Our goal for the The Last War Crime film project was to tell the true story of how we were misled into an attack and invasion of Iraq, which now even the neocons have been forced to admit has been a strategic catastrophe.They have also tried to revise history as if they could not have known that the intelligence was bad, when in fact they knew (or should have known) all along that the intelligence was garbage (a polite word).

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My guest today is The PEN, activist and policy advocate. Welcome back to OpEdNews, PEN. 

JB: When we spoke back in January, 2012, we discussed The Last War Crime, the film you made about indicting Dick Cheney for torture. There are many people who are not aware of your film's existence, let alone its contents. Can you fill us in?

PEN: Sure, so nice speaking with you again, Joan.  As usual, you are right on top of things.  At that point, we were working hard literally around the clock to finish up the post production for the movie.  And we didn't stop.  And we are just now at a point where we are ready to make available a limited edition of what people call a "screener" DVD.  Our plan at this point is to empower people to organize their own home and community screenings, and to get word out about the completion of this project that way.  If someone wants to obtain a copy of the screener, we are asking them to commit to doing such a local screening, and they can do so at this link.

Our goal for the The Last War Crime film project was, in the first instance, to tell the true story of how we were misled into an attack and invasion of Iraq, which now even the neocons have been forced to admit has been a strategic catastrophe.  But they have also tried to revise history as if they could not have known that the intelligence was bad, when in fact they knew (or should have known) all along that the intelligence and war sales pitch were garbage (a polite word).  And how could they have known that?  Because they got that "intelligence" from torturing people, notorious throughout history for being used to obtain false confessions.

So, the first third of the film recreates in docudrama style the historical events from the morning of 9/11 to the Colin Powell UN speech.  But we also wanted to imagine what it would have been like if some courageous U.S. attorney had uncovered evidence of the war crimes committed by Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, and done something to hold people accountable while they were still in office.  This is not that farfetched if you remember the U.S. attorney firings and the scandal about that because they would not politicize their jobs.  

JB: Yes, I remember that well.

PEN: And the rest of the film tells an entertaining dramatic story around such a fictional vision.  Call it a political fantasy fulfillment film if you like.

When we last spoke about the progress of the getting out word of The Last War Crime film, we talked about how YouTube had banned one of our preview clips, for completely bogus reasons, and how MTV/Viacom had refused to run an ad for the movie on their Times Square jumbotron.  Despite over 12,000 protest messages we were able to mobilize about that, Viacom just ignored us and I had suggested to you that we were considering some kind of federal lawsuit as a recourse.

JB: Yes. 

PEN: After that, the same thing basically happened again when we tried to submit an ad for The Last War Crime movie to the top political news/talk radio station in Washington, DC.  The excuse there for rejecting an ad for our film was that it was too "controversial."  

And judging that was our best test case, representing ourselves we did in fact file a federal lawsuit in the DC federal district court captioned a "Complaint for Political Speech Discrimination." That was in November of 2012, against that radio station and their parent corporation, the second largest radio station conglomerate in the country.

Not surprisingly, defendants' counsel, one of the top 50 law firms in the country, quickly filed an obligatory motion to dismiss, which I think we brushed aside quite effectively with the opposition we filed.  The way these court procedures work: the side that files a motion has a automatic opportunity to file a reply to our opposition, but they are not supposed to bring up new issues in that reply, that we would not have had a fair chance to respond to in writing.  But, fearing they were losing the argument we think, that's exactly what the other side tried to do, even to the point of making, in our view, serious misrepresentations about the contents of legal precedents.  

We hit the law library again and researched what the appropriate legal reaction should be in such a situation, and then filed our own motion to ask permission to file what is called a surreply, a rare procedural remedy that the Court has discretion to grant or not, and which is generally not favored.  Defendants opposed our surreply request motion, we exercised our right to reply to that, and that last filing took us to the end of January, earlier this year.

JB: Don't leave us in suspense, PEN. Then what happened?

PEN: Well, after that, nothing happened for months.  The case just sat on the bench of the assigned judge with no dispositive action by the Court.  Because of the caseload in the DC federal court, which handles the most important questions of federal jurisdiction, this is not unusual for cases being given serious consideration.  If our core claims were not meritorious, the Court early on could have easily just dittoed the text of defendants' motion to dismiss, and that happens too.  

About five months ago, there was an entry in the docket that our case had been reassigned to a senior judge in the district, kicked upstairs so to speak.  This is the same judge who has been handling the 2 billion dollar lawsuit filed by Bank of America against the FDIC.  This is big time litigation land.  But still no action was taken on the merits in our case. 

Then last week, we got notice that our motion requesting permission to file that surreply had been GRANTED.  This in and of itself does not prove that we will prevail on the substance of our complaint, but we believe it strongly suggests that the Court is taking our arguments very seriously, and at least in this one matter granted for us a motion despite the opposition of the other side.

JB: So that's definitely encouraging news. What else?

PEN: I might mention that this is not the first lawsuit we have been forced to file related to The Last War Crime movie.  Also after we last talked we had a problem getting permission to use in the film some extraordinary pictures taken by the NYPD helicopter photographic unit on the morning of 9/11.  Because all news copters were excluded from being within 5 miles of lower Manhattan that morning, only the NYPD photographer was in a position to take some stunning close-in photos of the huge clouds of dust and smoke enveloping 50 and 60 story buildings in the aftermath of the collapse of the World Trade Center towers.  And we wanted to use these pictures as a dramatic photo montage in The Last War Crime movie.  Almost nobody knew these historically significant photos even existed, but we found them by exhaustively going through the multi-terabyte NIST database, which had collected anything and everything related to these events.

