ben affleck for instance ben affleck's former wife jennifer got it on paper equipment out through the cia in early two thousand and thirteen americans might have found it curious to see the first lady appear via satellite at the academy awards ceremony to announce the best picture oscar for a film about the rescue of american hostages from iran in one thousand nine hundred by the cia well when i think of other films big films that have conveyed the cia's message i think of argo argo as a film that talks about the daring do of a couple of cia and soon to go to iran and rescue six american diplomats the iranians wanted to let go of those hostages pretty quickly they didn't really want to cause a problem with the united states of america but i had a total of khamenei who is men personified is evil and the u.s. press had made a deal with the reagan administration urged the reagan campaign at that point not

to release the hostages and only after reagan had been elected strangely enough that day the hostages were released so that bill neglects to mention how pivotal reagan ministration was for the reagan campaign was in making sure that those hostages want released it was called the october surprise the october surprise may have set the stage for the iran contra scandal of the one nine hundred eighty s. as reagan's white house cut deals with the iranian government to sell them arms in exchange for assistance in releasing american hostages including cia agents in lebanon on the proceeds from those on cells really diverted to the contra armies fighting to overthrow the socialist government in nicaragua he betrayed america what he had done was far worse than nixon and watergate and here was reagan that way with it katharine graham she was one of the leaders of the conservative movement there to kill off. he said no more watergate's because she said the

country can't survive so when the iran contra broke there was no cooperation from the media to go after reagan on that. so for example in one thousand nine hundred fold it was a phone call countermeasures which would be scripted and greenway was going to stop us to go any we've seen it davis it was you know big big production but it was set on an aircraft carrier and it referred to iran contra the cia gunrunning scandal involving iran and the crack you are now salvador and so on and the military literally said in a memo we have no reason to remind the american public of the iran contra scandal although to denigrate the white house. that is the mentality so they with they said no we won't provide next rocker if you're filming and a film was therefore never made even though it was a long way down the track now that happens time and time and time and time again

which ultimately changes the culture the popular culture in the united states and across the west by changing the popular culture you're also playing havoc but it's true as well. in two thousand and seventeen tom cruise starred in american made a film exposing the dark side of iran contra that the cia knew drugs were being smuggled into america to facilitate financing their contra armies but the film did its best to portray one of the smugglers very seal as an independent wild card rather than a lifelong cia asset. seal was one of the most important covert operatives of the us in the time of the bay of pigs and yet this movie has the cia first learning about him when they see that he's successfully smuggling cigars from cuba the director doug lehman is the son of the house majority counsel

to the kerry commission that looked into iran contra they never got to the bottom of the contra cocaine thing but his dad was generally looked upon as a good guy but i do research into personal he's the guy that made oliver north bemis it was as a result of his inept questioning that oliver north became america's hero and then i find out that this guy his father also was a personal attorney for henry kissinger personal journey for robert best go personal journey for michael milken and the list goes on the climate's father arthur was not part of the subsequent kerry subcommittee's. field cocaine smuggling in the conscious supply.

when journalist gary webb published articles in the san jose mercury to better elucidate the relationship between cia and other agencies that protected contra drug trafficking he was run out of mainstream journalism his story was finally told in two thousand and fourteen kill the messenger gary webb you know was a really a great investigative reporter who broke a story right at the beginning of the internet era was actually the first big internet news exposé and it involved some geishas of cia connected drug sales in the one nine hundred eighty s. and l.a. the biggest crack campaign freeway ricky ross who is well known to the public because the l.a. times already called him the cantenna crack cocaine the person most responsible for the rise of the drug epidemic gary webb came along and revealed that nicaraguans working with the cia had actually provided him with cheap cocaine for all these years the three major newspapers all stepped in with the washington post which is

traditionally been like the attack dog of the cia over the decades and to a certain extent still is they just attacked gary's story and then attacked gary's entire career and try to discredit and drove him out of journalism nothing like that is ever happened before a sense to my knowledge and again as you mentioned it drove him out of journalism and ultimately destroyed his life their relationship between the ruling elite and media has existed since the origin of newspaper but if you'd seventeen congressmen callaway and more sounded the alarm that the j.p. morgan bank working with big steel shipping in weapons manufacturers had purchased controlling interests in twenty five of the largest newspapers across the country to promote american entry into the first world war on the side of the british and french who bowed the morgan. banks hundreds of millions of dollars in wartime debts hollywood was quickly recruited to work. nineteen seventeen the government

