Posted on 12/21/2007 7:32:45 PM PST by 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
...a felony count for possession of "illicit mushrooms," a felony count for possession of cocaine base and a misdemeanor count of possession of marijuana. # Posted 12/25/2007 by FR Lancey Howard
==============
Looks like Sorkin is doing hallucinogenic mushrooms again.
FYI, the felony drug charges in this case were dismissed against Aaron Sorkin after he completed 18 months of counseling and periodic drug tests. Accordingly, he has a clean criminal record. Sorkin pleaded guilty to the charges two months after being arrested in exchange for entry into a deferred-judgment program that allowed him to seek treatment and potentially have the charges dropped. Had Sorkin failed to complete the program, he could have faced a sentence of more than three years in prison and fines of $10,000.
If you strictly enforced the laws for illegal drugs possession in Hollywood, there would no a Hollywood. The majority of people would either be in prison or skipped the Country. - Retired Los Angeles Country Judge (Name withheld by request)
Posted for FlAttorney by TAB
As for 'Nam, we won that when the NVA sued for peace after operation Linebacker II, but the (D) led 1975 congress abandoned it to the commies... with disastrous results.
Problem with Vietnam is that we that treaty had been on the table for 6 years, ever since LBJ stopped bombing in his “show of good faith”, which was really a demonstration of lack of will. The NVA sued for peace because they knew that while the bombing was kicking their butts it was a temporary demonstration of will that would fade. If we’d kept bombing them in 1967, or even a couple more weeks in 73/ 74 we wouldn’t have been signing a bad treaty the Dems could back out of. We could have won out right and signed a treaty that would have included a unified free Vietnam, instead of a divided destined to be communist Vietnam. We really lost the war in 1967 when with LBJ show of cowardice, then again after Tet when we decided they won it even though they destroyed themselves. Everything after that was formality and wasted lives.
You said that "we abandoned a lost battlefield in Vietnam." That is flat wrong and you have been spinning your answer ever since. The battlefield is the province of the military. There is no one else there to win or lose it. The fact is our military won the battlefield in Vietnam and the politicians pulled them out. There was no "lost battlefield" to abandon. We abandoned a victorious battlefield to be accurate. I don't see anyone agreeing with you and you are most definitely being a flaming asshole about it.
This has been gone over, what I meant, but apparently didn’t express well, was that we abandoned THE lost battlefield OF Vietnam. And you should take away those quotes, because that’s not a quote, that’s an interpretation. You should also not waste time resurrecting multiple day old arguments that have already been settled.
It wasn’t settled for me. I read about 8 of your responses and didn’t see the grudging apology you’re offering now. Perhaps if you hadn’t clung so tightly (and insultingly) to your original poorly expressed thought you wouldn’t still be taking flak. I’ll waste my time on anything I see fit too thank you very much.
You were almost there, post 92, where I apologize to the guy that wasn’t addicted to turning things into a flame war. And as for the insulting, sorry I was insulted first, the other guy started in with the shouting and the blowhole and the calling me a liar. I’ll admit I shouldn’t have followed down that path, but I’m not going to apologize for insulting an insulter. You can waste your time however you see fit, but when you come in 4 days and 100 posts late and call me an asshole and put quotes around something that isn’t a quote don’t expect me to be even slightly impressed.
I could have read further. Seeing nothing but intractability on your part it seemed pointless. My bad there. But you stepped in a very big very sticky cow pie with your lazy characterization and you deserve to still be scraping it off six months from now. I make no apologies for that or for throwing your own insult back at you. As for impressing you; who cares?
If you strictly enforced the laws for illegal drugs possession in Hollywood, there would be no Hollywood. The majority of people would either be in prison or skipped the Country. - Retired Los Angeles Country Judge (Name withheld by request)
TAB
I wouldn’t say it was lazy characterization, it was a poor sentence, I’ve never blamed the military for the loss of Vietnam and didn’t think could be interpreted in that way. It’s hard to think a sentence means something you never think. When I read the sentence I still can’t see the anti-military interpretation, I’m accepting that it’s possible because other people see it, but that interpretation is simply not something I would ever intentionally say.
The guy I called an asshole is an asshole, he’s still an asshole, it’s gotten to the point that it’s not an insult, it’s a demononstrable fact. I tried really hard to make piece with him, but he doesn’t care, he just wants to be mad. And as for you throwing it back, well that’s kind of pathetic, I let people fight their own fights, pretty insulting to do otherwise. Which is pretty funny, there you are insulting him by throwing insults at me and not letting him fight his own battles. See how things can mean what you didn’t want them to mean?
