The Equalizer 2 [2018)

If Q was real, the operation probably emanated from the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Year one of Trump’s Presidency.

Year two.

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Susan’s address book.

Proof that McCall was DIA Defense Clandestine Service?

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It definitely says “Defense Intelligence Agency” (although the logo is not quite right).

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Here’s the real one.

No extraneous fighter jet (different from previous).

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Dave at the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Proof that McCall was military intelligence?

Establishing that he was USMC is much easier and obvious.

But something seems to have happened with this movie.

And Robert (Roberto?) McCall is suddenly DCS.

Suddenly a MILITARY covert operative.

HUMINT.

But mainly a hitman.

If Q was real, the operation probably emanated from within the Defense Intelligence Agency.

And it was possibly based in Brussels, Belgium.

Which would seem to suggest a NATO connection.

But not necessarily.

Perhaps NATO was a cover.

The Q posts started in Oct. of 2017.

The Equalizer 2 (in which the protagonist is suddenly not just a government hitman, but specifically a MILITARY “high-level paid government assassin” [outtake]) dropped less than a year later.

July of 2018.

I can think of only one well-known movie in which the hero or heroes are with the DIA.

And it’s a comedy (Spies Like Us).

EVERY movie is about the CIA.

Every spy movie.

The most obvious provenance of a “government hitman” would be the CIA.

CIA plots to assassinate world leaders have leaked over the years.

We know that the CIA has assassinated “unfortunates” (or sought to assassinate them) around the world.

We know this through declassified documents.

But very, very little is known about the DIA.

There are endless stacks of books on the CIA.

And several on the NSA.

But, as far as I know, NOT A SINGLE BOOK on the DIA.

That is remarkable.

It bears mentioning that a TS/SCI clearance at DIA is only good for DIA intelligence products.

Same for a TS/SCI clearance at the CIA (only clears a person to see CIA intelligence products of such a level).

And the same applies to a TS/SCI clearance at NSA (it is only good for accessing top secret/sensitive compartmented information intelligence products which emerge from the NSA itself).

These three agencies (DIA, CIA, and NSA) are seemingly compartmented from one another at least so far as civilian security clearances go.

Which means the CIA could be cooking up anything…and the DIA and NSA might not necessarily know about it.

It means that there is much about the NSA about which the CIA and DIA are ignorant.

And it means that an operation like Q might have been possible…and might have emanated from within the DIA.

[N.B.  military top-secret level is known as TS/SAP:  are DIA and NSA employees (both military) potentially holding civilian and military security clearances?]

The timing is interesting.

Q’s first post was Oct. 28, 2017.

The Equalizer suddenly became military intelligence on July 20, 2018.

He could have as easily been CIA.

It would have been the norm in Hollywood to make him CIA.

So how on earth did he become DIA?!?

If my research is correct, the CIA plays a much bigger role in Hollywood than does the Department of Defense.

And of all Defense Department entities to highlight in a film, DIA (Defense Clandestine Service) is a notably-odd choice.

Perhaps it was the zeitgeist.

Perhaps Q had soured the American public (and much of the world) to the idea of CIA.

So Antoine Fuqua and company decided to distance themselves from The Company and make the agency in question the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Perhaps.

No coincidences, right?

Which brings us to the DIA.

An agency started by JFK.

Go back and read the Q posts.

There are a few where the authors seem to be writing glowingly about JFK.

Make sense if their agency was formed by him (1961)?

We always figured INSCOM.  NSA.

But no one ever focused on DIA.

And they are the only military entity with covert operatives (as far as we know).

As for declassified records, we have no indication that the DIA has ever assassinated (or even sought to assassinate) anyone.

The same cannot be said for the CIA.

They sought to assassinate Castro (for starters).

We have declassified documents about poisoned scuba suits and exploding cigars.

Documents about the CIA recruiting mafia hitmen to whack Castro.

It’s pretty safe to say the CIA has assassinated quite a few people worldwide (including some world leaders).

But what about the DIA?

We don’t have the evidence to assume the same.

Operation Northwoods is very damning.

It indicts the Joint Chiefs of Staff for planning terror attacks (real or simulated) on Americans as a casus belli to invade Cuba.

False-flags.

JFK rejected these options which CJCS Lemnitzer (Lyman L. Lemnitzer) presented to him.

So we can say that the Joint Chiefs of Staff of Kennedy’s era had few qualms about conducting REAL terror attacks (such as mass shootings) on the American mainland (in places such as Florida…blaming “Cubans”…and thus giving the USA a green light to take out Cuban missile sites, etc.).

Very, very little is known about the DIA.

Sure, they have a Twitter account (last time I checked), but nothing they post is substantive.

