They brought us war in Iraq, the promotion of "American global leadership," pre-emptive strikes; the "spreading of Democracy." This is the Project for the New American Century. But what do the hawks in Washington have in store for the world now? The War Party investigates this group of beurocrats responsible for the Project for the New American Century, called the neo-conservatives. This interconnected, dispersed group are running the White House in concert of the Bush years and family dynasty. Is it surprising how little has changed?
The Kill Team profiles four young American men, who referred to themselves as the "Kill Team," that carried out a string of war crimes in 2010, during the United States' invasion of Afghanistan, systematically murdering Afghan citizens. The film focuses on Private Adam Winfield who attempted, with the help of his father, to alert the military to the murders his platoon was committing. His pleas went unheeded. Faced with threats to his life from superior officers and other members of the military, Winfield makes a split-second decision that changes his life forever. The Kill Team follows Winfield and his family through the wartime events and legal proceedings that follow, interspersed with interviews of the other soldiers involved, and video footage from Afghanistan, revealing first-hand revelations of a war culture rooted in hatred, social pressure, and sociopathy.
We is a visual essay exploring the politics of empire, war, corporate globalisation, imperialism and history; using the words of Indian author and political activist Arundhati Roy, from her speech Come September given in Santa Fe, New Mexico one year after the September 11th attacks--not long after the invasion of Afghanistan. The result is a mix of archive footage illustrating specific historical events throughout South America, the Middle East and elsewhere, in context with the September 11th attacks; placed alongside the themes of empire, global economics and a short history of neo-collonialism...
When the government of Indonesia was overthrown by the military in 1965, the gangsters Anwar Congo and Adi Zulkadry were promoted from selling black market movie theatre tickets to leading the most powerful death squad in North Sumatra. In The Act of Killing Anwar and his cohorts recount and gruesomely re-enact their experiences and some of their killings for the cameras, making horrific scenes depicting their memories and feelings about the killings. But as they begin to dramatise Anwar's own nightmares, the scenes begin to take over as artforms, leading to confrontations of memories of historical reality. Can the horrific imagination succumb to moral catastrophe in this case? And if sociopaths are not reachable people anymore, the question becomes what we must do to stop them.
Since 1945, by deed and by example, the US has overthrown 50 governments, including democracies, crushed some 30 liberation movements and supported tyrannies from Egypt to Guatemala. Bombing and war is as American as apple pie. Obama, having stacked his government with warmongers, Wall Street cronies and polluters from the Bush and Clinton eras, the 45th president is merely upholding tradition...
In December 2001, David Hicks, an Australian citizen, was captured in Afghanistan and handed over to the United States military, where he was moved to Guantanamo Bay for "interrogation." He has been held there ever since, not charged with any crime. Despite this, the United States labelled him an "unlawful combatant," a legal fiction concocted by the United States in order for them to torture Hicks and many other people like him, in the name of fighting the so-called "War on Terror." Many people, including Hicks, were kept in detention without charge for many years, denied a fair trial, and denied access to the United States' legal system. So how did a 26 year old former-stockman from Adelaide end up in the United States' torture chamber? Terry Hicks, David's father, sets out to answer this question, as he traces his son's journey from Adelaide to Japan to Kosovo, through Pakistan and Afghanistan, where he is captured in Taliban country.
In 1978, three years after the end of the Vietnam War, film-maker John Pilger travels back to Vietnam to find out what had happened under the new regime. Do You Remember Vietnam? recounts numerous personal stories: talks with a young tour guide at a war crimes museum who had been imprisoned in the infamous US tiger cages; a former North Vietnamese soldier into the underground base where he spent 20 years crawling through tunnels undetected; and views from the streets in Hanoi, where the largest single aerial bombardment in history took place.
This film makes use of court documents, diplomatic cables and testimony by business figures themselves, as one case of many, in which corporations and indeed governments side with warlords, as good for business, in the endless pursuit of profit. The story revolves around the civil war of Liberia in the 1990s, with the seeds for exploitation and destruction having been planted a century before by the United States, when formally enslaved peoples in Liberia in-turn set up a society of racism, greed and exploitation, exacerbated by western economic powers. Years later, with the presence of Firestone corporation coming to Liberia to exploit vast plantations of rubber for control over the 'market,' the company unfolds as a considerable catalyst for systemic terror, being the forefront for pushing for profits at all costs amongst a brutal civil war; colluding with warlords and corrupt governments in pursuit of this ruthless end. Unfurling as a case study in these methods, this film documents the case that is not so unique but a story amongst many—particularly throughout the so-called third-world—where corporate might and globalisation have extreme consequences...