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.
Bob Guccione hired his buddy Giancarlo Lui to make this technically inept 16mm featurette on the filming of the epic (Jack Pitman, “‘Caligula’ Winds Up $12.5-Mil Over Budget; Legalistics Too,” Variety, Wednesday, 30 November 1977, p. 31). The Caligula crew were exasperated that Lui never shot anything interesting (Solinas, Ultimate Porno, 196, 237–238). Instead, he came up with this thing. It’s a propaganda piece badmouthing Vidal and Brass and defending Guccione. Surprisingly, both Vidal and Brass (at his most corpulent and least enthusiastic) appear on camera, but not together, and not after their fallings out with Guccione. Hey, Don Bob was paying, so he was going to get the last word, right? And his last word, in the pretentious narrator’s voice: “One thing is certain: It will without question be the most widely seen and talked about film of our time.” Yeah right. This is included as a supplement in the DVD of Caligula.
Curiously, there are at least three different versions of this film floating around, two in English and one in Italian, and the differences are huge. It appears that Guccione interfered with this film almost as much as he interfered with Gore Vidal’s Caligula!
NOTE: It was in this documentary, among other places, that Guccione, without realizing that he had just put his foot in his mouth, admitted that his only reason for making Caligula was to combine big-name Shakespearean actors and hardcore sex into a mainstream movie. And that explains his unprofessional and unconscionable contempt for the writers, director, designer, cast, crew, suppliers, and shooting schedule.
| Script | Alan Wallis |
| Narration | Bill Mitchell |
| Assistant director | Ranieri Ferrara |
| Sound editor | Inge Behrens |
| Assistant editor | Stuart de Jong |
| Edited by | Michael Lomas |
| Produced and directed by | Giancarlo Lui |