83rd anniversary of the arrest of John Scopes
Crooks and Liars tell us that today is the 83rd anniversary of John Scopes’ arrest for the crime of teaching evolution. In memory, here’s a selection from Inherit the Wind:
Add comment May 5th, 2008
Posts filed under 'Film'
Sam Provance: Standard Operating Procedure continues the Abu Ghraib cover-up
Sam Provance accuses the film Standard Operating Procedure of obscuring the truth about the torture at Abu Ghraib. He asserts that the film continues the cover-up blaming the abuses on the MPs, rather than the civilian contractors and chain of command. He further claims that the film relies about the testimony of one of the CACI torturers, who, as part of the cover-up, focus the blame upon the MPs.
I have not seen the film and can’t judge Provance’s claims. But I feel that Provance, by speaking out when others remained silent, has earned the right to have his claims taken seriously.
“Sam Provance, a former Army sergeant specializing in intelligence analysis, refused to remain silent about the torture of Abu Ghraib, where he served for five months at the height of the abuses. He was punished for refusing to take part in the cover-up, and pushed out of the Army.”
Here is Provance’s article:
Abu Ghraib Film Obscures Truth
By Sam Provance
April 30, 2008Editor’s Note: Former Army Sgt. Sam Provance was the only uniformed military intelligence officer at Abu Ghraib who broke the code of silence surrounding the infamous prisoner abuses. He spoke out during the Army’s internal investigation, at a congressional hearing and in press interviews.
For his brave integrity, Provance was punished and pushed out of the U.S. military, clearing the way for the Pentagon to pin the blame for the sadistic treatment of Iraqi detainees on a handful of poorly trained MPs. Now, history is repeating itself in Errol Morris’s supposedly hard-hitting documentary on the scandal:
Representatives for film director Errol Morris told me during pre-production that “Standard Operating Procedure” would be the very best documentary on the abuses of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib - the one that would tell the whole truth.
I had pinned great hope on that. It didn’t turn out that way.
My perspective on the Abu Ghraib scandal came from spending from September 2003 to February 2004 at the Iraq prison as a sergeant in Army Intelligence. Working the 8 p.m.-to- 8 a.m. night shift, it was impossible not to notice who was directing the operation. And I shared all this with Morris.
But now I’ve seen the film and I’m disappointed. Morris does little to get to the bottom of what happened. He muddies already opaque waters regarding who was actually responsible for the abuse of prisoners.
The film focuses on the awful photos, the people in them and those who took them. This perspective plays right into the hands of the cover-up artists. It perpetuates the myth that the abuses are rightfully laid at the feet of those impressionable, but very human, young soldiers.
Morris should have been looking up the chain of command; at the civilian and military officials actually responsible for ordering these Military Police Reservists to rough up prisoners.
A no-holds-barred documentary? Give me a break.
Finally, the Whole Truth!
I was first put into contact with the makers of “SOP” while I was still in the Army. From the beginning, I was told this was going to be a huge project with the production support of Sony Pictures Entertainment; and that Morris, who had won an Oscar with his documentary, “The Fog of War,” would be at the helm.
This was to be the breakthrough investigation into what really happened at Abu Ghraib, who was responsible for the abuse and why it was ordered - the project that really got people’s attention, going where previous investigators and media had feared to tread.
Call me gullible but, believing this was to be a groundbreaking work, I fully cooperated with Morris. I assisted him in his quest for documents, videos, photos, notes and helped him contact fellow soldiers who were at Abu Ghraib and knew what happened.
When I was discharged from the Army in October 2006, I went to Boston for a two-day interview.
Morris asked me to sign several contracts before and after the interviews, and I did as he asked without paying much attention to them. I do remember however, that in one contract Morris agreed to pay me one dollar.
In any event, I never got the dollar, but was reminded of this last week when I read in the New York Times that others got paychecks for their participation.
I have never asked for or taken money for media interviews. To me, that undermines the process and trivializes the importance of the issues of torture and prisoner mistreatment and their meaning for the moral atmosphere in our country as a whole.
When the film was finished, Morris told me he had intended to use some of the footage from my two days of interviews and the materials I provided, but decided in the end to “narrowly focus” on the Military Police. This, of course, is what so many others have done and is in the worst tradition of a Nixon-style “modified, limited hangout.”
Chain of Command?
