baseless shilling for war.  As noted above, Mueller's warnings about Iraq weapons can be viewed as ironic given his questionable Iraqgate investigation about how the intelligence agencies under the George H. W. Bush administration illegally funneled funds (through agricultural credits) for a military buildup in Iraq.

 •   A Basis For Hundreds of Imprisonments (and Worse).   Is it naive to believe that when the government imprisons people and/or subjects them to abusive punitive actions (physical abuse and solitary confinement) or worse, it should be predicated upon some sort of investigation that justifies the actions taken?  Mueller was sued (but let off the hook) for rounding up hundreds of Muslims and South Asian Immigrants (762 of them) after 9/11 and putting them in detention facilities (or they may have been sent to foreign countries for torture).  Another example of Mueller distressingly going after and locking up innocent people?

•    The Before-The-Fact Investigation of 9/11- The PATRIOT Act.   Mueller helped push through passage of the PATRIOT Act by furnishing misinformation to Congress about what the FBI knew and could have done about stopping 9/11.  Mueller told Congress that the PATRIOT Act needed to be passed because there were no warning signs about 9/11 and that, had the PATRIOT Act been in effect, it would have allowed for discovery of warning signs about the Florida flight school training of those who were identified as the terrorists.  In fact, FBI agents had this information ahead of time, but the Bureau simply sat on it and did nothing. Based on this, The Wall Street Journal called for Mueller's resignation and the New York Times said there were concerns about his leadership of the FBI.

That's my list.  I'm happy to add to it if I have overlooked anything.  There is much more in the articles worth knowing about Mueller's background and the long form articles provide more details, a zillion links, as well as more analysis.  Aside from Mueller's repetitive involvement in highly suspect investigations, Mueller oversaw and relentlessly defended mass surveillance including illegal warrantless surveillance.  Mueller's last stop before his Russiagate Probe was working with the ginormous private government surveillance Company, Booz Allen Hamilton, to protect its secrets.

Probably the best reason to be familiar with Mueller's list of botched investigations is to also learn something about the media and power structure in this country.  While Mueller was conducting his "Russiagate: investigation we were subjected to all sorts of descriptions of Mueller as a "straight arrow," someone who was almost boring, universally respected in Washington D.C., and someone who trusted to be fair and reliable by both Republicans and Democrats in a bipartisan consensus.  More likely the "respect" Mueller gets is fear based, because the one thing Mueller can be trusted to do at this point is to keep getting away with things without consequence.
 
Every time there has been an important juncture in Mueller's career, a moment when he is about to be promoted into some new significant office, all his prior scandals have been mysteriously forgotten by the media and Mueller has been praised instead.  This is what happened when Mueller was under consideration to first head the FBI, the office he took one week to the day before 9/11.  It is what happened when there was lobbying to change the law, enacted following J. Edgar Hoover's departure, to give Mueller an extra two-year extension of his term as head of the FBI.  It is what happened when Mueller was proposed to be put in charge of the Russiagate investigation.  That is what has allowed Mueller to continue and persist in his patterns allowing this list of highly questionable investigation to keep getting longer.  Yes, all this is despite how the scandalous facts of these botched investigations are out there available to be discovered.

The Awokening– A Climate Change Change Short Story

We didn’t notice it at first.  I certainly didn’t notice, not at the beginning.  I mean how could you notice anything if you didn’t know anything was happening, that there was anything to look for, or what to look for?

We were thinking about things like sea level rise, how it was locked in, so it was a question of thinking about how much sea level rise, how fast, where it would be experienced worst– sea level rise is not just the melting icecaps, it's also that warm water expands, it’s “thicker”– The local tides also factor in with tide-funneling coastline shapes causing some areas to be affected worse– And we were thinking about how to adapt.

Figuring out where to move and when, how long it could make sense to wait, were questions on almost everyone’s minds. Areas that we’d thought of as cool and alpine were warming up.  Anywhere could be where there’d be fires next.  Lots of areas were drying out with local vegetation that evolved in wetter climates becoming dry dead fuel.  And then there were more and more areas that looked like they’d be, unpredictably, at times, too wet and too low lying when floods came.  Ironically, it was sometimes impossible to find potable, unpoisoned drinking water in some of those same areas.

Everyone was aware of the hopelessness and the resignation.  I mean, even if we didn’t consciously acknowledge it, it was there as a sense we all had.  If nothing else, you knew it without knowing it.

Those of us who knew enough, who weren’t listening to the national network, cable or legacy internet programs as our news sources, blamed the fossil fuel companies.  We blamed what we understood was their psycho-graphic control.  We remembered, in the early days, how swathes of people didn’t believe that there was climate change, or if they believed it, they didn’t think it was man made, or maybe they did think humans were causing it.  Maybe they thought it would be good, or not so bad.

Maybe some people thought it would be bad, but not for them.  Or they thought they’d get some personal benefit from what was happening, the way they were plugged into the system, so that the good for them would outweigh the bad. . . Some people, a lot, said it was happening, but didn’t think they could do anything about it.  Others suspected they could do something about it, but just couldn’t figure out what that was.

Some of us did something about it by voting for politicians who said they were going to do something about it but then didn’t.  We voted for those kinds of politicians more than once.  And we spent a lot of time figuring out who to believe as we voted.  It seems we could never be right.  It was a no-win proposition every time.  Many of us just didn’t have time for all of it.  Life was increasing taxing with people struggling to make ends meet.  Or we maybe we did have the time, but we somehow never got around to doing anything.  Escapist fantasy was especially popular.  We could watch it on our tablets indoors while our air conditioners ran.  Life spent with super heroes saving worlds around the universe, frequently earth itself, and CGI generated versions of our favorite old movie stars was a tad more soothing . .

. . . There were a thousand things that could be picked from, essentially an infinite menu of reasons not to do anything about climate change that the fossil fuel companies could deliver in tailored packages to suit our individual personalities and disable us.  “Nano-targeting” was one phrase for it.  The social media companies, data-collecting marketers like Amazon, the search engines, our phone and door bell trackers, provided the manipulators with everything necessary to know about any of us.  They picked our leaders for us too.  It meant they also picked and had a hand in which charismatics were sent into bubble oblivion, maybe assigned small personalized ineffectual followings to be dispensed with at the same time.

