Tom Dispatch: How Zero Dark Thirty Brought Back the Bush Administration!

We got Osama bin Laden, and now, for millions of Americans, we'll get him again on screen as Zero Dark Thirty hits your neighborhood multiplex. Lauded and criticized, the film's the talk of the town, but it's hardly the only real life CIA film that needed to be made. Here, for the record, are five prospective films, all potentially suspenseful, all involving CIA daring do, and all with plenty of opportunities for blood and torture, that are unlikely to make it into those same multiplexes in your lifetime. Let's start with the CIA's 1953 coup against Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, whose democratically elected government had nationalized the country's oil industry. What a story! It couldn't be oilier, involving BP in an earlier incarnation, the CIA, British intelligence, bribery, secretly funded street demonstrations, and lest you think there would be no torture in the film, the installation of an autocratic regime, that would create a fearsome secret police, and torture opponents for decades to come. All of this was done in the name of what used to be called "the Free World." That "successful" coup was the point of origin for just about every disaster and bit of "blowback", a term first used in the CIA's secret history of the coup, in US Iranian relations to this day. Many of the documents have been released, and what a story it turned out to be! Hollywood, where are you? Or here is another superb candidate: the CIA's Phoenix Program in Vietnam. Boy, if you want a little torture porn, try that baby. Meant to wipe out the Vietcong's political infrastructure, it managed to knock off an estimated 20,000 Vietnamese, remarkably few of whom were classified as "senior NLF cadres." Reportedly, the program was regularly used by locals to settle grudges. It was knee, maybe waist deep in blood, torture, assassination, and death. It's the Agency we have come to know and love. But hold your breath waiting for Good Evening, Vietnam. For a change of pace, how about a CIA inspired comedy? We are talking about the rollicking secret kidnapping of a radical Muslim cleric off the streets of Milan in early 2003, his transport via US airbases in Italy and Germany to Egypt, and there, evidently with the CIA station chief for Italy riding shotgun, directly into the hands of Egyptian torturers. What makes this an enticing barrel of laughs, was the way the CIA types involved in the covert operation rang up almost $150,000 in five star hotel bills as they gallivanted around Italy, ate at five star restaurants, vacationed in Venice after the kidnapping, ran up impressive tabs on forged credit cards for their fake identities, and were such bunglers that they were identified and charged for the abduction in "absentia" by the Italian government.