Here’s the oddest thing: Even though Morris’s lens is trained on the Military Police, he does find room for a civilian interrogator, Tim Dugan, who worked at Abu Ghraib for CACI, a contractor factory for civilian interrogators.
I witnessed for myself how civilian personnel, like Dugan, corrupted the military. Indeed, they were the genesis of the break from conventional interrogation techniques into what Vice President Dick Cheney hinted at when he spoke of the “dark side” of intelligence.
It was they who ordered the Military Police and some of my own unit’s Military Intelligence soldiers to “soften” the detainees for interrogation, and encouraged the behavior depicted in the photographs. I know; I was there. And, of course, I told Errol Morris.
So I was surprised, to say the least, to see Morris giving Dugan a place to contend that, essentially, the abuses were all the military’s fault.
Odd indeed. Even Maj. Gen. George Fay, whose investigation of Abu Ghraib left much to be desired, reported the pernicious effect civilian interrogators had on the impressionable and inexperienced soldiers.
Fay reported, for example that Daniel Johnson, one of Dugan’s CACI interrogator colleagues, whom I knew at Abu Ghraib, was using Spc. Charles Graner as “muscle” for his interrogations.
And yet, Morris describes Dugan as “remarkable.” Remarkable, indeed, Errol.
Did no one tell you that CACI, Dugan and several of his fellow interrogators were sued by their victims in Abu Ghraib, seeking to hold them accountable for their behavior?
In the civil case brought by the Center for Constitutional Rights on behalf of Abu Ghraib prisoners, the lawsuit implicates Dugan in the abuse.
“CACI interrogator Timothy Dugan also tortured plaintiffs and other prisoners,” the lawsuit alleges. “For example, he physically dragged handcuffed plaintiffs and other prisoners along the ground to inflict pain on them. He struck and beat plaintiffs and other prisoners. He bragged to a non-conspirator about scaring a prisoner with threats to such a degree that the prisoner vomited.
“When a young non-conspirator directed him to cease the torture and comply [with] Army Field Manual 34-52, Dugan scoffed at his youth and refused to follow the direction.”
The lawsuit further alleges that Dugan took part in a CACI cover-up of when a detainee died by going through “the charade of interrogating a prisoner who was already dead as part of the conspiracy’s efforts to conceal a murder.” Dugan is accused, too, of threatening a fellow CACI employee who talked to investigators.
CACI has denounced the lawsuit as baseless, and the individual defendants were dismissed out on a technicality. However, on Nov. 6, 2007, U.S. District Court Judge James Robertson in Washington denied CACI’s motion for summary judgment and ordered a jury trial against CACI.
A criminal investigation also is pending in the Eastern District of Virginia concerning some of the CACI employees.
In “SOP,” Dugan presents himself as a whistleblower who tried to stop the abuses. He claims that he reported to his “section sergeant” that two Army female interrogators were stripping detainees naked as an interrogation technique, and how shocked he was to see this.
Dugan claims he got the brush-off; was told not to get involved. So who was this “section sergeant?” And is he/she above the law?
Why did Dugan not offer himself as a witness in any of the various investigations? Where has he been if he felt then the way he now says he did? Again, why sport the good-guy badge now?
I came away with the impression that Morris was unprepared for the interview and was being taken for a ride.
CACI’s Defense
For obvious reasons, CACI has gone to extraordinary lengths to separate itself from the horrors of Abu Ghraib, arguing that the military alone was at fault.
CACI recently announced the release of a book, Our Good Name: A Company’s Fight To Defend Its Honor And Get The Truth About Abu Ghraib.
CACI contends strongly that its interrogators adhered to the military chain of command, something it has been feverishly trying to establish in the lawsuits against it.
And so, the behavior captured in the photos? That was the military’s responsibility, not CACI’s.
That is not what I observed from my ringside seat.
I told Morris that the reality was that the civilian contractors paid little heed to the military chain of command, and that they were the ones actually running the show. That didn’t make it into the final version of “SOP.”
Even though it is now an established fact that between 70 to 90 percent of detainees at Abu Ghraib were completely innocent, something I learned directly on site, Dugan implies that the harsh interrogation practices applied there were legitimate - except of course for the failings of the military.
This myth-making is intended to hold CACI harmless and help it maintain its very lucrative government contracts. CACI International had $1.6 billion in revenues in 2005. Folks have always told me it all has to do with money; I suppose they’re right.
