Art.. Storytelling.. Fascism

[Magda Hassan]

Dirty Wars: Jeremy Scahill's antidote to Zero Dark Thirty's heroic narrative

In this new documentary, the Nation's investigative reporter lifts the lid on the ugly reality of US counter-terror operations

• • guardian.co.uk, Monday 28 January 2013 19.56 GMT
    

The film Dirty Wars details the stories of Afghans who have experienced attacks by drones or special forces. Photograph: John Moore/Getty Images

As President Barack Obama prepared to be sworn in for his second term as the 44th president of the United States, two courageous journalists premiered a documentary at the annual Sundance Film Festival. Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield reaffirms the critical role played by independent journalists like the film's director, Rick Rowley, and its narrator and central figure, Jeremy Scahill.
The increasing pace of US drone strikes, and the Obama administration's reliance on shadowy special forces to conduct military raids beyond the reach of oversight and accountability, were summarily missed over the inaugural weekend by a US press corps obsessed with first lady Michelle Obama's new bangs. Dirty Wars, along with Scahill'sforthcoming book of the same title, is on target to break that silence … with a bang that matters.
Scahill and Rowley, no strangers to war zones, ventured beyond Kabul,Afghanistan, south to Gardez, in Paktia province, a region dense with armed Taliban and their allies in the Haqqani network, to investigate one of the thousands of night raids that typically go unreported. Scahill told me:

"In Gardez, US special operations forces had intelligence that a Taliban cell was having some sort of a meeting to prepare a suicide bomber. And they raid the house in the middle of the night, and they end up killing five people, including three women, two of whom were pregnant, and … Mohammed Daoud, a senior Afghan police commander who had been trained by the US."

Scahill and Rowley went to the heart of the story, to hear from people who live at the target end of US foreign policy. In Gardez, they interviewed survivors of that violent raid on the night of 12 February 2010. After watching his brother and his wife, his sister and his niece killed by US special forces, Mohammed Sabir was handcuffed on the ground. He watched, helpless, as the US soldiers dug the bullets out of his wife's corpse with a knife. He and the other surviving men were then flown off by helicopter to another province.
Sabir recounted his ordeal for Rowley's camera:

"My hands and clothes were caked with blood. They didn't give us water to wash the blood away. The American interrogators had beards and didn't wear uniforms. They had big muscles and would fly into sudden rages.
"By the time I got home, all our dead had already been buried. Only my father and my brother were left at home. I didn't want to live anymore. I wanted to wear a suicide jacket and blow myself up among the Americans. But my brother and my father wouldn't let me. I wanted a jihad against the Americans."

Before leaving, Scahill and Rowley made copies of videos from the cellphones of survivors. One demonstrated that it was not a Taliban meeting, but a lively celebration of the birth of a child that the raid interrupted. Rowley described another video:

"You can hear voices come over it, and they're American-accented voices speaking about piecing together their version of the night's killings, getting their story straight. You hear them trying to concoct a story about how this was something other than a massacre."

The film shows an image captured in Gardez, by photographer Jeremy Kelly, sometime after the massacre. It showed a US admiral named McRaven, surrounded by Afghan soldiers, offering a sheep as a traditional gesture seeking forgiveness for the massacre. The cover-up had failed.
William McRaven headed the Joint Special Operations Command, or JSoc. Following the thread of JSoc, painstakingly probing scarcely reported night raids, traveling from Afghanistan to Yemen to Somalia, Scahill's reporting, along with Rowley's incredible camerawork, constructs for the first time a true, comprehensive picture of JSoc and Commander-in-chief Obama's not-so-brave new world.
The Inauguration Day drone strike in Yemen was the fourth in as many days, along with a similar increase in strikes in Pakistan. The Washington Post reported that Obama has a "playbook" that details when drone strikes are authorized, but it reportedly exempts those conducted by the CIA in Afghanistan and Pakistan. On Inauguration Day, Obama officially nominated John Brennan, a strong advocate for the "enhanced interrogation techniques" that many call torture, and architect of the drone program, to head the CIA.
With the film Dirty Wars, co-written with David Riker and directed by Rowley, Jeremy Scahill is pulling back the curtain on JSoc, which has lately exploded into the public eye with the torture-endorsing movie Zero Dark Thirty, about the killing of Osama bin Laden. When Dirty Wars comes to a theater near you, see it.
Sadly, it proves the theater of war is everywhere, or, as its subtitle puts it: "The World is a Battlefield." As Scahill told me:

"You're going to see a very different reality, and you're going to see the hellscape that has been built by a decade of covert war."

Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column

[Magda Hassan]

How Digital Technology Has Helped Unleash a Devastating New Era of Propaganda


"Propaganda always wins," said Leni Riefenstahl, "if you allow it."


John Pilger
April 2, 2013 |



What is modern propaganda? For many, it is the lies of a totalitarian state. In the 1970s, I met Leni Riefenstahl and asked her about her epic films that glorified the Nazis. Using revolutionary camera and lighting techniques, she produced a documentary form that mesmerised Germans; her Triumph of the Will cast Hitler's spell.

She told me that the "messages" of her films were dependent not on "orders from above", but on the "submissive void" of the German public. Did that include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie? "Everyone," she said.
Today, we prefer to believe that there is no submissive void. "Choice" is ubiquitous. Phones are "platforms" that launch every half-thought. There is Google from outer space if you need it. Caressed like rosary beads, the precious devices are borne headsdown, relentlessly monitored and prioritised. Their dominant theme is the self. Me. My needs. Riefenstahl's submissive void is today's digital slavery.
Edward Said described this wired state in Culture and Imperialism as taking imperialism where navies could never reach. It is the ultimate means of social control because it is voluntary, addictive and shrouded in illusions of personal freedom.
Today's "message" of grotesque inequality, social injustice and war is the propaganda of liberal democracies. By any measure of human behaviour, this is extremism. When Hugo Chávez challenged it, he was abused in bad faith; and his successor will be subverted by the same zealots of the American Enterprise Institute, Harvard's Kennedy School and the "human rights" organisations that have appropriated American liberalism and underpin its propaganda. The historian Norman Pollack calls this "liberal fascism". "All is normality on display," he wrote. "For [Nazi] goose-steppers, substitute the seemingly more innocuous militarisation of the total culture. And for the bombastic leader, we have the reformer manqué, blithely at work [in the White House], planning and executing assassination, smiling all the while."
Whereas a generation ago, dissent and biting satire were allowed in the "mainstream", today their counterfeits are acceptable and a fake moral zeitgeist rules. "Identity" is all, mutating feminism and declaring class obsolete. Just as collateral damage covers for mass murder, "austerity" has become an acceptable lie. Beneath the veneer of consumerism, a quarter of Greater Manchester in England is reported to be living in "extreme poverty".
The militarist violence perpetrated against hundreds of thousands of nameless men, women and children by "our" governments is never a crime against humanity. Interviewing Tony Blair ten years on from his criminal invasion of Iraq, the BBC's Kirsty Wark gifted him a moment he could only dream of. She allowed Blair to agonise over his "difficult decision rather than call him to account for the monumental lies and bloodbath he launched. One is reminded of Albert Speer.
Hollywood has returned to its cold war role, led by liberals. Ben Affleck's Oscar-winning Argo is the first feature film so integrated into the propaganda system that its subliminal warning of Iran's "threat" is offered as Obama is preparing, yet again, to attack Iran. That Affleck's "true story" of good-guys-v-bad-Muslims is as much a fabrication as Obama's justification for his war plans is lost in PR-managed plaudits. As the independent critic Andrew O'Hehir points out, Argo is "a propaganda movie in the truest sense, one that claims to be innocent of all ideology". That is, it debases the art of film-making to reflect an image of the power it serves.
The true story is that, for 34 years, the US foreign policy elite have seethed with revenge for the loss of the shah of Iran, their beloved tyrant, and his CIA-designed state of torture. When Iranian students occupied the US embassy in Tehran in 1979, they found a trove of incriminating documents, which revealed that an Israeli spy network was operating inside the US, stealing top scientific and military secrets. Today, the duplicitous Zionist ally not Iran is the one and only nuclear threat in the Middle East.
In 1977, Carl Bernstein, famed for his Watergate reporting, disclosed that more than 400 journalists and executives of mostly liberal US media organisations had worked for the CIA in the past 25 years. They included journalists from the New York Times, Time and the big TV broadcasters. These days, such a formal nefarious workforce is quite unnecessary. In 2010, the New York Times made no secret of its collusion with the White House in censoring the WikiLeaks war logs. The CIA has an "entertainment industry liaison office" that helps producers and directors remake its image from that of a lawless gang that assassinates, overthrows governments and runs drugs. As Obama's CIA commits multiple murder by drone, Affleck lauds the "clandestine service . . . that is making sacrifices on behalf of Americans every day . . . I want to thank them very much." The 2010 Oscar-winner Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty, a torture-apology, was all but licensed by the Pentagon.
The US market share of cinema box-office takings in Britain often reaches 80 per cent, and the small UK share is mainly for US coproductions. Films from Europe and the rest of the world account for a tiny fraction of those we are allowed to see. In my own filmmaking career, I have never known a time when dissenting voices in the visual arts are so few and silent.
For all the hand-wringing induced by the Leveson inquiry, the "Murdoch mould" remains intact. Phone-hacking was always a distraction, a misdemeanour compared to the media-wide drumbeat for criminal wars. According to Gallup, 99 per cent of Americans believe Iran is a threat to them, just as the majority believed Iraq was responsible for the 9/11 attacks. "Propaganda always wins," said Leni Riefenstahl, "if you allow it."
http://www.alternet.org/media/how-digita...paging=off

