Charlie Wilson's War could have won an Oscar in a category Best Public Deception. Film hides Carter's having secretly funded, armed and trained the fundamentalist hill tribes, attacking a modern women emancipating government in Kabul, to sucker the Soviets into entering Afghanistan SIX MONTHS LATER. Photo of men lying face down, hands wired behind their backs – the caption reading "Teachers executed for having taught girls."

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Charlie Wilson's War received only one Oscar nomination, best supporting actor, for Philip Seymour Hoffman portraying Gust Avrakotos, a CIA agent. Had there have been an award for Best Public Deception, Charlie Wilson’s War should surely have won an Oscar.

As film critique Joanne Laurier wrote for the World Socialist Web Site,

“as history, Charlie Wilson’s War is an effort to take advantage of the general low level of popular historical knowledge."

The film hides President Carter's having secretly funded, armed and trained the fundamentalist hill tribes, attacking a modern women emancipating government in Kabul, in order to sucker the Soviets into entering Afghanistan SIX MONTHS LATER - as his National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski would later BRAG to a French Newspaper in 1998.

President Carter's heartless criminally homicidal secret attack on a small friendly nation's government using ethnic and religious divisions to foment civil war goes unprosecuted. Our presidential CIA government is above all laws, treaties, and our own constitution, ONLY for the acquiescent silent cover up by conglomerate entertainment/news media

A photo of three men lying face down with their hands wired behind their backs – the caption reading “ teachers executed for having taught girls”, is remembered by this writer as being featured in major media during this period, (in an unguarded media moment).

Added to the shameful cover up by conglomerate owned entertainment/news industry is this grotesque Hollywood movie of which scams it audience, hiding a now documented presidential homicidal crime.

Though relatively few Americans know, it was their very own government headed by the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Jimmy Carter that first made use of Islamic terror - and did it to provoke the Soviet Union into entering its forces in to Afghanistan to protect the Kabul Socialist government.

Carter's crime of initiating the destruction of Afghanistan is blacked out in the film and in George Crile's book, originally titled “The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History — the Arming of the Mujahideen.” The 2007 paperbound edition was subtitled, “The Extraordinary Story of How the Wildest Man in Congress and a Rogue CIA Agent Changed the History of Our Times.”

Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts have let their popular public images be used to falsify history in what must be seen as betrayal of their fans - whether or not they were aware of the truth.

Critic Joanne Laurier describes the opening scene:

"In a secret CIA ceremony in the 1990s, a Democratic Party congressman from Texas is being honored for his role in delivering a “lethal body blow to Communism.” The agency is celebrating the “defeat and break-up of the Soviet Union”—one of the “great events of the 20th Century.”

So begins the new Mike Nichols movie, Charlie Wilson’s War. Starring Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts and Philip Seymour Hoffman, the film bills itself as the real story of how in the 1980s, a hedonistic politician, Charlie Wilson (Hanks), conspires with an extreme right-wing Houston socialite, Joanne Herring (Roberts), and an untamed CIA agent, Gust Avrakotos (Hoffman), to conduct the largest US covert operation in history: the securing of money and weapons for the fight of the Afghan “freedom fighters” against the Soviet army."

But the truth is that the US under Carter/Brzezinski heavily supported the mujahedeen before the Russian military ever got to Afghanistan. The whole idea of that policy, of course, was to lure the Soviets in.

It was Carter's advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, who bragged to French news magazine, Le Nouvel Observateur, in Paris, 15 January 1998, of suckering in the Russians, by frightening them into believing the U.S. was threatening to create a hostile Muslim nation on its doorstep amid the Soviet Muslin republics, by our pouring in money to arm and train fundamentalists, fundamentalist tribes who would later receive much more, openly, from successive U.S. administrations, and which would include the funding, along with Saudi help, of tens of thousands of extreme Wahhabi sect madrasahs, schools that would eventually produce the Taliban, who along with Osama bin-Ladin, would eventually also receive U.S. aid.

“Question: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs [From the Shadows], that American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention. In this period you were the national security adviser to President Carter. You therefore played a role in this affair. Is that correct?

Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise. Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.”

Critic Laurier continues,

“In its effort to lionize Charlie Wilson as the savior of the Afghan people, who are scarcely present, the film omits a few inconvenient facts. The maverick congressman came onto the scene well after the Democratic administration of Jimmy Carter had decided to give financial and military support to the Islamicists engaged in guerilla warfare against the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul, which had come to power in a military coup in 1978. This preceded the Soviet invasion of the country in 1979.

 

The Carter regime, which hoped a war in Afghanistan would be the USSR’s Vietnam, began funding and arming the most right-wing fundamentalists, the ideological ancestors of the Taliban and Osama bin Laden.

 

Nor does the film mention that Carter’s successor, Ronald Reagan, was an enthusiastic promoter of the fundamentalists and that his CIA director, William Casey, is deserving of the title “founding father” of al Qaeda for his campaign of globally recruiting Islamic militants to come to Afghanistan to fight the anti-Communist cause. (Carter’s national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski gloated in a 1998 interview that some “stirred-up Moslems” were a small price to pay for the collapse of the Soviet Union, the “liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War.”)

