Sidney Blumenthal: "From Norman Rockwell To Abu Ghraib"

[Hissyspit]

http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2007/04/26/torture_policy

From Norman Rockwell to Abu Ghraib
To understand how Bush justifies a torture policy that is the bane of our nation, consider the sentimental cowboy art that decks his Oval Office walls.

http://www.imgred.com/

Editor's note: Parts of this article will be published in different form by the Nexus Institute of Amsterdam, which held a conference on kitsch that the author attended in November 2006.

By Sidney Blumenthal

April 26, 2007 | Having written extensively on the Bush administration's torture policy for Salon, I concluded, in light of the shocking photographs from Abu Ghraib, that the visual medium is the most powerful and penetrating way to communicate the policy. More than two years ago, I brought the idea of making a documentary on the Bush policy to Alex Gibney, the director of "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. Alex shared my sense of urgency, and "Taxi to the Dark Side" will premiere April 27 at the Tribeca Film Festival. (Alex is the director; I am executive producer.)

Through the film runs the story of an Afghan taxi driver, known only as Dilawar, completely innocent of any ties to terrorism, who was tortured to death by interrogators in the U.S. prison at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. "Taxi to the Dark Side" traces the evolution of the Bush policy from Bagram (Dilawar's interrogators speak in the film) to Guantánamo (we filmed the official happy tour) to Abu Ghraib; its roots in sensory deprivation experiments decades ago that guided the CIA in understanding torture; the opposition within the administration from the military and other significant figures (the former general counsel of the Navy, Alberto Mora, and former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, Lawrence Wilkerson, explain how that internal debate went, while John Yoo, one of its architects, defends it); the congressional battle to restore the standard of the Geneva Convention that forbids torture (centered on John McCain's tragic compromise); and the sudden popularity of the Fox TV show "24" in translating torture into entertainment by means of repetitious formulations of the bogus ticking-time-bomb scenario.

Yet "Taxi to the Dark Side" is more than an exposé of policy. Its irrefutable images are the counterpoint to the peculiar aesthetics propagated in the age of George W. Bush, in which, through the contradictory styles of softening nostalgia and hardening cruelty, the president and his followers seek to justify their actions not only to the public but also to themselves.

The notion that there might be an aesthetic that informs the Bush presidency would seem to be an unfair and artificial imposition on a man who prizes his intuition ("I'm a gut player") and openly derides complication ("I don't do nuance") -- that is, if Bush himself did not insist on the connection...

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Bush understands his war in Iraq through his Western artifacts -- a West, by the way, without any manifestation of Native Americans. The more resistant the reality in Iraq, the tighter he clings to the symbolism of the West. And so do those who support him. "America has a vital interest in preventing the emergence of Iraq as a Wild West for terrorists," Sen. John McCain declared on April 11. But there is a dark side to the Wild West show of the conservative mind (just as there was to the Wild West). "We have to work the dark side," said Vice President Dick Cheney a week after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

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[izzie]

1. I would think he was right. I recall reading this

One time in WW2 FDR was unhappy that we did not have the will to fight as hard as he liked so he let pictures of dead Americans on a beach and flouting in the water to be printed by Life. It did the trick or so said. I am not sure this is all true but many things were not shown in the US in WW2 as our culture was so that it was just shocking to the pop. True or not this WH has to think pictures talk as no dead men coming home are shown, yet dead sons of Saddam are shown along with Saddam, and the rest of the pictures from that prison never came out and we were told they would be. DOD let Congress see them. Do you recall we were going to see them?