We knew they were doing it.  You could tell.  I mean, if you cared to pay attention, you knew.  You didn’t need hints from those occasional leaks.  Besides, some of those leaks were themselves meant to make you think certain things and why get entangled?  Yes, sure, go ahead and connect the dots as proof if you were compulsive about proving things.  But, otherwise, just go with the big overall picture.  You could tell.  You could just easily tell.

First, I’ve got to say that it didn’t seem like anything when you stopped running into people who wanted to tell that there was no climate change, that it wasn’t man made, or wouldn’t be so bad, anything from that whole list of crap.  After all, it made sense that people were simply out of rope to believe the impossible; That was clearly explanation enough. . .

That explanation went far enough to cover that much. . .

 . . I remember young, red-headed Edgar excited about his new job.  Truly excited.  Really?  He was working on solar capture fabrics.  An anomaly?  I remember that first and best.  Then Shaheen was excited about her job— It involved road and highways generating energy, multiple ways actually.  Hester was working on storage, with weights elevating on rails that could spin flywheels coming down.  Her eyes had a certain gleam.

It was the sense of optimism that was disorienting. Each time it seemed unexpected, and now the  repetitiveness of such encounters just made it seem much more improbable. – People, I mean a different kind of people, were actually going back into government and interested in doing all sorts of things there, a ton of it having really positive implications rippling out in all directions for the climate.  Also respecting government, you, of course know the names of the new capable and charismatic leaders who arose.  They emerged pretty much right away.

My friend Joshua had no knack at all for engineering, but his enthusiasm for things that others were achieving got him involved in promoting and spreading the word.  Technically, he was “advertising” the new technologies to help make them successful in finding a market, and, indeed, he was now working at a legacy advertising firm that had taken this on as its specialty. PR firms were going the same route. 

You almost didn’t need the advertising or PR firms: People were hungrily seeking out news everywhere, because there was so much that was terrifically good to learn and potentially take advantage of yourself by finding new endeavors to plug into.  Journalists were plying a new skill: solution identification.  They were doing a real good job to investigate, find and bring solutions to the surface.  A lot of surfaced solutions, or near solutions, were combining with others to make even better ones.

Renewables had already essentially been cheaper than fossil fuel.  The flip over to zero fossil fuel use occurred fast.  Elimination of the subsidies for fossil fuels might never even have been required.  But is was more than that: With the flip, came a vast increase, an upward dizzying spiral, in the efficiency of energy production at lower and lower cost with less and less environmental impact. The energy storage problem for renewables was quickly solved in multiple scores of ways.

We soon had so much extra energy, a vast surplus, beyond what was needed for all our economic needs that it was obvious that there was only one thing to do with it.  We started up all sorts engines and devices to extract carbon from the atmosphere and our oceans. At first the methods for extracting carbon from the seawater took the lead.– Either worked: The oceans, in a continual rebalancing, grabbed carbon from the atmosphere so it was the same thing.  Carbon extraction was easier than dealing with the methane.  Nevertheless, the fact was we were on track to get it all satisfactorily done.

There were a lot of jobs, with attendant excitement and enthusiasm, in the carbon extraction business too.  The work that had once been done to determine the cost to the world of dumping carbon into the atmosphere like trash was handy in setting a price for what people could be paid per ton of carbon extraction.  As the cost of the technology came down, profits attracted wider and wider scale participation.  We turned back the clock.  That was what people said: "We turned back the clock."    The climate catastrophe chaos was reversed.  The planet restored itself to what had been climate normalcy for all the tens of thousands of years any form modern human civilization has existed.

I felt dumb at first not to realize it.  Where the change came from was obvious.  Why the change was so sudden and complete was obvious. But, when you are in the middle of a whirlwind, recognition can come with obstinate slowness.  I, like others, had been so habituated to blaming the fossil fuel industry for the way they commandeered psycho-graphics to immobilize the population and continue their plunder unimpeded, I wasn’t immediately ready to change the lens through which I viewed the world.

It was obvious, truly obvious.  What was obvious was that some other group had taken power behind the scenes.  All those psycho-graphic tools still existed, but now they had been wrested from the fossil fuel industry.  The psycho-graphic tools, the ability to manipulate human beings in a fine tuned personalized way across a huge spectrum of personalities, was being turned around and used for purposes exactly opposite to how the fossil fuel industry had used them.  Through psycho-graphic tools every individual’s strengths in terms of personality and skill, where they might fit in in terms of solving the climate change emergency, was systematically identified and assessed so that they could be tipped into taking the most appropriate personal actions they could take.

It worked.  It worked.

My problem with all this, is that it wasn’t the way it was supposed to happen.  I revile psycho-graphics.  I had this problem with it when it was being used by the fossil fuel industry to keep us consuming fossil fuels.  I had the same problem when it was being used to keep us perpetually at war with huge amount of runaway military spending.  I still have a problem with psycho-graphics.  I ask you, where is the democracy in a group of powerful people, a coordinating elite, deciding the direction that everyone should take?

Where is the democracy?  I thought it was all supposed to happen starting bottom up, grass roots, the wisdom of crowds when people listen to each other.  Where is the democracy?  Is this the way it was supposed to happen?

* * * *

From the Kickstarter page for "The Truth Has Changed" tour.

 Author's Note: The idea for this short story came to me after I saw a Brooklyn performance of Josh Fox’s “The Truth Has Changed.”  It was in Brooklyn, in Mr. Fox's theater company's rehearsal space, because, with some strange controversy involved, his show was kicked out of The Public Theater in Manhattan.  I give credence to Fox’s statements that the eviction probably came about because of the show’s content.

Fox’s one man show (think echos of a Spalding Gray performance) is, in part, about the climate crisis emergency.  He’s written an accompanying book, which has a foreword by climate activist Bill McKibben.  Fox’s show is also largely about information control, the kind that is directed at manipulating the public.  Information control and manipulation of public opinion is charging ahead with the development of new techniques so fast that it is hard to separate a short futuristic science fiction story like this from yesterday’s news.  That aspect of Fox’s show gives it a fair amount of overlap with the issues of censorship, information control and dumbing down the public that have been concerns for Citizens Defending Libraries, of which I am a co-founder.

