Torturing Democracy - a must see documentary

Christa

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Sat May-30-09 05:57 AM
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Torturing Democracy - a must see documentary

Edited on Sat May-30-09 06:00 AM by Christa

Last night I watch the documentary "Torturing Democracy" by Bill Moyers, on PBS. It was not an easy documentary to watch, but I urge everyone to do so and to spread the word about it. It should be shown on mainstream media, but hell would freeze over before that happens.

"Torturing Democracy" begins at 9/11 and recounts how the Bush White House and the Pentagon decided to make coercive detention and abusive interrogation the official U.S. policy on the war on terror. In sometimes graphic detail, the documentary describes the experiences of several of the men who were held in custody, including Shafiq Rasul, Moazzam Begg, and Bisher al-Rawi, all of whom eventually were released. Charges never were filed against them and no reason was ever given for their years in custody.

The documentary traces how tactics meant to train American troops to survive enemy interrogations -- the famous SERE program ("Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape") - became the basis for many of the methods employed by the CIA and by interrogators at Guantanamo and in Iraq, including waterboarding (which inflicts on its victims the terror of imminent death), sleep and sensory deprivation, shackling, caging, painful stress positions, and sexual humiliation.

"We have re-created our enemy's methodologies in Guantanamo," Malcolm Nance, former head of the Navy's SERE training program, says in "Torturing Democracy." "It will hurt us for decades to come. Decades. Our people will all be subjected to these tactics, because we have authorized them for the world now. How it got to Guantanamo is a crime and somebody needs to figure out who did it, how they did it, who authorized them to do it... Because our servicemen will suffer for years."

In addition to its depiction of brutality, "Torturing Democracy" also credits the brave few who stood up to those in power and said, "No." In Washington, there were officials of conviction horrified by unfolding events, including Alberto Mora, the Navy's top civilian lawyer, Major General Thomas Romig, who served as Judge Advocate General of the U.S. Army from 2001-2005 and Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Couch, a former senior prosecutor with the Office of Military Commissions.

If we want to know what torture is, and what it does to human beings, we have to look at it squarely, without flinching. That's just what a powerful and important film, seen by far too few Americans, does. "Torturing Democracy" was written and produced by one of America's outstanding documentary reporters, Sherry Jones.

Sherry Jones and the film were honored this week with the prestigious RFK Journalism Award from the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights. "Torturing Democracy" was cited for its "meticulous reporting," and described as "the definitive broadcast account of a deeply troubling chapter in recent American history."

http://blog.buzzflash.com/contributors/1983

Watch it here: http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/torturingdemocracy/program/

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