FURY IN THE NEWSEUM

FURY:   AN ANTI-WAR FILM?

By Lowell P. Wigglesworth for CPW News Service

    The 2014 film, Fury, starring actor Brad Pitt who was accompanied at the Washington premier by General Colin Powell, purveyor of the “yellow cake uranium bamboozle”  and whose encouragement of Iraq War (part II) that along with the Afghanistan war has created the longest war in U.S. history, has been declared a powerful anti-war film, but is it?  Powell has not often commented on the return of troops to capture and kill Saddam Hussein who had been supported in war against Iran  (September 1980-August 1988) by the U.S. at the same time the U.S. traded weapons with Iran to help secretly underwrite the Contras in Central America.  Neither has Colin Powell mentioned the irony of his leadership that proclaimed that we should during the first Gulf War find the Iraqi viper and cut off its head or of the green light given to Saddam Hussein in 1990 by U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, whose tell-tale memo was released by WikiLeaks and clearly articulated on the floor of Congress by Congressman Ron Paul.  The failure to roll into Baghdad during the first Iraq war and to replace the government left the door open for GWB to reinitiate protracted war in the Middle East that coincides with General Wesley Clark's assertion that the Republican neo-cons were leading a "policy coup" to ferment war in the oil rich region.

     A close analysis of the supporters of the Brad Pitt's film, Fury,  including the flood of photographers who captured the premier for the Department of Defense would indicate that the film is hardly anti-war.

     Sylvia Darlington Butler of the Sherman-Abrams Institute claims that “this is one of the most blatantly pro-war films in U.S. history and it normalizes battle field anomalies and exceptions-to-the-rule of engagement like the Geneva Conventions.  When Brad Pitt takes a rookie soldier whose failure to kill quickly is resolved by shooting an unarmed prisoner of war in the back to steel his soldier’s heart for war, my stomach turned,” said Butler, a relative of two-time Congressional Medal of Honor winner Smedley Darlington Butler.

      Ms. Butler has spent her life looking into just how the military of nations builds consent for war.  “Take the premier of the film, Fury, at the Newseum in Rosslyn a suburb of Washington, D.C..    Rosslyn sounds so much like Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland, home of the famous and historic Knights Templars, that the similarity should not be lost on Frank Gannett’s Freedom Forum’s move from Alexandria, Virginia to Pennsylvania Avenue under the new name Newseum.   Board member of the Newseum at the time of its move in 2000 was Tim Russert who shortly after his attack on the Bush and Kerry membership in Yale’s secretive Skull & Bones fraternity and questioning of Colin Powell on the yellow cake issue which Powell had to admit was a mistake,  died of a massive heart attack on June 13, 2008.  Russert claimed that the Newseum would leave an indelible mark on American culture from its new more visible location.  Indeed it has. 

      While little is said of the battle that raged between media moguls Frank Gannett and William Randolph Hearst, the Freedom Forum maintains that it is a voice for the First Amendment in America, but is it?   When the San Jose Mercury New’s Gary Webb wrote Dark Alliance:  The CIA, the Contras and the Crack Cocaine Explosion, neither the Gannett, Hearst or Knight-Ridder organizations backed up his well documented claims.   
 

     After his suicide by two shots to the head on December 10, 2004 shortly after CBS’s Mary Mapes and Dan Rather botched the report of the George Walker Bush Texas Air National Guard memos that opened the door to a narrow Bush win over John Kerry (50.7 to 48.3% of the total vote) those memos typed by Mrs. Marion Carr Knox, discredited as she was by the Associated Press’ Louis Boccardi who received the  Freedom Forum/Newseum’s highest journalistic award, and one must really wonder.  "The Knox story was available in 2000 when the margin of the Gore/Bush election was even slimmer.  So why wasn't it exposed then?  Mapes knew of it in 1999!  Boccardi and Bush lawyer, Dick Thornburgh, obviously threatened Marion Carr Knox after the Mapes/Rather interview in 2004, but why the silence in 2000? Knox's son, Patrick Carr, confirmed that his mother was, contrary to the Thornburgh and Boccardi finagling, being quite honest, " said Butler, who believes that Mapes' and Rather's winning a Peabody Award for their "breaking" the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in 2004 when it was Amnesty International that broke the story in 2003 while Rather was an owner with Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld of a 9,000 acre private ranch in Las Vegas, Nevada, proved problematic for the claim of unbiased journalism.   "It shows a disgusting, incestuous, putrid, mutual-pud-pounding relationship between a reporter and an American war criminal.  It's like claiming that there is separation of church and state when the head of the U.S. Army's psychological warfare in the 1980's was Col. Michael Aquino, a disciple of Anton LaVey head of the Worldwide Church of Satan and who was investigated for a pedophilia case at San Francisco's Presidio Army base," said Butler.  "The modern soldier's arsenal of weapons includes the murder of civilians as a means of killing the soldiers' will to fight. That made the Confederate General William Tecumseh Sherman the first truly modern, albeit, barbaric soldier whose methods were incorporated into World War II carpet bombing recommended by Robert Lovett, Yale Bonesman and Assistant Secretary of War during World War II.  The evolution of an Abu Ghraib on top of the Col. Michael Aquino revelation is quite understandable," said Butler.  "This is why civilians should act swiftly and decisively to rid their culture of criminal despots to insure that peace prevails.   Had Deone Lucas served Hitler a poison stuffed squab in Hamburg in the 1930's Dietrick Bonhoeffer and the Scholls would have survived the 1940's," said Butler.  "Not to mention the six million Jews the majority of whom Edwin Black's book, The Transfer Agreement, shows were sold down the river for the future of some at the expense of the rest and a program that was as American-made by U.S. fascists as it was by the German's....as Black has meticulously laid out in War Against the Weak."