I will note that Fox’s show is a strenuous tour de force and challenging in the bleakness of some of its urgency.  Project Censored has begun grappling with the notion that negative news reporting that eschews the provision of “solutions” is a form of news abuse.  It results in “negative news overload” that enervates the public, a form of control in itself.  Fox is interested in solutions too.  The program notes for “The Truth has Changed” explains that one of his other endeavors is “The Solutions Project,” co-founded with Mark Ruffalo, Mark Jacobson and Marco Krapels.  Similarly, with respect to the climate crisis, Project Censored notes that there is “The Drawdown Project.”  Personally I believe many solutions would presently be unfolding at a quickening pace if we had a fossil fuels tax and were looking to start paying people to extract carbon from the atmosphere and oceans and I think the two should be related.

Fox’s show does not leave the subject of potential solutions entirely unaddressed, but it is mostly more about the urgency with which we need to find them.  His show does not identify or present the questionable solution posed by the short story above. I hope it leaves your thoughts provoked.

The show was shut down at The Public.  Content too challenging?

On The Political Spectrum, We Are Told That We Are All “Red” or “Blue,” Or Maybe That We should be “Purple”– If All Those Colors Are Taken, And They All Mean “Corporatist” Plus Spending More On War, Maybe We Need A New Color!

Relentlessly "Red" or "Blue"? Aren't there other colors in the political spectrum that don't mean "corporatism"?

If anything should convince us faster of how completely we are coaxed to relentlessly play the “Red Team/Blue Team” game of politics, it probably should be the way that we don’t talk in terms of any other colors to describe the political spectrum.  Matt Taibbi is one of our political observers who notes the that the “Red Team/Blue Team” divisions are designed to encourage the kind of knee-jerk rooting for your chosen “team” that turns off critical thinking and escalates the kind of passions that obscure and interfere with the ability to discern and build upon common interests.  In fact, the cover of Taibbi’s new book, “Hate Inc.,” about how the corporate mass media routinely fuels anger and division in this country confirms the importance of the Red/Blue color meme representing division in half red and half blue.

More honestly, as I have been writing about here in National Notice, the bigger truth is that the public is largely united on most of the most important issues, with huge supermajorities of the public agreeing on what they want for country on a score of those most important issues even while elected officials refuse to provide those things and the corporate press backs those electeds up by relentlessly messaging that these are things that the public can’t expect to have.

Notwithstanding these commonalities, we are being sold the notion that we are divided.  Right after the 2016 election, on the eve of the presidential inauguration, PBS’s seemingly sober and authoritative Frontline rushed in to explain to us that we were in turmoil was because we are a divided nation, broadcasting its “Divided States of America” on January 17, 2017.  More recently, Frontline is back again with more of the same, broadcasting a few weeks ago, “America’s Great Divide: From Obama to Trump,” January 14, 2020.  Not only are we being sold on the idea of these false divides, we are being sold on the idea that the divide is between, and must be thought about in terms of, “red” and “blue,” or “Republican” versus “Democrat.”

Meanwhile, some observers whom I consider more astute because they are thinking the way I do (how is that for my own personal confirmation bias?) are not seeing the poles of the political spectrum in those terms at all.  They see the ranging of opinions in terms of populism versus corporatism, or populism/Democratic Socialism versus corporatist/Neoliberalism. On this spectrum, Trump was elected delivering faux populist promises and, with a switcheroo that he vaguely still tries to deflect attention from, has delivered corporatist crony capitalism, kleptocracy, and more neoliberalism.  Bernie Sanders can, in this light, be seen as a candidate that has more in common with Trump for what Trump initially promised, which explains the attraction of Sanders for so many who once voted for Trump.

Seeing the spectrum this way, both the Republicans and the Nancy Pelosi/Hillary Clinton Democrats represent the corporations and the wealthy global cooperate elite, and both “red” and “blue” are colors that stand for the pursuit of cooperate interests adverse to the general public.  In the case of climate change catastrophe chaos and militarism, these interest are very likely even completely adverse to the continuing survival of mankind and life on this planet.

If we can only now be politically defined in terms of those two pre-selected colors, I think we need some new colors.  Occasionally, when we are not being told how hopelessly divided we are as a country when we are actually not, we are paternalistically told that, rather than being so extreme, we should migrate to somewhere in the political spectrum that’s between, to the color “purple,” viewed as somehow moderate, or maybe even “independent” thinking.  That’s what’s going on with the Purple Project for Democracy.  It has a catchy slogan, “We The Purple,” conveying that it somehow reflects populism, and it bills itself as a “strictly non-partisan, apolitical effort,” but it is a top-down oriented plan for a corporate media coalition to start dictating what should be considered reliable theoretically middle of the road media.  In other words, it is an effort by entities such as The Washington Post, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Hearst newspapers, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute, NPR to speak with a more unified and authoritative voice to marginalize the noncorporate reporting and viewpoints that compete with their own.

If “red” represents corporatism and “blue” represents corporatism, then “purple” is just more corporatism that is theoretically peacefully without the “Red Team/Blue Team” squabbling and hate that the media typically conjures up.  A sort of spiritual “corporatism”?  Purple has long been a color identified with spiritualism.  The “purple” they want to sell us instead represents more efforts to separate us from any genuine populism-building narratives.

We obviously need a new color, or new colors.  I should note that one color, green, has already been taken by an alternative party, the Green Party, with a strong identification with, and platform built on, environmentalism.  Rather than just suggest that this is the answer, although the green party has important answers, I’d rather suggest that we go with something not quite so predefined and perhaps not so automatically associated with the environment. "Yellow" might have negative connotations when the path needs to be courageous.  Perhaps, the hard to define color of "teal"?

One other thing we need to change, along with the introduction of new colors, is the way that we hold our elections.  The way that we hold our elections is part of the reason that we only hear about “red” and “blue.”  The way that we currently hold our elections locks us into the rigid constriction of the  duopoly and ensures that it is easy for the corporations to buy off the only two parties who are only theoretically competing. Along with a new political color or colors, we need to be instituting changes that give third parties, parties like the Green Party, a change to rise, strengthen, and become truly competitive when they have valid and important ideas. . .  very likely the ideas that reflect the reasonably longings of huge supermajorities of the population-- That means changes like instant runoff elections, and proportional representation.

