<table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" border="0" ><tr><td valign="top" style="font: inherit;">Kudos to Naomi Wolf, but I'm guessing McCain and all's condemnation for the same reason will make more of an impact. <br><br>--- On <b>Sun, 1/6/13, David Johnson <i><dlj725@hughes.net></i></b> wrote:<br><blockquote style="border-left: 2px solid rgb(16, 16, 255); margin-left: 5px; padding-left: 5px;"><br>From: David Johnson <dlj725@hughes.net><br>Subject: [Peace-discuss] Fw: Kathryn Bigelow film producer - Leni Riefenstahl-like propagandist of torture<br>To: Undisclosed-Recipient:;@mail0.frost.chambana.net<br>Date: Sunday, January 6, 2013, 11:13 AM<br><br><div id="yiv1884403540">
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<div style="FONT:10pt arial;">----- Original Message -----
<div style="BACKGROUND:#e4e4e4;"><b>From:</b> <a rel="nofollow" title="dlj725@hughes.net" ymailto="mailto:dlj725@hughes.net" target="_blank" href="/mc/compose?to=dlj725@hughes.net">David Johnson</a> </div>
<div><b>Sent:</b> Sunday, January 06, 2013 11:01 AM</div>
<div><b>Subject:</b> Kathryn Bigelow film producer - Leni Riefenstahl-like
propagandist of torture</div></div>
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<div><font face="Arial" size="2">
<h3 class="yiv1884403540post-title yiv1884403540entry-title">Zero Dark Thirty: A Pentagon
Tale </h3>
<div class="yiv1884403540post-header">
<div class="yiv1884403540post-header-line-1"><font size="4"></font></div></div>
<div id="yiv1884403540post-body-2419138373945926755" class="yiv1884403540post-body yiv1884403540entry-content"><font size="4">I was going to write a short
piece on this new film by Kathryn Bigelow about the assassination of Bin Laden,
although like Spike Lee with Django, I am not going to watch
it. However, Naomi Wolf seems to have a done a good job on it
and we reprint it here. Reprinted from: </font><a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/15403-zero-dark-thirtys-torture-lie"><font size="4">Reader Supported News</font></a><br><font size="4">If readers haven't seen
them yet make sure you see The Tillman Story and The Road to Guantanamo.<br>And
don't forget how they tried to fool us with the Jessica Lynch adventure
Hollywood style and even more importantly, tell your children about the Gulf of
Tonkin.<br><br></font>
<h1 class="yiv1884403540txttitle"><font size="4">Zero Dark Thirty's Torture Lie</font></h1>
<div class="yiv1884403540txtauthor"><font size="4">By Naomi Wolf, Guardian UK</font></div>
<div class="yiv1884403540date"><font size="4">05 January 13</font></div><font size="4">
<br></font>
<blockquote><i><font size="4">By peddling the lie that CIA detentions led to Bin
Laden's killing, you have become a Leni Riefenstahl-like propagandist of
torture</font></i></blockquote><br><font size="4"><img src="http://readersupportednews.org/images/stories/alphabet/rsn-T.jpg" border="0">he Hurt
Locker was a beautiful, brave film; many young women in film were inspired as
they watched you become the first woman ever to win an Oscar for directing. But
with Zero Dark Thirty, you have attained a different kind of
distinction.<br><br>Your film Zero Dark Thirty is a huge hit here. But in
falsely justifying, in scene after scene, the torture of detainees in "the
global war on terror", Zero Dark Thirty is a gorgeously-shot, two-hour ad for
keeping intelligence agents who committed crimes against Guantánamo prisoners
out of jail. It makes heroes and heroines out of people who committed violent
crimes against other people based on their race - something that has historical
precedent.<br><br>Your film claims, in many scenes, that CIA torture was
redeemed by the "information" it "secured", information that, according to your
script, led to Bin Laden's capture. This narrative is a form of manufacture of
innocence to mask a great crime: what your script blithely calls "the detainee
program".<br><br>What led to this amoral compromising of your
film-making?<br><br>Could some of the seduction be financing? It is very hard to
get a film without a pro-military message, such as The Hurt Locker, funded and
financed. But according to sources in the film industry, the more pro-military
your message is, the more kinds of help you currently can get: from personnel,
to sets, to technology - a point I made in my argument about the recent
militarized Katy Perry video. <br></font>
<div class="yiv1884403540indent"><font size="4">It seems implausible that scenes such as those
involving two top-secret, futuristic helicopters could be made without Pentagon
help, for example. If the film received that kind of undisclosed, in-kind
support from the defense department, then that would free up million of dollars
for the gigantic ad campaign that a film like this needs to compete to win
audience.</font></div><br><font size="4">This also sets a dangerous precedent: we
can be sure, with the "propaganda amendment" of the 2013 NDAA, just signed into
law by the president, that the future will hold much more overt corruption of
Hollywood and the rest of US pop culture. This amendment legalizes something
that has been illegal for decades: the direct funding of pro-government or
pro-military messaging in media, without disclosure, aimed at American
citizens.<br><br>Then, there is the James Frey factor. You claim that your film