     When one realizes that the upcoming film by Robert Redford and James Vanderbilt, Truth, based on Mary Mapes book, Truth and Duty, about the 2004 Dan Rather story about GWB's National Guard performance, it is likely to be as problematic as the film Fury according to Butler.   "We see here a pattern that quickly becomes obvious.   The First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University is supported by the Freedom Forum and the Newseum, but is it really concerned about preserving what Thomas Jefferson said….'Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press and that cannot be limited without being lost,'" asked Butler. 
     "Just because James Vanderbilt is directing the Mapes and Rather story, Truth, and because the Newseum supports the First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University does not insure that there's not significant slight-of-hand involved in the upcoming media event.  You have to remember that Cornelius Vanderbilt and William Walker fought each other over a Central American canal from the Pacific to the Atlantic that would insure the flow of goods from the Middle East to the Far East to Europe and the world and that included the game-breaking opioids from Turkey, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and India where the British's chief opium supplier, David Sassoon, had cornered the market that we now enjoy by virtue of our more powerful military, particularly our navy.   Walker was an unrepentant slaver who wanted to turn the Caribbean into a 'Golden Circle' of slavery.  Vanderbilt?  Well, look at the history of Vanderbilt's Chancellor, Harvie Branscomb, Sr.," said Butler.  "It's time for the Newseum to come clean," said Butler, "and to admit that the media is a boiling sludge pot of seriously mixed motives and ambitions not all of which are concerned about the furtherance of free speech and enlightened living.  The Roosevelts may have been a part of these U.S. insider's China Trading mercantilism, but they were unrepentant.....both Teddy and FDR.....populists who challenged the fascists without aligning with the commies," said Butler who admitted that Smedley Darlington Butler was as disillusioned with Teddy's "Yankee imperialism" as he was with the National City Bank gang for being their "goon on three continents."

    Butler has noted that after the Civil War Texas was occupied by Union troops, primarily the Buffalo Soldiers, black troops domiciled on the Nassau-Waldec Plantation near Round Top, Texas, a German plantation today owned by the Rather family.   "The plantation used the oversight of brothers Morgan and Giles Smith who operated out of Galveston, Texas and both having fought on for the Union during the Civil War to control in Reconstruction the Texas politics after the Civil War.  Both Morgan Lewis Smith and his brother, Giles Alexander Smith fought at the critical opening battle of the Civil War, Fort Donelson, and under William Tecumseh Sherman at Vicksburg and the March to the Sea....critical battles in destroying the South's rail ambitions to the Pacific. It's as if they damn well knew how to control the old Jefferson Davis highway from Savannah to San Diego that the rail road barons wanted so badly and to prevent it from becoming the preferred route to the China Traders' with their desire to control the route to the Pacific's opium, silk and spice trade," said Butler who claims that some of her family members were part of the Elder-Butler post-Civil War feud in Texas.

     “Tell that to Gary Webb,” said Butler.   “Tell it to the family of Pat Tillman or Jessica Lynch who found that the Department of Defense had in a Washington paper, the Washington Post, an ally in its metro-editor, Vernon Loeb, who approved the front-page debacle of that Washington Post’s propaganda on the Tillman friendly fire….if it was friendly fire given his outspoken criticism of the war….or of Jessica Lynch’s falsified rescue.    Tell it to General David Petraeus whose life was torn apart when Vernon Loeb and co-writer of Petraeus’ biography, Paula Broadwell, wrote All In: The Education of General David Petraeus.   I say that the Hoover Institute at Stanford should donate the diary of Joseph Goebbels to the Newseum so that the American people can really see what is going on here.  Never mind that Al Jazeera is domiciled at the Newseum Center.    Where is Loeb now?  In Houston at the Houston Chronicle,  from whose competitor, the Houston Post, came the author of The Mafia, the CIA and George Bush and a tightly documented analysis of just how the CIA, the Mafia, George Bush and the 1980’s S&L scandal and the Iran-Contra network had the same cast of characters….an observation not wasted by Gary Webb who used that information in Texas to prove his story in California.  Where was the Washington journalism establishment in supporting these two fine reporters?    Skewering them!   The Washington Post’s Woodward and Bernstein who saw Watergate as far worse than Iran-Contra would learn that the editor of their story, All The Presidents Men, made into another Hollywood snow job by Robert Redford, would find their editor, Alice Mayhew, jerked from editing the powerful The Mafia, CIA and George Bush in 1991 just before the 1992 Bush/Clinton/Perot election.  Who would come down mercilessly on Gary Webb’s 1996 revelations in Dark Alliance?   Vernon Loeb’s colleagues at the Washington Post, Jeff Leen and Steve Coll….with Coll now the Henry Luce Professor of Journalism at Columbia in New York and the head of the journalism department where the mass media department is educated in methods of  “applied sociology” and the mass-manipulation techniques of Robert Merton, father of the man who invented the Black-Scholes credit default formulas that tanked the U.S. economy in 2008 and led to the worst rape of the U.S. since the 1929 stock market crash and the disgraceful period of bamboozling from 1999-2008,” said Butler.  “It’s all bull shit folks and it’s bad for you,” concluded Ms. Butler who noted that the price of oil in 2008 sky-rocketed to $150 per barrel in the midst of the war and financial crisis and to the profit of the world's oil companies.