But Congress should be asking some simple questions. It should start by asking why civilian contractors are being employed in connection with the interrogation of persons under detention in wartime, a function which previously has been entirely in the hands of the uniformed military?
This could yield some interesting answers. Indeed, evasion of military rules and discipline as well as avoidance of congressional oversight might be at the heart of the answers.
Morris takes pride in calling “SOP” a horror movie and - with the mood music and the needless slow-motion reenactments - he makes sure of that.
However, “SOP” does little more than humanize some of the “bad apples” (a good thing, I suppose), while gratuitously absolving the civilian interrogators actually responsible for fouling those apples.
But, wait. Abu Ghraib is not primarily about Military Police - or civilian interrogators. It is about the many thousands of wrongfully detained Iraqis - many of them abused, tortured and even killed. It is also about their families. What about their story?
Morris has called “SOP” just “the tip of the iceberg,” citing the unused volumes of material he’s collected since production began. But Morris owed his viewers a glimpse of the whole iceberg, not just the small misleading piece that bobbed above the surface.
He has announced his next film project: a comedy. Go figure.
Sam Provance, a former Army sergeant specializing in intelligence analysis, refused to remain silent about the torture of Abu Ghraib, where he served for five months at the height of the abuses. He was punished for refusing to take part in the cover-up, and pushed out of the Army. For his sworn testimony to Congress, click here.
Add comment May 4th, 2008
Remembering Marla Ruzicka
Today is the third anniversary of the death of Marla Ruzicka in Iraq. Antiwar activist Marla founded the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict (CIVIC), which is still active. Her life is described in Sweet Relief: The Marla Ruzicka Story.
Here is the short film A Glimpse of Marla , by the FullMonte. Read more about Marla at this blog devoted to remembrance of her.
Add comment April 16th, 2008
Bronx students discuss Obama speech on race
A very moving video of Bronx students discussing Barack Obama’s speech on race. If discussions like this are occurring elsewhere in the country, it’s a very good sign for democracy. The Nation has referred to the Obama campaign’s community organizing. This video gives a sense of what that might mean to high school freshman who talk about being inspired to reject a life of crime and abuse and to aspire. Perhaps we’re on the cusp of some profound changes.
1 comment March 29th, 2008
Hillary’s “3 A.M. ad” Girl Doesn’t Approve of that Message
Bush III fear-based campaign picked the wrong girl:
Add comment March 21st, 2008
Remember Rachel Corrie!
Today is the fifth anniversary of Rachael Corrie’s murder in the West Bank. Please go to the video memorial I posted on January 31 here.
Add comment March 17th, 2008
Taxi to the Dark Side
Academy award winning Taxi to the Dark Side is now available from Google video:
Add comment March 13th, 2008
Eric Mink on Taxi to the Dark Side
Eric Mink, in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, reviews the wonderful and disturbing new film, Taxi to the Dark Side. I saw it on Saturday and have been teary-eyed ever since. It reminds me why I have sacrificed the last years of my life to the fight to end torture. None of us are safe as long as such brutality is tolerated:
“Taxi to the Dark Side”: A nation betrayed, a nation’s conscience stained
by Eric Mink
Dilawar was 22 when he was killed. He left behind a wife and a 2-year-old daughter, as well as brothers, a father and the friends and neighbors who had watched him grow into a young man in the small peanut-farming village of Yakubi.
Yakubi sits at latitude 33.4608 degrees north, longitude 69.99 degrees east, in a high valley in mountainous eastern Afghanistan. If you type those coordinates into a Google Maps search, you can zoom in and out of satellite photos confirming that Yakubi is in the middle of nowhere.
Lacking a knack for farming, Dilawar - it was the only name he bore - started driving a taxi, a used Toyota his family bought him. He died on Dec. 10, 2002, hanging from his wrists from a wire-mesh ceiling, his arms spread above him, his head fallen forward and to the side, his feet barely touching the ground. He was alone.
The official death certificate for Dilawar, signed by coroner Dr. Elizabeth A. Rouse, listed the “mode of death” as “homicide.” The cause was “blunt force injuries to lower extremities complicating coronary artery disease.” More descriptively, Dilawar’s legs had been hit repeatedly, hundreds of times, until the tissues inside had broken down and turned to pulp. Internal blood clots then had broken free, traveled to his heart, lodged in a partially blocked artery and stopped the flow of blood.
