History Channel 2 Hour Documentary Premier: The True Story of Charlie Wilson

History Channel et. al. ^ | December 22, 2007 | Staff

[flattorney]

Produced by Wild Eyes Prods. Executive producers, Carl H. Lindahl, David Keane; producers, Ryan Spyker, Aaron Cowden; director, Keane; writers, Bowden, Terrence Henry. Narrator: Bill Lloyd. Editor, Justin Inda; music, Michael Plowman. Running time: 120 Min.

“Charlie Wilson’s War” (Wide Release Theater Movie)
Genres: Comedy, Drama, Adaptation, Biopic and War
Running Time: 1 hr. 37 min.
Release Date: December 21st, 2007
MPAA Rating: R for strong language, nudity/sexual content and some drug use.
Distributors: Universal Pictures Distribution
Production Co.: Icarus Productions, Participant Productions, Relativity Media, Playtone
Studios: Universal Pictures
Filming Locations: Morocco
Los Angeles, California USA
Produced in: United States
- - Based on the true story of how Charlie Wilson, an alcoholic womanizer and Texas congressman, persuaded the CIA to train and arm resistance fighters in Afghanistan to fend off the Soviet Union. With the help of rogue CIA agent, Gust Avrakotos, the two men supplied money, training and a team of military experts that turned the ill-equipped Afghan freedom-fighters into a force that brought the Red Army to a stalemate and set the stage for conflicts in the Middle East that still rage to this day.
Reviews and additional movie information:
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Book: Charlie Wilson's War:
The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History
Hardcover: 416 pages
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press (April 2003)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0871138549
ISBN-13: 978-0871138545
------
PaperBack – 550 pages
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Pub. Date: April 2004
ISBN-13: 9780802141248

Posted for FlAttorney by TAB

[discostu]

A loss is a loss. We lost Vietnam, we lost it because we never wanted to win it, but we still lost.

[Liberty Valance]

I hope someone is telling the true story, because Hollywood damn sure won’t.

LOL - Tom Clancy's books come to mind ...

[flattorney]

I hope someone is telling the true story, because Hollywood damn sure won’t.

Oh, there is a reason for all this by the "GOP Panzer PAC's" which both FlAttorney's Miami and his brother's Houston law firms are heavily involved. But you know the Free Republic motto "Loose lips sink ships" - TAB

[Recon Dad]

Read the book you’ll enjoy it even more than the movie.

[RetiredArmy]

You need to get your facts straight before using your blow hole. We did not lose the military war in Vietnam. We pulled out of Vietnam because a bunch of liberal lawmakers in D.C. had no stomach for it any longer and LBJ had screwed up the war by trying to run the damned thing from 15,000 miles away. The troops in the field kicked the reds asses. We lost about 58,000 troops. They lost a couple of million. We beat their ass. You can whine all you want to about we lost the war, but the military did not lose. The military was pulled out. We abandoned the South Vietnamese and left them to be murdered. THAT was done by puss sucking politicians, in D.C. Not the troops in the field. We won the military war. We lost the political war. The military was not responsible for the political war.

[discostu]

You need to stop reading into what I’m saying and looking for a fight, just read what I ACTUALLY wrote. I never said we lost it militarily, I said we lost it. Because we DID lose Vietnam, the how only matters in that we should use it to remind us not to get into wars we aren’t actually committed to. But that’s immaterial, we lost the war, the fact that we won every battle doesn’t change the fact that we fled the country with our tail between our legs, we lost Vietnam, that is a simple non-negotiable fact. It’s not whining, it’s not something from my blow hole, it’s the truth. We lost the war. I didn’t blame the military, you assumed I did but that’s YOUR assumption all we all know about ass-u-me, I just said we lost, because we did.

[RetiredArmy]

Your post at 53 was: Well in South Vietnam we lost, can’t really blame us for abandoning a lost battlefield.

So, YOU did not blame the military huh? You did not say that huh? Then what the hell do you call abandoning a lost battlefield, then pal? If you did not call the military losers and losing the war, what is a lost battlefield? I'm sure you will come up with a good excuse.

[RetiredArmy]

My post was 53, yours was 54. And don’t use that as your excuse.

