Rendition.
I went to see Rendition tonight which I found to be very good but, sadly, not brilliant.
I was taken by the bravery of a group of US film makers to be making a film depicting what the US is actually engaging in in it's war on a noun. And I did leave thinking that the mindset in the US must have changed a great deal since 9-11 - and those months afterwards - when criticism of Bush's policies were tantamount to treason.
Now we see a screen version of what actually happened to people like Maher Arar and what is most striking is not the utter immorality of torturing someone, but the total fucking pointlessness of it all. If someone is waterboarding you and subjecting you to electric shocks you will say literally anything to make them stop.
And, of course, unlike in this movie, the Bush thugs have never admitted that they got it totally wrong when they spirited Maher Arar off to Syria and are still claiming that he is a "terrorist suspect", despite the fact that the Canadian government have paid Arar $10 million in compensation, such is their shame for their hand in the affair.
The Bush thugs have pointedly refused to offer anything even resembling an apology:
And, of course, we have Mukasey about to be confirmed as US Attorney General: a man who isn't sure if waterboarding is torture.Even worse, it refused to reveal the "secret evidence" which it claimed it had on Arar – until the Canadian press got its claws on these "secret" papers and discovered they were hearsay evidence of an Arar visit to Afghanistan from an Arab prisoner in Minneapolis, Mohamed Elzahabi, whose brother, according to Arar, once repaired Arar's car in Montreal.
There was a lovely quote from America's Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff and Alberto Gonzales, the US attorney general at the time, that the evidence again Arar was "supported by information developed by US law enforcement agencies". Don't you just love that word "developed"? Doesn't it smell rotten? Doesn't it mean "fabricated"?
Fisk points out:
The New York Times readers at least spotted the immorality of Mukasey's remarks. A former US assistant attorney asked "how the United States could hope to regain its position as a respected world leader on the great issues of human rights if its chief law enforcement officer cannot even bring himself to acknowledge the undeniable verity that waterboarding constitutes torture...". As another reader pointed out, "Like pornography, torture doesn't require a definition."The movie did succeed in making me very angry, but only at the fact that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld will never go to jail for what they have done. And in any just world, where all were equal, they would face charges for the criminal behaviour they have indulged in.
Click title for trailer.
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