Matt Taibbi’s review of Zero Dark Thirty

I haven't seen Zero Dark Thirty and I don't plan to do so. I've read enough about the film's glorification of torture and violence, and the falsifications of history, that I'm not interested. I did read Matt Taibbi's review, however, which is primarily a comment on what this film says about us:

The real problem is what this movie says about us. When those Abu Ghraib pictures came out years ago, at least half of America was horrified. The national consensus (albeit by a frighteningly slim margin) was that this wasn't who we, as a people, wanted to be. But now, four years later, Zero Dark Thirty comes out, and it seems that that we've become so blunted to the horror of what we did and/or are doing at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and Bagram and other places that we can accept it, provided we get a boffo movie out of it. That's pathetic. Bin Laden was maybe the most humorless person who ever lived, but he has to be laughing from the afterlife. We make an incredible movie that celebrates his death - a movie so good it'll be seen everywhere in the world - and all it does is prove him right about us.

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Unending U.S. hypocrisy in the Middle East

Glenn Greenwald sums up a large part of U.S. Middle East foreign policy: Obama administration has continuously lavished the Saudi Kingdom with a record amount of arms and other weapons, and has done the same for the Bahraini tyranny. He has done all this while maintaining close-as-ever alliances with the Gulf State despots as they crush their own democratic movements." According to a high-ranking adviser to four Presidents, including President Obama, this means: "work even harder, do even more, to strengthen the Saudi regime as well as the neighboring tyrannies in order to crush the "Arab Awakenings" and ensure that democratic revolution cannot succeed in those nations." The result is flagrant U.S. hypocrisy: "US policy to support the worst tyrannies that serve its interests, sitting right next to endless US pro-war rhetoric about the urgency of fighting for freedom and democracy."

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FBI coordinated crackdown on Occupy Protests

According to Naomi Wolf, the coordinated arrests and violence against protestors were not coincidentally timed.

It was more sophisticated than we had imagined: new documents show that the violent crackdown on Occupy last fall – so mystifying at the time – was not just coordinated at the level of the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and local police. The crackdown, which involved, as you may recall, violent arrests, group disruption, canister missiles to the skulls of protesters, people held in handcuffs so tight they were injured, people held in bondage till they were forced to wet or soil themselves –was coordinated with the big banks themselves.

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