started to issue with a call that the time liberty bonds and hollywood rallied to the cause and help sell these liberty bonds you had people like mary pickford douglas fairbanks charlie chaplin and other hollywood stars out there promoting these war bombs. the whole field of public relations that the name public relations was created by a guy named bernays. he created the field a young man specifically to sell war bonds for the first world war that was the origin of what we now know as public relations and he realized instead of telling people buy bonds too because you'll make some money off your bonds you know you know save it will help america instead it was like you're buying bonds to defeat the hun you know that killing babies in belgium this was this was his propaganda you know this if you're if you're against killing babies in belgium by us war bonds

and so the whole war bond propaganda. that was the very first use of what we today call. public relations but you also had during world war one the beginnings of government propaganda on a much larger scale much of this was run through the committee on public information that was headed by george creel and they were deliberately trying to manipulate the public to support the war and they did that on a lot of different fronts again during world war one this was a time when you had vast censorship where it was against the law to oppose the draft it was against the law to publicly speak against the war really and many very patriotic americans were thrown into prison. during world war one because they were opposing the war including eugene debs leading big bill haywood people who spoke out against world war one his being a war in which working class kids were being sacrificed the name of profits for the

big banks. in the one nine hundred thirty s. radio was the internet of its day and programs like the radio research project at princeton university with rockefeller foundation financing had already begun to discern that in the words of theodore door no radio music listeners are not childlike but they are childish their primitivism is not that of the end developed but that of the forcibly retarded. frank stanton was one of the project's directors before becoming president of c.b.s. news. program. i'm. going to report to.

regular. i'm moving to normal. in one hundred thirty eight orson welles created a national panic with his radio broadcast of h.g. wells' is war of the world it's about a quarter of the listeners on hollowing morning actually believed they were being invaded by the dread germans. three years later and attacked it coming not by germans or martian invaders but by the japanese one of the ironies is that many of the people who were going to be blacklisted and greylisting during the mccarthy period were the ones who were out there promoting the war and promoting war bonds during the war in the hysteria of the early cold war anyone seen as pro-communist despite the soviets being america's strongest ally during the war were not subject to loyalty oaths background checks and even when i'm playing. well some hollywood

actors like ronald reagan actually became f.b.i. informants others refused to disavow their first amendment freedom of political association during the witch hunt and september of nineteen forty seven we have got the first hearings about the hollywood ten as we've come to know that they actually called for forty one witness is nineteen of whom they expected to be hostile and those nineteen ten testified ten leading hollywood people seven of whom were writers only one was an actor but they claimed the first amendment and refused to answer a question. ns about their political affiliations based upon the first amendment they were later found to be in contempt they were sent to prison in one thousand nine hundred fifty these are people like dalton trumbo ring lardner lardner was the most highly paid and successful screenwriter in hollywood at the time i mean

these are the top names these were academy award winners and they were clearly very very patriotic and they refused to talk about whether they had been members of the communist party there was nothing illegal about being a member of the communist party and given america's commitment to first amendment rights there was no reason why they should be called to testify about that but careers were ruined and my uncle was blacklisted all over crawford later became had the screen writers guild and. you know we do forget that hollywood was very complicit and while we talk about the you know there's a story the unfriendly ten writers like dalton trumbo who had written antiwar scripts and now they are being labeled as communists because they weren't going along with the new militarism but remember the hollywood did turning these people my uncle could not get work he was very very difficult to break through it took him

ten years of being terrorized and being knocked out to be able to get back to hollywood and even then things had to be sanitized. across europe municipalities are taking their water supply back from private companies who feel to me to be about this is the simple song alone even some company elsewhere though they invite private companies to take over the utilities many by the telescope of alexis you guys who got a book on the program i because. i've been this is. just a good time out. for you member of the left bill brought up locals are ready to

stand up for the basic human right of access to water it's about water but it's also over much more than water it's about the hurt and the redistribution of all as to purchase their debt downwards do you want to. join me every thursday on the alec simon show and i'll be speaking to get off of the world of politics sports business i'm show business i'll see you then. seemed wrong. but all wrong just don't call. me. yet to stamp out these things come out ahead and engage me because betrayal. when so many find themselves worlds apart we choose to look for common ground.

