Insight into why the revisionist media never ‘gets’ it:

“The extent to which this practice existed was revealed in 1975, when William Colby informed a congressional committee that more than 500 CIA officers were operating under cover as corporate executives and that 40 CIA officers were posing as journalists.

“When it comes to the CIA and the press, one hand washes the other. In order to have access to informed officials, reporters frequently suppress or distort stories. In return, officials leak stories to reporters to whom they owe favors.

“At its most incestuous, reporters and government officials are actually related-for example, Delta PRU chief, Navy Commander Charles Lemoyne and his New York Times reporter brother, James. Likewise, if Ed Lansdale had not had Joseph Alsop to print his black propaganda in the United States, there probably would have been no Vietnam War.”

—  Douglas Valentine, “A Bad Vietnam Lesson For Afghanistan,” Consortium News, September 17, 2009

Doug Valentine sent me this film review to publish, in response to criticism of his earlier piece at this blog on the CIA by a US military historian:

(Note: I’ve added my own links to Doug’s piece to help readers not familiar with the material. I’ve included both government or government-affiliated links, as well as links from progressive sites, to be even-handed.)

Order Doug’s new book on the DEA below:

“The Strength of the Pack: The Personalities, Politics, and Espionage Intrigues That Shaped the DEA”.

Military Historians, Avatars, and the CIA
A Film Review, 11 January 2010

I went to see Avatar last week and was stunned by the movie’s subversive message. In an age when the means of information management are firmly in the choke-hold of militaristic propagandists, it was, to say the least, refreshing and uplifting.

This is not Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks glorifying soldiers and the American Way . Avatar is Graham Greene meets Walt Disney.

Disclaimer: For those who haven’t seen the flick and don’t want to know the plot, read no more.

The movie begins in the science fiction future, with a crippled US marine (he lost the use of his legs in combat, perhaps in the US invasion of Venezuela ) volunteering for a secret mission on a moon in another solar system. The moon, named Pandora, has a mineral that is extremely valuable to American industry. The only problem confronting the mining corporation is that a tribe of natives (the ten foot tall, blue NaVi) occupy the ground where the mineral is found.

No problem: the mining corporation simply calls in the marines, the scientists, and the anthropologists. Jake Sully, the archetypal handsome albeit crippled marine, is on Pandora to replace his recently deceased brother, who had studied for years to perform as an Avatar. Jake is untrained, but accepted by the mining corporation because he resembles his brother, whose DNA has gone into the making of an Avatar.

An Avatar is not a divine being who comes to earth to enlighten mankind, as in Hindu myth; an Avatar is a replica of a NaVi native, created from DNA from both human and NaVi, but without consciousness. Volunteers like Jake enter the Avatar’s body while in a dream-state and, on behalf of the mining industry, attempt to learn the NaVi’s mysterious ways, so they can more easily be destroyed. The Avatars operate under cover of a humanitarian program conducted by anthropologist, Dr. Grace Augustine.

The film leaves no doubt that the mining corporation is in charge, or that the marines are there not only to provide the Corporation with security (defending America’s interests abroad is how a military historian would explain it) but to secretly subvert the NaVi.

Indeed, the person in charge of military operations, Colonel MilesQuaritch, with the knowledge of the corporation’s representative, enlists Jake and tells him that his secret mission is to map out the NaVi’s infrastructure, so the marines can launch a successful military operation. Being a good marine, Jake accepts the job as perfidious double agent.

For those unfamiliar with covert operations, this is where the film becomes an allegory about the CIA and the type of Civil Affairs operations it conducts in Afghanistan and Iraq under cover of Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRT).

(See my recent article on PRTs at Consortium News) Although military historians have made it an article of faith to cover-up the practice, the CIA has been using humanitarian programs as a cover for murder and mayhem since 1955, when it used resettled Catholic refugees from North Vietnam as cadre in its Civic Action program in South Vietnam . Organized and funded by the CIA, the Civic Action Program aimed to do four things: to induce enemy soldiers to defect; to organize rural people into self-defense forces to insulate their villages from VC influence; to create political cadres who would sell the idea that the CIA-installed Catholic President Ngo Dinh Diem (as opposed to the Buddhists or Vietminh) represented national aspirations; and to provide cover for spies and assassins.

In doing these things, Civic Action cadres dressed in black pajamas (like Avatars, to resemble the people they were deceiving) and went into villages to dig latrines, patch roofs, dispense medicines, and deliver the same CIA propaganda that fills military history books. In return for modern medicine, the people were expected to inform on Vietminh guerrillas and vote for CIA candidates.

