So you remember how Dick Cheney and company did everything in their diabolical power to hoodwink America into going to war with Iraq and liberating the Iraqi people from the brutal fist of Saddam Hussein pursuing a petty vendetta and building a permanent American imperialistic free-market paradise? Although a significant portion of the American electorate is still in therapy to suppress the dark Bush/Cheney years and the Statue of Liberty still suffers from acute nausea, perhaps you recall the John Yoo Torture Memo, the infamous memo that the Bush Administration relied on in justifying its harsh interrogation “techniques” on prisoners overseas. This was the memo that was in force when the Abu Ghraib detainees were subjected to cruel treatment and torture, including “Waterboarding“, Dick Cheney’s favorite water sport that was used on a variety of essential and non-essential prisoners to extract information (and to make Cheney smile).
Even though the film is still in post-production and not a single eye has caught a glimpse, the writer and director of “The Last War Crime” , a new full-length feature film about indicting Dick Cheney for torture, has been at loggerheads with the iniquitous forces of corporate censorship that have fought to prevent this film from being seen. A major point of contention, especially with YouTube, involves a scene that reenacts US military and CIA officials performing waterboarding on a captured prisoner.
This is the clip that apparently was so utterly offensive that it compelled YouTube to immediately take it down on the bogus claim that it contains nudity, or is otherwise sexually provocative. There is neither nudity nor is a reenacting an actual military procedure in any such way of a sexual nature, unless one considers violating the Geneva Convention to be hot. In fact, the actor depicting one of the non-essential Arabic prisoners is actually wearing a bathing suit. So unless this is the 1950s or Riyadh, it’s safe to assume certain right-wing powers don’t care to see people catch wind of their horrific bull sh*t and speak out against it.
Here’s the clip:
I had the pleasure of chatting with the writer and director of The Last War Crime, The Pen, and he had some very startling things to say about his fight with Viacom and Youtube over the promotion of this film. I urge all of my readers to join thousands of others by visiting The Last War Crime’s action page and sending your comments and lending your support to this brave film maker’s fight with corporate censorship of free speech.
MICHAEL HAYNE:First of all, Thanks for taking the time to Google chat with me. After all, we live in an era where speaking with your mouth is obsolete.
THE PEN: Happy to hear from you. What shall we talk about?
MICHAEL HAYNE: Well, I see that you recently made a documentary about America’s former overlord of the league of calamitous intent, Dick Cheney, and all of his lovely work to make democracy safer for Lockheed Martin, Halliburton, the American Enterprise Institute, and the makers of testicle zappers.
THE PEN: It’s natural to assume that the film is a documentary, as the majority of progressive film makers work in that format. But while we recreate some actual historical events in the film as accurately as possible, it is primarily what you would call a narrative film. And indeed, it is about indicting Dick Cheney for torture, which we now know was used not to protect America or to make us safer, but was instead used to get the false confessions that would justify selling the American people on a war with Iraq.
MICHAEL HAYNE: Excellent, excellent! Yes, it seems like ages ago when the Cheney cabal hoodwinked America into invading Iraq. Most important, it’s great that you have decided to focus on the darkest moments of that protracted conflict, which was the “Enhanced Interrogation” that was used on many non-essential Iraqis to obtain information.
MICHAEL HAYNE: So tell me a little bit about the film and what you hope to achieve from it.
THE PEN: For the last 10 years, there has been a full court press in the right-wing media, which is basically all the main stream media, to write a false history. When George Bush argued that you could not judge him in real-time, as if you could not exercise the critical judgment to do so, and that history would have to be his judge, he presumed that his people would control the writing of that history. And we open the film with quotes like that from him. So the primary motivation of the film was to dredge out of the memory hole the truth of what happened, and to remind people of this truth, and at the same time tell an entertaining story about what would have happened if justice had already prevailed, a political fantasy fulfillment movie in that sense.
MICHAEL HAYNE:So it’s probably best that viewers not eat popcorn during it unless they have the solvents to get vomit out of their clothes.
MICHAEL HAYNE:Now obviously a film of this nature is going to be difficult to get out to the masses given its political nature. And of course it is going to make the corptocracy sh*t in its $3000 Armani suit.
MICHAEL HAYNE:Now, I believe there’s an actual scene in the movie that dramatizes the military’s use of waterboarding,. I’ve been told that this particular scene prompted YouTube to actually remove the clip from its site. So tell me a little bit about your experience with YouTube and their reasoning for blindly removing it.
THE PEN: Actually, the right-wing is doing everything they can to get this movie out to the people of America and the rest of the world, by TRYING unsuccessfully to censor its message. In the case of YouTube they took down our preview waterboarding scene, most likely based on the complaint of a single right-wing operative, and their excuse was that the clip portrayed “nudity, pornography or other sexually provocative” material. This was yet another false accusation. But we had the resources to rally a public outcry and by the time YouTube had received 7,000 protest messages they had tried to quietly (with not even the courtesy of a notice to us of the put back) reinstate the clip.
MICHAEL HAYNE: Ah, the classic “nudity” cop-out. Perhaps you should’ve had a remix of Lil’ Wayne playing in THE background with dancers in American flag bikinis. They would’ve slurped that right up!
THE PEN: That would prompt a lot of popcorn eating to be sure.
MICHAEL HAYNE:Ha!
MICHAEL HAYNE: Congrats on being able to successfully take your message to the people and demonstrate how utterly futile and counter-productive censorship really is.
MICHAEL HAYNE: Speaking of censorship….
MICHAEL HAYNE: With SOPA causing so much terror to the liberty of George Bush’s internets, combined with the atrocious Citizen United Supreme Court decision essentially giving soulless, lifeless corporations personhood, I was curious if you felt that any of this might have influenced YouTube’s decision to have it removed. And you did mention to me that a right-wing group probably complained about it. Also, has any right-wing group contacted you directly and have you gotten any weird late night phone calls from dudes that sound like Kissinger?