The NYPD tried to blow off our request for use of the pictures in a way that was clearly arbitrary in our view, so we researched how to challenge an administrative decision in New York City.  In that case we filed an Article 78 petition, which we determined was the correct remedy.  We heard back from New York City's intellectual property attorney.  Yes, they actually have someone dedicated for that.  He told us, in a very nice way actually, that if he wanted to he could run us around back and forth in court for years.  We told him equally nicely that he would find us to be very intellectually stimulating running partners.  

JB: Cute!

PEN: We suspect he was astonished at some of the obscure legal citations we were able to find supporting our petition.  And the NYPD pretty much surrendered immediately.  And the pictures are in the film now.

JB: Good work!

PEN: But the big deal is the federal lawsuit.  It's no secret to us that many, many people, especially progressives, have had their political policy related ads censored in the past.  

JB: Agreed. In 2005, there was a similar incident when an ad was submitted to WHYY, the National Public Radio station in Philadelphia. It was for Mark Crispin Miller's book, Fooled Again, about the stolen presidential election of 2004. Suddenly, the book was too - that word again -  "controversial" and the ad was rejected.

PEN: Wow, when a national public radio station is rejecting ads for political reasons, that is a full blown crisis of democracy! We ourselves have experienced this multiple times just around this one film, and it is still going on all the time.  We are asking the federal judge to CHANGE the law on First Amendment grounds, and we have two independent arguments of first impression we are presenting, either of which would create a new precedent binding nationwide.  If we prevail on any level, we believe it will fundamentally change the playing field related to political advertising.

The last time we spoke about the forces trying to suppress promotion of The Last War Crime movie, I told you, "If there is a path to get the movie out, it must be directly through the biggest obstacle someone puts in our way."  And this is precisely what we are doing now.

JB: So, let me make sure I understand the process.  In essence, you're doing an end-run around the usual movie distribution routes by going for home and group viewing. That's good. What about doing something similar to what Robert Reich and Jake Kornbluth did with their recent independent film, Inequality for All? They rented out theaters in a number of cities for showings and then will release the film soon on Netflix. Would something like that work for you?

PEN: We actually have something like that going on too.  Over a thousand people have already requested advance tickets, and we have already had such screenings in Los Angeles and San Francisco.  We see no reason why this film should not have a real theatrical run.  But for people to really show up in droves, or rent and buy The Last War Crime movie like crazy, as we know they will, first we seriously need to get the word out about the film.  And that is of course why the corporate media is trying to block our advertising, because they have a political agenda in not seeing that happen.  Frankly, we think their censorship is going to backfire.  Watch what kind of attention this project gets when we establish a major new free speech legal case precedent.

JB: That legal precedent would be nothing short of fabulous for all of us. Anything to add before we wrap this up?

PEN: It's taken us over two years to complete post production on the film, something way over 5,000 man hours, to get everything polished the way we always wanted.  But now the stars are aligning for this project, and we can't wait to get cranking on the next one.  And all our people need to do at this point is just pick up a screener and show it to their friends, and make it the movie of that week for their movie night of their community group, and have those people do the same thing, and we can bulldoze all the prejudicial policy barriers the corporate media has put in our way.  And once these barriers are down, so many others will be empowered to do the same thing. 

JB: A veritable snowball, gathering speed as it heads downhill!  Good luck on this project, PEN. Please keep us in the loop. I can't wait to see The Last War Crime.  I always feel so inspired when I talk with you. Thanks so much.

PEN: We love you all at OpEdNews!

JB: Thanks! The feeling is definitely mutual. Okay folks, time to click on that link and arrange a movie night with your friends and neighbors. Let's start that ball rolling!

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The Last War Crime movie website

previous interviews with The PEN:
YouTube and MTV Try to Shut Down New Cheney Indictment Film 1/29/2012

The PEN: Save the Bees Before We All Starve 8/10/2013

Authors Website: http://www.opednews.com/author/author79.html

Authors Bio:

Joan Brunwasser is a co-founder of Citizens for Election Reform (CER) which since 2005 existed for the sole purpose of raising the public awareness of the critical need for election reform. Our goal: to restore fair, accurate, transparent, secure elections where votes are cast in private and counted in public. Because the problems with electronic (computerized) voting systems include a lack of transparency and the ability to accurately check and authenticate the vote cast, these systems can alter election results and therefore are simply antithetical to democratic principles and functioning.



Since the pivotal 2004 Presidential election, Joan has come to see the connection between a broken election system, a dysfunctional, corporate media and a total lack of campaign finance reform. This has led her to enlarge the parameters of her writing to include interviews with whistle-blowers and articulate others who give a view quite different from that presented by the mainstream media. She also turns the spotlight on activists and ordinary folks who are striving to make a difference, to clean up and improve their corner of the world. By focusing on these intrepid individuals, she gives hope and inspiration to those who might otherwise be turned off and alienated. She also interviews people in the arts in all their variations - authors, journalists, filmmakers, actors, playwrights, and artists. Why? The bottom line: without art and inspiration, we lose one of the best parts of ourselves. And we're all in this together. If Joan can keep even one of her fellow citizens going another day, she considers her job well done.


When Joan hit one million page views, OEN Managing Editor, Meryl Ann Butler interviewed her, turning interviewer briefly into interviewee. Read the interview here.

While the news is often quite depressing, Joan nevertheless strives to maintain her mantra: "Grab life now in an exuberant embrace!"


Joan has been Election Integrity Editor for OpEdNews since December, 2005. Her articles also appear at Huffington Post, RepublicMedia.TV and Scoop.co.nz.