Asawin Suebsaeng is the interactive writing fellow at the Washington, DC bureau of Mother Jones. He has also written for The American Prospect, the Bangkok Post, and Shoecomics.com.
A graduate of Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Penn., Asawin came back to DC with hopes of putting his flimsy Creative Writing major, student newspaper tenure, and interest in human rights and political chicanery to some use. He started cutting his teeth at F&M's student-run weekly, The College Reporter, serving as editor in chief. He has interned at The American Prospect, been a reporter for the Bangkok Post, and scribbled for ShoeComics.com. His favorite movie is either Apocalypse Now or Pirahna 3D, depending on the day or mood.
On Monday, the US military handed over the Parwan Detention Facility (a.k.a. the Bagram military prison) to the Afghan government. It was the last prison in Afghanistan still under American control. The transfer ceremony took place at the detention facility—renamed the Afghan National Detention Facility at Parwan—as US Secretary of State John Kerry made a surprise visit for talks with Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Gen. Joseph Dunford, the top American commander in Afghanistan, was in charge of transferring the facility at the ceremony.
Afghanistan has taken full control of Bagram military prison from the United States, as US-led forces wind down more than a decade of war.
The handover on Monday follows an agreement reached after a week of negotiations between US and Afghan officials, which includes assurances that inmates who "pose a danger" to Afghans and international forces will continue to be detained under Afghan law...The United States last year agreed to hand over responsibility for most of the...detainees at the prison to Afghanistan and held a transfer ceremony in September.
US soldiers remained at the prison, however, and controlled the area around it.
The detention center, located near the US-run Bagram military base north of Kabul, holds over 3,000 prisoners, the vast majority of whom were already under Afghan control. About three dozen non-Afghan detainees will stay under American control. Transfer of control has been one of messier issues of contention between Kabul and Washington as most US forces prepare for an exit in 2014. Though the facility never enjoyed the same kind of name recognition as AbuGhraib or Guantanamo, it was at the center of major controversies and allegations of torture and human rights abuses. Here is some essential background on the detention center and the Bagram air base:
Al Pacino yells a lot in this movie. Granted, that could be said of any number of Al Pacino movies.
Phil Spector, which premieres Sunday, March 24 at 9 p.m. ET, is the second time in three years that Pacino has starred in a Barry Levinson -produced HBO movie in which he plays a highly controversial real-life figure who ends up going to jail. (The other being 2010's You Don't Know Jack, for which he won an Emmy for his portrayal of physician-assisted suicide proponent Dr. Jack Kevorkian.) This time around Pacino is the eponymous record producer, the unhinged musical genius behind the "Wall of Sound" studio production technique—a thickly layered sound heard on classics like The Ronettes' "Be My Baby" and The Beatles' "The Long and Winding Road." Spector had long enjoyed a reputation for being a lunatic; his eccentricities were often eclipsed by allegations of a pattern of violence against women. Less appalling tales involve him doing things like holding The Ramones at gunpoint during a recording session in 1979.
All his wild and vicious behavior culminated in the shooting death of actress/model Lana Clarkson at his California mansion in 2003. For this, Spector was convicted of second-degree murder in 2009, and sentenced to 19 years to life.
Who among us didn't fund our college spring break trip with money stolen from a diner in a poor, predominantly black neighborhood? Who among us didn't go to Florida with our friends and our Disney Princess backpacks, only to drunkenly strip naked in an alleyway and start flipping off passing cars for absolutely no reason? And who hasn't dry-humped James Franco on a bed covered with $100 bills and loaded Uzis before embarking on a bikini-clad killing spree in a mansion?
In this sense, the violent and lotus-eating Spring Breakers is exactly like your average college spring break vacation.
I'm not going to waste too much time recapping the film; I've embedded a trailer below, which should more than suffice. The best way I can describe Spring Breakers (other than "Scarface meets Britney Spears," which was already taken) is that this is Piranha 3D,except the piranha fail to show up. It's a feverish and frenzied story about four spoiled, staggeringly immature, narcotics-addled white girls who have major raceissues, but it's not Girlson HBO. The film, directed by the fairly notorious Harmony Korine, torpedoes the Disney-era memories of Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens in a haze of bare bodies, murdered hedonists, and snorted blow.
There have been so many fact-sheets and think pieces written about Spring Breakers that it's nearly impossible for me to contribute anything novel at this point. And the film is so dense in its perverted ridiculousness that it would take me a three-part book series to unpack it all. I will however provide you with a brief guide to the rich philosophy—economic, moral, literary, political—of Spring Breakers, presented in digestible quotes from the film. Here you go:
Education reform
"Fuck school!"
Poetry
"Big booties...This is poetry in MOTION, y'all!"
Surmounting life's many obstaclesand coming out a winner
"Let's just [steal] this fucking money, and go on SPRING BREAK, Y'ALL!"
The American Dream (transcription via Kyle Buchanan)
"This is the fuckin' American dream! This is mah fuckin' DREAM, y'all! All this shee-yit! Look at my shit:
I got… I got SHORTS—every fuckin' color!
I got designer T-shirts!
I got gold bullets! Motherfuckin' VAM-pires!