THE PEN:We get abusive messages from right wingers all the time. There is much to applaud in the outcry over SOPA in the last couple days, it proves that when people do in fact speak out we can change policy. We’d like to think that the Occupy movement and all the other instances of people having the courage to come together to challenge them has put them on the defensive. But ONLY if we continue to speak out with as many voices as we can muster.
MICHAEL HAYNE: Well, it’s like Harry Belafonte once said “You can cage the singer, but not the song”. Only in this case, the singer would be stripped naked and waterboarded 183 times.
THE PEN:Yes, they were getting such great intelligence they only had to waterboard him 183 times to finally get the lies they wanted.
MICHAEL HAYNE:Oh yes. It’s the equivalent of punching a guy in the face 183 times because you read on some blog that he was sleeping around with your wife.
MICHAEL HAYNE:Now I read somewhere that you attempted to advertise “The Last War Crime” in Times Square and Viacom prevented you from doing so. Elaborate a little further on what happened there, as well as the current state of your battle with Viacom, or Rupert Murdoch’s Second Death Star
THE PEN: Well, no sooner had we beaten back YouTube, we hit a brick wall in getting out our first paid advertising. We wanted run some 10 second promos on MTV’s Times Square video screen. But when we contacted their ad manager to buy the ads, the first thing they demanded was to see a synopsis of the movie. So I asked them if they would have to approve the underlying content of the movie to approve an ad. But we submitted our ad anyway and got back a response that they could not accept advertising for the “product”, not just one particular ad, again confirming this was based on the content of the movie. You can see the actual email exchange from a link on the new action page.
MICHAEL HAYNE:Oh man, so I almost had a reason to go to Times Square and see something other than Calvin Klein reminding me that I can only get laid with their products, or the major networks reminding me that washed up, has been B-stars have new series coming up.
MICHAEL HAYNE:So even though you appeared to have their [VIACOM] approval at first, they immediately balked once it became clear that you weren’t doing a film with funny talking animals?
MICHAEL HAYNE:All I had to do was mention the title of the movie and the inquisition about content started.
MICHAEL HAYNE: Wow.
MICHAEL HAYNE:Who knew that “The spy who shagged me” was a less offensive title than one that implies some of the darkest moments in American history and US foreign policy.
MICHAEL HAYNE:So what’s your course of action?
THE PEN: The action page is live, and even as we have been chatting we have sailed past 3,000 submissions on this one, many with very passionate personal comments added. And isn’t it interesting that now with thousands of protests pouring in, Viacom in their latest communications from yesterday is trying to back away from the very incriminating admissions their representatives have already made. As a fallback position they are trying to assert there is something so “disturbing” about our ad that adults in Times Square have to be protected from it. We’d like to think they would be as vigilant in protecting free speech.
MICHAEL HAYNE: Excellent, the hits and comments that is. I really think corporate equivocating should be an Olympic Sport. As I always say, when it comes to Corporations and Today’s Republicans, free speech (or should I say “fee” speech) is an inalienable right…as long as it agrees with them.
THE PEN: It is interesting that you should type “fee” speech. The Supreme Court in the Citizens United case discarded any pretense that our political discourse isn’t controlled entirely by who has the money to buy “free” speech. They equated money with speech. Except that even if you have the money, if the corporations don’t pre-approve of your message, you cannot even BUY “free” speech.
MICHAEL HAYNE: So basically what you’re saying is that corporations are ultimately massive cancerous taints.
Michael HAYNE: Not to cut you off, but my digestive system is starting to remind me of that Cajun food I ate last night.
MICHAEL HAYNE: Well you clearly seem to have a boat load of perseverance in the face of overwhelming adversity. Better yet, the current meme of corporations’, through Citizen United, nefarious attempts to inhibit, if not downright, abolish free speech that seeks to challenge crimes of the highest order doesn’t appear to be affecting you. As always, these one-dimensional greed-mongers have spread sheets for brains and almost always underestimate the power of the web when it comes to mobilizing support. That’s precisely why SOPA was overwhelmingly repudiated (or is it ‘refutiated’?).
THE PEN: I’d just like to make one more point. The key word in what you just said is perseverance. We absolutely will prevail. But to make sure that happens we need everyone who is reading these words now to submit the action page at http://www.lastwarcrime.com. We need everyone reading these words to go to the Last War Crime’s facebook page and “like” the page so that movie distributors know how many people want to see this film. We need every journalist who is reading these words to write about the many thousands of protests that Viacom is getting and to demand that they respond on the merits. This is a potentially game changing action, to actually CHANGE the way a corporation behaves. Then and only then will we prevail.
MICHAEL HAYNE:It was very interesting chatting with you and please keep me abreast of any new developments regarding the “The Last War Crime”. Call me a dreamer, but I hope it results in Mr. Cheney watching it in a bomb encased coffin from the Hague.
THE PEN:And thank you for your kind interest and for giving me the opportunity to speak these words.
MICHAEL HAYNE: Absolutely! I would drop it from Helicopters if I could! Anyone reading this should be advised to “like” the facebook page and visit the action page as well.
Michael is a comedian/VO artist/Columnist extraordinaire, who co-wrote an award-nominated comedy, produces a chapter of Laughing Liberally, wrote for NY Times Laugh Lines, guest-blogged for Joe Biden, and writes a column for MSNBC.com affiliated Cagle Media. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook, and like NJ Laughing Liberally Lab. Seriously, follow him or he’ll send you a photo of Rush Limbaugh bending over in a thong.
