In the latest chapter in the Salisbury Novichok saga the police have released a selection of images of two men they are naming as Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov. While there has been widespread speculation that the images are fake, doctored or otherwise not real pictures, this has involved a lot of embarrassing leaps to […](Read more...)
Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House is a 2017 biopic of former deputy director Mark Felt a.k.a. Deep Throat. The FBI were involved with the film early on in its development, which is odd because in many ways the film portrays the Bureau very badly. The movie tells the story of […](Read more...)
Condor is a TV reboot of Three Days of the Condor, and centres around a CIA officer who goes on the run after he is framed for killing 11 of his colleagues. In this episode I examine whether Condor was CIA-sponsored, why the Agency might support a series that shows them planning massive crimes, and […](Read more...)
In this special episode I reflect on the war in Syria and the propaganda emanating from governments on both sides. In particular I focus in on how the apparently anti-war Left has been fooled into becoming de facto propagandists for the Russian and Syrian security states, and how the same binary narratives are issued in […](Read more...)
The FBI’s entertainment liaison office has supported a wide range of Hollywood productions, from conspiracy thrillers like Shooter to comedy adventures like So Undercover to action dramas including Captain Phillips. But they also rejected a large proportion of the requests they receive for production assistance, with reasons ranging from the film depicting an FBI agent […](
The military legal drama Rules of Engagement is perhaps the greatest modern example of racist, warmongering propaganda. Unsurprisingly, it benefited from full Pentagon support, in exchange for numerous script changes. The film was eerily prescient, foreshadowing two terrorist attacks in Yemen, and in some ways the entire post-9/11 war on terror. In this episode I […](Read more...)
Rules of Engagement is notable for being possibly the most violent, racist, colonialist film Hollywood has made since the end of the Cold War. It pre-empted two real life terrorist attacks in Yemen including one on the US embassy. The film was produced with close co-operation from the DOD, particularly the Marine Corps, in exchange […](Read more...
Marvel have enjoyed a long-running and mutually beneficial relationship with the Pentagon, but there was a falling out during production of The Avengers (2012). On this month’s subscriber-only podcast I examine two of the MCU films that immediately followed this argument – Iron Man 3 and Captain America: The Winter Soldier – and highlight scenes […](Read more...
The Weather Underground were the most active and successful militant left-wing group in US history. As part of their anti-Vietnam war operations they bombed the Pentagon, the State Department, corporate headquarters and other high-profile targets. In this episode I examine whether they were a lethal terrorist organisation, or a non-lethal militant anti-war gang. I look […](Read more...)
The Weather Underground were the most successful Leftist militant group in history, a radical offshoot of the SDS and the anti-Vietnam War movement. As a result, Hollywood has almost no interest in telling stories about them and the only recent film on the Weathermen was Robert Redford’s low budget thriller The Company You Keep. The […](Read more...)
