"The United States cannot simply declare "strategic pause" while experimenting with new technologies and operational concepts.

Nor can it choose to pursue a transformation strategy that would decouple American and allied interests.

A transformation strategy that solely pursued capabilities for projecting force from the United States, for example, and sacrificed forward basing and presence, would be at odds with larger American policy goals and would trouble American allies.

Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event like a new Pearl Harbor.

Domestic politics and industrial policy will shape the pace and content of transformation as much as the requirements of current missions."

PDF. Rebuilding Americas Defences by Thomas Donnally

Military movies in the 1930s inaccurately portrayed the services as prepared for World War II, Suid said. The 1950s war movies depicted unbeatable military might that preceded the U.S.'s loss in the Vietnam War. Then, the 1970s brought a barrage of anti-war movies that helped set back recruiting for years, he said.

"Films do create false beliefs, and when that's revealed, it adds to the trauma," Suid said. - The Military and the Silver Screen - Pentagon, Hollywood Maintain a Symbiotic Relationship

Ben Affleck, Josh Hartnett and five other actors spent March 28-31 at Schofield Barracks' "lightning boot camp," in search of inspiration for the military characters they will portray in the upcoming film "Pearl Harbor." Now filming on Oahu with 1,000 local extras, "Pearl Harbor" is scheduled for release on Memorial Day 2001. - military.com

"The MILITARY in the MOVIES"

THE MYTH OF PEARL HARBOR

Memorial Day propaganda blitz

With the release of Pearl Harbor, a cinematic reenactment of the popular myth handed down to us by Roosevelt's hagiographers, the Memorial Day weekend will culminate in an orgy of lying war propaganda. The movie, starring somebody named Ben Affleck (so I'm not into popular culture, what can I tell you?), steadfastly ignores recently unearthed evidence that FDR and his cronies knew when and where the Japanese would strike and reiterates the bald-faced lie of the alleged "sneak attack" by the Japanese. You can hear the wheels and cogs of the propaganda machine begin to turn and whir, because it isn't just Pearl Harbor - get ready for a weeks-long marathon of World War II memorabilia. As Eric Deggans put it in the St. Petersburg Times last week, "A virtual flood of TV and film projects focused on incidents from the World War II era is set for release in weeks to come." In the movie theaters it's Pearl Harbor, the $135 million blockbuster opening May 25. This past weekend featured no less than three special television movies focused on the events surrounding World War II (Conspiracy, a tale of genocidal Nazis run amok, Submerged, a story of a wartime submarine rescue, and a new rendition of the Diary of Anne Frank). At the video store it's Tora! Tora! Tora!, coming out in DVD and special VHS editions, and the list goes on. Gee, do you think they're trying to tell us something?

VAUNTING AND FEAR

The intended moral of it all was summed up in Newsweek by James Wire, an 82 year-old Pearl Harbor survivor, who thinks the Pearl Harbor movie is "'great' because it's a warning: 'Americans have become complacent. They think it can't happen now. But it can." A state of advanced paranoia is the natural condition of every Empire: it is the price we pay for our imperial preeminence, "a curious and characteristic emotional weakness of Empire," as Garet Garrett put it, which amounts to "a complex of vaunting and fear."

PERPETUAL TERROR

In short, we must live in a state of perpetual terror, or else the War Party (Hollywood division) isn't doing its job. "Terrorism" lurks in every airport, a ghostly specter haunting the conscience of the nation. At any moment, foreign Furies could unleash their terrible vengeance: a cyber-attack, a "rogue nation" missile attack, yet another Pearl Harbor-style "sneak" attack that we had every reason to anticipate but somehow didn't. Fear must be our permanent state, it must infuse the very air we breathe, and to that end Hollywood is more than complicit. - Justin Raimondo [written in May 2001 - wow!]