is "based on real events", and in interviews, you insist that it is a mixture of
fact and fiction, "part documentary". "Real", "true", and even "documentary",
are big and important words. By claiming such terms, you generate media and
sales traction - on a mendacious basis. There are filmmakers who work very hard
to produce films that are actually "based on real events": they are called
documentarians. Alex Gibney, in </font><a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://youtu.be/WX0MPcN08Zc"><font size="4">Taxi to the Dark
Side</font></a><font size="4">, and Rory Kennedy, in </font><a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://youtu.be/P31RzaYp-Kg"><font size="4">Ghosts of Abu
Ghraib</font></a><font size="4">, have both produced true and sourceable
documentary films about what your script blithely calls "the detainee program" -
that is, the regime of torture to generate false confessions at Guantánamo and
Abu Ghraib - which your script claims led straight to Bin Laden.<br><br>Fine,
fellow reporter: produce your sources. Provide your evidence that torture
produced lifesaving - or any - worthwhile intelligence.<br><br>But you can't
present evidence for this claim. Because it does not exist. <br></font>
<div class="yiv1884403540indent"><font size="4">Five decades of research, cited in the </font><a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1294790/"><font size="4">2008 documentary The
End of America</font></a><font size="4">, confirm that torture does not work.
</font><a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-torture-does-not-work-as-history-shows-777213.html"><font size="4">Robert Fisk provides another summary</font></a><font size="4"> of that
categorical conclusion. And </font><a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://www.humanrightsfirst.org/2011/05/03/five-reasons-why-torture-did-not-help-us-forces-find-bin-laden/"><font size="4">this 2011 account from Human Rights First</font></a><font size="4"> rebuts
the very premise of Zero Dark Thirty.</font></div><br><font size="4">Your actors
complain about detainees' representation by lawyers - suggesting that these
do-gooders in suits endanger the rest of us. I have been to see your "detainee
program" firsthand. The prisoners, whom your film describes as being "lawyered
up", meet with those lawyers in rooms that are wired for sound; yet, those
lawyers can't tell the world what happened to their clients - because the
descriptions of the very torture these men endured are classified.<br><br>I have
seen the room where the military tribunal takes the "testimony" from people
swept up in a program that gave $5,000 bounties to desperately poor Afghanis to
incentivize their turning-in innocent neighbors. The chairs have shackles to the
floor, and are placed in twos, so that one prisoner can be threatened to make
him falsely condemn the second.<br><br>I have seen the expensive video system in
the courtroom where - though Guantánamo spokesmen have told the world's press
since its opening that witnesses' accounts are brought in "whenever reasonable"
- the </font><a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://archive.truthout.org/073109C"><font size="4">monitor
on the system has never been turned on once</font></a><font size="4">: a monitor
that could actually let someone in Pakistan testify to say, "hey, that is the
wrong guy". (By the way, you left out the scene where the </font><a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://news.antiwar.com/2012/12/13/human-rights-court-cia-tortured-sodomized-german-citizen/"><font size="4">CIA dude sodomizes the wrong guy</font></a><font size="4">: Khaled
el-Masri, "the German citizen unfortunate enough to have a similar name to a
militant named Khaled al-Masri.")<br><br>In a time of darkness in America, you
are being feted by Hollywood, and hailed by major media. But to me, the path
your career has now taken reminds of no one so much as that other female film
pioneer who became, eventually, an apologist for evil: Leni Riefenstahl.
Riefenstahl's 1935 Triumph of the Will, which glorified Nazi military power, was
a massive hit in Germany. Riefenstahl was the first female film director to be
hailed worldwide.<br><br>It may seem extreme to make comparison with this other
great, but profoundly compromised film-maker, but there are real echoes. When
Riefenstahl began to glamorize the National Socialists, in the early 1930s, the
Nazis' worst atrocities had not yet begun; yet abusive detention camps had
already been opened to house political dissidents beyond the rule of law - the
equivalent of today's Guantánamo, Bagram base, and other unnameable CIA "black
sites". And Riefenstahl was lionised by the German elites and acclaimed for her
propaganda on behalf of Hitler's regime.<br><br>But the world changed. The
ugliness of what she did could not, over time, be hidden. Americans, too, will
wake up and see through Zero Dark Thirty's apologia for the regime's standard
lies that this brutality is somehow necessary. When that happens, the same
community that now applauds you will recoil.<br><br>Like Riefenstahl, you are a
great artist. But now you will be remembered forever as torture's handmaiden.
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