[Peace-discuss] Fw: Kathryn Bigelow film producer - Leni Riefenstahl-like propagandist of torture

Sun Jan 6 19:27:18 UTC 2013

Kudos to Naomi Wolf, but I'm guessing McCain and all's condemnation for the same reason will make more of an impact. 

--- On Sun, 1/6/13, David Johnson <dlj725 at hughes.net> wrote:

From: David Johnson <dlj725 at hughes.net>
Subject: [Peace-discuss] Fw: Kathryn Bigelow film producer - Leni Riefenstahl-like propagandist of torture
To: Undisclosed-Recipient:;@mail0.frost.chambana.net
Date: Sunday, January 6, 2013, 11:13 AM

----- Original Message ----- 
From: David Johnson 
Sent: Sunday, January 06, 2013 11:01 AM
Subject: Kathryn Bigelow film producer - Leni Riefenstahl-like 
propagandist of torture

Zero Dark Thirty: A Pentagon 
Tale 

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: Reader Supported News
If readers haven't seen 
them yet make sure you see The Tillman Story and The Road to Guantanamo.
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.

Zero Dark Thirty's Torture Lie
By Naomi Wolf, Guardian UK
05 January 13  

By peddling the lie that CIA detentions led to Bin 
  Laden's killing, you have become a Leni Riefenstahl-like propagandist of 
  torture
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.

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.

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".

What led to this amoral compromising of your 
film-making?

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. 

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.
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.

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 Taxi to the Dark 
Side, and Rory Kennedy, in Ghosts of Abu 
Ghraib, 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.

Fine, 
fellow reporter: produce your sources. Provide your evidence that torture 
produced lifesaving - or any - worthwhile intelligence.

But you can't 
present evidence for this claim. Because it does not exist. 

Five decades of research, cited in the 2008 documentary The 
End of America, confirm that torture does not work. 
Robert Fisk provides another summary of that 
categorical conclusion. And this 2011 account from Human Rights First rebuts 
the very premise of Zero Dark Thirty.
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.

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.

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 monitor 
on the system has never been turned on once: 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 CIA dude sodomizes the wrong guy: Khaled 
el-Masri, "the German citizen unfortunate enough to have a similar name to a 
militant named Khaled al-Masri.")

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.

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.

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.

Like Riefenstahl, you are a 
great artist. But now you will be remembered forever as torture's handmaiden. 

-----Inline Attachment Follows-----

_______________________________________________
Peace-discuss mailing list
Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net
https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.chambana.net/pipermail/peace-discuss/attachments/20130106/807a1c22/attachment-0001.html>