Move The Money!: A New York Campaign That Envisions Redirecting For Domestic Benefit The Phenomenal Amount of Money Being Wasted On The Military And Endless Wars

This is about the Move The Money campaign, a campaign in New York City involving a resolution before the city council based on the obvious benefit of redirecting to domestic benefit the huge amount of money now being wasted on the United States military and senseless, never ending wars.  It is a campaign that two groups I am involved with have joined in: Citizens Defending Libraries, of which I am a co-founder, and the social justice committee, Weaving Social Justice, of the First Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Brooklyn in downtown Brooklyn, the Heights area.

Here is what I’d like to tell you about the campaign.

*MOVE THE MONEY!*

What If, By Talking About And Realizing How Much We Senselessly Spend On War, We Chose to Do Something Else? . . Think of All The Good Things We Could Pay For Instead!

Resolution 747A before the New York City Council, supported by more than 40 NYC organizations, would put the Council on record as opposing bloated Pentagon war budgets that rob the City and its residents of badly-needed funds for vital public services, many of them now suffering from increasing cutbacks in federal spending.

Let’s Realize How Much We Senselessly Spend On The Military

This chart is from Wikipedia on this date produced from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute but these somewhat shifting numbers are hard to keep up to date.  United States for 2018 already went up to $712.55 billion in spending according to the latest figures from the National Priorities Project.

Before beginning to imagine how much good could be done by moving money from our bloated military budget, it is important to know how much we spend on the military and our perpetual wars. . .  We spend vast amounts on the military, more than most people know or can even begin to believe.  How many of us know and can conceptualize that:

    •    The Pentagon and military budget is about 60% of the nation’s discretionary budget.  If all of the unknowable black box spending that goes into the Military-Industrial-Surveillance Complex were included, that percentage could well bump up higher.  Current accounting practices let the military and surveillance industries spend money in secret and not account for the money they spend in violation of the Unites States Constitution.

    •    In 2018, taxpayers in the United States are paying $712.55 billion for the military.

    •    We spend more on military spending than the next ten countries combined, and we spend much more than all the rest of the countries in the world left over after that.

    •    In all, the United States spends over one-third of what is spent on the military worldwide.  In addition to that, much of the spending by other countries is on arms we supply making the world more dangerous.

    •    About 70% of the spending on the military worldwide is by the United States along with the countries, such as those in NATO, that the Unites States clearly identifies as allies (and which we sell weapons to), while only about 14% of the spending worldwide military spending is being spent by those we might identify as potentiality unfriendly countries whether or not those countries have ever attacked us or other countries (as we have done numerous times).

    •    Just the increase in the military spending in the last two years, since Trump came in, is as much as Russia spends on its entire military budget ($66 billion).  Similarly just that increase is greater than the entire military budgets of Britain ($55 billion) or France ($51 billion).

    •    In May of 2011 after the U.S. announced that it had killed Osama Bin Laden, the National Priorities Project calculated that, as of that time, “in all, the U.S. government has spent more than $7.6 trillion on defense and homeland security since the 9/11 attacks.”  Point of reference: a “trillion” is one million millions.

    •    New York State projects a $6 billion deficit. It will impact NYC too- By contrast, what New York State sends to the federal government to spend on the military every year is 10.4 times that, $62.4 billion!

    •    Our fixated disposition to keep spending more is entrenched with national level Democrats and Republicans (e.g. Elizabeth Warren, a senator from Massachusetts who promotes herself as a left wing progressive) voting in 2017 to increase the defense budget by $80 billion, surpassing the $54 billion increase requested by President Trump.  60% Of House Democrats voted for a defense budget far bigger than Trump requested.

Is any of the above surprising to you or would it be surprising to some of the people you know?   That's why the information needs to be out so we can start setting better priorities.

What Could We Spend The Money On Instead- Real Needs and Benefits at Home?

War is profitable business.  It busies packs of lobbyists who know a great deal more about often secret budgets than we, as the public, will ever learn.  But that profit drains the resources of our society, enfeebling our ability to accomplish so much else.

Martin Luther King, Jr., from his very famous “Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break Silence” speech given April 4, 1997, one year to the day before his assassination.

We spend these vast amounts on the military while we are told over and over again, (as for instance by the media moderators of Democratic candidate debates, such as CNN’s January 14, 2020 debate) that we don’t have money to spend on public goods like:

    •    Schools, teachers, education,
    •    Libraries,
    •    Housing, including federal funds for the affordable housing of the New York City Housing Authority,
    •    Public infrastructure like roads, bridges, subways, railways,
    •    Employment programs,
    •    All of our human needs at home.

 . .  We would add to this list, for extra emphasis, how the American public is also being told that we don’t have enough money to pay for healthcare, medicare for all, or for measures to address climate change, except that medicare for all and taking actions to address the climate change catastrophe chaos emergency would actually be the far cheaper alternatives so they would costs less. . . . But if we reduced spending on the military, it would help evaporate the excuses about not having enough money.  It should also be noted that the U.S. military contributes mightily, in many ways, to worldwide pollution, burning of fossil furls and the climate crisis.

We have significant needs at home and here in New York.  For instance, New York State is currently projecting a $6 billion deficit. That deficit will impact New York City’s budget too.  By contrast, as noted above, what New York State sends annually to the federal government to spend on the military is 10.4 times that, $62.4 billion!
     
If you want to see more data specific figures about the trade-offs of what reduced military spending could pay for, see the website and use the on-line calculation tools of the National Priorities Project.

An example of the information the on-line calculation tools of the National Priorities Project can produce.

The “Move The Money” Campaign and Coalition

The “Move The Money” Resolution 747A before the New York City Council is being promoted by a campaign that is the work of a growing coalition of more 40 New York City organizations.

The Move The Money coalition has a Move The Money coalition Facebook page, and also posts updates and news on Twitter from @MoveTheMoneyNYC encouraging the use of the hashtag #MoveTheMoneyNYC.