[Bigun]

We DID NOT LOSE ON THE BATTLE FIELD IN VIETNAM!!! We kicked the NVA and the Cong’s dirty asses. THE WAR WAS LOST IN WASHINGTON, D.C. We did not lose it in the field. The ass holes in Sodom on the Potomac lost it.

That is absolutely true!

The U.S. military never lost a battle in Viet Nam - not a one - and the South Vietnamese government only fell - long after all U.S. forces had been removed - when the dimocrats in congress cut off all funding.

[Bigun]

“What we still don’t understand is why you Americans stopped the bombing of Hanoi. You had us on the ropes. If you had pressed us a little harder, just for another day or two, we were ready to surrender! It was the same at the battles of TET. You defeated us! We knew it, and we thought you knew it. But we were elated to notice your media w as definitely helping us. They were causing more disruption in America than we could in the battlefields. We were ready to surrender. You had won!”

General Vo Nguyen Giap in his memoirs

[flattorney]

Hollywood Finally Stickes it To Mushy-headed Liberals, by IMDB DButcher: (with edit)

Charlie Wilson was an aimless and directionless Democratic Congressman into little more than hookers and blow until he was spurred to action by God-fearing conservative and commie basher Texan Joanne Herring. In uncompromising terms, the film lays out the moral failure and weak-willed incompetence of the Carter Administration (like the later military incompetent Clinton Admin) in recognizing the real threat that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan posed. Here was a Carter Administration that armed Afghan resistence with pop guns.

The film makes a very good point. Once a liberal Congress lined up behind Ronald Reagan, they brought an end to a global ideology that threatened world security. I thought it was particularly bold in the way that it endorsed the idea that covert action in such instances is very effective. The way it exposes how the Democrats in Congress weren't even willing to fund $1 million in building Afghan schools was a courageous tactic for this film to take, especially given Jack Murtha's role as chairman of that committee. Given that Murtha has been one of the more vocal critics of the current war, I could see how easy it would be to gloss over that fact, but it made no mistake of excusing the short-sidedness of Murtha's failings as chairman.

I know that a lot of conservatives are going to have a knee-jerk reaction to this movie and call it un-American. A lot of liberals are going to line up to look at this as a bold attack on Republicans. But, in the end, it shows that Rudy Giuliani has been fighting corruption and criminal wrong-doing since the 1970s. It shows that Carter was a weak leader and that until the 1980s, we brought the Soviets to their knees. It shows that great things happen when Congress lines up behind these principles and has a strong Republican leader in the White House to back the expenditures and effort.

God Bless Ronald Reagan. And God Bless a Hollywood film with the courage to show what can happen when men like Jimmy Carter are sent to the ash heap of history.

Counter Point: 12/20/07 Charlie Wilson's War – Make that Whopper (8:25 minutes)
# In this short documentary by filmmaker, Melissa Roddy, she counters mis-information presented in the movie "Charlie Wilson's War". This documentary includes interviews with first-hand participants in events surrounding the 1980s war against the Soviet Union, including Senator Gordon Humphrey (R-NH, Ret.); former Special Envoy to Afghanistan, Edmund McWilliams; Prof. Tom Johnson of the U.S. Naval Post Graduate School and CIA Chief of Station to Pakistan Milt Bearden. The movie, “Charlie Wilson’s War” states only that Ahmad Shah Massoud was the recipient of U.S. assistance during the 1980s. In fact, Congressman Charlie Wilson and the CIA recklessly supported a ferociously anti-American fundamentalist - Gulbaddin Hekmatyar - during the 1980s and early 90s. Ahmad Shah Massoud received a mere trickle of U.S. support during this period, and he was well known to be the most deserving. But then -- unlike Gulbaddin Hekmatyar -- Ahmad Shah Massoud was never involved with Osama bin Laden. Hence the basis for the movie's distortion.

@ @ @

Your thoughts if you have viewed the movie. Need expert input on the validity of the information in the Counter Point video. - TAB

[flattorney]

12/19/07 KRQE News interview with producer David Keane of the History Channel's Documentary: "The True Story of Charlie Wilson" (3:23 minutes).

