A Hidden Film is Coming Out....Please be advised...

[KerryReallyWon]

winter soldier is coming! Most important email of the day!!

THE GUARDIAN
Friday, October 14, 2005

On film
Apocalypse then.

As allegations about worse abuse at Abu Ghraib loom, how timely that a shocking documentary about US soldiers in Vietnam is resurfacing.

John Patterson
Friday October 14, 2005
The Guardian

Last August - when John Kerry was being slimed daily by the
Republican-backed Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, for having spoken publicly back in 1971 about American atrocities in Vietnam - I wondered how long it would take before some enterprising Democratic campaign staffer remembered the documentary Winter Soldier.

The film is a record of an event organised by the group Vietnam
Veterans Against the War - of which Kerry was a leading figure - in
Detroit in 1971. It has no directorial credit, but it was shot by
film-makers who later became acclaimed documentarians, including Oscar-winner Barbara Kopple. It features testimony by representatives of all four branches of the US military about atrocities they had witnessed or committed in Vietnam between 1963 and 1970. Witness after witness told of obscene, revolting, almost unimaginable acts, often sobbing as they did so, and every confession drives one back to the famous words of a mother of one of the soldiers indicted for the massacre at My Lai just months earlier: "I gave them an American farmboy, and they sent me back a murderer."

They spoke of faking body counts to impress superiors; throwing Viet Cong suspects bound with copper wire from airborne choppers to their deaths; the routine mutilation of corpses (back at base, ears could literally be traded for beers); the destruction of entire villages for sport by bored gunnery and artillery units (loser buys the next round); the wilful destruction of rice-yields, stored crops, livestock, farm implements; the use of chemical defoliants that turned arable soil to concrete; rape; "indiscriminate murder"; and at one particularly gruesome point, the disembowelment and skinning of a dead Vietnamese woman by a civilian Usaid operative, her innards pulled out and flung around her "as a sign".
I figured that a single cable showing of Winter Soldier would shove the Swifties back in their box once and for all, but it never
happened. When a movie is this explosive, this dangerous to the rose-tinted collective right wing folk memory of the Vietnam conflict, there will never be a rush to air the evidence anew. Indeed, right wingers are still claiming the testimony was faked or coerced. I also hadn't realized just how obscure Winter Soldier was as a movie. Most of the major print media ignored the hearings at the time. The big TV network news outfits between them only broadcast one three-minute piece. This despite of the fact that all participants' credentials and accounts had been extensively verified and crossed-checked by rank, discharge papers, unit numbers, and by geographical location in the battle zone.

But Winter Soldier was barely ever seen. Hell, I've never seen it,
though I've read the Winter Soldier Investigation transcripts many
times. It only played a couple of weeks in politically sympathetic
Manhattan venues in 1971, though it was also once broadcast - as an unannounced schedule-padder - by a New York City cable outfit possessed, one hopes, of a mile-wide subversive streak, and thousands of viewers may have caught it.

Since then nothing. Until now.

Winter Soldier is about to receive a DVD release in the US (Brits can look up its website, wintersoldierfilm.com). It will drop into
American cinemas and living rooms in an atmosphere stained by the promise of further Abu Ghraib torture-porn (photos and video of "rape and murder", according to Seymour Hersh of the New York Times, who broke My Lai, and Republican senator Lindsay Graham, a former Navy attorney), and the recent gore-for-porn scandal (US troops in Iraq swapping battlefield snapshots for online nude pictures). Any doubts about the tragic potential for US (and indeed any) troops to degenerate into stone killers are no longer tenable. As Viggo Mortensen discovered in A History of Violence and as Karl Rove, Scooter Libby and Tom DeLay are presently finding out in Washington DC, the past will one day erupt all over you, and all your best-laid plans will be laid to waste, all your illusions turned to ashes.

Winter Soldier - it's about time.