Here’s a list of organizations that have joined the Move The Money coalition to fight for passage of Resolution 747A (you can ask yours to join too)—

        •    1199SEIU United Health Care Workers East
        •    350-Brooklyn
        •    Action Corps NYC
        •    AFSCME Local 1549, DC37
        •    Arab American Association of NY
        •    Bay Ridge United Methodist Church
        •    Black Veterans For Social Justice
        •    Brooklyn For Peace
        •    Brooklyn Society For Ethical Culture
        •    Bronx Community Greens
        •    Bronx Peace Action
        •    CCDS-NYC
        •    Central Brooklyn Independent Democrats
        •    Citizens Defending Libraries
        •    CODA - Coalition For A District Alternative
        •    CODEPINK, New York
        •    Concerned Citizens For Change
        •    Domestic Workers United
        •    DSA Anti-War Working Group
        •    Fort Greene Peace
        •    Fort Greene SNAP
        •    First Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Brooklyn, Weaving the Fabric of Diversity Committee
        •    FUREE
        •    Granny Peace Brigade
        •    Greater New York Labor-Religion Coalition
        •    Judson Memorial Church
        •    Nuclear Age Peace Foundation
        •    NYC Chapter of US. Labor Against the War
        •    NYC Chapter, UAW 1981/National Writers Union
        •    NYC Raging Grannies
        •    NYC War Resisters League
        •    NY State Nurses Association
        •    NYS Peace Action
        •    Occupy Kensington
        •    Park Slope United Methodist Church Social Action Committee
        •    Peace Action Bay Ridge
        •    Peoples Climate Movement - NY
        •    Professional Staff Congress - CUNY
        •    Queens Peace Council
        •    Rise And Resist
        •    Salam Arabic Lutheran Church
        •    Sierra Club, NYC Group
        •    St. Boniface Peace & Justice Committee
        •    St. Peter’s Evangelical Lutheran Church
        •    The Manhattan Project for a Nuclear Free World
        •    United Community Centers
        •    Uptown Progressive Action
        •    UPROSE
        •    Urban Homesteading Assistance Board
        •    Veterans For Peace, Chapter 34

Sponsoring New York City Council Members

New York City Council members who have already signed on to support and sponsor the passage of the Move The Money Resolution 747A include: Ydanis A. Rodriguez, Justin L. Brannan, Carlina Rivera, Antonio Reynoso, Karen Koslowitz, Margaret S. Chin, Stephen T. Levin, Deborah L. Rose, Helen K. Rosenthal, Ben Kallos, Andrew Cohen, Costa G. Constantinides, Daniel Dromm, Brad S. Lander, and James G. Van Bramer.

If you don’t see your city council member listed above please contact them ans ask them to join in sponsoring the bill.

(To find out who your council man is go to “Who Represents Me? NYC”-  And more information about city council members and their districts can be found here.)

What Will Happen When The Bill Is Passed?

The New York City Council would hold in-depth hearings and to that would educate, inform and the public while investigating and revealing the tradeoff in the decisions we are currently making about how we spend our money in this country as money is diverted into the Pentagon, and the priorities we could be setting as alternatives.

On Facebook the coalition says:

    If passed, Resolution 747A would put the City on official record opposing bloated Pentagon budgets that divert 60 percent of the annual Federal discretionary budget to endless wars, nuclear weapons, and hundreds of bases around the globe while slashing money for veterans, mass transit, health care, public schools, and affordable housing and other vital public services.

     Passage of Res 747A would mandate in-depth public hearings to determine just how much money is being robbed from the city and its residents and would have the City urge Congress to reverse its lopsided spending priorities and make substantial cuts to its budget that favors war before people's urgent needs.

What Can You Do To Support The Move The Money Campaign?

Things you can do to support the campaign:

    •    Contact your city council member, call or write and ask them to sign on to the campaign.  Sign the campaign postcards to your city council member.

    •    Get your friends and family to reach out to their Council Members. And write to us at movethemoney.nyc@gmail.com for a supply of postcards that you can get others to sign.

    •    Finally, ask your organization to join the coalition and become part of this important movement.

    •    Modest contributions to the campaign will help pay for more campaign post cards to send.

The [Redacted] Report, With Adam Driver and Annette Bening: A Film That Presents Itself As Questioning The Questioning of 9/11 Suspects. . . Is, Indeed, About What’s Left Out And Questions Not Asked

Redaction oriented promotion for the film "The [Redacted] Report"

The promotion of the film, “The Report,” originally titled “The Redacted Report” (note the emphasized deletion) has been interesting in the way that it stresses what has been left out, the redactions.  In a clever bit of advertising promotion for this Amazon Prime feature (Vice Studios is also a producer) editions of the New York Times arrived in November with a wrap-around special section, looking like a newspaper section, titled “Truth Matters.” It was rendered almost entirely unreadable because the majority of the text appearing there was blacked out with redactions.  All you could supposedly make out on that section’s front page that it was something about the “White House, . . the Constitution,  . . .violations, . . etc.” 

. . .The back of the special section furnished a quote from Variety: “ . . by the time it’s over the movie feels like something this country needs [i.e. to know?] now more than ever.”

A few days later the New York Times Arts section slathered on more enticement for the scandal-revealing film by running an article officially telling readers that something had been left out of the film, see:  The Report’ and the Untold Story of a Senate-C.I.A. Clash Hollywood Left Untold- `The Report,” about a 9/11 torture inquiry, omits a crucial episode.  By Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane, Published Nov. 15, 2019, Updated Nov. 16, 2019, or if you want the Times internet headline for the same story, The Adam Driver film dramatizes a contentious investigation into post-9/11 torture. But it leaves out a tense episode that could have buried the results altogether.

That Times story on the first page of its Arts section tells us that the “crucial episode” omitted about the “9/11 torture inquiry” that “could have buried the results” of the “contentious investigation” altogether was that the report was the subject of “a pressure campaign to keep the report under wraps” that included James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, citing a classified assessment and telling members of the Senate Intelligence Committee that release of the report “could lead to riots, attacks on American embassies and the killing of American hostages overseas.”

The big reveal, the hook based upon which the two Times headlines for the article were written, is that there were efforts to suppress that report, however, the whole movie is organized around tension involving efforts to suppress the report and its information. . .  And, despite what the two Times article authors claim, there is something very similar to their cited “episode” included in the film. . .  But having read the Times article (the internet version of the Times article includes the “teaser” trailer promoting it), you might be lured into thinking that, when you see the film, that you’ll know everything about what was left out . .

