The latest reports from the US Army's entertainment liaison office brings us almost up to date on their activities, which includes support to everything from the film Jackie to History Channel documentaries and The Ellen DeGeneres Show. One continued theme is the military support not just for cookery programmes but also for their corollary - competitive weight loss reality TV game shows.(Read more...)
In this month’s subscriber-only podcast I talk about some of my recent FOIA escapades, including my attempts to track down the 2nd Pentagon-Hollywood database. The existence of this second database was revealed to me by the Marine Corps communications office, but both the Marine Corps and the Office of the Secretary of Defense deny that […](Read more...)
Newly-released reports from the US Army's entertainment liaison office show that they maintain a close and friendly relationship with Warner Bros., enabling them to get involved at early stages of major films and wield considerable influence over their content. While Warner have a reputation for making some of the darker, more subversive movies in Hollywood their relationship with the Pentagon remains secure.
National Security Cinema is a new book that uses over 4,000 pages of documents to reveal government censorship and propaganda in Hollywood. From the Pentagon's rewriting of James Bond to the CIA's manipulation of Meet the Parents this is the biggest and best book ever written about military-intelligence propaganda in the entertainment industry. And I'm not just saying that because I co-wrote it.
Good friend Pearse Redmond invited Matt and I on his radio show to talk about our new book National Security Cinema: The Shocking New Evidence of Government Control in Hollywood.
In 1988 CIA director William Webster attended the Bohemian Grove, where he gave a lakeside talk about intelligence matters. His speech, now available to the public for the first time, is both amusing and at times shocking. From Tom Clancy to a voyeuristic child who wanted to join the Agency, Webster covered a variety of subjects including the relative merits and demerits of spy satellites vs fake moustaches.
What if I told you that the same man trained Meir Kahane’s killer, the World Trade Center bombers, the African embassy bombers and Osama Bin Laden’s bodyguards? What if this man was a member of the Egyptian Army unit that assassinated Anwar Sadat, and was a translator and close associate of Ayman Zawahiri? And what if he did all this while serving in the US Special Forces, as an FBI informant and working for the CIA? That man is Ali Mohamed, perhaps the most astonishing spy of recent times.
In 1985 the CIA produced an analysis of the French arm of the New Left - the early post-Marxist intellectual movement. Somewhat bizarrely the Agency were broadly in favour of this new movement because it provided less resistance to US goals both in France specifically, and in the world more generally. As time has shown, a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing because without an in-depth understanding, all predictions are just guesswork.
The conventional explanation of how Yugoslavia 'fell apart' is that ethnic and religious tensions led to civil wars, necessitating the breakup of the country into a series of smaller states. The reality is that Yugoslavia was knowingly and willingly destroyed by NATO, with Al Qaeda playing a critical role in the wars in Bosnia, Kosovo and Macedonia.
Once more I joined Pearse Redmond on Porkins Policy Radio to discuss recent developments: The Reality Winner NSA leak story, Chelsea Manning and Dennis Rodman's latest trip to North Korea to visit his good friend Kim Jong-un.(Read more...)
