Happy belated new year! We are dangerously close to the Jan. 18 release of Gangsters of Capitalism, my book about Smedley Butler and the making and breaking of America’s empire. (Thanks to everyone who has pre-ordered so far—if you haven’t, here’s a link.)

Since I’m doing a bunch of interviews around the debut, I wanted to do something a little different with the book here. Gangsters of Capitalism is to a large extent about historical memory—about how the first great wave of U.S. overseas imperialism has (and hasn’t) been passed down through the generations, including through movies. So, we thought, why not watch some movies about the themes and places in the book? And invite interesting people to talk about them?

We are calling it “Gangsters Movie Nights.” And we are starting with a banger. Spencer Ackerman, author of Reign of Terror, writer of Forever Wars, and Pulitzer Prize winner for his work on the Snowden files, joins me to talk about the place where Smedley Butler’s career and America’s overseas empire both began: Guantánamo Bay.

As I note in the episode, there aren’t many movies that deal with Gitmo. There’s A Few Good Men, but it’s set in the days before the prison camp. There’s a recent Jodie Foster film that didn’t make a huge splash. Then Spencer came up with the answer: 2008’s Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay.

What does a gross-out/buddy/stoner comedy have to say about American empire? How long can two investigative journalists talk about what was originally slated to be a direct-to-DVD sequel to a movie about a trip to White Castle? To find out, hit play above or download this episode wherever you get your podcasts—Spotify, iTunes, etc. If you’re more of a reader, a transcript is below.

Thanks for listening and spreading the word. Please subscribe below to make sure you don’t miss an episode.

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Also a reminder that the online launch event for Gangsters will be next Tuesday, January 18, at 6 p.m. ET, featuring me in conversation with Mike Duncan of the Revolutions and History of Rome podcasts. It will be hosted online by D.C.’s Politics & Prose bookstore. You can RSVP to virtually “attend” here.

Transcript (may contain errors)

Harold Lee (John Cho): Do we have the right to make a phone call?

Ron Fox (Rob Corddry): Oh, oh yeah. Oh yeah. I'm sorry. You want rights now? You want freedoms right now? Is it time ... is it freedom o'clock?

Guess what? Where you guys are going, they have never even heard of rights.

Harold: Well, where are we going?

Jonathan M. Katz: Hello, you are listening to The Racket, a newsletter and podcast, which you can also find online at theracket.news, that's dot N-E-W-S. I am Jonathan M. Katz and I've got a really cool episode of the podcast newsletter for you here today.

So this is part of the run up to the release of Gangsters of Capitalism, my book, which comes out on January 18th. Go pre-order it if you have not pre-ordered it yet. There's a lot going on as we move into pub date. The first excerpt is up at Rolling Stone. You can go read it right now at rollingstone.com. It is about the main figure in my book, the Marine Smedley Butler and his foiling of an alleged 1934 fascist coup to overthrow Franklin Roosevelt, which has a lot of very clear tie-ins to the crises of democracy that are happening today and January 6th, and all those things.

For those of you who are not familiar, Smedley Butler was a Marine who fought in basically every overseas war, invasion, occupation of the early 20th century. And the book looks at Butler's life to understand American empire, both from our perspective and the perspective of the people whose countries we've invaded. It's, I think, a fascinating book. I think you're really going to enjoy it.

We here at The Racket thought we would do something a little different in the run up to the book's release as a way of exploring the many places and themes discussed in Gangsters of Capitalism through the medium of film. We're calling it Gangsters Movie Nights. So each week we are going to be talking about a film set in one of the places that I talk about in Gangsters of Capitalism. One of the places that the United States and Smedley Butler invaded, occupied in the early 20th century. So, China, Haiti, the Philippines, it goes on from there, and we have a really exciting roster of guests who are experts in the regions, the histories of the places that I wrote about who I have constricted to watching these films with me. Some of them are movies that I talk about in the book. Some of them are movies that you have possibly heard of. Some of them are extremely obscure and some of them are absolutely horrible.

So we are starting off in the place where America's overseas empire and Smedley Butler's career began. A place in Cuba called Guantanamo Bay. So I visited there in 2017, which is a trip you can read about in Gangsters and to talk about Guantanamo, I have the best person I can think of to talk about Guantanamo Bay, Spencer Ackerman.

Spencer spent 20 years covering the war on terror from Guantanamo, as well as Iraq, Afghanistan, Washington, all over the place. In 2014, he shared the Pulitzer Prize for his work on the revelations about the national security agency that came courtesy of Edward Snowden. Spencer also wrote an incredible book, which you should go read right now, it's called Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump. Spencer also writes the Forever Wars newsletter at substack.com, which I should note is edited by the editor of The Racket, Sam Thielman.

So I've wanted to put Gangsters of Capitalism in conversation with Reign of Terror from the moment I read Spencer's book and our shared coverage of Guantanamo seemed like the ideal place to do it. The problem was that there aren't actually very many movies that talk about Guantanamo, at least those that have come out since the prison camp opened. There was one film, however, and I'm going to blame Spencer for suggesting it. And that is 2008's Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay written and directed by Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg.

So before we get into it, I have a couple of content warnings. First of all, this film contains racist stereotypes, mostly but not, I think honestly, solely for the purpose of mocking them, very graphic jokes about sexual assault, which we'll discuss. We're also going to proceed on the assumption that anyone who would care about spoilers saw this thing sometime over the last 14 or so years. Though, granted, the target audience for this movie may admittedly not remember what they saw when they did.