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The Coup Depicted The World Trade Center

Written On: Thu, Sep 13, 2001 01:15 PM LOS ANGELES (Reuters) -

Striking a macabre note, a new album cover by hip-hop band The Coup -- whose music has a strong anti-capitalist bent -- had until recently depicted the World Trade Center exploding, the band's label said on Wednesday.

"We changed the artwork as soon as we saw what had happened," said Daria Kelly, director of sales for 75 Ark, the band's label.

Kelly said the picture, which eerily shows group member "Boots" Riley holding a detonator in front of the exploding towers, was yanked from the San Francisco-based company's Web site at (http://www.75ark.com) by 9:30 a.m. PDT on Tuesday, hours after two hijacked airliners actually smashed into the World Trade Center's twin towers and brought them down, possibly causing thousands of deaths.

Kelly said the artwork was done about two months ago for the band's upcoming album, "Party Music," which features a single called "5 Million Ways to Kill a CEO" and is due to hit stores on November 6.

"We were going to print them this week. Thank goodness we hadn't yet printed them," she said, adding that the new album cover would probably just bear the band's logo.

Meanwhile, the rock band Dream Theater and its record company, EastWest, are contemplating whether to withdraw that group's new album, "Live Scenes From NY," because of similar cover art.

That album, released Tuesday, depicts the World Trade Center towers and the Statue of Liberty engulfed in flames and perched atop an apple draped in barbed wire.

"It's an unfortunate coincidence, an eerie coincidence," said Gihan Salem, a spokeswoman for EastWest, an imprint of Elektra Entertainment under AOL Time Warner Inc.'s Warner Music Group. She said a decision on whether to recall the album would be made in a day or two.

While the 75 Ark label quickly moved to delete the World Trade Center image -- showing explosions in the towers at about the same level as the actual blasts -- the picture has begun to circulate on the Internet and generate a lot of reaction.

It was featured Wednesday on lifestyle-culture Web site at (http://www.ammocity.com) accompanied by the following message: "The album cover for hip-hop group 'The Coup' manages to even outweird the quotes from Nostradamus doing the email rounds today."

Kelly said she had not received any e-mails about the cover, noting it hadn't been circulated by the label very much.

"We just started press about a month ago," she said describing the Oakland, Calif.-band's music as focusing on the "destruction of corporate America."

The band, considered among the more overtly political rap bands, was formed in the early 1990s. Lead rapper/producer Boots Riley, whose real name is Raymond Riley, was involved in political activism before becoming a musician, according to music industry sources.

Released in 1993, the Coup's debut album "Kill My Landlord" was a highly charged blend of leftist resistance and 70s funk, which received wide critical praise - hiphop-elements.com

Let's Roll ..

TIME gets the first look at United 93, the controversial film that is unbearable--and unmissable

By RICHARD CORLISS - Time.com [Sunday, Apr. 09, 2006]

On United Airlines Flight 93--out of Newark, scheduled for San Francisco, bound for history--34 passengers caught up on paperwork or dreamed their last dream. Four others were there on a mission. Forty-six minutes into the flight, one of them shouted in Arabic and brandished a bandolier of explosives. Another got into the cockpit, stabbing the pilot and co-pilot. A third seized the controls. Some of the captives, getting on phone lines, learned that two other planes had torpedoed into the World Trade Center. Realizing their doom, the passengers also found a mission. They stormed the hijackers, rammed their way into the cockpit and, to keep the plane from being one more missile aimed at a U.S. landmark, tried to wrest command of it.

Fourteen times.

That's how many times Paul Greengrass, writer-director of United 93, put his cast through the hijacking and ensuing heroics. On a set in suburban London's Pinewood Studios, where many James Bond fantasies have been filmed, Greengrass staged this real-life, high-stakes death battle over and over--the whole ordeal, nonstop, in takes lasting from 20 to 55 min., as the reconstructed Boeing 757 would wobble and shudder, and the camera crew followed the action like nosy paparazzi. Says Cheyenne Jackson, who plays Mark Bingham, one of the stalwart passengers: "We spent so many hours throwing our trays around and bleeding and screaming and crying and praying, and throwing up and peeing ourselves, and trying to imagine every possibility of what these people were going through. It was an environment where we could go to these deep, dark places. But the saddest thing about it was that finally we could wash off our makeup and come out of those places."

