ICT, Loockhed Martin, Future Combat Systems, Full Spectrum Warrior, Kuma War. A devastating wave of terrorist attacks spreads across America, Europe and Southeast Asia, targeting specifically U.S. and U.K. interests, including embassies, regional corporate headquarters, and even western retail and restaurant chains. After months of intense hunting, U.S. intelligence tracks the source of the attacks to the tiny eastern nation of Zekistan. Zekistan was born seemingly overnight with the fall of the Soviet Union, resulting in a struggling third-world nation, torn by ethnic and sectarian strife, armed with a large surplus of Soviet-era military hardware and a critically weak government. Barely a year after its independence, the nation fell into brutal civil war between ethnic Zekis and settlers from surrounding nations. The Zekis were defeated by fundamentalist dictator Mohammad Jabbour Al Afad, who wasted no time in ordering the ethnic cleansing of the native Zekis. After the U.S-led operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, thousands of ex-Taliban and Iraqi loyalists crossed the borders of Zekistan seeking asylum by invitation of the nation’s dictator, Al Afad. It wasn’t long before the same terrorist training facilities and death-camps that the U.S. fought to remove in Afghanistan were operating again under full sponsorship by Al Afad’s government. After repeated warnings and failed diplomatic resolutions in the UN, NATO votes to invade Zekistan to depose Al Afad, eliminate the terrorist element, and stop the ethnic cleansing of the Zeki people. Pakistan grants the U.S. fly-through access to their airspace, and the operation begins. For several consecutive nights, carrier groups USS Carl Vinson and USS Ronald Reagan in the Arabian Sea launch thousands of sorties to take out air defense, armor, and enemy bases. With the dust barely settled, Infantry and Armor from seven NATO nations begin to land at captured air bases in southern Zekistan. The land invasion is underway… ...a media archaeology project by OVNI ARCHIVES: reading agents abu-ali & retroyou. 1999-2004.

Civilian casualties continue to mount long after wars “officially” end. I shot these video images of preserved fetuses and living children in a Vietnamese hospital in 1991. Medical professionals believe that the continuing high percentage of birth defects in Vietnam is a direct consequence of the US use of Agent Orange from 1961 to 1971. Depleted uranium weapons used in Iraq in 1991 are now linked to similar birth defects, both in Iraqi children as well as in babies born to soldiers serving in the Gulf War.

At the dawn of the Algerian independence struggle, René Vautier produced a film about the French conquest of Algeria in 1830. It was severely criticized by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which regarded this prediction of an Algerian rebellion against the foreign oppressor as a danger to national security. In reaction to this accusation, in 1957 René Vautier went over to the "other side" and shot, camera in hand, a film about and with the Algerian resistance movement. René Vautier wanted to show what he saw and counter the French colonial propaganda version. Naturally, the French side sought him out for what they considered to be treason. Nevertheless, 800 copies of the film were printed from East Germany, in 17 languages, and distributed worldwide (except in France, where it had to wait for a screening at the occupied Sorbonne in May 68). But not all Algerian independence fighters agreed that their revolution should be filmed by a Frenchman, especially as René Vautier's contact had been liquidated. Caught up in the meanders of revolutionary power struggles, and without being told why, the filmmaker is detained in a prison by decision of the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic (GPRA) along with other Algerians, while the film is broadcast by the FLN... Twenty-five months in a prison in Denden, west of Tunis. After the declaration of independence, René Vautier founded the first Algerian Audiovisual Center and directed the first film in independent Algeria: Le peuple en marche. During this shoot, René Vautier was wounded three times. He came under direct fire from the French army, deliberately aimed at his camera. A piece of shrapnel lodged in the Breton filmmaker's (hard) head. He would carry this memory with him all his life, making him probably the only filmmaker with a piece of camera in his head.