The CIA’s Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) in Afghanistan and Iraq, like their prototypes the Civic Action cadre in Vietnam, are one of the primary means of gathering intelligence from informants, secret agents and field interrogations. The main focus of PRT intelligence gathering is to identify suspected members of the resistance. CIA officers, from their hammocks in the shade, run Afghan or Iraqi agents in the PRTs, who in turn contact sub-agents in the villages where they perform their Good Works. The sub-agent tells the agent where a particular suspect lives in the village, how many people are in his house, where they sleep, and when they enter and leave the house. The sub-agent also provides a picture, so the PRT attackers supposedly know who they’re snatching or snuffing out.

Jake’s mission can also be compared to those conducted by

Human Terrain Teams (HTT) in Afghanistan. Composed of anthropologists and soldiers,the mission of a HTT is to understand and catalogue the beliefs and behaviors of people the CIA wishes to exploit in the most devious and murderous ways imaginable.

In Vietnam , the CIA called this psychological warfare. When the CIA learned from its anthropologists that the Buddhists believed that a person cannot enter heaven unless his liver is intact, the CIA instructed its death squads (PRU, for Provincial Reconnaissance Units, in Vietnam ) to remove and often eat the livers of the people they murdered. In an article she wrote about this in 1970, journalist Georgie-Anne Geyer quoted a PRU adviser as saying “he ate supper with his PRUs on the hearts and livers of their slain enemies.”

Notably, military historian Mark Moyar, a professor at the Marine Corps University, is energetically advocating for the creation of PRU-style death squads in Afghanistan.
[See Consortiumnews.com, “A Bad Vietnam Lesson for Afghanistan.” ]

CIA death squads in Vietnam also left their calling cards nailed to the forehead of the corpses they left behind. They were playing card size with a light green skull with red eyes and red teeth dripping blood, set against a black background. The CIA terrorists used their pistol butts to hammer the cards into the victim’s third eye, the pituitary gland. The third eye is the seat of consciousness for Buddhists, and this was a form of mutilation that had a powerful  psychological effect.

As Geyer wrote, the CIA started a counter-guerrilla movement in northern Quang Ngai Province . Terror and assassination were included in their bag of tricks. At one point, [they] printed 50,000 leaflets showing sinister black eyes. These were left on bodies after assassination or even
– ‘our terrorists’ are playful – nailed to doors to make people think they were marked for future efforts.

Without the mutilation, this is precisely the type of HTT or PRT mission Colonel Quaritch sends Jake on. Before the movie began, the audience was subjected to the usual five minute National Guard recruitment propaganda film. There was a bunch of buffed-up buzz-cut young men in the audience, exactly the type of person who is so vulnerable to this type of rah-rah America hype. You know: become a soldier and you automatically are strong, brave, dependable, patriotic, honest, and true.

The young men in the audience were, initially, cheering Colonel Quaritch, the monster who recruits Jake on his secret mission to subvert the NaVi. The colonel is a veritable poster boy Rambo for the military: he’s tough and buffed and nobody fucks with him. More than that, he’s merciless and takes immense pleasure in massacring the Navi and destroying their holy sites. He represents all you can be.

Like the young men in the audience, Jake is initially charmed by the colonel’s macho mystique. However, once in the field, Jake meets and falls in love with Neytiri, a beautiful NaVi woman. Neytiri recognizes that Jake is special. She does not understand why, at first, though later Jake is recognized as a divine Avatar come to rescue the NaVi from destruction at the hands of the American imperialists.

This is where the young men in the audience started to get a little fidgety. By the end of the movie, when I saw them in the men’s room, they were totally confused.  On the one hand they were being told the National Guard is goodness and light, and on the other they were being
told that it is the enemy of all that is good and natural on Planet Earth.

How these young men react will determine America’s spiritual fate.

Correction (January 11):

Lila: In “A Bad Vietnam Lesson for Afghanistan,” Consortium News, September 17, 2009, Valentine writes:

“Posing as refugee relief organizations, the paramilitary teams activated stay-behind nets, sabotaged power plants, and spread false rumors (“black propaganda”) that the communists were disemboweling pregnant Catholic women, castrating priests, and sticking bamboo slivers in the ears of children so they could not hear the Word of God.”

Lila: I want to clarify that while the CIA might indeed have been propagandizing, it would be quite incorrect to assume that the communists were not employing torture as well, as illustrated by former POW testimony about torture by the communists in South Vietnam before the House International Relations Committee, in November 1999.

An aside: The first book I read about Vietnam was “Deliver Us From Evil,” by the charismatic young Catholic doctor, Tom Dooley. It made a lasting impression on me, even though I soon found out that magazines like Reader’s Digest had been instrumental in creating an image of Dooley that deviated quite a bit from reality, if James T. Fisher’s debunking biography, “Dr America: The Lives of Thomas A. Dooley” (University of Mass Press, 1997), is to be believed.