He means that the passengers on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, of course, could not come out; they crashed and died, along with the hijackers, in a field near Shanksville, Pa. But there are many Americans for whom the dark place of a movie auditorium is a last refuge from reality. The trailer for United 93 has upset viewers with its gritty evocation of that day, especially a shot of the plane hitting the second tower of the World Trade Center. Audiences who wouldn't flinch at slasher movies and serial-killer thrillers have shouted back at the previews. A multiplex in Manhattan yanked the trailer after complaints from patrons. Some were angry, some in tears. They felt violated to see, in the guise of entertainment, a pinprick reminder of a tragedy for which Americans still grieve and which they may wish to keep buried, along with the people and the image of national invulnerability lost that day.

Yet the events of 9/11, like a nightmare that haunts the waking, have permeated the media. Not just the all-news channels but also books, plays, songs. Michael Moore's political take, Fahrenheit 9/11, scared up $119 million at the domestic box office, and ABC is preparing a mini-series based on The 9/11 Commission Report, with Stephen Root as terrorism czar Richard A. Clarke and Harvey Keitel as John O'Neill, the FBI's al-Qaeda sleuth who died in the World Trade Center carnage. Flight 93, a TV movie about the same events shown in United 93, reaped the A&E Network's all-time highest ratings and stoked no protests.

Perhaps those who saw the trailer didn't realize that this was the one flight, of the four hijacked that day, with an inspiring ending. This was the one on which the good guys, following passenger Todd Beamer's John Wayne--like invocation, "Let's roll," foiled the bad guys. The saga of this flight makes for, in 9/11 terms, a feel-good movie. Just as important, United 93, at which TIME was given an exclusive first look, is a good movie--taut and implacable--that honors the deeds of the passengers while being fair, if anyone cares, to the hijackers' jihad bravado. (At one point the passengers are heard murmuring the Lord's Prayer while the hijackers whisper their prayers to Allah.) If this is a horror movie, it is an edifying one, a history lesson with the pulse of a world-on-the-line suspense film.

Ready or not--and the pending release this week of the black-box tapes from the doomed flight suggests some kind of turning point--United 93 opens around the country April 28, three days after its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival, within view of the still gaping Twin Towers site. Greengrass's film is the first of a few big-studio projects dealing with 9/11. World Trade Center, the account of two Port Authority policemen trapped beneath the towers' charnel rubble, follows in August. James Vanderbilt's screenplay of Against All Enemies, Clarke's contentious memoir of his career tracking terrorists, which begins with frenetic scenes in the White House on 9/11, is floating around Hollywood. Paul Haggis, fresh from his Oscar upset with Crash, has expressed interest in directing it.

Against All Enemies will get its juice from the spectacle of stratospheric double-dealing; there's more backstabbing than in Hamlet. World Trade Center promises to be a hymn to the courage and perseverance of Sergeant John McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage) and Officer Will Jimeno (Michael Pena). Jimeno was trapped in an elevator shaft for 15 hours, McLoughlin interred in rubble a few feet below Jimeno for 23 hours.

The days the two men visited the set--Howard Hughes' old airplane hangar near Marina del Rey, Calif.--McLoughlin, who had 30 surgeries that left braces on his legs and an open wound on his left hip, stayed away from the 65-ft. mound of Styrofoam beams and cargo boxes meant to represent ground zero. "I hate getting upset," he says. As soot-covered extras in police and military uniforms milled around, Jimeno was reduced to tears by the sight of the too-lifelike rubble pile. "I survived for a reason," he says. "We, as a country, have a short attention span. We don't want people to forget those who died and those who saved us."