Well, then:  what DO we know about the Defense Intelligence Agency?

What little we know might be gleaned mainly from the biographies of current and former DIA Directors.

Beyond that, there isn’t much.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Director_of_the_Defense_Intelligence_Agency

Practice your analysis skills.

Find a way.

Break a code.

Know the most commonly-used English letters.

And the % of time they occur.

Same for every other language on earth.

It was an Arab who realized this.

1000 years ago?

U.S. Army X I 11

USAF V I 6

U.S. Navy I I I 3

USMC I 1

CIA I 1

The Defense Intelligence Agency is primarily a U.S. Army institution (judging by the preponderance of leaders from that service branch).

With quite a bit of Air Force influence (at times).

Occasional Navy leadership.

And extremely rare Marine leadership.

The DIA also briefly had a former CIA operative for a Director.

[we are not going to get out of this morass until everyone reads The Secret Team by L. Fletcher Prouty]

From Prouty, we know that even the CJCS can be a CIA operative (as in Maxwell Taylor).

Who else has recently acted more like woke CIA operatives than patriotic military men?

Mark Milley?

Lloyd Austin?

Michael Gilday?

Next we want to find nodes.

Nexuses.

Choke points.

If we want to understand.

My gut tells me QAnon is bullshit cooked up by Russian intelligence or (more likely) the FBI.

But it could just as well have been a CIA operation.

Indeed, that is what the most famous DIA Director (Michael Flynn) intimated in this article:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10252807/Lin-Wood-Releases-Michael-Flynn-audio-calling-QAnon-CIA-disinformation-plot-total-nonsense.html

The problem with intelligence work is that you would say the same thing (for different reasons) whether you were lying, or telling the truth.

Flynn:  “I think it’s a disinformation campaign. I think it’s a disinformation campaign that the CIA created. That’s what I believe. Now, I don’t know that for a fact, but that’s what I think it is.”

Is that the truth?  Or does he know that Lin Wood is recording him?

I think it’s the truth (i.e. Q is bullshit).

But it would make a nice cover.

What connects the current and former Directors of the DIA?

Two institutions:  the Command and General Staff College in Kansas.

And the National War College at Fort McNair in D.C.

And who taught at those two institutions?

When did they teach there?

Maybe it’s just a coincidence.

Hijack the hijackers.

What else connects the Directors of the DIA?

Army G-2.

What aforementioned erstwhile teacher connects to that entity?

Probably just a coincidence, right?

Of the 20 historical Directors of the DIA, only one was black:  Vincent R. Stewart.

He also happened to be a U.S. Marine (like Robert McCall).

He’s also dead.

Or is he?

He was appointed by the only black President in U.S. history.

Why is it significant that he is dead?

Because he was only 64 when he died.

How did he die?

I don’t know.

When did he die?

A few months ago.

April 28, 2023.

The Equalizer 3 came out on September 1, 2023.

Did General Stewart die suddenly because he had taken one of the three COVID vaccines which were rushed through testing and given Emergency Use Authorization by the FDA?

Why did the Commandant of the USMC (Eric Smith) have a heart attack and go into cardiac arrest on October 29, 2023 at the age of 58 or 59?

Was he too vaccinated with one of the Operation Warp Speed vaccines??

Eric Smith is still alive.

General Stewart is dead.

Why is it notable that he is dead?

When was the last time a Director of the DIA died (prior to Stewart)?

Funny you should ask.

Stewart was the first Director of the DIA to die so far THIS YEAR.

The second was Dennis M. Nagy (who was briefly with the Air Force before a long career with DIA).

Nagy died on August 5, 2023.

He was 80.

Here’s the problem.

Half of the Directors of the DIA are still alive.

Each and every one that surrounds General Stewart.

Of the 10 most-recent Directors of the Defense Intelligence Agency, only General Stewart is deceased.

Most DIA Directors die in their 80s.

Some die in their 90s.

A couple died in their 70s.

General Stewart was the youngest Director of the DIA to ever die.

The current DIA Director and his predecessor are both from Army G-2 (Army intelligence).

The most recent DIA Director to be educated at the CGSC (Fort Leavenworth) is General Flynn.

His predecessor was also educated there.

The DIA also has quite a connection to Texas.

General Maples was from Texas.

Back to the CGSC, General Hughes was an alumnus (that’s 3).

Hughes also connects to NGA and NRO.

General Minihan is from Pampa, Texas (that’s 2).

[Clapper]

General Soyster is an alumnus of both CGSC (4) and the National War College.

It should be noted that multiple DIA Directors went to work for L-3 Communications after retiring.

