ACLU: What Captain America Has to Say About the NSA

[Electric Monk]

SPOILER WARNING: This post discusses major plot points of the new Captain America movie.

What is patriotism? Is it doing what the government says, or is it doing what you believe is true to the Constitution and American values? "Captain America: The Winter Soldier" – currently the No. 1 movie in the country – comes down on the latter side, wrapping its message in a red, white, and blue action-packed candy shell.

Unfrozen WWII super-soldier Steve Rogers – a.k.a. Captain America – works for SHIELD, which is basically the CIA plus Navy SEAL Team Six plus the NSA times a thousand. At first, the movie seems to be only a commentary on targeted killing. And it is that, featuring a set of enormous SHIELD military drones called "helicarriers," which prompt an exchange between Cap and SHIELD boss Nick Fury.

"We're gonna neutralize a lot of threats before they even happen."

"I thought the punishment usually came after the crime," Cap replies, recalling the Obama administration's elastic definition of the word "imminent" in its legal justification for putting people on the real-world kill list.

"SHIELD takes the world as it is, not as we'd like it to be," Fury says, echoing Dick Cheney's defense of over-the-line counterterrorism tactics.

"This isn't freedom – this is fear," Cap declares.

more
https://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security-technology-and-liberty/what-captain-america-has-say-about-nsa

and, related, from MotherJones

"Captain America: The Winter Soldier" Is About Obama's Terror-Suspect Kill List, Say the Film's Directors

There are currently no plans to screen Captain America: The Winter Soldier at the White House, as far as the film's directors have heard. But if it makes it to the White House family theater, President Obama would be watching one big-budget, action-packed, and Scarlett Johansson-starring critique of his controversial terror-suspect "kill list."

This isn't me reading things into a mainstream comic-book movie. It's what the directors themselves will tell you.

&quot Marvel) said they wanted to make a political thriller," Joe Russo, who directed the film with his brother Anthony, tells Mother Jones. "So we said if you want to make a political thriller, all the great political thrillers have very current issues in them that reflect the anxiety of the audience...That gives it an immediacy, it makes it relevant. So (Anthony) and I just looked at the issues that were causing anxiety for us, because we read a lot and are politically inclined. And a lot of that stuff had to do with civil liberties issues, drone strikes, the president's kill list, preemptive technology"—all themes they worked into the film, working closely with screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely.

more
http://www.motherjones.com/mixed-media/2014/04/captain-america-winter-soldier-obama-kill-list-politics-drones-nsa

[TlalocW]

1. Captain America is quite the liberal in certain ways

I used to be a big comic book reader in my teens and early 20s. I can remember storylines where Cap quit being Captain America because he didn't like what the government was doing. Spider-Man once jokingly asked him if his costume didn't violate the flag code, to which Cap delivered a speech that basically said flag burning didn't bother him. Once, he even let Bill Clinton try out holding his shield, which I know bothered the hell out of the what would eventually become freepers.

TlalocW