This Can't Be Happening!

The film The Act Of Killing is the big buzz in the world of cinema. The documentary about death squad killers in Indonesia in 1965 has to be one of the oddest films in recent memory. Imagine a filmmaker, in this case 38-year-old Joshua Oppenheimer, handing over control of his film to a handful of psychopathic killers so they can re-enact how they murdered their countrymen and -women.

The result is a riotous confusion of genres that both exacerbates and delights the senses and the mind. At the showing I saw in Philadelphia, several comments afterwards were critical and dismissive of the film — as in, how dare this guy give such a powerful venue of expression to such loathsome human beings.

It was a very good point.

Anwar Congo, center in hat, and his killer pals driving in Jakarta. At right, filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer.

It’s like someone handed over the reins of a film production crew to Boston mob butcher Whitey Bulger and said, “How did you do it, Whitey? As we just heard in testimony in your trial, how did you strangle that young woman while her stepfather watched? Here, use this young woman volunteer and re-enact it for the cameras. Then, we’ll get the stepfather to re-enact how he dragged her dead body down to the cellar and extracted all her teeth with pliers. It’ll be great! And, Whitey … this is performance art, so have fun doing it. Smile a lot.”

That absurd scenario begins to get at the bizarre cinematic artifact Joshua Oppenheimer has wrought on film. The only difference is the Indonesian death squad killers who were strangling people and chopping off their heads did those deeds back in 1965 for political reasons, not Boston mob priorities. For me, that makes all the difference, turning a self-indulgent, macabre glorification of crime into a unique and politically potent work of genius.

I have been deeply ashamed of my country many times. The Nixon Christmas bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong was one such time, when hospitals, schools and dikes were targeted. The invasion of Iraq was another. Washington’s silence over the fatal Israeli Commando raid on the Gaza Peace Flotilla–in which a 19-year-old unarmed American boy was murdered–was a third. But I have rarely been as ashamed and disgusted as I was Saturday reading that US Attorney General Eric Holder had sent a letter to the Russian minister of justice saying that the US would “not seek the death penalty” in its espionage case against National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, promising that even if the US later brought added charges against Snowden after obtaining him, they would not include any death penalty, and vowing that if Snowden were handed over by Russia to the US, he would “not be tortured.”

So it has come to this: That the United States has to promise (to Russia!) that it will not torture a prisoner in its control — a US citizen at that — and so therefore that person, Edward Snowden, has no basis for claiming that he should be “treated as a refugee or granted asylum.”

Why does Holder have to make these pathetic representations to his counterpart in Russia?

Because Snowden has applied for asylum saying that he is at risk of torture or execution if returned to the US to face charges for leaking documents showing that the US government is massively violating the civil liberties and privacy of every American by monitoring every American’s electronic communications.

Snowden has made that claim in seeking asylum because he knows that another whistleblower, Pvt. Bradley Manning, was in fact tortured by the US for months, and held without trial in solitary confinement in a Marine military brig for nearly a year, part of the time naked, before being finally put on trial in a kangaroo court, where the judge (a mid-ranking officer surely thinking about the impact her verdict will have on her promotion prospects) is as much prosecutor as jurist, and where his guilt was declared in advance by the President of the United States — the same president who has also already publicly declared Snowden guilty too. (How, incidentally, can a military “court” render any real justice, when the Judge and Jury are officers who are beholden to superior officers, up to and including their commander in chief, and who have to consider how their decisions will affect their careers in the service?)

US Attorney General Eric Holder (l) and NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden

 
The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.
– D.H. Lawrence

 
The moderate conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks recently wrote a column titled “Men on the Threshold” employing a famous image of John Wayne in the 1956 film The Searchers as a symbol of the American male worker facing a growing crisis of unemployment.

Brooks certainly has the right to do what he likes with such mythic imagery. And he writes, “Classics can be interpreted in different ways.” But in this instance, in the name of truth and justice, he should be brought up on charges of premeditated and aggravated misuse of myth.

