AMY GOODMAN: A little-noticed story surfaced a couple of weeks ago in the Army Times newspaper about the 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team. “Beginning Oct. 1 for 12 months,” reported Army Times staff writer Gina Cavallaro, “the 1st BCT will be under the day-to-day control of U.S. Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command, as an on-call federal response force for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters, including terrorist attacks.” Disturbingly, she writes that “they may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control” as well. The force will be called the chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or high-yield explosive Consequence Management Response Force. Its acronym, CCMRF, is pronounced “sea-smurf.” These “sea-smurfs,” Cavallaro reports, have “spent 35 of the last 60 months in Iraq patrolling in full battle rattle,” in a combat zone, and now will spend their 20-month “dwell time” — time troops are required to spend to “reset and regenerate after a deployment” — armed and ready to hit the U.S. streets....
FOR THE FULL STORY, CLICK HERE.
It gets worse:
NAOMI WOLF: On October 1, 2008, President Bush deployed a brigade — which means three to four thousand warriors — somewhere in America. We do not know where they are deployed though citizens have informally reported to me having seen military vehicles and troops in Georgia and Alabama. We do know that their official mandate according to the first report is “crowd control” as well as action in the event of a mass civilian catastrophe. Initial reports described their technology “module package” as involving Tasers and rubber bullets.... The First Brigade is Bush’s force: they are not answerable to Congress or to the Governors of states: they are answerable to the Commander in Chief. In an Alternet posting, I interviewed Air Force Colonel (retired) David Antoon who noted that the troops must obey the president, even if he asks them to arrest Congress or fire on civilians or attack media outlets. If they do not obey orders, he notes, they face five years in prison.... Antoon himself calls the deployment “ominous.” Troops on our streets makes us something less than a democracy: one definition of a police state is when a leader sends his own military units into civilian streets. Meanwhile the civilian policing of citizens is becoming more brutal. Hundreds of preemptive arrests took place in St Paul, dozens of journalists were arrested.... In St. Paul, funds were sent in advance to pay off the lawsuits against police forces that were guaranteed to arise from the planned abuse of citizens. This sort of thing is happening across the country. The tactic has established a closed circle that has turned citizens’ law enforcement agencies into contractors of a state that is directing acts of increasing severity against US citizens. Now a military brigade is being deployed....
FOR THE FULL STORY, CLICK HERE.
Click here to see an interview with Naomi Wolf conducted in early October 2008.
For the past five years or so I hve been hearing rumors that Halliburton has been building (and has now finished building) 800 prisons throughout the USA, not yet functioning, but just waiting for the right crisis. I have not found reliable evidence for the specific quantity, readiness, functionality, locations, or details, but you might be interested in taking a look at page 5 of this Halliburton press release dated 26 January 2006: KBR has been awarded a contract announced by the Department of Homeland Security’s United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) component. The Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity contingency contract is to support ICE facilities and has a maximum total value of $385 million over a five-year term. The contract provides for establishing temporary detention and processing capabilities in the event of an emergency influx of immigrants into the United States, or to support the rapid development of new programs.... Now, really, what are the chances of “an emergency influx of immigrants into the United States”? And what are the “new programs” that could come under “rapid development”?
FOR THE FULL PRESS RELEASE, CLICK HERE.
After the bannings of
Ça ira,
Chi lavora è perduto,
NEROSUBIANCO, and
L’urlo;
and after the feuding over Yankee;
and after the
TINTO BRASS—Withdrew “The Shriek” from film-author program at Cannes last year and sent it to Berlin instead. Brass was in England filming “Dropout” as producer-director. He rolled another, “Vacation,” entirely on location along Adriatic Coast. To recover from financial stress of improvised filmmaking in the past two years, Brass goes commercial next month to film an untitled thriller.
He finally did make a commercial thriller in 1988, but it probably had nothing at all to do with this one.
INTERLUDE
After so many financial failures and so many vocal objections to his films from so many quarters, I’m amazed that Brass didn’t quit. If I had been in his shoes, I would have concluded that my movies hadn’t really been good after all, and I would have pursued another career. But for some reason Brass kept going, and he was right to have done so. He explained his compulsion, which he credited to his peculiar personal metabolism, to Nerio Minuzzo in L’Europeo (9 November 1967): “All this talk about cinematic æsthetics, I don’t understand it at all. My only problem is filming. If I go six months without putting my eye on a viewfinder I go mad.” But the question still arises: How was he able to keep going? His family were apparently well to do, and that probably helped, even if he was disinherited. And to top that off, his wife’s family are, as far as I can guess, wealthy. Brass’s wife, Carla Cipriani, who is known as Tinta, was an integral part of her family’s famous Locanda Cipriani in Venice, a luxury restaurant—which serves as a location for some of Brass’s films.
TAKE A LOOK AT THESE WEB
SITES:
Locanda Cipriani
The Locanda Cipriani on Torcello
Jennie Schacht, “Una Bella Mangiata in Italia”
AND THE INEVITABLE DEAD LINK:
http://www.weissmann.com/Samples/cp/dining.htm
Tinto Brass wrote a lovely love letter to his wife on an earlier version of that first web site, but it has since disappeared. Oh well.
And a relative’s establishment, Harry’s Bar,* was once upon a time the favorite hangout of numerous celebrities, Ernest Hemingway among them.
With such a background, moviemaking might not be easy, but it’s certainly not impossible. And if you can afford it and if you’re having fun, why not continue—and damn the rest of the world, right?
*[A bitter legal family battle a few years ago resulted in the owner of Harry’s Bar getting the exclusive right to use the Cipriani name for olive oil and condiments. My suggestion to Carla Cipriani is to adopt the name “Tinta” for her line of products.]