two stories
1st
Why I Can’t Watch Homeland Anymore … and the Glorification of the CIA
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http://www.citywatchla.com/lead-stories ... of-the-cia10 Oct 2014
OBSERVING MEDIA-The fourth season of Claire Danes’ hit show Homeland premiered Sunday night, but I wasn’t watching. Its glorification of the CIA has crossed a line, and I can no longer view the show as pure entertainment.
Homeland uses a hip, anti-establishment tone to promote even the worst abuses of the Central Intelligence Agency. It is today’s equivalent of the 1960’s show Mod Squad. Mod Squad featured “the hippest and first young undercover cops on television.” It used figures from youth culture to promote the reactionary and racist Los Angeles Police Department. Mod Squad villains were drawn from the same counterculture elements that the LAPD was beating up on city streets.
Homeland uses a similar strategy. Its star, Claire Danes, has the blonde look of Mod Squad star Peggy Lipton. Danes’ Carrie Mathison’s character, like Lipton’s, is a woman in a man’s game. Carrie acts like she’s battling the establishment while promoting the CIA’s core agenda at every turn.
Who Turned Iran? Carrie’s role in glorifying the CIA became crystal clear in the show’s reinvention of Iranian politics in Season 3.
Homeland’s message in Season 3 was that the CIA had the ability to change Iranian politics by getting someone it controlled in power in Iran. The end result—Iran’s agreement to nuclear talks—was portrayed on the show as 100% a product of the CIA’s wiles.
But in the real world, internal forces within Iran, not the CIA, led Iran to become more accommodating on nuclear policy. The difference is quite significant.
Since its founding, the CIA has routinely assassinated world leaders and key political figures under the guise that such acts were necessary to bring “democracy.” The CIA did this in Iran in 1954, replacing a democratically elected leader with a dictator. A dictator who murdered and tortured hundreds of thousands of Iranians until he was overthrown in 1979.
Homeland doesn’t offer this history lesson. Nor does it ever reveal the many other nations where the CIA used assassination and violence to replace democratic leaders with dictators.
Because to tell viewers the truth would cause many to wonder why they are rooting for Carrie and her CIA colleagues in carrying out their missions. In its essence, Homeland is reclaiming and reviving the same dangerous myth of the “CIA knows best” that has caused misery to millions across the globe.
Danes’ Carrie Mathison is the chief vehicle for getting anti-establishment types to buy into this message.
The other vehicle is Mandy Patinkin’s character, Saul. Saul plays the tormented Jewish CIA chief straight out of a Malamud novel. Nobody could possibly believe that a gentle, thoughtful soul like Saul would wrongly kill people—so when that’s what he does, it has to be that the CIA is following the moral course.
Homeland places Carrie and Saul—and by implication the CIA—are on the right side of history. The CIA’s actual history notwithstanding.
In the last episode of Season 3 there was an exchange between Carrie and Brody in which the latter questions what all of the CIA killing really accomplishes. But Carrie does not even give pause to consider whether the man she loves and admires most in the world may be on to something.
It’s Only Entertainment!-Yes, Homeland is not the real world. Yet as Alex Gansa, the show’s creator admitted “viewers will again find in “Homeland” parallels to real events in the Mideast.”
That’s the problem. Homeland creates close parallels to real life events via a fictional CIA whose real world operations are very different. The real world CIA failed to foresee the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Iran. It also failed to anticipate Mubarak’s problems in Egypt. It missed the rise of ISIS entirely.
The real CIA is not controlled by principled and thoughtful analysts like Saul and Claire. The real CIA is driven by people like Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld, for whom ideology and politics always come first.
Does Homeland’s deviation from reality matter? The LAPD certainly thought television shows about its work shaped public perceptions. That’s why it closely cooperated with Dragnet, Adam 12 and other LA cop shows to create an image of a caring, non-racist LAPD entirely at odd with the fa
2nd
ACLU accuses Boston police of racial profiling
Stop and frisk: Racial profiling in Boston
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http://www.bostonherald.com/news_opinio ... _profilingThursday, October 9, 2014
Blacks are more likely to be stopped and frisked by Hub cops in a “problematic pattern” that stops short of “widespread” racial profiling, according to the researcher whose findings the ACLU cited in an explosive report on Boston police tactics.
“I can’t explain why these racial patterns exist ... but it’s clear there are problematic patterns,” said Anthony Braga, the Rutgers criminologist and Harvard fellow whose analysis of more than 204,000 so-called “civilian-police encounters” in Boston between 2007 and 2010 was the basis of yesterday’s American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts report that accused the Boston Police Department of “racially biased policing.”
Braga noted that blacks were 8 percent more likely to be involved in a police encounter multiple times and 12 percent more likely to be stopped and frisked. But he said the stat heavily cited by the ACLU — that blacks make up 63 percent of the encounters, but only 24 percent of the population — is a “misrepresentation” of whether there really is a racial bias.
“The context of policing is not what’s going on with New York with stop and frisk,” Braga, a former BPD policy adviser, said, noting that of the 204,739 reports analyzed, only 40 percent include instances of stop-and-frisk. “There is a problem, and the problem needs to be understood. It’s a mixed bag. But the ACLU portrayal of the report ... doesn’t represent the spirit of what we’ve done.”
The ACLU report sparked an immediate firestorm yesterday, with police brass saying it was outdated and ignored recent reforms in training. The police department said the findings show that cops are targeting gang members in “high-crime areas.”
Cops are also repeatedly stopping those with criminal records or “gang membership,” according to police, who say just 5 percent of the individuals stopped accounted for 40 percent of the total reports.
Police Commissioner William B. Evans said that the use of the type of police report the ACLU studied has dropped 42 percent between 2008 and last year, though officials said they did not have a racial breakdown of who was stopped during that period.
“We aren’t out there stopping every African-American child for no reason at all,” Evans said. “We put most of our officers, like we did this summer ... into the areas where we see the gun violence. And unfortunately that is where most of that is populated by African-American young males. It’s only reasonable to believe that we’re going to stop and talk to more black males than any other part of the city.”
In making recommended changes, including adding body cameras to police, the ACLU said that in 75 percent of reports, Boston police described the reason for the encounter as simply “investigate person” — a description it assailed as “because I said so.”
“The findings confirm what many people from communities of color have long suspected: Boston police officers targeted people of color at far greater rates than white people,” the ACLU report states.
While Mayor Martin J. Walsh noted the findings precede his administration, he also said he wasn’t challenging them.
“I’m trying to build a city here. My theme in the campaign was ‘One city.’ And having certain neighborhoods targeted or certain individuals targeted inappropriately isn’t the way I want to do it,” he told the Herald.
“If I’m a young black male and I see this report, certainly I see this as targeting me. I see the sensitivity and the concern in the black community and the communities of color. The numbers speak for themselves.