Although the film's director is Oliver Stone, this is no paranoid panorama on the order of JFK. It's a boy-down-a-well saga with, insists first-time screenwriter Andrea Berloff, "no politics. This is a small story. We're in the hole with these two guys for practically the whole movie." With the digging out comes the uplift. "I hope people will walk out of the theater and say to themselves, 'Life is short,'" Jimeno says, "and go home and hug their loved ones." Berloff has the same aim. "You don't want people leaving theaters slitting their wrists. I don't think the world is ready for the Towering Inferno version of 9/11. I don't know how you would make that movie."

These three films, in various stages of gestation, all look to be honest, fact-based depictions of a central American story. They also have recognizable movie antecedents. In the horror stories of history, Hollywood picks through the carnage to find heroes, and the makers of the 9/11 films have found a few. Clarke, in Against All Enemies, is the lonely sentinel begging a smug, slow-witted establishment to take al-Qaeda seriously. He's Frank Capra's Mr. Smith after 30 years in Washington, his stubborn zeal intact. Another species of hero is the lucky survivor; and as Schindler's List was not about the nearly 6 million Jews killed by the Nazis but about 1,100 who escaped, so World Trade Center focuses on two of the last victims evacuated alive after the big buildings collapsed. As for the United 93 passengers--in movie terms, and in the life of the world--they are the first heroes of the 21st century.

"At 28 minutes past 9," says Greengrass of Sept. 11, "none of us were wondering What are we going to do? We were watching telly, wondering What the f___ is going on? The people on United 93 weren't doing that. They were looking at four guys. They knew exactly what was going on." Knowing of the World Trade Center attack, they could surmise that their own flight might be the next weapon.

"Subsequent to 9/11," says Greengrass, an Englishman who directed the superb docudrama Bloody Sunday, set in Northern Ireland in 1972, and the gritty espionage film The Bourne Supremacy, "we all had to make decisions about the world we live in, about the courses of action that we take. This film is saying that, before we got to that, there was this event: this extraordinary work of fate, mired in confusion, with the passengers gaining knowledge of 9/11 as they went. What that did was create a debate on the plane: What are we going to do? Are we going to do nothing and hope for the best, or are we going to do something? What can we do? What will be the consequences of both courses of action? That is our post-9/11 debate." Which the doomed, defiant passengers had just a few minutes to comprehend and resolve--on the fly.

United 93 is a meticulous reconstruction of that morning. Greengrass worked closely with the victims' families, who had already heard the black-box recordings, and the actors, who were improvising. Few events, either on the plane or in the air-traffic control centers, are underlined for effect. As Bingham's mother Alice Hoagland notes, "What happened on board Flight 93 has so much drama and pace, it needs no embellishment."

At the start of the film, before 93's takeoff, our knowledge of what is to come bestows a creepy portent, a sad, sick, helpless feeling, to banal intimacies and mundane activities. A simple cell-phone "I love you" holds a lifetime of poignancy; the closing of the plane door is like the sealing of a tomb with live bodies inside.

In a film that, in its near finished state, runs about 105 min., it's 30 min. before Flight 93 is aloft, an additional 12 min. before the second plane hits the World Trade Center, a full hour before the hijackers seize control. For the viewer, the wait is rackingly tense, as real as a newsreel.

That is because, wherever possible, Greengrass cast people close to their roles. J.J. Johnson, who plays the captain of Flight 93, is a real United pilot. Trish Gates, who plays head flight attendant Sandy Bradshaw, was a real United flight attendant. Ben Sliney, who as national operations manager for the FAA kept track of the mounting atrocities, appears as himself. Lewis Alsamari, who plays one of the hijackers, spent a year in the Iraqi army.

The actors playing the terrorists were kept segregated from those playing the passengers; they stayed in different hotels and did not meet until the hijack sequence was shot. Those actors had to deal with the violence on a more personal level. "We all came out with stuff that we've never seen in ourselves before," says Jamie Harding, who describes his character, Ahmed Al Nami, by saying, "I do all the beating and hurting, although I don't actually kill anybody." Alsamari says he looked at a scene in the film in which he attacks the pilot and co-pilot, "and I had my hand on my mouth. I thought, I can't believe someone could do that. It was like looking at somebody else."

