****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
This film shows how a Rand employee filtered top secret documents to the press, and how those made headlines for more than two weeks, somehow contributing to speeding up the end of the Vietnam war, and even playing some role in the resignation of President Nixon. What most astonished me in this documentary was not the story of how the Vietnam war was rejected in the '70s, but the fact that nowadays nobody seems to care on the current wars being fought in Iraq and Afghanistan.The Nixon administration classified a man like Ellsberg "the most dangerous man of America"; nowadays, we still have "dangerous men and women", but nobody cares; Richard Gage has united more than 1.000 architects and engineers, people who professionally know that the three skyscrapers that went down on 9/11 couldn't possibly have done so due to fire, but were controlled demolitions (9/11 Mysteries Part 1: Demolitions) - they all insist in a new investigation; we have a man like David Ray Griffin, who has summed up more than 50 arguments why the official version of 9/11 is a big lie (The New Pearl Harbor Revisited: 9/11, the Cover-Up, and the Exposé); we even have a former Pentagon officer, April Gallop, prosecuting her own former boss, for the bombing of the Pentagon, where her son was seriously hurt; but : who cares?Nobody cares, because the press is no longer independent. Forty years ago, the New York Times and The Washington Post still had some editorial independence and somehow fulfilled their role as government watchdogs; nowadays, those papers are fully corporate-controlled; CIA director William Casey claimed in 1981 that "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." See also former Washington Post editor's Ben Bagdikian excellent analysis of the current state of affairs in The New Media Monopoly.Nobody cares, because even if there would be a desire to do so, there is hardly any free time left... precisely because we are submerged, once again, in a Great Depression, courtesy of our real "masters" - the big banks... Obama recently said : "We have spent over a trillion dollars at war, often financed by borrowing from overseas. This, in turn, has short-changed investments in our own people, and contributed to record deficits. For too long, we have put off tough decisions on everything from our manufacturing base to our energy policy to education reform. As a result, too many middle class families find themselves working harder for less, while our nation's long-term competitiveness is put at risk." See also Vile Acts of Evil: Volume 1 Banking in America to understand how the banking system has been playing tricks with the public in the last two centuries.On top of that, we don't have popular leaders any more firmly opposing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. John Lennon sang "Give peace a chance" and wrote "Power to the people" to give the demonstrators a new hymn in the '70s. He has not only been shot, but no pop star has even come close to his heels to replace this real working class hero. We are left with Bono, who likes to be invited by Bush and Blair. He even claims that John Lennon did much harm writing "Imagine", a "very deceiving" song following him. Yeah, right, Bono. The only deception I see in this is you befriending mass murderers, instead of standing up to their unjustified wars.America 's new legally criminal social structure based on administrative detention, enshrined in The Patriot Act and a number of executive orders, some secret, changed society profoundly, more and more in the direction of a totalitarian state, very far away from the democratic republic the Founding Fathers had in mind. Heavily-armed SWAT teams smashed down doors and agents armed with search warrants carried out simultaneous raids in Minneapolis and Chicago early morning on the 24th of September 2010. Rummaging through personal belongings, agents carted off boxes of files, documents, books, letters, photographs, computers and cell phones from Minneapolis antiwar activists Mick Kelly, Jessica Sundin, Meredith Aby, two others, as well as the office of that city's Anti-War Committee. Meanwhile, FBI agents raided the Chicago homes of activists Stephanie Weiner and Joseph Iosbaker.It is time we recognize the many freedoms we used to have and lost all along the way ! This documentary is a wake-up call !
