It turns out I’m a talker.
I just saw Alex Gibney’s compelling and terrifying documentary Taxi To The Dark Side, about the use of torture by the US military, and the complex and confusing rhetoric that surrounds the issue—and these times.
It seems almost perversely mind-boggling that a film about torture from the American military can win the Academy Award and at the same time the Invasion of Iraq—with statistics brutally comparable to Darfur—can not only carry on, but President Bush, without being utterly opposed, can contine to whip up rhetoric for invading Iran.
I truly don’t know if that staggering polarity shows how vibrant is this democracy, or how damaged is this democracy. The fact that, for me, the two parties are so closely aligned to be one party with slight variations, suggests the latter.
It’s a bit like how virtually every polled country was against the invasion of Iraq, and protested in huge numbers, and it made no obvious difference.
The documentary revealed the brutality of water-boarding, and showed the profoundly terrifying effects of mind-torture, sleep and sensory deprivation and so on.
It also juxtaposed some of what has gone on compared to the torture that goes on in the TV show 24, for example, which I’ve never seen. In the process, the film debunks and exposes the cold emptiness of the show’s and Alan Dershowitz’s ‘ticking bomb’ defense of torture.
The film is very worth seeing.
In an interview in Filmmaker magazine, Gibney is asked why policy on torture shifted within the US military.
That‘s a good question. We don‘t know what was going on in the mind of Dick Cheney…So suddenly, without really thinking at all about ramifications, and without wanting to go to anybody who might question them, [the Bush administration] rushes into a policy that wasn‘t very well thought-out.
I think they felt they were operating in a historical vacuum, which is to say [confronting] a new kind of threat, and they had to apply a new kind of force.
But there‘s a body of evidence that tells us that these kinds of techniques, in addition to being morally abhorrent and illegal, are also not very effective in terms of getting good intelligence…
I‘m not sure I will ever answer that question to my satisfaction. I think they were panicked and angry, and that led them to this very tragic era. I also think at some point, whether it was unconscious or conscious, there was a political dimension to this too, because if you think about it, what‘s torture best at?
It‘s best at getting the prisoner you‘re torturing to tell you what you want to hear. The KGB used a lot of these techniques that we‘ve been using recently in order to extract false confessions.
That‘s what they wanted — false confessions.
Well, what‘s better to mask either mistakes or to align intelligence with political policy than torture?
To me that was the scariest thing that came out of this project for me, that somehow we drifted into territory that might be more familiar in the old Soviet Union.
The Soviet Union again, as a comparison. Check out the blog before this one.
Not much to add. Love everybody a little more, when you can, if you can…
Pete xox