united states has always had a. use and its tax on other countries. economic sanctions are often just the beginning another thing you like to do is place some military pressure on the countries a talking about. and there must be an effort to demonize that country and the leader of that country. we have a responsibility for the game. and we need to make rules for the rest of. this without us there will be.

there's a myth that hollywood was this great liberal out because when the liberals had it there was not really any discussion of. class war in america of who's controlling america it was soft liberal social issues like gay rights a civil rights but remember not too early only kind of after martin luther king smashed them in the face and they couldn't ignore him at the selma march in bloody sunday but you know so you have basically social liberalism you know women's rights but again it's soft stuff soft liberalism while hollywood tends toward liberality

on social issues it's warfare. it's really question the here was or benevolent intentions of american troop deployments since world war two my father was in that war and he hated these war movies because of the glorification sit there leaving out the real horror show and because of that you know he couldn't stand watching these glorification of the of the second world war i really hope you understand how impossible it was to make clear to know i mean it was written in one nine hundred seventy six it was not made to eighty six i was turned down dozens of times it was very hurtful and to be rejected people would say it's a great script it did help my reputation as a writer but no one would make it because it was too depressing they said but i said what's depressing about the truth you've got a truth that should be in the movies but that i mean that's a conflict that goes to the heart of hollywood i mean hollywood was never based on

telling the truth you can't lose money being an american lone survivor he carried chuck norris metamorph into mark wahlberg and lone survivor and he kills how many i mean there's i forgot seven americans get killed for every american they take down twenty or thirty taliban of course it's the same thing in blackhawk down every american who goes gets killed in that battle check it out has to kill like i think thirty or forty dark skinned people it's just amazingly that's the way it has to be there's kind of a biblical commandment that says one dead american equals thirty forty four and marcus luttrell's lone survivor certainly glorify the american war machines ability to fight off overwhelming enemy odds drawing more upon the mythology of john wayne's green berets than reality the green berets was made during the vietnam war with the full cooperation of the pentagon and president lyndon johnson likewise lone survivor was made during the afghan war with pentagon support killed when it

depicted navy seals fending off hundreds of taliban and killing dozens in a valiant alamo like last stand but the after action report that day only acknowledged up to thirty taliban being present and no reports of enemy casualties even the afghani man who saved the child's life denounce the book. but really what we're talking about is the military having a massive role within within hollywood in terms of manipulating script content we found that always to be interesting to us was not that there was a large number of these products that were affected but the previous scholarship that everyone knew all journalists everybody assyrian and that there were just a few hundred of these things like that but we found using critical information act request that there actually if you found wasn't so obviously been what you might call a cover up or at least some kind of sort of soft cover up you may put it to make it look like this isn't such

a great issue of censorship but it but it is early on in my career when i sent the platoon script to get some pentagon help and philippines they wrote back that we had to really rethink vietnam having been there as a front line soldier of course that i objected to all their objections and not only that they put out an order not an order as much as a desist kind of memorandum to their commanders saying that the troops should not cooperate with this movie same thing happened to us on born the fourth of july so i was doing a t.v. pilot. and we were filming in intel in northern california and it was written by gary devor we play these f.b.i. agents kind of thing and i get a knock on the door i've gone through hair and makeup i've memorized my my lines for that day and i get a knock on the door and it's the second or third ag and there and the guy says well stephen we've got these rewrites for you and i was like well wait a second i've already memorized my my lines like why the rewrites you know. and he

said well we talk to you talk to the f.b.i. and they want to make these adjustments. and that was my first ken of i don't know introduction to that to the fact that if you're playing if the alphabet agencies or any agencies are used like f.b.i. certainly cia. anytime you do in a film in those letters are involved and maybe even in cases where the they don't use those letters but they use something similar. they have final approval on oh and what's been said and what's you know what you're what you're saying steve shalyn is a canadian born actor who found success in hollywood films like a river runs through it and the bodyguard but he alleges that when he tried to launch his own production company in canada called lion's gate his endeavor was sabotaged to this day he does not profess to know the who or why behind i had my own bad experience i was starting