David Brooks and Ethan Edwards "on the threshold"

Ethan Edwards is considered Wayne’s best acting role. There’s none of the usual John Wayne swaggering big-man nonsense with sidekicks like Dean Martin or Fabian. Here, he’s a mean and cruel sonuvabitch who sets out with a younger man across the barren Texas plains to find a girl kidnapped by Indians whose family they had massacred. The search lasts seven years. We learn he intends to kill the girl (Natalie Wood) once he finds her, since she has been ruined by becoming the sexual mate of an Indian.

In the end, Edwards softens enough to return the girl to her family. In the famous scene at the end, Edwards stands silhouetted in the doorway of a rough home with the dusty Texas plains behind him. While the family is rejoicing and welcoming its lost daughter back into the fold of civilization, Edwards stands alone, apparently unable to enter. As the popular interpretation goes, his hard cold-bloodedness was what brought the girl back to civilization, but that same violent temperament won’t permit him to fit into the domestic scene inside. He turns and walks off, presumably to find other frontiers.

No argument, this is a powerful image of American history and Manifest Destiny from a truly magnificent classic film. But, let’s not kid ourselves and New York Times readers, it has nothing to do with the plight of American male workers in 2013. It’s a case of expropriating a classic, tough masculine image from popular culture to represent a theme Brooks wants to emphasize. At best, it’s facile; at worst, cynically opportunistic.

The tumble of revelations and developments involving the Internet has produced a pastiche of truths that, when examined closely, show links between what might usually be considered separate news stories.

This week we encounter a stunning ruling by the judge in the Bradley Manning case while, in a totally different setting, the people who come as close to governance of the World Wide Web as we get can’t decide on a major Internet issue that significantly affects your freedom.

On Thursday, the Manning case’s presiding judge Colonel Denise Lind — who is also determining the verdict — announced that she is going to consider the government’s contention that Manning was “aiding the enemy” when he blew his whistle. The defense had moved that she drop that charge. Yesterday, my colleague John Grant wrote incisively on the social and political impact of this ruling. I want to say a bit about the view of the Internet that drives Colonel Lind’s decision.

Meanwhile, the W3C (short of World Wide Web Consortium), which is is as close as we come to a world “authority” on web browser standards, continues to grapple with a major issue popularly called “Do Not Track”. It’s an attempt by the Consortium to agree on “standards” (the do-and-don’t rules for web development) for tracking: the way that somebody you don’t know, have never heard of and have certainly given no permission to is recording your every move on the Web and doing whatever the heck it wants with that information.

The Elusive Don't Track Option and Judge Denise Lind (sketch by Clark Stoeckley, Bradley Manning Support Network)
 

The two developments are linked by a profoundly perverted notion of the Internet and a destructive vision of what it should become. They highlight, taken in tandem, a truly frightening development.

Succintly put, if you have an Internet that acts as it’s supposed to, everybody is going to have access to whatever is published. Effectively, anything you publish on the Internet could, given the right circumstances, “aid” an enemy and you’ll never know it. That’s the character of the Internet — it’s open. On the other hand, it’s also supposed to protect your privacy: what you decide to publish is open, who and what you are isn’t…until they started tracking.

 
We now have clarity from a full-bird colonel in judicial robes that Bradley Manning is to be charged with “aiding the enemy.” OK, not much of a surprise here. Colonel Denise Lind’s ruling seems pretty predictable.

Her ruling may make things simple for all the right-leaning pod-people who salute everything a field grade military officer says, but for the rest of us, it raises a profound and rather perplexing question: Exactly who is the “enemy” in this case?

Court martial scene with Colonel Denise Lind, lower right, and Pvt. Manning in drawings by Clark Stoeckley

The military and intelligence agency brass and their enablers will tell you it’s some nefarious and nebulous network called al Qaeda, which we should all know by now is a substitute for our old Cold War enemies and fictional entities like Spectre in the original Ian Fleming spy pulps. That is, al Qaeda has become The Boogie Man.