Is that so?  Not quite!  That’s why I am writing this article.

First, I don’t want to spoil things for anyone: See the film.  It has great performances, including by Adam Driver as the report’s chief investigator and Annette Bening as Senator Diane Feinstein, along with superb performances of many supporting actors like Jon Hamm.  The film also deals with very important issues.  You can feel good about the fact that they are issues that frequently don’t get the attention they should.  Indeed, they are issues that there are continual efforts to bury, just as the film is about attempts to bury the titular report of the title.

See the film, but see the film bearing in mind some of the points we’ll make in this article.

The film is docudrama.  Docudrama’s have a great advantage communicating in that they can synthesize complex stories for the public that could otherwise be exceedingly difficult to understand.  As human beings, our minds organize around narratives, stories that can be told around a campfire.  But when docudramas put their composite or narratively simplified characters up on the screen we lose sight of reality.  When blanks get filled in for the sake of moving the story along, we are likely to forget to ask questions about how those blanks could otherwise have been filled in or ought to have been. 

In the case of the film “The Report,” although it asks questions about how 9/11 suspects who were tortured were “questioned,” it doesn’t ask all the questions that are there to be asked despite the feeling that the film gives that it covers everything.  The film doesn’t ask questions about how a number of blanks that it fills in should have been filled in.

Before we get to those blanks and the questions that weren’t asked, let's look at a list of the many facts and issues the film does address.  The list makes the film appear almost seditious in the amount of criticism it is willing to direct at our government’s intelligence agencies.  Much of what is set forth on the list below is discernible by watching the trailer, but not all of it:

    •    9/11 scared people, made people scared it would happen again, so they would accept the crossing of boundaries that people wouldn’t accept before, many of them.  CHECK!
    •    People in the intelligence community actually foresaw that 9/11 was coming, but, somehow, those available insights were ignored allowing 9/11 to happen.  Decisions were specifically made not to investigate beforehand matters about the 9/11 events that would soon thereafter take place.  CHECK!
    •    Immediately following 9/11, huge amounts of increased funding flowed as a result thereof into the military-industrial-surveillance complex, with a virtual blank check going to the intelligence agencies included in that flow. For instance, just a small for instance, the unqualified private contractors who concocted methods of torture were paid over $80 million.  CHECK!    
    •    9/11 suspects were tortured by the U.S. government. CHECK!
    •    Torture is reprehensible and morally wrong (or at least most watching the film would concur). CHECK!
    •    Torture by the United States government is illegal. CHECK!
    •    When the United States government engages in such illegal torture, it creates a greater likelihood that members of our own military will be subject to similar treatment, while our country simultaneously loses the ability and grounds to prevent and object to it. CHECK!
    •    Those who are properly trained in our government know quite well that there are reliable, productive interrogation techniques that much more competently get information that don’t involve torture. CHECK!
    •    Coercion, including using torture, does not work to get information. CHECK!
    •    Coercion, including using torture, yields false and undependable information. CHECK!
    •    The CIA that conducted such torture had a long, long, decades long knowledge that torture does not work to get information. CHECK!
    •    Torture sometimes kills suspects putting whatever information they potentially had out of reach. CHECK!
    •    The government’s switch over from interrogation techniques capable of yielding valuable information to torture techniques that wouldn’t work made it seem almost as if the government didn’t actually want real information.  CHECK!
    •    That if the government actually knew torture didn’t work (as apparently it did), it was even more illegal. CHECK!
    •    The CIA was making its plans (in November of 2001) to torture people before it had identified suspects from which it wanted any information.         
    •    Coercion, including using torture against suspects means that it becomes almost impossible to thereafter legally prosecute those suspects; thus it immunizes them from legal consequences. CHECK!  (That raises questions about what is actually intended with respect to the actual disposition of such individuals.  CHECK!) 
    •    The United States tortured people who had no connection in any way to attacks on the United States, and people whose potential for providing information was deceptively exaggerated– That included exaggerating to say that Abu Zubaydah with whom the torture program was initiated, had connections to top al-Qaeda leadership. CHECK!  The film notes that, of at least 119 people identified as having been tortured, more than one quarter of them should never even have been detained. CHECK!
    •    Torturing people creates hostility towards the Unites States generating new enemies.  CHECK!
    •    The Unites States Government lied to the public issuing statements that were false saying that its torture programs has been successful in obtaining information that prevented attacks. That included Dick Cheney falsely claiming on television that torture led to the capture of Osama bin Laden backed up by false statements of former CIA director Michael Hayden and former Attorney General Mukasey.  CHECK!
    •    That Public Relations people advising the CIA wanted (e.g. the misinformation in the film “Zero Dark Thirty” that the CIA helped make) President Obama’s popular bin Laden raid connected to information obtained by torture even before and when there was never any ability to manufacture such links.
    •    The United States Government, for about as long as it could, attempted to cover up just about all of the above, including the titular “Report” of the film about all of this.  That suppression could include character assassination of the messenger.  It included lying within the government and suppression of internal dissent within the intelligence agencies. CHECK!
    •    The CIA reportedly destroyed, so as to make them unavailable, tapes of its torture sessions (The destruction is what launches “The Report”’s investigation), so that we cannot now know and witness for ourselves the kinds of statements the CIA interrogators attempted to coerce the people it tortured into making and, further, we cannot see the responses the tortured individuals provided. The tape destruction was something that Gina Haspel (now CIA Director) was directly responsible for.  CHECK!
    •    There are serious questions about the CIA spying on the congressional oversight investigations of CIA activities. That included unauthorized searches of the investigators’ computers. CHECK!    
    •    That those in the government responsible for such actions were promoted, not punished or held to account and that includes Gina Haspel, one of those at the CIA most responsible, who was promoted to become the head of the CIA under Trump.  The film’s end cards say “No CIA officers have been charged in connection with the actions outlined in the report.  Many were promoted. One became Director of the CIA.”  CHECK!

That’s a long list.  And the New York Times article provided assurance that the producers provided “an annotated script” documenting the facts incorporated into the film. (The Times article noted some only very minor liberties with the facts that it says were taken.)  So what did a film that accurately includes all this leave out?  What questions did the film fail to ask, filling in its docudrama blanks in such a way that could go unnoticed?