Soyster’s predecessor’s predecessor (General Williams) was also an alumnus of CGSC (5) and the National War College (2).

Not long before, General Wilson had headed the DIA.

He too was an alumnus of CGSC (6) and the National War College (3).

His predecessor was an alumnus of CGSC (7).

Admiral de Poix (who is a bit further back on the roll of former Directors) was a National War College alumnus (4).

General Bennett, the 2nd Director of DIA, was an alumnus of CGSC (8).

Bias check:  Texas does not play that big of a role in the DIA.

Confirmed:  almost half of the DIA Directors graduated from the CGSC.

In recent times, there appears to be a shift towards the USAWC in Carlisle Barracks, PA being the premier educational institution for DIA Directors.

So The Equalizer series can be seen as a gigantic recruitment commercial for the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Or as an adjunct to Q.

Q hasn’t posted in 11 months.

McCall posted 2 months ago.

Interesting.

Maybe we are “literally” watching a movie?

The Equalizer series can also be seen as a gigantic Suunto watch commercial.

Which could be Finnish propaganda.

If that Finnish company weren’t owned by a Chinese company (it is).

Which brings us back to NATO.

Did Sam Rubinstein teach at the CGSC?

Good military vs. evil military.

Good guys (like L. Fletcher Prouty [Colonel X]) vs. private contractors within government.

The “private contractors” trope can also be read as CIA infiltration of the Pentagon.

This is PRECISELY what Prouty was writing about in 1973.

And perhaps the mechanism by which the CIA used DoD materiel to stage the 9/11 false-flag.

And then there is the overarching theme.

The storm.

Antoine Fuqua lets it bubble and simmer like a cauldron for much of this film.

Building background tension.

America needs hope.

America needs to reexamine itself.

Nothing shameful about that.

I find myself relating to thinkers I previously found revolting.

We get caught up in things.

PSYOPs.

But America is special.

It is worth saving.

But its survival is not guaranteed.

Rethink your assumptions.

About everything.

Body, mind, spirit.

The storm is here.

–PD

Ucho [1970)

A banned film.

From communist Czechoslovakia.

Party as nightmare (like O slavnosti a hostech).

But different.

Walls on all sides.

Claustrophobic.

As if Jeremy Bentham was tomorrow appointed head of the NSA.

From the single, centralized watchtower.

Stares out the embalmed ego of Bentham.

Auto-icon.

It’s just a skeleton stuffed with hay.  Dressed in Bentham’s clothes.

Like the panopticon.

A straw man prison.

Dear friends, I know of no film which conveys the horror of the 21st century.

Quite like this gem of resistance against totalitarianism.

This was the underbelly of communism.

The “evil empire” of which Reagan spoke.

His words seem funny today.  His unscientific, hypocritical words.

Because the Red Scare in the United States was typified by the same methods on display.

Here.

Surveillance.

Which I fear will not subside anytime soon.

Nor has this wave even crested.

“Mass surveillance doesn’t work,” Mr. Snowden wrote. “This bill will take money and liberty without improving safety.”

Finally The New York Times prints something worthwhile.

And even Hillary Clinton’s “History made.” ad can’t deflate the importance of Snowden’s words.

And so if you want to see the 12-tone paranoia of the communist “big brother” state (now that we are living in a “capitalist” big brother state), I would heartily recommend The Ear by director Karel Kachyňa.

It was banned for 19 years in Czechoslovakia.

Because it got real close to the truth.

It painted the communist party leaders as a bunch of jerks.

It portrayed the constant suspicion upon bureaucrats as a living nightmare.

The Ear.  Maybe some HUMINT at the party.

But largely this film deals with SIGINT (if author Jeffrey T. Richelson can be trusted).

The Ear deals primarily with what Richelson calls “clandestine SIGINT” in his book The U.S. Intelligence Community.

What we encounter in Ucho are “the oldest of these devices” (viz. “traditional audio surveillance devices”).

Wikipedia does a passable job outlining this area of inquiry in the article “Covert listening device”.

But dear friends…describing it so matter-of-factly does no justice to the strain which omnipresent surveillance puts on largely innocent people.

And therefore The Ear is a film which shows the psychological toll that governments exact when they make ethics secondary.

What we get from director Karel Kachyňa is the portrait of a society (his society) which assumes all citizens to be guilty until proven innocent.

This is ostensibly the opposite of the American system, but today’s Amerika is merely the other side of the coin:  same pervasion of surveillance (even if it is “capitalist”).

My hypothesis is that “free market” America has come to all-to-closely resemble the regimes it fought to defeat.  Those “victories”, then, were hollow.  We have appropriated the worst, most tortuous means of our past enemies.

But Kachyňa has another message for us in this masterpiece.