American patriots on the right will get no argument from me that there are, indeed, people and affiliations that mean real harm to Americans (including me) and that we need to protect ourselves from them. But that doesn’t address the question whether al Qaeda and other “terrorist” groups are being exploited as the boogie man for the convenience of the Pentagon, the CIA, NSA and demagogues like New York Congressman Peter King.

I fear a lot of “the hunt for al Qaeda” narrative is standard militarist fear-mongering employed to justify embarrassing and often illegal secret behavior that would shrivel up if it were really exposed to the light of day. Boogie men like al Qaeda are also useful to advance the careers and interests of the usual gang of capitalists and oppressive wealthy dominators that made this nation what it is today — the nation that Bill O’Reilly was wondering the other night might be going down the tubes like Old Rome.

Ah, the rule of law. How often we hear our government leaders angrily demand that the rest of the world adhere to this sacred stricture, most recently as it demands that countries — even countries with which the US has signed no extradition treaty like Russia or China — honor the US charges leveled against National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden and send him to the US for trial.

But the rule of law, in truth, means little to the US, which routinely thumbs its nose at the whole notion.

Take the case of Robert Seldon Lady, the former CIA station chief in Rome Italy. Lady, along with 21 other CIA operatives, was charged years ago with the illegal 2003 kidnapping off a street in Milan of a man that the US claimed was a suspected terrorist. Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr was thrown into a van and then secretly renditioned first to a secret CIA “black site,” and later to Egyptian police, who, he says, tortured him for the US. Four years later, Nasr was released after an Egyptian court ruled that he was not guilty of anything.

Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr was kidnapped off a Milan street by a gang of CIA agents led by CIA station chief Robert Lady, now convicted, sentenced and being sought by Italy on a fugitive warrant, but protected from extradition by the US

The Snowden saga continues to get weirder.

Let’s just pretend for a moment that the US government has it right, and that Edward Snowden, the renegade CIA and NSA employee who signed up with a government intelligence contractor, Booz Allen Hamilton, so as to steal a huge swath of National Security Agency data that has the potential to destroy US intelligence operations around the globe, lay bare the NSA’s secret architecture and alert the world’s terrorists to how they are being monitored, is as vile traitor out to destroy America.
Where is the last place under such circumstances that the US would want him to wind up? For me, I’d say there’d be three of them: Iran, China and Russia.

Trapped in a Moscow airport: Is Russia where the US wants Snowden to end up?

I received the text message from my buddy blasting the acquittal of George Zimmerman minutes before I boarded an airplane in London in route to South Africa.

To say I was not surprised by the acquittal handed down by the predominately white, all-female jury is an understatement.

That verdict freeing wannabe cop Zimmerman, whose self-defense excuse rested on his conflicted claims that he shot a teen through the heart during a confrontation that Zimmerman started – after Zimmerman ignored explicit orders from police to stand-down – is so symbolic of so many structural problems that have corroded the core of American society since its colonial-era start.

Unarmed teen Trayvon Martin was walking to his father’s home after purchasing candy and ice tea when targeted by Zimmerman who – seeing a black teen wearing a hoodie – told police dispatchers Martin was “up to no good” and looked like he was on drugs. Zimmerman’s observations, made at night in the rain, about Martin being up-2-no-good and on-drugs reeked of racial profiling – a fact downplayed by prosecution and studiously avoided by defense during Zimmerman’s trial.

While a part of me wanted to side with my buddy’s ire at Zimmerman’s not even getting a wrist-slap conviction on a lesser charge for his punk admission that he killed a kid who he said beat him up during a scuffle, another side of me remained detached, reminded as I was of the details in so many stories that I’ve covered in thirty-plus years of being a journalist.

