Robert Redford And Ellen Barkin Join Doug Liman At Sundance Event Shining Spotlight On Bush Torture

[marmar]

from the ACLU:



FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: [phone]; [e-mail]


PARK CITY, UT – Robert Redford and Ellen Barkin today joined director Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Fair Game) and an all-star cast at Sundance Film Festival to perform “Reckoning With Torture: Memos and Testimonies From the 'War on Terror.'" The event, presented by the American Civil Liberties Union, PEN American Center and Sundance, featured readings of formerly secret government documents. The production was filmed for a documentary Liman is directing to raise awareness of the scope and human cost of the United States’ post-9/11 torture program.

Redford and Barkin joined actor America Ferrera; writers Sandra Cisneros, Annie Proulx, Marilynne Robinson, Esmeralda Santiago, George Saunders and Naomi Wolf; documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney; former interrogation insiders Jack Rice and Matthew Alexander; and other surprise guests to perform the readings. The texts are drawn largely from over 150,000 pages of formerly classified government documents obtained by the ACLU in a lawsuit that the New York Times has called “among the most successful in the history of public disclosure”; they include secret legal memos that sought to justify torture, e-mails written by FBI agents who witnessed torture at Guantánamo, interrogation logs, transcripts of military tribunal proceedings and moving statements and affidavits by U.S servicemen and women who objected to the abusive interrogations.

Interspersed between readings, former Guantánamo detainees delivered haunting video testimonials, and acclaimed artist Jenny Holzer’s imagery incorporating the documents themselves provided a powerful visual backdrop for the readings.

“It’s a privilege to work with the ACLU and PEN American Center on this important project,” said Liman. “As the documents we are presenting make clear, there is no longer any doubt that the United States repeatedly and systematically violated longstanding prohibitions on torture. We’re at a pivotal moment in history, and my hope is that America will choose a path toward restoring this nation as a defender of human rights. If everyone gets involved in calling for accountability for torture, that is what will happen.” ..........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.aclu.org/national-security/robert-redford-and-ellen-barkin-join-doug-liman-sundance-event-shining-spotlight-b

[Name removed]

1. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Solly Mack]

2. k/r

[Lint Head]

3. There is a wave in the world an in the human condition that Egypt is

currently riding that is providing the opportunity to address the war criminals in our own government. I hope we as a nation do not squander this opportunity.

[russspeakeasy]

9. Waste it we will.

[lunasun]

18. you betcha!

[Omaha Steve]

4. K&R!

[Solly Mack]

5. ...

[hootinholler]

6. I am anti-torture

By anyone anywhere. This must stop.

-Hoot

[swilton]

7. Document, Expose and Archive

The crimes of the Bush Administration and now the Obama Administration cannot be hidden from the American people.

[butterfly77]

17. Kick..

:kick:

[MasonJar]

8. How can we disseminate this information to the majority?

[Bluenorthwest]

10. Today's strongest journalism is found in documenatry films

I have conversations all the time in which I try to point out the documentary world, the impact it is having, and the fact that the form serves more complex subjects far better than TV reporting does.
Look to the documentaries, which used to be so obscure that only film people watched them, which are now drawing huge audiences, at times making huge profits. Michale Moore changed the way we get large stories. This is the Gasland Era, not the 60 Minutes era.
What TV 'news' once did, the internet now does. What 'long form' news shows like 60 minutes used to do, documentaries do better.
When I hear people complain about 'no news' I feel like they are people sitting waiting for a telegram while the newly installed telephone is ringing off the hook. Same message, different delivery method.

[PatSeg]

13. A documentary can give a more detailed and indepth

account of a situation and the film makers are not controlled by corporate sponsors as in commercial television programming. Some of the best movies I've seen the past few years have been documentaries.

[Guy Whitey Corngood]

14. I just watched Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Elliot Spitzer. I think that's an excellent

example of what you're talking about.

[JDPriestly]

15. People are hungry for the truth. The MSM does not and cannot provide it.

The MSM are merely advertising vehicles. Their purpose is to sell, not to inform.

The documentary stands on its own.

[defendandprotect]

11. Thank you -- back later --

[butterfly77]

12. Kick,kick,kick &recommended!

:thumbsup: :kick: :kick: :kick:

[Chimichurri]

16. kr

[Waiting For Everyman]

19. Another spotlight: "A Question of Torture" by Prof. Alfred McCoy

(some here may remember his earlier book, The Politics of Heroin in South East Asia). A Question of Torture documents the direct connection between the CIA's mind control experiments and those experiments becoming the basis of its current torture program.

I don't know about you, but I found the linkage between those two things pretty doggone interesting. Turns out, the torture program isn't about runamuck brutality, there's very definitely "a method to the madness" of it. There's a reason why we're doing it, and it's a reason that has not been disclosed yet because it can NEVER be admitted to. (The PTB would rather be hated for what's perceived as their sick policy than admit what they're really up to.)

The youtube link below is to a lecture given by Prof. McCoy in 2007 at Santa Barbara Univ. titled, "A Short History of Psychological Torture":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccEudcvc1lM



Quoting from @11:50 mins. into it (regarding the Abu Graib photos and how the thought occurred to him, to investigate this):

" ...when I looked at those photos, I did not see snapshots of simple brutality or a breakdown in military discipline. For example that most iconic photo, of a hooded Iraqi with fake electrical wires hanging from his extended arms, shows not the sadism of "a few creeps", but instead, the two key trademarks of the CIA's psychological torture: the hood was for sensory disorientation; the arms were extended for self-inflicted pain. It was that simple, that obvious... "

"By using the past to interrogate the present, I published a book titled A Question of Torture last year, which tracks the trail of an extraordinary historical and institutional continuity through countless pages of leaked and declassified documents. And through this research I found that from 1950 to 1962, the CIA led a secret research effort to crack the code of human consciousness - a veritable Manhattan Project of the mind, with costs that reached at peak a billion dollars a year...."

Those billions and that project weren't for nothing, and forgotten. A mind control technology came from it which is alive and well today... and not only that... it has progressed 40-years-worth farther down the road. (Even deliverable by DEW now. See Nich Begich on HAARP, and a talk by USAF Col. John Warden from a series of them called "New World Vistas: Aerospace Power for the 21st Century", 1996, published by the United States Air Force Scientific Advisory Board, Ancillary Volume pgs. 89-90 - I used to have a link to what he said which is now broken - what a surprise). Mind control technology is what our torture program is all about - it's much more than a problem of just torture itself... and that's why our government is not going to stop doing it. It's about mass and individual control, which is very advanced by now - mostly because we refuse to admit that it's real. (Even more creepy... Warden talks as if it's some nifty new "product" they've invented to use - and that was in 1996, remember.)


Brings to mind a couple of my favorite quotes...

"No matter how paranoid you are, what they're actually doing is worse than you can possibly imagine." -- Ralph J. Gleason (founder of Rolling Stone, editor of Ramparts)

"If it works, you won't hear about it." -- Dr. Eldon Byrd (physicist, expert and researcher, Marine Corps Nonlethal Electromagnetic Weapons project, and the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute in Bethesda, MD)

[butterfly77]

20. K&R..