If the actors find United 93 hard to take, what will an audience's reaction be? Many people will certainly feel they're not ready to see the film. And that's fine. But it's honorable and artful as a re-creation of history, and as a film experience it's both unbearable and unmissable.

"Movies need to address the way the world is," Greengrass says. "We have to tell stories about 9/11." He also notes, "The victims' families want this film made. Every single one of them." (Universal, the studio producing the film, is donating 10% of the first weekend's box-office gross to the Flight 93 National Memorial Fund.)

Hamilton Peterson, whose father and stepmother died on the flight and who serves as chairman of Families of Flight 93, sees two reasons America needs this film. "One, we're proud of what these Americans did," he says. "These are ordinary citizens who in a matter of minutes overcame what very evil and capable people had planned for years. The passengers took action without police or official support. They knew right from wrong, and they acted on it. Out of the dark of 9/11 came these heroes. And two, it is an example that future world citizens can learn from. If you remember Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, he tried to engage a very dangerous bomb and was thwarted by the bravery of the passengers and crew. Flight 93 served as a beacon for them. I don't think you can reaffirm that message too often or too much."

"I hope we're not as a society inured to the messages of the movie," says Hoagland. Those messages, of the hijackers' terrible cunning and dedication, the passengers' valor and sacrifice, are both timeless and timely. "I know it's not too soon," she says. "I hope it's not too late."

With reporting by Rebecca Winters Keegan/ Los Angeles, Reported by Clayton Neuman/ New York

images released by the U.S. District Court, a government exhibit shows a photo of the flight data recorder found at the scene in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, where Flight 93 crashed on Sept. 11, 2001, that was introduced at the sentencing trial of admitted terrorist conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui. (AP Photo/U.S. District Court)

Moussaoui Jurors Hear Flight 93 Tape

By MATTHEW BARAKAT, Associated Press 12 April 2006 - ALEXANDRIA, Va. -

In the final minutes of doomed United Air Lines Flight 93, on Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers try to shake off passengers clamoring for control of the plane over Pennsylvania. Amid groans and sounds of a struggle, a voice says, "I am injured." A hijacker asks, "Shall we finish it off?"

Moments later, the plane hurtles out of control to the ground, according to a cockpit voice recording played for a jury on Wednesday by federal prosecutors seeking the execution of Zacarias Moussaoui.

Culminating their case, the prosecutors figuratively placed the jury aboard the flight for its last heart-wrenching moments, using a computerized simulation of the plane's flight path based on information from the flight data recorder.

Hamilton Peterson, whose parents were on Flight 93, earlier heard an enhanced audio version that was played for family members only. He believes the recording provides evidence that passengers attacked and killed a hijacker guarding the cockpit door.

The audio played in the courtroom made it impossible to confirm that interpretation. The Sept. 11 Commission concluded there was a struggle for control but reached no conclusion about whether passengers killed a hijacker.

Much of what was heard was open to interpretation. In the last minute, voices could be heard in English saying "push up" and "pull down," as flight data showed the steering yoke moving wildly. Some interpreted that as a struggle for control in the cockpit between passengers and hijackers. The hijackers for more than four minutes before that had been swinging the plane wildly in an effort to throw the rebelling passengers off balance.

At 10 a.m. a hijacker asks in Arabic "Shall we finish it off?" The response come back: "No, not yet."

Then a voice is heard in English: "In the cockpit! If we don't, we die!"

At 10:01 a.m., a hijacker asks again: "Shall we put it down? The response: "Yes, put it down."

At 10:02 a.m., a hijacker says, "Give it to me. Give it to me." At 10:03 a.m., the recording ends, and the simulation shows the plane flying nose down, then rolling over belly up and hitting the ground nose first.