Actual TV ads run by ex-Congressman Charles Wilson during his re-election campaigns. (4:48 minutes)

TAB

[discostu]

I didn’t blame the military. The battlefield I referred to was the entire country, the maxi-battlefield, the battle field that was the ENTIRE war. Which is painfully obvious in the first clause, where I mention the whole country. Do we need to go over basic sentence diagramming here? Or can you figure this one out on your own? See it’s “South Vietnam” in the first half of the sentence, “lost battlefield” in the second half, same things, interchangeable concepts.

[discostu]

There were still some US forces when we left, not many but some. Of course the punchline is we never needed that treaty that the democrats never honored, we could have won the war outright. But we lacked the will to fight to win, we lacked the desire to do more than just let our military win battles, we lacked the balls to construct a series of battle plans that would have taken control of the entire country, and therefore we lost. The lesson of Vietnam is there’s a lot more to fighting a war than winning a bunch of battles, that if you’re not actually willing to win a war your record in battles doesn’t matter, that you can be 1,000,000-0 in the battle count but if you lack the commitment you’ll be 0-1 in the war.

[Bigun]

"A nation can survive its fools and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and he carries his banners openly against the city. But the traitor moves among those within the gates freely, his sly whispers rustling through all alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears no traitor; he speaks in the accents familiar to his victim, and he wears their face and their garments and he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation; he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of a city; he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to be feared. The traitor is the plague."

Cicero About 2500 years ago

[flattorney]

Gust Avrakotos, 67; led CIA's arming of Afghan mujahideen against Soviets
By Patricia Sullivan, Washington Post
December 26, 2005

Very good and detailed two page biography of Mr. Avrakotos published after his death in the Boston Globe. - TAB

WASHINGTON -- Gust L. Avrakotos, 67, the CIA agent in charge of the massive arming of Afghan tribesmen during their 1980s guerrilla war against the Soviets, died of complications from a stroke Dec. 1 at Inova Fairfax (Va.) Hospital. Mr. Avrakotos, who ran the largest covert operation in the agency's history, was dubbed ''Dr. Dirty" for his willingness to handle ethically ambiguous tasks and a ''blue-collar James Bond" for his 27 years of undercover work. In the 1980s, he used Tennessee mules to bring hundreds of millions of dollars in automatic weapons, antitank guns, and satellite maps from Pakistan to the mujahideen. Working with former Representative Charles Wilson, a Democrat from Texas, Mr. Avrakotos eventually controlled more than 70 percent of the CIA's annual expenditures for covert operations, funneling it through intermediaries to the mujahideen. As a result, the tribesmen drove the Soviets out of Afghanistan, and the long Cold War shuddered toward an end.

Read entire article

TAB

[flattorney]

"For over a thousand years Roman conquerors returning from the wars enjoyed the honor of triumph, a tumultuous parade. In the procession came trumpeteers, musicians and strange animals from conquered territories, together with carts laden with treasure and captured armaments. The conquerors rode in a trimphal chariot, the dazed prisoners walking in chains before him. Sometimes his children robed in white stood with him in the chariot or rode the trace horses. A slave stood behind the conqueror holding a golden crown and whispering in his ear a warning: that all glory is fleeting.” - General George S. Patton Jr.

From FlAttorney's FR "Straight Talk" page

TAB

[discostu]

I’m not even sure I want to call it treason. There’s a certain intellect to treason. How we handled Vietnam was just stupid. Getting into a war that you don’t actually want to win is dumb, it’s something no traitor would contemplate because they’d never figure it would work. Who would think you could actually get a country to commit it’s forces to a war, a war those forces in under 6 months from the start if they were just allowed to actually fight the damn thing, and then not let them fight it? It’s an absurd concept, beyond the dreams of the most far reaching traitor, but we pulled it off just by being dumb enough to do it.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

On the subject of good movies on political topics, I'd love to see an honest film made
of My Grandfather's Son by Justice Clarence Thomas. No lib would do it, tho - it'd
have to be a Mel Gibson production . . .

And since Justice Thomas is a Catholic as Gibson is . . .

[Inyokern]

I have not seen the movie but I assume that it is slanted to the left but nearly as slanted as “Redacted” and “Lions for Lambs” and some of the other recent war movies. I predict it will do much better at the box office than those movies, putting the lie to the idea that public will not go to see war movies.