In such upside-down societies, promotion might be the worst form of punishment.

Beware, my coopted friends.

 

-PD

 

Skyfall [2012)

If you wait too long, you lose the impression.

I was way behind on trying to support my compatriots.  It is not necessary to agree.  What I champion is freedom of expression.

And so we try to remember the mood…the efficacy of cinema in the hands of Sam Mendes.

Perhaps the first “real” director to approach the Bond franchise after having had success beforehand.

Mendes will always have a place in my heart for his deft touch directing Thora Birch in American Beauty.

Fortunately we can look forward to a second contribution in the forthcoming Bond film Spectre.

But for now we have this.

What of it?

I should dispense with self-congratulatory pomp at this time rather than let it distract me.

Yes, I have now seen all of the Bond films from Eon Productions.  You can access the reviews of all 23 pictures here on my site by clicking the Bond tab.

Now that we have that out of the way…

The first glaring bit of strategic signaling occurs when we learn that our MacGuffin is a hard drive.

Of course, it’s what’s on the hard drive which makes this worth mentioning.

NATO agents embedded in terrorist groups.

For anyone with a knowledge of Operation Gladio this brings up a troubling association.

To wit:  the possibility that the organizations are controlled by NATO for cynical purposes.

This was, and continues to be, a fundamental aspect of geopolitics.  False-flag terror.

Perhaps Mendes (or the writers of the film) knowingly left this bread crumb to add a quasi-credibility to what has often become a propagandistic series for the power elite.

Whatever the case may be, the opening sequence is generally good.

Let’s face it:  it’s getting harder and harder after 23 films to have James Bond do something novel.

His seeming demise before the credits roll make us think of that horribly daft episode from the Connery days:

You Only Live Twice.

Ralph Fiennes is unlikable from the start, but we learn why as the film progresses.

Mendes does a nice job of faking us out on several occasions.  We even suspect Bond as a terrorist briefly.

Another breadcrumb:  the depleted uranium bullet fragments from Bond’s shoulder.

With this we are brought back to that stain upon U.S. military operations over the past 15 years.

Keeping in mind the research of Doug Rokke, we might again be seeing an attempt by the Bond franchise to relate with an increasingly informed viewer base.

Think on your sins?

Well, all cinematic sins are forgiven once director Mendes has occasion to mold and shape the lights of high-rise Shanghai into a sci-fi backdrop for good old fashion ass kicking.

Modigliani.

We are meant to associate the extra-terrestrial eyes with Bérénice Marlohe.  Like the grey-eyed goddess Athena, we will later meet her in the shower (ohh-la-la!).

When all else fails in a film, have the location shift to Macau.

Indeed, the best dialogue comes between Daniel Craig and Mlle. Marlohe at the casino bar.  It reminds us of that fleeting bit of verbal mastery aboard the train in Casino Royale when Craig and Eva Green took turns sizing each other up.

Enter Javier Bardem.

Bardem is certainly among the most convincing villains in the entire Bond pantheon.  Something about that bleached-blond hair gives us a creepy feeling every time his character Raoul Silva is shown.

Bardem’s acting, particularly around the time of his character’s first appearance, is world-class.

Ben Whishaw does a fine job as the new Q (though we miss John Cleese and, of course, Desmond Llewelyn).

Credit Sam Mendes with a deft portrayal of the battle between old ways and new.

New is exemplified by the new Q:  cyber-reliance.

Old is exemplified by the crusty James Bond:  HUMINT.

This film almost telegraphs the Zeitgeist which would spawn Edward Snowden as global hero, but it casts such genius (>145 IQ) as the enemy in Bardem’s character.

[As a side note, I should like to add that Snowden’s story would have to be most ingenious cover ever if found to be inauthentic.  Such iron-clad credibility no doubt came at a steep price for the NSA (see PRISM).  Though farfetched, one never knows to what lengths the Western national security state will go next to try and salvage its tenuous hold on global hegemony.  All things considered, his defection to the public side (in the interest of the general public) seems to be authentic and highly admirable.]

Skyfall becomes less successful when Bardem has Hannibal Lecter lighting cast upon him during the glass-cage treatment later in this film.  This is an unimaginative bit of filmmaking beneath the level of director Mendes.

As trivial as it may seem, Mendes later redeems himself with a simple shot of approaching figures reflected in the chrome of a side-view mirror.   It doesn’t hurt that the mirror in question is attached to an Aston Martin DB5.

Overall, the successes of this film should rightly be attributed to Sam Mendes.  That said, this is not a masterpiece.  It is a very good, yet flawed, film.

Here’s hoping Mendes knocks it out of the park with Spectre.  Cheerio!

-PD