According to the Times, the film’s “heroes and villains are sketched in black and white.”  Maybe, but are the “villains” supposedly sketched as “black,” sketched in the right shades of black?  Are those shades as black as they should be?  Because we don’t know a lot of things for sure, we can only speculate about how black those shades should be.  That’s hard to do in a docudrama format, but it is a question that deserves asking.

The film’s trailer shows how the film conveys that those wearing the black hats in the film were acting with the intent “to gain intel and save American lives.”  Even as they are shown to be mendacious and deceiving, incapable of recognizing their own sadism, the film allows those wearing its black hats to be seen as essentially misguided and/or perhaps incompetent.  The Times even manages, in its discussion of the film, to back up the idea of this incompetence of government officials by finding an `independent expert,’ Edward Peters, author of a history of torture, to say that those in charge of the nation’s torture program were incompetent to the level that they were “so ignorant of the history of torture,” that they didn’t actually know that they were, without question, torturing people.  Really?: The advantage of being `inexpert’ about torture “history” when you are in charge running a torture program is that you have an excuse for failing to recognize when you are torturing people as your job?

The Times softened any possible judgment that could be leveled against the black hats in the film even further, by supplying, in its film discussion, information that 60 percent of visitors to the International Spy Museum in Washington “voted in favor of torture” (in response to a survey the museum created) if “suspected terrorists . .  may know details about future attacks.”  This was after the Museum Curators provided “video clips in which the [torture] program’s architects defended it and opponents of torture denounced it.”

The Times discussion ends with a note (via quotes from Senator Udall, an author of the report) that the legacy of the report’s “grim record” is that it could serve a possible “warning” if “future leaders” are tempted to use torture again.  But here we have the two Times co-writers of the article, who just saw the film, inserting into their article that discusses these `warnings,’ theories about how maybe those wearing the film’s black hats were possibly not all that bad, that maybe these black hats were only `inexpert’ about torture history, and maybe these black hats were somewhat representative of the 60% of the visitors to the Spy Museum exposed to the pro-torture arguments offered by those in government running these programs who were inexpert in such history.

The real subject here is not intended to be how the New York Times recontextualized the black hats of the film into arguably normal people; the subject here is intended to be the unquestioned suppositions the film itself supplies, almost unnoticeably, concerning about how black the hats of the black hats in the film might actually have been.

The film, presupposing to know them, continually ascribes defensible, even admirable motivations to those who conducted and ran the torture program.  The film has the composite character that stands in for the Gina Haspel and who delivers her supposed point of view say that she justifies what she is doing because, in the aftermath of 9/11 “we are not going to get beat again.”  To her fictional credit, the Gina Haspel composite character, in later scenes, expresses exasperation when it is clear that torture is not bringing forth “the truth,” and she shows irritation with the idea that, when torturing people, you have to supply those people with the words you want them to say (your own “intel” on the subject) to get them to repeat it back.– In other words, she shows irritation that torture is only effective to put the words of your own script in their mouths.

Another stand in character for the torturers who presents the views of those favoring torture tells the investigators in an earnestly overwrought fashion that the report investigators don’t know what worked or didn’t, and that those engaged in the program who were doing these things are “trying to protect this country from people who want to destroy everything we believe in.”  One of the chief torturer concocters says that after 9/11 he “wanted to do something to keep people safe.”*

(*Somewhere herein we have to note that film often has its character's use, just as in real life, the euphemism "EIT Program"_-- Enhanced Interrogation Technique Program--  for torture.) 

It is towards the end of the film that these presumed motivations of the torturers get emphatically vouched for one more time by Adam Driver playing the film’s trusted protagonist, the report’s chief investigator when he is squarely asked: “If the CIA knew that torture didn’t work, why did they continue to do it?”

Driver’s character, Daniel Jones responds: “After 9/11 everyone was scared, scared it might happen again, and the CIA would be blamed if it happened again.  Or maybe they were ashamed: How come the most sophisticated intelligence agency on earth couldn’t keep its own people safe?”   

Actually, based on the film’s earlier revelations that the CIA knew torture didn’t work decades before, why did “the most sophisticated intelligence agency on earth,” in this instance, do it in the first place, let alone “continue” to do it?

Certainly, some of the people involved in conducting and running the torture program could have had such motivations as the film supplies, but to supply all of the top people running our intelligence agencies with such motivations, means that all of the top people at “the most sophisticated intelligence agency on earth,” if not simply sadists, had to be grossly incompetent and extraordinarily misguided, uninformed about the very things about which they are supposed to be expert.– Maybe as the author of the book on the history of torture says, because they don’t know their history?  How easy is this to presume, as is the film’s wont?

Even though the film emphasizes how the entire torture program never got any valuable information and although the film makes a brief reference to how over one quarter of the people tortured by the U.S. in its torture program “should never even have been detained,” it portrays a number of the key individuals being tortured mostly as if they are individuals who likely may be harboring just out of reach information that they are not giving up under torture.  We hear the suggestion that some of the tortured not giving information may “never be forthcoming or honest,” as if that was the point.  At another point, the torturers feeling stymied because they get no information, make out one of the men being tortured as seemingly crafty when they quote him as telling them that if they hurt him “he’d just make things up to get us to stop.”  We are similarly told that “KSM [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] admitted he just told them what they wanted to hear to make it stop.”  The torturers in the film figure they are faced by `super-resisters’ who just give them stuff they already have, lies to make them stop, not the truth.  They decide they know about a man they are torturing only that “the truth is he’s lying.”

The film makes a big deal of the fact that those tortured just gave the CIA back information that the CIA already had.  As noted, the film included mention of how the only way to get more information from the tortured was to give the tortures more “intel” already in the hands of the CIA that the torturers could then extract from the tortured. This bounce back of information supplied by and already in the hands of interrogators is an inherent problem with torturing and coerced confessions.  It’s why everyone in these professions knows that coercion and coercive interrogation techniques are famous for yielding false confessions.  People are sent to prison for crimes the police want them to confess to in such situations, not crimes they actually commit.  (And, concomitantly, someone else is likely to go free.) 

