One classic Hollywood cliche is to invert the victim and aggressor whenever the aggressor happens to be us. After the Vietnam War for instance, there was a rash of films like The Deer Hunter (1978) and Rambo: II (1985) where the nefarious Vietnamese held secret gulags of American POWs.
In reality there were no POWs and the actual victims were the 2 million Vietnamese casualties some of which are still dying today from chemical defoliants.
Today, with the end of the Iraq War and the killing of Osama bin laden, we're seeing an even bigger regression especially when it comes to spies.
Take the Showtime thriller Homeland. In the show, the US has discovered Nick Brody, a long held Iraq War POW who has been tortured and brutalized for 8 years by the Iraqis. At the same time CIA operative Carrie discovers that an American POW has been 'turned' against the country. Indeed, Carrie is committed to prevent another 9/11 from happening:
Carrie: I missed something once before. I won't, I can't let that happen again.
Saul: It was ten years ago. Everyone missed something that day.
Carrie: Everyone's not me.
Lacking evidence for a new attack, Carrie desperately wiretaps and surveils Nick's house without government sanction. This is complicated by the fact that she suffers from (ostensibly) bi-polar disorder and could be imagining everything. Of course when, spoiler, Nick does in fact turn out to be a secret terrorist it vindicates the downtrodden Carrie.
Indeed, somehow Homeland turns surveillance of soldiers, which in fact is a common procedure, into an unthinkable act perpetrated by someone Just Crazy Enough to save the day. It becomes the kind of self-flattery that not even J. Edgar Hoover would have fantasized of.
It's also worth mentioning that in the universe of the show, we begin with 9/11 and end with the fictional torture of an American POW. In reality the horrors of torture were committed by our side: everything from Abu Ghraib, to Guantanamo Bay to the 30,000 Iraqis held without trial were not perpetrated by Iraqi people and go unmentioned in the show.
This reactionary trend extends into the latest James Bond film, Skyfall (2012). In it, the villain is basically Julian Assange played by Javier Bardem who releases the identities of many MI6 agents and embroils the agency into a (gasp) public investigation by the British government. We are even given an impassioned speech by M about the necessity of state secrets and espionage.
As the The New Republic points out:
...the image of the rogue CIA agent seems to be changing shape in the post-Bin-Laden world. The figure is complicating: it seems less like a way to incriminate the Agency than a way to further humanize it....The new rogue agent doesn’t go off the rails because the CIA is ineffectual or malevolent, but because the operative is resistant to the organization’s reasonable doubts about collateral damage and rule of law.
That is, the ideological landscape is screaming for the government to put aside the rule of law and go after whoever they want.
Perhaps the clearest example of this ideology was in the film Argo (2012). Directed by Ben Affleck, it takes place during the 1979 hostage crisis and follows a CIA agent as he carries out a convoluted plot to rescue six escaped hostages.
On the surface the film is somewhat decent, it gives an introduction that explains the 1953 Iranian coup and the circumstances that triggered the 79 revolution. But in the level of substance the film does something perhaps no other has done.
In it, the villain isn't just the Revolutionary Guards or Iranian government but the entire Iranian people. Save for literally one Iranian who appears for a few seconds, every Iranian is chanting angry slogans and hunting the hostages down. Even the Iranian intelligence that sifts through shredded documents to identify the diplomats is staffed by ordinary women and children.
In many ways its a paranoia reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (1963) except that in Birds their just birds, here they are everyday human beings who become a threat to national security.
If anything this probably shows a panic among the elite that they're losing control of the world. It also shows that they're trying to convince everyone else of the same thing.