a production company and it was stolen from me my children were threatened kidnapped i ended up basically losing everything. including a nice house in the hollywood sign a farm up here in canada and i was i was on the run being tracked and followed and i was pretty undone by the whole experience when i went into a bar in beverly hills one night and i ran in to get rid of war and gary was friendly as usual heat steve i.e. dylan you know. like a hawk err you wouldn't believe this and i gave him like the mini version of what i'd gone through and what was kind of great is gary didn't look at me like i was nuts even discount what i was saying he just basically agreed with with me and said yeah well they can they can do that if they want it also told me about a project he was working on that had to do with the the war in panama and he was joe of all gene stuff or writing about stuff and that you know his buddies in the cia were not happy and this is twenty years ago and we know

a lot of this now we did not then and what this was about was the many in cartel. sending huge amounts of cocaine into the united states and the government being aware of it and not taking the stand against it that they might have and that there was a tremendous amount of money from the methane cartel transferring this cocaine into our country that went under. the guise of a of a business deal i guess and was put into panamanian banks while noriega was in power there with us and the money was laundered and was spent on. insurgency groups nicaragua and nieces all of the things that we now actually know are pretty true but then there was none of this known and poor reasons.

that i was not aware of at the time gary was aware of all of these things gary doer was a successful screenwriter known for his films like the dogs of war and raw deal as well as his bizarre disappearance it was one nine hundred ninety seven he was on his way back to turn a script into the studio that he was going to direct and it was actually the only time that the finished script the computer all of the research was in one place it was in his car and he disappeared on his way back to members of the cia and the n.s.a. appeared in my home within the first four or five days. and many other unusual things started happening i realized that perhaps it was not a typical crime that only aims in one direction it aims in the direction that this person was definitely working with the intelligence community they said don't

you believe he's dead it's been over a year and i said no if you want me to believe he's dead give me a body nine days later i was gay. when a body i was awakened at seven in the morning was chase brandon calling me from langley saying they found the car they found they found the car with the body in it and there was a three hour time difference of course between new york and l.a. and ten o'clock they called me from the sheriff's department in l.a. to tell me they found the car well they found. a year later or whatever in his truck. the skeletal remains. were supposedly thrown in the back of a truck so i guess that was sending a message to anybody that if you go rogue or if you go you know off the ranch is they say whatever and you're up against the cia what their plans are then this is what we're going to do and i guess. it's really indicative of you know i mean

that's just to all right it's aaron's the mystery of gary divorce fate may linger as long as that of j.f.k. but it is intriguing that divorce disappearance came in one thousand nine hundred seventy years after the cia established its first official hollywood liaison office it may have been merely symbolic but it seemed the coming decade of a two thousand and one the patriot act and a u.s. led global war would dominate the american. is still the us government did not trust its citizens to think critically for themselves and more importantly crises would have to unfold on the big screen where the heroes of the american intelligence services and military would inevitably fight to defend global freedom but behind the lie we must ask ourselves how much how the pill of propaganda evolved from psychological warfare a phrase derived from nazi germany's. worldview war.

twenty eight team coverage we've signed one of the greatest goal people but there was one more question and by the way who's going to be our coach. guys i know you are nervous he's a huge star in months and the huge amount of pressure you have to the center of the beach but how would you. grade the grid to get you out of the rock at the back nobody gets to you we need you to get the go. along. and i'm really happy to join that for the two thousand and three and world

cup in russia meet the special one. meets just at the reno team's latest edition to make up a bigger. look. across europe municipalities are taking their water supply back from private companies. this is the simple song alone even some company elsewhere they invite private companies to take over the utilities anybody tell us. you guys you got. this is. the more you bill brought up the locals are ready to stand up for the basic human right of access to water it's about water but it's also over much more than water it's about the hurt and the redistribution of. birds and their date downwards

the want are. welcome to maximize are plentiful survived. that's without. yanks this is what happens to pensions in britain. you watch kaiser report. in twenty forty you know bloody revolution to the demonstrations going from being relatively peaceful political protests to be creasing the violent revolution is always spontaneous. is it you know lloyd i mean i live. in the. school in the middle of the former ukrainian president recalls the events of twenty four. those who took part in this today over five billion dollars to assist ukraine in these and other goals that will ensure a secure and prosperous and democratic. led

. new protests brick in the disputed territories of israel palestine after scores of palestinians are killed during protests against the relocation of the u.s. embassy to jerusalem. u.s. move sparked cry across the globe with several world leaders and even some of israel's traditional allies expressing furious condemnation. also ahead this our team use our american soldier subjects and self to waterboarding in support of the controversial nominee for the cia. claiming that the brutal interrogation technique . to torture.