[Peace-discuss] Lay review of "American Made" from IMDB--Now you got me started on Barry Seals...

[Mildred O'brien]

-----Original Message-----
From: Mildred O'brien <moboct1 at aim.com>
To: davegreen84 <davegreen84 at yahoo.com>; karenaram <karenaram at hotmail.com>; davidjohnson1451 <davidjohnson1451 at comcast.net>
Sent: Fri, Jan 5, 2018 1:06 pm
Subject: Lay review of "American Made" from IMDB--Now that you got me started on Barry Seals...

While laid up recovering from the cold I had since Dec 16 I've been re-reading The Secret Life of Bill Clinton (1999), a well researched (unauthorized, it goes without saying) biography by the English investigative reporter, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard.  (Some dismiss him for once reporting for a Murdock UK paper).  He devoted a chapter to Barry Seal, Air Contra and Mena Airport (a 40-some year old topic apparently CIA is trying to whitewash by the contemporary movie), facts which I'm sure Hollywood doesn't touch.  Seal lost his job as a TWA pilot in 1972 [my brother who was a TWA pilot at that time may have known him] when caught trying to smuggle plastic explosives in a DC-3 into Cuba (probably intended for a Fidel assassination attempt), and afterwards found more gainful employment in Colombia:   


    "(Mena) goes beyond anything that was revealed by the various noisy investigations into the Iran-Contra affair.  What makes it so fascinating today is evidence that the CIA's base of operations was in Arkansas, and that Governor Bill Clinton was actively involved.  The idea that an outwardly liberal and progressive Democrat [sic] like Bill Clinton was secretly assisting Oliver North's crusade against the Revolucion Sandinista is so shocking that the American press has dismissed it out of hand.  But it is precisely because Mena turns the world upside down that it matters so much,  If true, it validates an inchoate suspicion felt by many Americans that things are not what they seem.  It suggests that the political rhetoric of the two parties in Washington is mere window dressing, while the real decisions are made in secret collusion without democratic accountabilty (emphasis mine). To examine Mena is to examine the institutional condition of the United States.  As for the president, it exposes him as a remarkable counterfeit, willing to betray his liberal principles [sic] for self-advancement.

     "It was the political Left that first became exercised about Mena.  They were alerted when a Fairchild C-123 military transport was shot down in Nicaragua on October 5, 1986 [Hasenfus].  The plane had been used earlier by cocaine smuggler Berriman Adler Seal, who based his fleet of aircraft at Mena.  Arkansas Congressman Bill Alexander, the Democratic Deputy Whip in the House, made it his lonely crusade in the late 1980s to find out whether drug smuggling had somehow become intertwined with rogue operations by the CIA at Mena.  The left-wing press, The Nation and the Village Voice, doggedly pursued the story, led by an Irish radical named Alexander Cockburn.  He passed the baton to Roger Morris, author of the Clinton biography Partners in Power, and Sally Denton.  They wrote a long expose called the "Crimes of Mena" for the "Outlook" section of the Washington Post in 1994, only to see it spiked at the last moment [a later story by Evans-Prichard was published on the front page of the Washington Times].

     "Until now [1999] no one has provided documentary evidence that Barry Seal's Mena-based air fleet was part of the 'Air Contra' supply operation or that Seal was actually running guns to Nicaragua under the cover of drug smuggling.  With due acknowledgment to my colleagues on the Left, I beg to offer the elusive proof."


Little would it be known that the subject would turn up as the romantic Tom Cruise tale of the murder of a washed-up pilot and a washed-up (let's hope) President.   That's only one topic of the book.  It goes into other curious Clinton coincidences as the Oklahoma City bombing of the Murrah Building,Vince Foster's and other murders.  (Unfortunately, it leaves off in 1999; I'm sure the author would find more fascinating Clinton material in the years since).  I used to think Oklahoma politics was dirty until reading this expose of Arkansas politicians.

Midge O'Brien


-----Original Message-----
From: David Green <davegreen84 at yahoo.com>
To: Mildred O'brien <moboct1 at aim.com>
Sent: Fri, Jan 5, 2018 8:58 am
Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] Lay review of "American Made" from IMDB

You're welcome, and Happy New Year!

