Brent Colton is a retired CIA operations officer now in the employ of the Creighton Corporation, a privately owned think tank that advocates various opinions on world issues, but it’s his clandestine job to solve the dirty problems for their private clients for a million dollar fee with no questions asked. When recovering stolen technology from a Vietnamese industrialist, Colton obtains evidence that he secretly partnered with a U.S. Senatorto rig the recent presidential election and elect him to the nation’s highest office.

IKE’S FAREWELL WARNING RE-EMERGES IN NEW FILM AS TIMELY PROPHECY
by Terry Heath, 2006

A new documentary film that won the 2005 Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival now in nationwide release features a warning from this nation’s 34th president about the unwarranted influence on U.S. foreign policy from the nation’s numerous military contractors and is gaining praise from civil libertarians across the nation as that influence on world affairs is still obvious to all of us in today’s times.

The film is called ‘Why We Fight,’ a title the documentary filmmaker took from a series of World War 2 propaganda films made by Frank Capra. It opens with the January 17, 1961 farewell address to the country by President Dwight Eisenhower who was about to turn over the keys to the White House to a young newcomer named John Kennedy.

The remarks made by the outgoing chief executive from the Oval Office was the last talk to the nation by the one time five-star Army general before returning to private life. What’s interesting in the speech is the candor he exhibited about what he believed to be the growing cozy relationship between military suppliers and those politicians in Congress who liked to keep the constituents in their districts happy with large contracts for the making of weapons and supplies. That, in turn, would keep those contractors and the leaders in the military pleased because they would keep getting improved weapons to counter the growing Cold War threat they believed they faced from the Soviet Union.

The phrase Ike used, ‘the military-industrial complex,’ has since become synonymous with the growing influence by military weapon suppliers on eager politicians wanting campaign donations for their coffers and jobs for their districts and the eagerness of those politicians to keep purchasing more and more weapons from these same suppliers.

It’s obvious the World War 2 hero who commanded the Allied military invasion of Europe that defeated Nazism knew what he was talking about when he warned his fellow citizens that ‘we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex.’

Unfortunately, for us citizens who believe a rising police state has developed in the four decades since.

Eisenhower is considered by many of today’s historians as an amiable military dunce who only knew how to operate in an Army setting so let the political experts in his administration make the decisions to run this country in his eight years in office in a similar fashion to that of a highly successful corporate CEO letting his underlings run the show while he spends most of his time visiting stockholders in cheerleading sessions to keep their stock value high. But it’s now apparent that he was much shrewder than originally believed in his dealings with Congress and the military bureaucracy he found in Washington during his tenure and what he felt was a growing threat against the unique political power of the president in setting American foreign policy and what the military need for defense.

The ninety-eight minute film then uses interviews with contemporary figures as diverse as Gore Vidal, John McCain, Richard Perle and William Kristol to showcase the filmmakers opinion that we still have too many Americans believing that the concept of never-ending war is good for the American economy and our nation’s foreign policy goals that is transposed with historic footage and material regarding why we are currently in the conflict in faraway Iraq.

Dwight Eisenhower recognized the horrors of war and his farewell warning to the American people and his successors not to be taken in by those who promote the perpetual re-armament of our military so we can always be stronger than our perceived enemies still resonates with great force today. It’s a sad commentary that in the forty-five years since he left office with that dire prediction that so few of our politicians chose to listen.

Terry Heath California E-Mail readermail@terryheathbooks.com