- - President Jimmy Carter and his Administration purposely provoked the Soviets to invade Afghanistan.
Imagine, they made a funny movie about how the US helped turn Afghanistan into a killing field. It's the film "Charlie Wilson's War, a ligthearted look of how a skirt-chasing Congressman and a no-nonsense CIA thug helped bring mountains of weapons and money to the fanatic, women-despising "freedom fighters" who gave us 9/11. It's certainly material for a "laugh riot". To be sure it was the Soviets who did most of the killing. From December 27, 1979 when they overthrew the government of Afghanistan until February of 1989 they ravaged the country. By the war's end there were a million dead Afghans, another 3 million injured, and a whole generation growing up to think that war and war crimes were the natural way of life. Soviet land mines still litter the country.
Yet the evidence is that the US government wanted the Soviets to invade and did what it could to provoke it. According to Secretary of State Robert Gates 1997 book "From the Shadows" the CIA started giving aid to Islamic rebels in Afghanistan six months before the Soviets invaded. This was confirmed and detailed in an interview with Zbignew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor in 1998 in the French journal Le Nouvel Observateur. In the interview Brzezinski explained that Jimmy Carter signed an order on July 3 of 1979 to give aid to the mujahadeen and that he (Brzezinski) wrote Carter a note that same day saying "this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention". Not that Brzezinski objected. To the contrary this is how he answered his interviewer's question on whether he had any regrets. "Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter. We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War."
Afghanistan would become the next venue for Cold War game playing and the Afghan people would be the pawns.
Charlie Wilson's role in this whole affair is vastly overstated. After all it was Jimmy Carter who hysterically declared the invasion "the most serious threat to peace since the Second World War." If ever a country was remote and unimportant in world affairs it was Afghanistan, yet earlier in 79 Carter had seen the total defeat of his boy, the Shah of Iran, so he had to show macho in some other theater. Hard as it may be to believe today, Carter portrayed the Russian move into Afghanistan as the first step to Soviet dominiation of the Persian Gulf and Americans bought it. Carter created the climate for the massive funding of the Afghan and foreign mujahadeen. Nor should we forget Ronald Reagan. His role can be summed up by his colorful statement in 1985 calling the mujahadeen the "moral equivalent" of the US founding fathers.
Yet there is no doubt Charlie Wilson's enthusiasim was important in bringing about a flood of money and weapons. Wilson, a Democrat and a liberal in domestic matters, was a hard core rightist in foreign affairs. The movie tries to make us believe that seeing Afghan refugees in Pakistan utterly changed Charlie Wilson, but he was a fervent anti-commmunist well before that. He was a good old buddy of Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Samoza and fought hard to get Carter to stop distancing himself from the Nicaraguan tyrant. The movie gleefully shows Wilson calling in favors on the House Intelligence and Defense Appropriations Committees and gathering half a billion dollars in weapons for the fundamentalists. The guns and money first flowed through Pakistan giving the US a way to deny involvement and gaining the dictatorship's ISI intelligence agency a chance to wet its beak.
The movie makes mention of aid going to just one mujahadeen leader, Ahmad Shah Massoud. Actually he received virtually nothing. Nearly half of CIA money went to Gulbaddin Hekmatyar, the most hardline of the mujahadeen. Hakmatyar in his younger days had been notorious for throwing acid in the faces of unveiled women. You can see why that didn't make it into the film, very difficult to show humorously.
Wilson's "sidekick" as reviewers describe him was CIA operative Gust Avrakotos, a man who was "crude and hilarious" according to one review. He was a "working-class" guy who ignored the stuffed shirts and got things done. In Greece, where he was posted in the 60's and 70's people remember him differently. Avrakotos was in Greece when army colonels overthrew the government and set up a dictatorship. He became the CIA's chief liaison with the Greek colonels. This fascist regime's best known victory was rolling over university students with tanks. Its biggest defeat was getting its ass whomped when it faced real (Turkish) soldiers in Cyprus. By 1978 Avrakotos was so villified by the Greek press that he left the country ripe for other adventures.
In the book by George Crile that was the basis for the movie Wilson is quoted as saying that his greatest achievement in Congress was not getting the guns to the mujahadeen, but saving aid to the regime of Pakistani dictator Zia al Haq. The aid was under threat because Zia was secretly building atomic weapons, and in those days the US pretended to be serious about the spread of such weapons. It was against US law to give money to countries building nukes. So every year there was a battle royal in Appropriations about the aid. Yet Wilson had his way. Pakistani cooperation in killing Ruskies in Afghanistan trumped the silly idea that the world should have any kind of handle on nuclear weapons. It's a pretty funny story yet somehow atomic bombs aren't mentioned anywhere in the movie.