[Jan Klimkowski]

Magda - great find.

John and Leni, Pilger and Riefenstahl.

What a fascinating exchange between the reporter who exposes the crimes of totalitarianism, and the artist who turned the philosophy of Nazism into powerful archetypal imagery.

What is modern propaganda? For many, it is the lies of a totalitarian state. In the 1970s, I met Leni Riefenstahl and asked her about her epic films that glorified the Nazis. Using revolutionary camera and lighting techniques, she produced a documentary form that mesmerised Germans; her Triumph of the Will cast Hitler's spell.

She told me that the "messages" of her films were dependent not on "orders from above", but on the "submissive void" of the German public. Did that include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie? "Everyone," she said.
Today, we prefer to believe that there is no submissive void. "Choice" is ubiquitous. Phones are "platforms" that launch every half-thought. There is Google from outer space if you need it. Caressed like rosary beads, the precious devices are borne headsdown, relentlessly monitored and prioritised. Their dominant theme is the self. Me. My needs. Riefenstahl's submissive void is today's digital slavery.
Edward Said described this wired state in Culture and Imperialism as taking imperialism where navies could never reach. It is the ultimate means of social control because it is voluntary, addictive and shrouded in illusions of personal freedom.

The truth is out there.

But the "submissive void" and the "digital slaves" ignore it.

"Propaganda always wins," said Leni Riefenstahl, "if you allow it."

Leni's heirs are making the movies of Hollywood.

[Magda Hassan]