The film avoids asking whether there would be any reason, other than utter incompetence, for the CIA to engage in and persist in so many interrogations where the result was simply statements bouncing back the “intel” the CIA came to those interrogations equipped with.  And even though coercion is famous for yielding false confessions, no more than exactly the story the interrogator wants recited back, the film doesn’t ask to what extent that statements bouncing back to the CIA the CIA’s own “intel” were perhaps false, verifying what might have been false information furnished by the CIA.

Unfortunately, the result of such unreliable investigative techniques is that we don’t know what we don’t know.  For instance, some of what is not known and needs to be discovered is the basis of and at the core of the lawsuit by 9/11 families against Saudi Arabia for the Saudi government’s assistance of the hijackers in the lead-up to the 9/11 attacks.  Saudi Arabian involvement in 9/11 is not mentioned in the film.— The film briefly mentions FBI Director Robert Mueller as one of those in government who is apparently suppressing the reporting of torture (an FBI agent explains that things went nowhere when he told the FBI about the torture- “They briefed Director Mueller and told me to get the hell out of there.”)– And the 9/11 families have introduced in their lawsuit an affidavit submitted as testimony from a former FBI agent saying Mueller, as head of the FBI, was not appropriately interested in investigating “multiple, systemic efforts by the Saudi government to assist the hijackers in the lead-up to the 9/11 attacks,” and that “the record shows” Mueller “covered up evidence pointing back to the Saudi Embassy and Riyadh — and may have even misled Congress about what he knew.”

Throughout multiple administrations, the United States continues to have a very close relationship with Saudi Arabia–  That includes the entire extended time period during which“The Report” takes place.

The film certainly does not stress enough that, because torture increased the unreliability of investigations that needed to be conducted, there is much that we probably haven’t found out, and much that is difficult to presume we actually know.  Nonetheless, about some things, beyond the torturers’ motives, the film presumes to know– In what is probably intended to be one of the film’s hardest hitting dramatic moments, Adam Diver’s Daniel Jones protagonist says of KSM:

What they really did was make it impossible to prosecute a mass murderer like KSM, because if what we did to him ever came out in a court of law the case is over.  The guy planned 9/11, and instead of going to jail for the rest of his life the CIA turned him into a recruiting tool for a war we're still fighting.

What is remarkable in a sense, is that because the film is so methodically thorough, it makes what is left out obvious if you bring to it the kind of scrutiny we are engaging in here. It's a scrutiny the film invites given the way it revels in its wonkishly analytical delights.  The Guardian’s review of the film describes writer and director Scott Z Burns as having a “a fetish for competence porn (that’s watching hugely capable, incredibly smart people carry out difficult tasks with great aptitude)” which keeps the film on track as being about the thrill of dealing with the actual facts.

After I got to just about this point writing this article, I went hunting for reviews of the film.  So far I have found no review that points out the questions the film does not directly ask identified here.  Even an alternative press review such as the one in Counterpunch fails to pick this up.  Previously published reviews generally accept what the film communicates at face value.  The Rolling Stone review of the film actually reassures “Burns redacts nothing here” praising the film for its complete comprehensiveness.

Some of the most glowing reviews of the film hearken back to the film’s debut at the Sundance Film festival. Variety’s review of that time concludes, “`The Report’ is a galvanizing movie that, if handled correctly, many people will want to see. .”  Sundance is where Amazon immediately picked the film up for distribution for $14 million.

I don’t see evidence that Amazon is failing to give the film the support it deserves, but many of the reviews of the film since Sundance proclaim it to be bland, dull and plodding, something I would absolutely disagree with, at least for those, like me, who have a part of their brain that lights up and activates with Andrew Sorkin type engrams and receptors when properly stimulated.  The Rolling Stone review endorses that Burns is correct in believing “that the granular details of cerebral inquiry into issues of morality are more than enough to hold our rapt attention.”

Because Amazon is streaming the film at the same time that it is playing in theaters, there is no way to report, interpret or make sense of any boffo box office figures that could help attract attention for the film.
               
An article in the Intercept reviewing the film (“If It’s Gonna Come Out, It’s Gonna Come Out the Right Way”: Heroes of Torture Report Movie Are Lauded for Dodging Reporters) spars with one aspect of the film to make an interesting point about the film’s ambiguity concerning whether it  stands up for the ethics of whistleblowing and those who resort to taking issues like these to the press.  The Intercept article also snarkily notes that the film gives some credit to the work of a “New York Times national security reporter,” but that the reporter who actually broke the story was Ali Watkins, a reporter at McClatchy (who later did a “stint” at the Times).  The Intercept has a page up saying that it “welcomes whistleblowers.” Unfortunately, the Intercept may not be the optimal publication to praise whistleblowing since it has provided treacherous shoals for whistleblowers seeking safe harbor there– The Internet is developing a very questionable record of "outed" whistleblowers who came to them anonymously and in confidence, i.e. Reality Leigh Winner and Terry James Albury.

What we have not so far mentioned here is that “The Report” adroitly explores the intricate multi-factored balances and interactions between the different departments and branches of government (and yes the press as fourth estate), and how this affects and involves labyrinthian constraints on getting anything done.  I’ll have to leave it to others who were tracking the political players more closely to decide how fair Burns’ film is to them.  (Burns says he voted for Obama twice, but the Obama administration gets roundly knocked, as it apparently deserved to be.)

Burns probably has a multilayered appreciation for the sort of politics involved in getting such a project done that is informed by his own experience.  Investigation and writing of the torture report was initiated in 2007 and the film chronicles how it took seven years to surmount the impediments involved for a summary of the report to finally be released. Burn’s reportedly took five years and 20 drafts to complete his screenplay, starting his work after the release of the report.  Vanity Fair reports that it wasn’t an easy film to get made. The magazine's article informs us that, towards the end, the film:

went from having a 50-day schedule to a 26-day schedule, and its $18 million budget was slashed to $8 million. Even with Driver—arguably the hottest male movie star of the moment—as the lead, Burns told press, “getting Hollywood to get behind a movie like this was difficult.”

Eight million dollars to make an important film like this is a paltry sum.

Just as redaction and compromise were continually issues in getting the report out as the film depicts, so too, we might expect that redactions, the leaving of certain blanks to be filled in only by the more astute viewers, were important to getting the film made.  Perhaps the most remarkable thing is that it was made while redacting as little as it did.  The film is well worth seeing.