I’ve seen too many racially unbalanced juries render acquittal verdicts in too many race-tainted cases where clear evidence of the white defendant’s culpability existed – culpability obscured by lack-luster prosecution and other perverse judicial system procedures/postures.
Travon Martin, 17, slain by a white gunman while buying some candy

In Edward Everett Hale’s short story “The Man Without a Country,” US Army Lt. Philip Nolan, following a court-martial, is exiled from his country, his citizenship snatched away, leaving him doomed to sail the seven seas confined to a Navy vessel, unable to make any country his home. His crime: being seduced by a treacherous leader to betray the US of A, the country of his birth.

Edward Snowden, 30, child of a career Coast Guard officer who signed up in the military after 9-11 to defend his country, later going to work at the CIA and the National Security Agency, was also seduced by treacherous leaders — first President George Bush, and then President Barack Obama–into participating in actions that betrayed his country, actions that breached the First and Fourth Amendments of the US Constitution that as a military officer and later a CIA and NSA employee he had sworn to “uphold and defend against all enemies, foreign and domestic.’

At first glance, we have a case of reality mimicking fiction here, with two once promising young military men being led astray and ending up adrift in a pathetic exile. But in truth, fiction and reality diverge greatly from one another at that point.

Lt. Nolan turns on his homeland and then spends the rest of his misearble life — 55 years — regretting his youthful action.

Snowden, however, gradually woke up to realize he had been deceived by the vile propaganda of a fake “War” on terror, and, in his position at the NSA, came to see that the two men who had been president during his young and impressionable adulthood were shredding the US Constitution, spreading fear among the public in order to be handed the power and the money to build an unimaginably complex and omnipresent secret surveillance program in service to a national security state that was destroying anything to do with real democracy in the United States.
Two men without a country: The fictional Philip Nolan, and the very real Edward Snowden

 
When people think of Florida, they think of oranges and pink flamingos, palm trees and beaches, the blue-green ocean. They think of Disney and margaritas. … But it has a feral heart, a teeming center that would rage out of control if not for the concrete and rebar that keeps it caged.
 
-Lisa Unger, from Black Out
 

As I watched the trial of George Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida, and absorbed the verdict of six White or Hispanic women jurors, my involvements with race in Florida as a kid all rushed front and center in my mind. The trial was an amazing racial lightning rod saturated with the unpleasant legacy of race in America, especially in the South. It seems appropriate that it unfolded in Florida, which has become the nation’s most bizarre and confused state.

Given this, it’s easy to understand why Seminole County Circuit Judge Debra Nelson sternly kept race out of the trial. In the end, while it may have tempered sensationalism in her court, the decision feels like an example of the problem itself and very much a real shortcoming of the trial. The way things work, thanks to the double jeopardy issue, the State cannot appeal the verdict. Had it gone the other way, appeal geniuses like Alan Dershowitz had already begun working the angles for a lengthy appeal process, like he was ready to do for O.J. Simpson and did for Claus Von Bulow.

As it stands, the only appeal process George Zimmerman has to face is possible threats to his life. His security concerns are no doubt serious; one might say, while he may have “walked,” it might be prudent if he walked fast under an assumed name to a secret location.

Judge Debra Nelson, Trayvon Martin and Trayvon's mother, Sybrina Fulton

The most amazing thing about the trial was that the dead victim seemed to be the one on trial. I was often confused which legal team was the “prosecutor” and which one was the “defense.” It felt to me that the defense attorneys, especially Don West, were acting like prosecutors, while the prosecutors were acting like defense lawyers. As it turned out, the real prosecutors were acting pretty ineffectually in that role. You had to wonder whether this might be because it’s anathema to prosecutors to seriously question the actions or motives of a police officer or — in this case, a “wanna-be cop.”

In an interesting footnote to the case, George’s father, Robert Zimmerman, a full-time magistrate from 2000-2006 in Virginia, wrote an e-book entitled Florida v Zimmerman: Uncovering the Malicious Prosecution of My Son George in which he calls the Congressional Black Caucus a “pathetic, self-serving group of racists… advancing their purely racist agenda.” He also writes that the NAACP “simply promotes racism and hatred for their own, primarily finical [sic], interests.”