 

Far from being an unsung champion as film director Nichols would have it, Wilson was a pawn on the global chessboard—a bagman for those responsible for nearly two decades of civil war and the destruction of Afghan society.”

In a Los Angles Times review of the book, Chalmers Johnson—the well-known academic, one-time consultant to the CIA and author of Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire—wrote a scathing review of both Crile’s book and the Nichols movie:

"Wilson’s activities in Afghanistan led directly to a chain of blowback that culminated in the attacks of September 11, 2001 and led to the United States’ current status as the most hated nation on Earth."

 

Carter signed the finding on July 3, 1979, six months before the Soviet invasion, and he did so on the advice of his national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, in order to try to provoke a Russian incursion. Brzezinski has confirmed this sequence of events in an interview with a French newspaper, and former CIA Director [today Secretary of Defense] Robert Gates says so explicitly in his 1996 memoirs

 

Among those supporting the Afghans (in addition to the U.S.) was the rich, pious Saudi Arabian economist and civil engineer, Osama bin Laden, whom we helped by building up his al Qaeda base at Khost. When bin Laden and his colleagues decided to get even with us for having been used, he had the support of much of the Islamic world. This disaster was brought about by Wilson’s and the CIA’s incompetence as well as their subversion of all the normal channels of political oversight and democratic accountability within the U.S. government. Charlie Wilson’s war thus turned out to have been just another bloody skirmish in the expansion and consolidation of the American empire — and an imperial presidency. The victors were the military-industrial complex and our massive standing armies. The billion dollars’ worth of weapons Wilson secretly supplied to the guerrillas ended up being turned on ourselves."

Johnson adds that

“there is ample evidence that, when it comes to the freedom of women, education levels, governmental services, relations among ethnic groups, and quality of life—all were infinitely better under the Afghan communists than under the Taliban or the present government of President Hamid Karzai, which evidently controls little beyond the country’s capital, Kabul.”

In the book, page 14, George Crile makes it seem otherwise " Soviet invasion surprised and radicalized Carter, who suddenly saw the USSR as evil and Brezhnev as not rational. " Did Crile not know how hundreds of thousands reading the Internet know that Carter funded, armed and trained the hill tribes starting in June or July to sucker in the Soviets in December?

In the movie several CIA grouped characters and Charlie himself in the movie joke openly about how much they love to kill Russians. The movie featured such talk as admirable, portrayed as swashbuckling and manly. The CIA comes across as 'good,' like James Bond, cute and loveable, a bit roguish, but exciting, and definitely something to cheer for.

This article is the third written on the subject, each time motivated by something in the news and in addition has written to Jimmy Carter through his Carter Center.

Jimmy Carter enjoys prestige and respect for his work as a dedicated promoter of peaceful solutions. What an enormous contribution to peace Carter could make by enlightening us on the process of covert murderous intention during his presidency. If he would just 'fess up' about his now no longer secret orders funding, training and equipping the fundamentalist tribes of the mountains against the socialist (women liberating) government in Kabul, a full six months BEFORE the first units of the Soviet army entered Afghanistan. One would imagine that Carter himself would see the great value of an honest admission and welcome an opportunity to unburden himself of whatever feelings of anguish and self-recrimination he might be experiencing.

Peace loving Jimmy, please tell us candidly of the times when you weren’t for peace and the mitigating circumstances thereof. Help us understand that the roots of today's genocidal belligerencies go way back to a history of nefarious foreign policy.

May heaven grant that this in bad taste low level heartless ‘entertainment’ over the bodies of Afghans awakens a desire in Jimmy Carter’s soul to explain and hopefully condemn how this insidious use of CIA to instigate terror came to be. We are supposed to be entering an era of change.

Authors Website: http://prosecuteuscrimesagainsthumanitynow.blogspot.com

Authors Bio:

Jay Janson is an archival research peoples historian activist, musician and writer; has lived and worked on all continents; articles on media published in China, Italy, UK, India, in Germany & Sweden Einartysken,and in the US by Dissident Voice; Global Research; Information Clearing House; Counter Currents; Minority Perspective, UK,and others; now resides in NYC; First effort was a series of articles on deadly cultural pollution endangering seven areas of life emanating from Western corporate owned commercial media published in Hong Kong's Window Magazine 1993; Howard Zinn lent his name to various projects of his; Weekly column, South China Morning Post, 1986-87; reviews for Ta Kung Bao; article China Daily, 1989. Is coordinator of the Howard Zinn co-founded King Condemned US Wars International Awareness Campaign, and website historian of the Ramsey Clark co-founded Prosecute US Crimes Against Humanity Now Campaign, which contains a history of US crimes in 19 nations. Dissident Voice supports this website with link at the end of each issue of its newsletter.