Live Coverage of the Senate Torture Report

By Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald
Today at 12:18 AM



One of the worst myths official Washington and its establishment media have told itself about the torture debate is that the controversy is limited to three cases of waterboarding at Guantánamo and a handful of bad Republican actors. In fact, a wide array of torture techniques were approved at the highest levels of the U.S. Government and then systematically employed in lawless US prisons around the world - at Bagram (including during the Obama presidency), CIA black sites, even to US citizens on US soil. So systematic was the torture regime that a 2008 Senate report concluded that the criminal abuses at Abu Ghraib were the direct result of the torture mentality imposed by official Washington.
American torture was not confined to a handful of aberrational cases or techniques, nor was it the work of rogue CIA agents. It was an officially sanctioned, worldwide regime of torture that had the acquiescence, if not explicit approval, of the top members of both political parties in Congress. It was motivated by far more than interrogation. The evidence for all of this is conclusive and overwhelming. And the American media bears much of the blame, as they refused for years even to use the word "torture" to describe any of this (even as they called these same techniques "torture" when used by American adversaries), a shameful and cowardly abdication that continues literally to this day in many of the most influential outlets.
The Senate Intelligence Committee today will release part of its "torture report." The report is the by-product of four years of work (2009-2013) and is 6,000 pages long. Only the Executive Summary, roughly 600 pages, will be released today. Even some of that is redacted: the names of CIA agents participating in the torture, countries which agreed to allow CIA black sites, and other details. For months, top Democrats on the Committee warred with the Obama White House due to the latter's attempts to redact far more vital information than even stalwart CIA ally Dianne Feinstein thought necessary.
None of this has been in any plausible doubt for years. Recall that Gen. Antonio Taguba, who led an official investigation into prisoner abuse, said in 2008: "There is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account." Gen. Barry McCaffrey said : "We tortured people unmercifully. We probably murdered dozens of them during the course of that, both the armed forces and the CIA." Nobody needs this Senate report to demonstrate that the U.S. government became an official squad of torture (with the American public largely on board).
Still, this will be by far the most comprehensive and official account of the War on Terror's official torture regime. Given the authors Committee Democrats along with two Maine Senators: Angus King (I) and Susan Collins ® it's likely to whitewash critical events, including the key, complicit role members of Congress such as Nancy Pelosi played in approving the program (important details of which are still disputed), as well an attempt to insulate the DC political class by stressing how the CIA "misled" elected officials about the program. But the report is certain to lay bare in very stark terms some of the torture methods, including "graphic details about sexual threats" and what Reuters still euphemistically and subserviently calls "other harsh interrogation techniques the CIA meted out to captured militants."
Important parts of the Obama administration engaged in all sorts of gamesmanship to prevent the report's release, including a last-minute call from John Kerry to Feinstein in which the Secretary of State warned that release of the report could endanger American lives (a warning affirmed yesterday by the White House) And a vital part of President Obama's legacy will be his repeated and ultimately successful efforts to shield the torturers from all forms of legal accountability - which, aside from being a brazen breach of America's treaty obligations, makes deterrence of future American torture almost impossible (Obama did that even in the face of some polls showing pluralities favored criminal investigations of torture).
To see how little accountability there still is for national security state officials, recall that the CIA got caught spying on the Senate Committee and then lying about it, yet John Brennan kept his job as CIA Director (just as James Clapper is still Director of National Intelligence despite getting caught lying about NSA domestic spying). Any decent person, by definition, would react with revulsion to today's report, but nobody should react with confidence that its release will help prevent future occurrences by a national security state that resides far beyond democratic accountability, let alone the law.
The Intercept will have comprehensive coverage of the report throughout the day. We'll have full annotations of the report; graphical guides to the key parts; reporting in Washington from Dan Froomkin, who has been covering the report for months, and other reporters; and I'll be live-blogging key parts of the report and other fallout in this space all day, appearing, in reverse chronological order, underneath these initial observations.


Torture used to extract false information to justify Iraq War
Buried in footnote 857 of the report is this remarkable account of how the CIA rendered a detainee to an unknown country, had him tortured, and then used the false information he provided about Saddam's WMDs and "alliance" with al Qaeda to justify the U.S. attack, including information used by Colin Powell at his notorious 2003 U.N. speech (via Sam Husseini):

-Glenn Greenwald at 4:58 p.m. EST


Torturing detainees with broken and prosthetic legs
This is simply repulsive, for reasons that speak for itself (contributed by The Intercepts Margot Williams):

-Glenn Greenwald at 3:47 p.m. EST
Feinstein's speech
When releasing the report, Dianne Feinstein delivered a speech that contained some rather stark accusations against the CIA. My colleague Peter Maass wrote the following summation of the highlights:

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, unveiling the report on the floor of the Senate, described the CIA's use of torture as "a stain on our values and our history," and she issued a particularly harsh condemnation of one of the agency's former directors, Michael Hayden, whom she said had misled her committee and the public.
Referring to the contrast between what CIA cables said about the actual interrogations and Hayden's portrayal of the interrogations, Feinstein said the CIA's own documents "presented a starkly different picture from Director Hayden's testimony before the committee." She added, "I remember clearly when Director Hayden briefed the committee (and) referred specifically to a tummy slap'… and presented the entire set of techniques as minimally harmful….They were not. The committee's report demonstrates that these techniques were very harmful and that the constraints that existed on paper in Washington did not match the way the techniques were used around the world."
Feinstein also accused Hayden of misleading the committee by saying the CIA had decided to destroy videotapes of interrogations because Congress had not requested them. "Director Hayden stated that if the committee had asked for the tapes they would have been providedbut of course the committee did not know the tapes existed," Feinstein said.
In addition, Feinstein said the agency misled and provided false information to Department of Justice officials who were investigating whether the CIA program was legal. It is not clear whether her statements indicate a desire on her part for the DOJ to reopen its now-closed investigation.
"The CIA provided inaccurate memoranda and explanations to the Department of Justice while its legal counsel was considering the legality of the coercive techniques," Feinstein said, noting that the DOJ relied on CIA assurances about the conduct of interrogations that were not "consistently or even routinely carried out" in the actual interrogations. She added that "in many cases important information was withheld from policy makers" for yearsand she provided specifics:
"The CIA didn't tell President Bush about the full nature of the [enhanced interrogation techniques] until April 2006. That's what the records indicate. The CIA similarly withheld information or provided false information to the CIA inspector general…in 2004. Incomplete and inaccurate information was used in documents provided to the Department of Justice and as a basis for President Bush's speech on September 6, 2006, in which he publicly acknowledged the CIA program for the first time. In all of these cases, other CIA officers acknowledged internally that information the CIA provided was wrong."
The CIA's obstruction continued until recently, Feinstein added, with the agency requesting redactions to the Senate report that were apparently intended to weaken its impact, rather than keep out of the public realm classified information that was legitimately sensitive. "The [requested] redactions to our report prevented a clear and understandable reading of our study and prevented us from substantiating the findings and conclusions…we objected."

-Glenn Greenwald at 3:14 p.m. EST



Look Forward, Not Backward, the leader instructs again
Barack Obama who notoriously protected all torturers from all forms of legal accountability based on his lawless, repellent and selectively applied decree that we should Look Forward, Not Backward today said much the same thing in response to this report:

In August, he acknowledged with casual language more suitable to describing a purchase of new socks that "we tortured some folks," but warned us not to get "too sanctimonious" about it. So if you're feeling sickened and outraged by today's revelations, just listen to the President: stop Looking Backward and being sanctimonious, and just forget about all this unpleasant business about torture just like he did.
-Glenn Greenwald at 2:51 p.m. EST


Ladies and Gentleman, Barack Obama and his administration
In all their brave and principled glory:

-Glenn Greenwald at 2:22 p.m. EST
Pure sadism: "Rectal rehydration," threats to rape and kill detainees' mothers

The Leaders of the Free and Civilized World did the following:

-Glenn Greenwald at 2:06 p.m. EST

Media role in torture
The U.S. media beyond what I explained above (most would not even call it "torture") - played a central role in first obscuring, then justifying, the Bush torture regime to the public. One of the most extreme examples was this Joe Klein column in The Guardian viciously mocking those who claimed the U.S. was torturing detainees ("total rubbish, of course"), and he even wrote this about detainees:

They wear orange jump suits, which are probably an improvement over their Afghan cave-wear (I would actually prefer they be dressed in pink tutus, to give them an appreciation of the freedoms accorded western ballerinas).