I got Scarface—on repeat. SCARFACE ON REPEAT. Constant, y'all!
I got ESCAPE! Calvin Klein Escape! Mix it up with Calvin Klein...Smell nice? I SMELL NICE!
That ain't a fuckin' bed, that's a fuckin' art piece. My fuckin' spaceship! U.S.S. Enterprise on this shit. I go to different planets on this motherfucker!
Me and my fuckin' Franklins here, we take off. TAKE OFF!
Look at my shee-yit. Look at my SHIT!
I got my blue Kool-Aid.
I got my fuckin' NUNCHUCKS. I got shurikens; I got different flavors: I got them sais. Look at that shit! I got sais. I got blades!
Look at my sheey-it! This ain't nothin', I got ROOMS of this shit!
I got my dark tannin' oil—lay out by the pool, put on my dark tanning oil! ...
Look at my shit."
Race relationsin America
"I was the only white boy in my neighborhood."
Gun rights in America
"I got machine guns...A fucking army up in this SHIT...I'M THE FUCKIN' DEATH STAR...DROPPIN' PLANES!!!!!"
Sexual politics
"I love penis."
(Quotes featured here are applicable in virtually any situation or argument, really.)
Spring Breakers gets a wide release on Friday, March 22. The film is rated R for practically everything that's in it.Click here for local showtimes and tickets.
Click here for more movie and TV coverage from Mother Jones.
In Olympus Has Fallen (FilmDistrict, 118 min.), highly trained and well-armed North Korean terrorists storm the White House, murder nearly every Secret Service agent in Washington, DC, and take the president hostage in the underground command center. The terrorists explode large chunks of the White House, tear down its American flag in particularly heinous fashion, kill a lot of innocent civilians, and knock over the Washington Monument in the process. And a lone agent (played by GerardButler) is the only one who can save the day, mostly by using sharp objects, assault weapons, and Die Hard-emulating trash-talk.
Given that the real-life White House is fairly well protected—maybe with lasers—and hasn't been burned down since the British invaded in 1814, this film isn't going to win awards for realism. (The assumption of North Korean military competence is also really, reallyfunny.)
But even the most intentionally unrealistic action movies aim to get some details right. The Core, a 2003 sci-fi disaster movie about scientists who travel to the center of the Earth to set off nukes, had its very own scientific consultant. And Olympus Has Fallen director Antoine Fuqua (Training Day, Tears of the Sun) sought out a good deal of Washington and Secret Service advice on how to craft his thriller. One of the technical consultants was Dr. Joe Bannon, a former special agent with the Office of the Attorney General and Department of Justice in Los Angeles, where he also worked as an allied agent with the Secret Service.
"I understand the terrorist mindset [of] willing to lay down their life for what they believe in."
Bannon now teaches presidential and heads of state protection—as well as a form of martial arts that combines "ancient Shaolin Wisdom with Modern Medical Science"—at the Bannon Institute of Martial Arts and Executive Security International in Colorado. And as brawny as that may sound, when he talks about protective services, Bannon blends religious convictions and psychological maxims. "I understand the terrorist mindset [of] willing to lay down their life for what they believe in," Bannon told me. "Not that I agree with any attack on the United States or the White House, but I have to respect that value."
In his long career as a special agent assisting the Secret Service, Bannon served on protection details for George W. Bush, the Clintons, the Gores, Ted Kennedy, Dianne Feinstein, the Saudi royal family, the first family of Kurdistan, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Pope John Paul II. "I provided close-quarter protection for the Popemobile when he gave a service at Mission Dolores in San Francisco in 1987," Bannon said. "I helped him down the stairs of the Popemobile and he smiled at me and touched me on the shoulder. Everyone wanted to rub my shoulder after that to get, like, a blessing out of me."
In his decades-long career in law enforcement and dignitary protection, he racked up a nice roster of honors and medals; on November 14, 2006, the mayor of San Francisco officially declared it "Joe Bannon Day."
Regret was the running theme when Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) talked about Iraq at an event Tuesday hosted by the American Enterprise Institute. The panel discussion, held on the tenth anniversary of the start of the Iraq War, also included Gen. Jack Keane (ret.), who McCain praised as a prime intellectual "architect of the surge" in Iraq in 2007. The two featured speakers bounced back and forth between a range of topics, including the slaughter in Syria and the "spinning centrifuges in Tehran." McCain gave his backhanded approval to the Obama administration for "finally" committing a billion dollars to the expansion of America's national missile defense systems—a move by the Pentagon last week meant to counter a (nonexistent) threat from North Korea.
The focus of the event was, of course, the lessons learned in the ten years since the war in Iraq kicked off; it has been over a year since the official end of US involvement in combat operations.
Since the troop surge began in January 2007, McCain has trumpeted his support for the 20,000-strong surge—and its perceivedsuccess in stabilizing the country—as a point of political honor. And his message during this ten-year anniversary event was no different: "If I have a scathing critique of the Bush administration, it is this: It took them three years to figure this out," McCain said, regarding the administration's delay in boosting the number of American troops in Iraq. (During defense secretary Chuck Hagel's confirmation hearings, McCain grilled him for his staunch opposition to the deployment of those additional troops.)
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