So I also want to note, it might sound like a weird choice to talk about American empire abuses and the war on terror through the lens of, let's just admit it here, it's a gross out stoner comedy. But I think that it actually is going to provide for a very productive conversation. Gangsters is all about exploring historical memory and there is no better way to do that than ... or there are fewer better ways to do that, I should say, than looking at the documents that a culture produces to delve into its own dreams and its own nightmares. So Spencer, let's get into it.

Spencer Ackerman: So I guess that's a disclaimer to listeners that conceptually, this episode may not work. We came up with the idea of doing Harold and Kumar, not just cause it's one of the only movies we could think of that really does apply here, but also the fact of a movie like that, playing this accidentally cultural outsized role when it comes to the existence of a forever prison is, itself worthy of discussing because when you realize that the Guantanamo post 9/11 cannon prominently features Harold and Kumar escape from Guantanamo Bay, that's a lesson in how normalization proceeds.

Jonathan: Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle came out in 2004 and it is an unapologetic stoner film, as is this one. It's essentially a movie about two college friends who get stoned and try to go to White Castle, and it takes them on basically a picturesque adventure in which they get into all kinds of trouble. Insofar as Harold and Kumar occupied a larger place in the culture than its role in stoner culture. It was one of the first movies to feature two Asian actors, a John Cho, who's of Korean descent and Cal Penn, who's Indian American. So it got some plaudits ... it inspired some people. I think some of my Indian and east Asian American stoner friends saw themselves in that movie. But beyond that, it's a stoner movie. It's just the dumb misogynist kind of stoner movie.

Spencer: Again, this is a pretty bad movie. It's not so bad that respect must be paid, except in some places. This isn’t an irredeemable movie, but I got pretty high watching this and that didn't improve the experience. There's really sublime, stoner humor and then there's whatever Harold and Kumar is.

Harold is the friend with the stick up his ass and Kumar is the irresponsible one who keeps getting Harold into some zany capers.

There's a bit of a subplot that we should mention where Kumar's ex-girlfriend is marrying a Bush administration official. And you know, the guy before going to marry Kumar's ex says something on the order of, "If you ever find yourself in any jams, let me know and through my connections to the president, through my dad, we'll get you out of it."

So our boys get on the plane to Amsterdam and Kumar, wacky guy that he is, can't resist having built a smoke free bong. Basically he invents a vaporizer. And because Kumar is brown, once the device is revealed on the plane, it's suspected that they're terrorists.

Woman on plane: Terrorist!

Harold: Goldie? No, ma'am-

Woman on plane: What the f**k is that thing in his hand?

Harold: Not a terrorist. He's just an idiot.

Kumar Patel (Kal Penn): This is just a bong.

Man on plane: He said he got a bomb!

Spencer: So they end up in Guantanamo Bay. I think this movie was released in 2008. I got to say that I did see this movie in the theaters. So, this is a return trip to escape from Guantanamo Bay for me.

This is really the amazing thing about this movie. There's maybe five minutes of screen time where they're actually at Guantanamo Bay. This is more a movie about the country that creates a Guantanamo Bay than it is a movie about Guantanamo Bay. But among the remarkable things that we see at Guantanamo is male sexual assault.

Unfortunately, because this movie is what it is, this is a very serious thing that gets played for laughs. People in U.S. custody, whether it's at Guantanamo or whether it's at the CIA black sites, were sexually tortured. This was not a torture program that somehow found itself able to avoid the pitfalls, shall we say, of the temptation to harm people sexually when you have impunity over them.

Harold and Kumar, again, badly, offensively to play this for laughs, nevertheless, show the reality that among the things that happen at Guantanamo Bay is sexual assault. I'm unfortunately forgetting the detainee's names, but one of the detainees who went on a hunger strike in 2013, a pivotal moment in the Guantanamo Bay detention facility's history wrote an op-ed that ended up getting published in the New York Times, talking about how among the places that U.S. Guards and medical personnel inserted tubes in order, ostensibly, to forcibly hydrate and feed him, was his penis. Again, very, very rarely have we come to terms with that, or even have it as acceptable framing for what goes on there.

Jonathan: The joke here is that the detainees are forced to eat what the guards charmingly call a cock meat sandwich. Harold and Kumar are about to perform the act when two middle Eastern guys in the cell next to them bite off the guard's penis. But that isn't the only form of prisoner abuse that the film lampoons.

They're thrown into the cell. They have a goat shitting on their bed? But that's touching on a real thing, right? The detainees, for years, have talked about animal infestations, the infamous banana rats, that s**t in their cells.

Spencer: So a banana rat is an abnormal, even for New York City, large rodent. It's not feral like a rat is, but it's so named because its feces remind us somewhat of bananas. So it's called the banana rat.

Jonathan: So I went in 2017 to do the historical research and also to talk about Guantanamo now. So in this movie, unsanitary conditions and animal infestation is played for a joke at Guantanamo. You probably remember, I'm sure you remember, Spencer, the gift shops at Guantanamo.

Spencer: Yeah.

Jonathan: There were gift shops everywhere. It was just like American capitalism taken to its reductio ad absurdum.

So Guantanamo is ... it's a Naval station. There's a base town. There is the JTF, the Joint Task Force section, which is the prison. In the main gift shop in the base town, they sell plush toys and one of the plush toys that you can buy for your kid is a banana rat. Those weren't the only bad jokes that were being made in that gift shop.

Spencer: No. Nowhere near.

Jonathan: Yeah. There were t-shirts with iguana in front of barbed wire and it was like "fun in the sun."

Spencer: Yeah. So the first time I went to Guantanamo bay w