Dilawar died in the custody of the U.S. Army at Bagram Collection Point, a prison and interrogation facility about 30 miles north of Kabul. He had been there a little less than five days. Dilawar had done nothing to merit detention and knew nothing that merited interrogation. He was beaten to death by the United States of America.
Dilawar’s story serves as the moral center of “Taxi to the Dark Side,” a non-fiction film that opens at the Tivoli Theatre in St. Louis on Feb. 22. That is two days before the broadcast of the 80th Academy Awards in which “Taxi” is a nominee for best documentary feature.
Written and directed by Alex Gibney, “Taxi” is meticulously photographed, edited and scored. As filmmaking, it is as artful as it is emotionally involving.
Its facts, however, are not revelatory. News of Dilawar’s death at Bagram and its official classification as a homicide first appeared in a March 2003 story, datelined Yakubi, by New York Times reporter Carlotta Gall. It took two more years of reporting by her stateside colleague Tim Golden, with assistance from Gall and other reporters, to unearth the horrific details of Dilawar’s treatment as recounted in a 2,000-page secret criminal investigative report by the Army.
Golden’s extraordinary stories were published in May 2005. They explained that local operatives of an Afghan warlord who had shelled a U.S. base had shifted suspicion, falsely, to Dilawar and three passengers in his taxi. American forces fell for it and took the men into custody. The three innocent passengers eventually were shipped to the prison at Guantanamo, where they languished for years before being sent home. Dilawar was taken to Bagram.
Yet “Taxi to the Dark Side” can not be written off as old news. With the outrage of Dilawar’s torture and death as its driving narrative force, “Taxi” gathers disparate threads and weaves them into a sharp-edged picture of how far from our core beliefs our country has veered in the last seven years.
The film is methodical and relentless. It covers President Bush’s declaration - later invalidated by the U.S. Supreme Court - that prisoners held by American forces are not necessarily covered by the Geneva Conventions. It shows Vice President Cheney on “Meet the Press” shortly after 9/11 telling host Tim Russert, in effect, that battling terrorists will require U.S. intelligence forces to adopt their tactics, to go to the “dark side.”
“Taxi to the Dark Side” recounts the creation of the Justice Department’s infamous torture memo of August 2002 - withdrawn in 2004, then secretly redrafted in 2005 - redefining the term to permit almost any technique. It includes the December 2002 authorization of extreme interrogation methods - later rescinded after protests from military lawyers - by then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and it points out that some of those methods were used at Bagram on Dilawar and many others.
And by no means does the film overlook the related prisoner-abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib in Iraq and the arbitrary denial of basic legal rights to prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay, the latter now under a second review by the Supreme Court.
Adding to the film’s force are on-camera interviews with many key players, including former military and government officials, civilian lawyers who have been drawn into various aspects of the story, Times reporters Gall and Golden and, most chillingly, some of the U.S. soldiers who beat Dilawar.
Last summer, a former commandant of the U.S Marine Corps and a former lawyer who served in the White House of President Reagan wrote an oped piece for the Washington Post denouncing an executive order issued by Bush. The order claims to interpret the Geneva Conventions in ways that permit extreme and abusive treatment of prisoners by the CIA. The authors wrote that Bush’s order “compromised our national honor and . . . may well promote the commission of war crimes by Americans.”
The authors did not point out that the Military Commissions Act of 2006 includes provisions that attempt to immunize American officials - retroactively - from responsibility for war crimes committed in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere.
“Taxi to the Dark Side” does not rant. It does not screech. Its tone is quietly authoritative and, in its treatment of Dilawar and his captors, elegiac. It addresses the tragedy of Dilawar’s senseless death, but it also finds some measure of understanding for soldiers caught up in the whirlwind of a chaotic war that has been mismanaged and manipulated by the military and civilian chain of command above them.
But the film’s larger point is that there is tragedy here for all Americans. The leaders to whom we turned after 9/11 for protection, reassurance and wisdom turned out to be frightened little men and women who had no faith in the enduring strength of American principles. They betrayed our principles and they betrayed us. History will record their stewardship as a stain on the nation’s conscience.
Add comment February 11th, 2008
Clips from Taxi to the Dark Side
Clips from Acadmy Award winning Taxi to the Dark Side
[h/t InformationClearinghouse]
Add comment February 1st, 2008