7 ways “Zero Dark Thirty” excuses torture

Thu, 10 Jan 2013 18:31:00 +0000

On January 11th, 11 years to the day after the Bush administration opened its notorious prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow’s deeply flawed movie about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, opens nationwide. The filmmakers and distributors are evidently ignorant of the significance of the date -- a perfect indication of the carelessness and thoughtlessness of the film, which will unfortunately substitute for actual history in the minds of many Americans.

The sad fact is that Zero Dark Thirty could have been written by the tight circle of national security advisors who counseled President George W. Bush to create the post-9/11 policies that led to Guantanamo, the global network of borrowed “black sites” that added up to an offshore universe of injustice, and the grim torture practices -- euphemistically known as “enhanced interrogation techniques” -- that went with them. It’s also a film that those in the Obama administration who have championed non-accountability for such shameful policies could and (evidently did) get behind. It might as well be called Back to the Future, Part IV, for the film, like the country it speaks to, seems stuck forever in that time warp moment of revenge and hubris that swept the country just after 9/11.

America’s growing intolerance

Tue, 29 Mar 2011 17:30:00 +0000

This piece originally appeared on TomDispatch.

Just in case you thought that "political correctness" had been thoroughly discredited in the culture wars of the 1990s, it's back -- and this time it's being treated as a stalking horse for terrorism and getting pummeled all over again.

You only had to listen to the recent hearings convened by New York Republican Congressman Peter King on radicalization and the Muslim religion to know that, if the ascending right in Washington (and elsewhere) has its way, the age of tolerance in America is over. In the name of putting political correctness in its grave, a surprisingly sizeable contingent of politicians, judges, and other influential figures are now calling for transforming draconian behavior -- that once would have made Americans blanche -- into the order of the day.

Blaming Political Correctness for Terrorism

Salon.com > Karen J. Greenberg

7 ways “Zero Dark Thirty” excuses torture

America’s growing intolerance