Hollywood whitewashes history and covert ops into “Action Adventure”

The latest Tom Cruise movie, American Made, manages the incredible — to sympathize with an amoral drug smuggler and government informer whose lies sparked a deadly, early example of fake news. The target of the disinformation was Nicaragua, the authors were the President and his men, and the Big Lie was that Sandinista leaders had struck a deal with the Medellin cartel to smuggle drugs into America.

While director Doug Limon‘s thrill ride version of Barry Seal‘s story does acknowledge his questionable role in the Contra war, the film is really about an exuberant flyboy — Maverick is back as an anti-hero — who stumbles into high adventures and government conspiracies. The twist (spoiler) is that this time Cruise dies.

Think Air America meets Mission Impossible and The Parallax View. We’ve seen this movie before, only this time it’s a whitewash of some relevant history.

Let’s begin with a televised speech by President Ronald Reagan on March 16, 1986. During this appearance Reagan displayed a photograph taken in Nicaragua, reportedly proving that top Nicaraguan officials were involved in cocaine trafficking. As it turned out, this was a lie. There was no real evidence, and the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) was later forced to issue a low-key “clarification.”  Full story...

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