Dennis Doros
Milestone Film & Video
PO Box 128
Harrington Park, NJ 07640
Phone: [phone] or [phone]
Fax: [phone]
Email: [e-mail]
Website: http://www.milestonefilms.com

:popcorn: :nuke:

[IndyOp]

1. Wow - that could be very, very important news -

People will believe if they see video of military men sobbing as they recount what they saw -

:wow:

[Nickster]

2. Very nice, I'll be getting a copy of that.

[Dogmudgeon]

3. I haven't found it yet -- BUT --

Here's a film that should be on everyone's must-see list:

It Happened Here
Director: Kevin Brownlow, Andrew Mollo
England. 1966.
96 minutes. Black & White.

In It Happened Here, Brownlow and Mollo's brilliant re-write of history, Germany has won World War II and Nazi troops occupy England. Pauline Murray, an apolitical Irish nurse, is transferred to London, where she slowly realizes the horrifying reality behind the occupation. The film is a terrifying intimation of what might have happened if the Allied effort had failed. Brownlow was only 18 and his co-director Mollo was 16, when they started this monumental documentary style drama in 1956.

"The German invasion of England took place in July 1940 after the British retreat from Dunkirk. Strongly resisted at first, the German army took many months to restore order. But the resistance movement, lacking outside support, was finally crushed. Then, in 1944, the resistance movement reappeared."

After years of hard work and with the help of hundreds of volunteers, It Happened Here was finally completed in 1964. But when United Artists released it two years later, the studio cut seven minutes of controversial material. Milestone's is the first presentation of the complete version here in the USA.

Video Details
VHS: $29.95 DVD: $29.95 PAL: $0.00

--p!

[Chemical Bill]

4. Thank you, I'll keep my eyes open.

I get the feeling that if I blink I might miss it.

Bill

[IndyOp]

5. Winter Soldier is showing NOW across the US -

Winter Soldier film website

View Still Photos

Upcoming Screenings ALL OVER the US Oct-Nov-Dec!

Orlando, FL
Hartford, CT
Great Barrington, MA
Winnipeg, Canada
Ithaca, NY
Atlanta, GA
Denver, CO
Rhinebeck, NY
Huntington, NY
Three Oaks, MI
Indianapolis, IN
Pittsburgh, PA
Huntingdon, PA
Boston, MA
Houston, TX
Hollywood, CA
Gainesville, FL
Albuquerque, NM
Detroit, MI
Seattle, WA
Madison, WI
Salt Lake City, UT
Pleasantville, NY
Durham, NC
Daytona Beach, FL
Houston TX
Olympia, WA
Columbus, OH
Washington, DC
Rochester, NY
San Francisco, CA
Philadelphia, PA

[McKenzie]

6. self delete - wrong context

[Bernardo de La Paz]

7. Hearts and minds are central.

[Blue_In_AK]

8. This is a great film...

I believe I saw it on Sundance not too long ago. It should be required viewing.

[PATRICK]

9. Then as now

The Bush years cast a sharp light back on what has been routinely happening with news and documentary films. The only nation that banned the Hiroshima footage, that still gets edited at best on so-called history channels. The same MIA when it comes to war crimes and things embarrassing to those in power. The basis of our distrust in the media now does not cast a flattering light back on the past where some the journalistic failings were standard procedure. World war II embedding probably began this climate of support and trust that ended so badly in Vietnam and was remade into the shill and ignorance game of today.

The good old days when journalists were supposedly just journalists, courageous, unsparing and intelligently informed and informative. And dissidents or pols never learned to recognize or deal with suppressed news.

The fact one can innocently wonder today why it never came out when needed shows how it is a continuing process of misinforming the American public. Successful only in not being behind bars.

[KerryReallyWon]

10. This needs to be pumped up when the time comes soon...

If Americans see the new Abu Ghraib sex torture pics...it's all over!


PS We hear the mkultra kidz did some of the training for this type of torture! One of the reasons for the army of child cum adult spies?

I have a DVD of Winter Soldier and I am going to do a showing at a poliical cafe'.....we need to get this out when the movie drops to the public!

:patriot: :pals: :kick:

[unhappycamper]

11. Locking

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