Given that in Australia Halliburton doesn't have the near-"household name" status it enjoys in the US, a good place to start this review would be to explain a couple of things. The name Hatherton, which appears a fair bit in this film, is undoubtedly intended to portray the US-based global corporation. Showing the company's CEO (on a website) bearing a remarkable facial similarity to former US Vice President Dick Cheney is no accident either. Cheney went from being a Defence Secretary implementing military privatisation to CEO of the company that received more than a fair share of the privatised defence work, and from there to being the proverbial "heartbeat away from being the US Commander-in-Chief". He also arranged for the Halliburton department that handled infrastructure projects worldwide to be set up in my home town of Adelaide, but that's another story. Then again, it isn't..

When local journalist Samela Harris read the blogs I was writing on Halliburton's presence here, she commented that the material might be the basis for a good "thriller." My stuff was basically an attempt to track a ripple of the international story that Ghost Writer conveys. Take the false names away and the film's surface-plot is of ex-UK PM Tony Blair being charged by the International War Tribunal for War Crimes because of his support for water torture and condoning the CIA's rendition of prisoners to and from secret "ghost camps". Meanwhile the body of the UK PM's autobiography ghost writer is washed up on a beach. If any reader of this missive hasn't worked out the movie's ending before the first half is over I'd be very surprised. Beneath the simple plot, (okay, for luck I'll avoid "spoilers") lies a background of Carlyle, Halliburton, the CIA and the Project for a New American Century (which first appeared before the English-speaking "world" on Webdiary) co-ordinating people in politics to achieve desired outcomes at a global level.

Sounds too far-fetched? Ok, let me rehash a couple of points that might reduce Ghost Writer's subtext to a local analogy. Australian Guantanamo inmate David Hicks, handed over to the US as a Taliban terrorist, came to Cuba after a rendition stopover in Egypt. A guilty plea meant that Hicks was never charged for the farcical evidence presented against him. When he was flown to Adelaide to serve the remainder of his term, jailed in a country under whose laws he'd committed no crime, he flew in what was reported to be one of the same planes that the CIA had been using to fly suspects to their hidden interrogation centres. US lawyers believe that Hicks might soon be able to ask for a Presidential pardon.

It's somehow ironic that not that long before one of Cheney's enemies (as one of the original Guantanamo prisoners Hicks was one of Cheney’s "worst of the worst") was being flown into Australia, another unlikely to ever be Dick's Facebook Friend had been thrown out. US activist Scott Parkin had trained and co-ordinated anti-Halliburton protesters in the company's hometown of Houston. The activists' antics during the company's AGM had drawn a lot of unfavourable publicity. When Parkin turned up in Australia, presenting anti-Halliburton street theatre and reiterating that Halliburton was "the poster child of war profiteering" it wasn't long before he was surrounded in a cafe by Federal police and immigration officers, thrown into solitary confinement and subsequently deported. The grounds for deportation were an adverse Australian security assessment based on classified US-fed intelligence. The bulk of that intelligence (later discovered by US journal Newsweek) was that Parkin had protested against Halliburton. One "secret file" told of him handing out peanut butter sandwiches in front of one of the company's offices as a protest of their overcharging for food services in Iraq.

Far from their infamy in the US, Halliburton had been enjoying the anonymity of pretending to be an Australian company. A wholly US-owned subsidiary, it still is mentioned in Federal Parliament as an Aussie company involved in major projects. While its global naval headquarters was based in the UK, in the care of Tony Blair, Cheney had placed his global infrastructure headquarters in Hick's hometown and prison, and in the domain of prominent Coalition of the Willing supporter, Australian Prime Minister John Howard. After the Iraq war "ended" the Adelaide-based Global VP for Infrastructure would become the head of our new naval construction precinct, mooted to become a possible southern hemispheric centre from which the US Navy could refit and replenish if Chinese control of the Pacific rendered return to home ports impractical.

While Halliburton (name-morphing into subsidiary KBR) was co-ordinating worldwide infrastructure projects from Adelaide and assisting the Coalition of the Willing to invade Iraq, our State Government's leader Premier Mike Rann was taking advice from a prominent US Homeland Security Advisor named Scott Bates. Bates, a prominent architect in the implementation of democracy into post-war Kosovo, was rumoured to be Hillary Clinton's intended successor as US President. Having first come here in 2000, when the Liberal Party were in charge, Bates visited Adelaide repeatedly, once spending half his two-week annual leave here, and admitted on ABC radio that he'd been advising Premier Rann on election campaign strategies as well as consulting with the SA Homeland Security co-ordinator. Since the week he was photographed at the local races alongside our Federal Ministers for Foreign Affairs, Defence and Immigration (and subsequent radio interview) further visits by Bates haven't been reported.

So much for my first stab at film reviewing ... I'll give away stuff I shouldn't if I go much further. Suffice it to say that after following the local scenario above I've enjoyed seeing global-level shenanigans portrayed by a simple stage play, though the story probably needed the beautiful Massachusetts scenery and Roman Polanski's sumptuous directing to enhance enough for it to remain a memorable opus. I'm glad it's received such sympathetic production treatment, as the global miasma beneath the plot's surface deserves to be recorded in a way that could be viewed comfortably fifty years from now , a warning to the future of how corporation-controlled warfare has been inflicted on our world. Anything that helps prevent a repeat of the inhumane military stupidity we've been subjected to over the last decade is something I can only admire and respect.

Actually Samela might be right, and the local aspects of such tales might indeed make a fine thriller flick. In Ghost Writer 2: Southern Hemisphere , Cheney could be dictating the script?

That's the great thing about the film's name, by the way.. it can be interpreted on several levels. The simplistic assumption is that the central character is the only one to whom the title refers. Another is that it refers to someone very high up in the political food chain.

I hope you see it.