Mike Nichols who directed the movie had very little to say about the fact that the weapons we gave the mujahadeen ended up being used a a long and bloody Afghan civil war once the Soviets left and that the mujahadeen/warlords mutated into the Taliban and al-Qaeda. "You don't know the consequences of any act," Nichols told a reviewer. Crap. Brzezinki knew exactly what he and Carter were getting into.
This movie glorying in our "triumph" in Afghanistan fits well in Washington's current climate where Democrats fall all over themselves saying Iraq was a mistake, but we should be sending more money and troops to Afghanistan. Sure, we really need to sacrifice more American lives for a warlord "Northern Alliance" government that is so hated that the Taliban is making a comeback.
One could imagine another movie about Afghanistan, about real heroic resistance, about the women of the Revolutionary Association of Afghan Woman (RAWA). They've struggled against fundamentalism and all the regimes oppressing Afghanistan since 1977. In a recent comunique they wrote "Instead of defeating Al-Qaeda, Taliban and Gulbuddini terrorists and disarming the Northern Alliance, the foreign troops are creating confusion among the people of the world. We believe that if these troops leave Afghanistan, our people will not feel any kind of vacuum but rather will become more free and come out of their current puzzlement and doubts. In such a situation, they will face the Taliban and Northern Alliance without their national' mask, and rise to fight with these terrorist enemies. Neither the US nor any other power wants to release Afghan people from the fetters of the fundamentalists." The activists of RAWA work in secret at great peril inside Afghanistan defending the very basic human rights of women. Theirs is not a funny story, but one worth telling. I don't expect Mike Nichols to have much interest, but you can check them out at www.rawa.org
Stanley Heller is chairperson of the Middle East Crisis Committee (Connecticut) and host of its weekly TV program "The Struggle".
http://www.counterpunch.org/heller12262007.html
Posted for FlAttorney by TAB
That is a laughable thought. The history of Vietnam isn't his battle alone. You still don't seem to realize the import of your fauz pax.
I wouldn’t say it was lazy characterization, it was a poor sentence, I’ve never blamed the military for the loss of Vietnam and didn’t think could be interpreted in that way.
I can't see any other way to interpret your initial statement. It says what it says and it was worded precisely enough to take at face value.
Sometimes what we think we're saying isn't at all what we are saying I will give you that. My apologies for jumping on your back before following the exchange to the end. I guess I'm just another flaming asshole amongst the many here. ;^)
It is important to understand that “Charlie Wilson’s War” is the second Afghanistan conflict movie to be produced and released by the same Democrats-Soros Shadow Party funded company being Participant Productions. There are many similarities between the two movies which were released within seven (7) days of each other. - 12.21.07, FlA & Co.
Posted for FlAttorney by TAB
Maybe it’s a laughable thought for you. Two of the big life lessons that were hammered into me growing up were to not fight somebody else’s fight, and to not let anybody else fight mine. Everybody has their own emotional baggage, part of mine is battle ownership.
Well apparently it wasn’t that precise since half the world isn’t reading it the way it was intended. Oh well, we’re all flaming assholes once in a while, it’s how you know you’ve got a pulse.
Hope Christmas was good for you. Time to play some Madden.
The history of the Vietnam war is a prickly subject for many.
Invites to jump in are rarely required.
Time to play some Madden.
Is that a video game or are you tuning in some football?
Bookmarking!
I saw this film (not voluntarily mind you), It was not that
great. It took some potshot attack on right wingers but one thing REALLY bothered me....
MINOR SPOILERS when they showed a sequence when “Russian” choppers and planes get shot down. They were not Russian planes at all.
However they showed and I am not kidding an F-4 Phantom
an A-6 Intruder and an F-16C Fighting falcon (1 of the most reconizable planes in history mind you) getting blown up I even saw a Huey
(you know our chopper of the Vietnam War). Cant they tell our planes from the Soviets without Dale Dye’s or DOD’s help??!!
THat is my take however.
I’m still a believer in battle ownership, that’s how I was raised.
The video game. Source of many source spots on my thumbs through the years.
FWIW I agree with your take on the CW story and the lousy Pubbie lineup. Sore or not, thumbs up to that.
IIRC, the German panzers in Patton were, ironically, Patton tanks.
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