Liberal journalist Jonathan Alter wrote a Newsweek column expressly demanding that the U.S. Government use torture, headlined "Time to Think About Torture." It began: "In this autumn of anger, even a liberal can find his thoughts turning to … torture."
Now we have new examples. Today's Senate Committee report describes how Douglas Jehl, then a New York Times reporter, now The Washington Posts Foreign Editor, promised the CIA positive coverage of its torture program (a common practice among some DC national security reporters):

My colleague Dan Froomkin emails to say:

Many of the same news organizations you are trusting today to accurately inform you about the torture report were either naive or knowing dupes in a CIA misinformation campaign orchestrated by top CIA officials, that included leaks of information that was amazingly enough both classified and inaccurate at the same time.
Finding No. 10 of the summary reads as follows:

-Glenn Greenwald at 1:40 p.m. EST


[U]Destruction of "Zero Dark Thirty" Scenario[/U]
The report utterly decimated the central claim of "Zero Dark Thirty" that torture played a key role in finding Osama bin Laden (h/t: Farhad Manjoo)

[URL="https://prod01-cdn01.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/2014/12/feinstein.obl1_.png"]
[/URL]

-Glenn Greenwald at 12:59 p.m. EST

Piggishness of American exceptionalism: Marco Rubio Edition
Moments after the report was issued, Marco Rubio tweeted this in defense of CIA torture:

Yesterday, the very same Marco Rubio boasted of his efforts to impose sanctions on "human rights violators" in Venezuela:
Does anyone at all have any difficulty seeing why few people outside the U.S. media take seriously the lectures of the Leader of the Free World?
-Glenn Greenwald at 12:32 p.m. EST

Psychologists played key role in torture program, then profited greatly

This is not only a profound and disgraceful violation of all professional ethics, but also a perfect illustration of what the ACLU's Jameel Jaffer calls "the torture-industrial complex", as those torture psychologists received contracts totaling $81 million as part of their outsourced work:

[URL="https://prod01-cdn02.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/2014/12/feinstein3.png"]
[/URL]…


-Glenn Greenwald at 12:15 p.m. EST

CIA leaked classified information to the media for propaganda purposes
For all the claims in Washington about how leaking classified information is destructive and criminal, the CIA consistent with what the Obama administration frequently does routinely leaked classified information to the media to propagandize about their torture program. Will there be any criminal investigations the way there are when whistleblowers leak information that embarrasses (rather than serves) the government? Yes, that's a rhetorical question:

-Glenn Greenwald at 11:55 a.m. EST

More waterboarding, and more brutal, than previously known
Even for waterboarding, it seems clear that there were more than just the 3 known cases, and the waterboarding was more brutal than previously known:



- Glenn Greenwald at 11:51 a.m. EST Innocent people detained and tortured

From Dianne Feinstein's summary of the report:


[URL="https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/12/09/live-coverage-release-senate-torture-report#Feinstein1"]
-Glenn Greenwald at 11:31 a.m. EST[/URL]

Torture report released

The report was just released, and is online here, or here.

Glenn Greenwald at 11:14 a.m. ET

Feinstein comments

At roughly 11:00 am, Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein will make public comments about the report, although it's unclear if it will be released simultaneously. You can watch those comments here.

Glenn Greenwald at 10:58 a.m. ET
Media torture advocates

Col. Morris Davis, the retired Air Force Colonel who served as the Chief Prosecutor of the Military Commissions at Guantánamo until 2007 when he lost his job for criticizing the tribunal, notes that MSNBC's Joe Scarborough this morning explicitly defended the torture techniques, arguing: "whatever it takes to keep America safe." Aside from being the essence of the authoritarian mindset security über alles - it's quite striking that major television personalities in the U.S. explicitly justify the use of torture. Is there any other western country where that's true? After all, The Washington Post hired former Bush speechwriter Marc Theissen as a columnist after he wrote an entire book justifying torture (when used by the U.S.).

The U.S. has led the way in destroying the ostensible western taboo surrounding torture, which is why official torturers go free and torture advocates are featured in almost every major media outlet.

Glenn Greenwald at 7:11 a.m. ET