On ‎Friday‎, ‎January‎ ‎5‎, ‎2018‎ ‎08‎:‎05‎:‎16‎ ‎AM‎ ‎CST, Mildred O'brien <moboct1 at aim.com> wrote:


Hi, David:

OR--they could read Penny Lernoux's "Cry of the People" (1982) and Fear and Hope: Political Democracy in Central America (1984) or "In Banks We Trust" (1984).  OR Evans-Pritchard's "The Secret Life of Bill Clinton" (1999) on Barry Seal's Mena, Arkansas operation, which financed Bill's political ambitions.  WHO would bother paying to watch a stupid Hollywood-Tom Cruise flick anyway???  I learned about US war on Central American in 1981 when my sister-in-law's cousin was murdered by the coup in the mountains of Guatemala at Lake Atitlan.  He was a missionary priest from Oklahoma who worked 13 years with Tzuthil Indians.  His mistake: improving their quality of life--and--questioning soldiers about so many of his "disappeared" parishioners.  He was made a candidate ("beatified") for sainthood last year by Pope Francis.  His parents, poor farmers from Okarche, OK drove to Washington to ask President Reagan (who they voted for and trusted--their first mistake) to investigate his murder.  Reagan wouldn't see them, but they talked to Secy. Alexander Haig who told them "he must have been doing something he shouldn't have."  Yeah, like exist...

Good way to start the New Year with your letter to the N-G.  Thanks.  

Midge

-----Original Message-----
From: David Green via Peace-discuss <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>
To: Peace-discuss List <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>
Sent: Thu, Jan 4, 2018 9:36 pm
Subject: [Peace-discuss] Lay review of "American Made" from IMDB

An apparently popular Tom Cruise vehicle:

Fails to Get Off the Ground
popcorninhell30 September 2017
At this point is there a person on earth who doesn't already know the CIA was up to some shady s**t in Central America? Those who might still be in the dark about this stuff please do yourself a favor and read "Castles Made of Sand" by Andre Gerolymatos or "A Great Place to Have a War" by Joshua Kulantzick. If you want something a little more specific to this film's subject matter there's "Smuggler's End" by Del Hahn. You can also watch: Bananas (1971), The In-Laws (1979), El Salvador: Another Vietnam (1981), Alsino and the Condor (1982), Under Fire (1983), Latino (1985), Salvador (1986), Romero (1989), Walker (1987), Down Came a Blackbird (1995),Blow (2001), Voces Inocentes (2004), Guatemala: The Secret Files (2008), Harvest of Empire (2012), Princesas Rojas (2013), Escobar: Paradise Lost (2014),the TV show Narcos (2015-present), Room of Bones (2015), Finding Oscar (2016), The Infiltrator (2016) and if that's not enough, the hearings on the Iran-Contra Investigation on Youtube.

All of these options and more would give you a more cogent, compelling and satisfying experience than sitting through American Made; a light, mediocre and curiously smug, bug-eyed view of important historical events. In it a TWA pilot turned CIA stooge makes a little side cash smuggling drugs, guns and people to and from Central America. While doing so, the movie frames the larger collusions and convolutions not as the result of a deeply flawed man sticking his thumbs in various proverbial pies but as an awkward jumble of "and then…" filmmaking in spite of him.

Barry (Cruise) fits neatly into the recent crop of true-life protagonists too stupid to realize they're in over their head. He smiles crookedly, trying to hide his intentions under aviator glasses – mostly to the amusement of his CIA handler played by Domhnall Gleeson. He's clearly playing with a bad hand and everyone including the infamous Medellin drug cartel knows it, but damned if they're not entertained by Barry's good 'ol boy braggadocio. He's like a composite of the dudes from War Dogs (2016) only with the serendipity (and obliviousness) of Forrest Gump (1994).

What exactly makes a man like this tick? The movie doesn't really seem that interested in answering that question. Instead it seems more concerned with giving us a history lesson based on Barry's limited first-person perspective and various camera collage techniques that make American Made look like an episode of Arrested Development (2003-Present). This is of course told without wit, irony or the requisite anger needed. One can't help but think that if director Doug Liman brought the same level of ire to this movie that he did in the under-watched Fair Game (2010), American Made would have been a bit more palatable to… someone.

As it stands however, American Made is for no one. It's a frustratingly mediocre waste of marquee space that's too dense to be entertaining and too cavalier to be worth a good discussion of Cold War foreign policy. It lacks characterization and perspective, leaving only Tom Cruise's boundless charisma to push it past the runway with any alacrity. As much as I'd like to say Cruise pulls it off, American Made as a whole should have stayed grounded for a little while longer.

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