A World That Has Gone Mad

This year's Best Documentary Oscar went to Alex Gibney's Taxi To The Dark Side, an exploration of the inhumane and criminal practices by the US government in interrogating suspects in the war on terror, particularly a taxi driver named Dilawar, murdered at Bagram Air Force Base under suspicious circumstances. I will submit that next year's Best Documentary Oscar will go to Standard Operating Procedure, Errol Morris' look back at the horror of Abu Ghraib. Political art of this stripe is usually ahead of the curve, and clearly people want to know more about how the rule of law has been undermined in the age of Bush. People are looking to peel back the layers.

This, he argues, is the paradox at the heart of the Abu Ghraib scandal. Yes, they are an exposé - without them, we wouldn't know about the horrors of the prison. After all, the US authorities went to considerable lengths to cover up what was happening. But the photographs are also about concealment. "I am now really interested in how the photographs encouraged us not to investigate Abu Ghraib," says Morris. "They create a barrier you don't want to walk beyond."

Morris, speaking in a Berlin hotel, is used to asking questions, not answering them, but he is gracious and humorous. He was told many times during the making of SOP that he was "much too late", and that Abu Ghraib was no longer a news story. He disagrees, and takes issue with the idea that the disgraced guards - the so-called "bad apples" he interviews in the documentary - should show more obvious evidence of remorse. His own attitude toward Lynndie England and others is far from hostile, and his film at times comes across as strangely sympathetic. "I have a lot of trouble interviewing people I don't like," he says. "Maybe I have to like them [the guards] - but I do like them. I am certainly engaged by them. I am not interviewing them because I want to pass judgment. There are all these odd ideas that you do an interview to get someone to confess or apologise. It is almost a Christian idea of the interview. Because I don't do that, I think I make people angry [...]

If you ask me, are these pictures of torture, I would say yes. Yet, they are defined by the US military as 'standard operating procedure'. You're talking about a world that has gone mad."

And this mad world continues to unfold. Last week we learned that the CIA used the British island of Diego Garcia as a refueling stop for transporting terror suspects gained through the practice of extraordinary rendition, without the knowledge of the British government. And we learned about the process of military commissions at Guantanamo Bay, which are at the very least rigged.

Colonel (Morris) Davis's criticism of the commissions has been escalating since he resigned in October, telling the Washington Post that he had been pressured by politically appointed senior Defense officials to pursue cases deemed "sexy" and of "high interest" (such as the 9/11 cases now being pursued) in the run-up to the 2008 elections. Davis, once a staunch defender of the commissions process, elaborated on his reasons in a December 10, 2007, Los Angeles Times op-ed. "I concluded that full, fair and open trials were not possible under the current system," he wrote. "I felt that the system had become deeply politicized and that I could no longer do my job effectively." [...]

When asked if he thought the men at Guantánamo could receive a fair trial, Davis provided the following account of an August 2005 meeting he had with Pentagon general counsel William Haynes--the man who now oversees the tribunal process for the Defense Department.

"[Haynes] said these trials will be the Nuremberg of our time," recalled Davis, referring to the Nazi tribunals in 1945, considered the model of procedural rights in the prosecution of war crimes. In response, Davis said he noted that at Nuremberg there had been some acquittals, which had lent great credibility to the proceedings.

"I said to him that if we come up short and there are some acquittals in our cases, it will at least validate the process," Davis continued. "At which point, [Haynes's] eyes got wide and he said, 'Wait a minute, we can't have acquittals. If we've been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off? We can't have acquittals. We've got to have convictions.'"

For the record, this odious character William Haynes resigned today.

A couple documentaries are not going to restore the soul of the country and reverse these damaging policies. The Office of Professional Responsibility investigation into the practice of waterboarding and the role of the Justice Department in authorizing the technique is a better start. But it's almost overwhelming. A lot of people are musing that what's driving the high turnout in the Democratic primaries is talk of hope or change or belief. What's driving the turnout is anger. Unadulterated anger with what the President and the Republican Party has done with this country. And that anger is like a scab that we have to keep picking at. We must know what's been done in our name.

Michael Moore Is Fat

This documentary questioning the tactics of Michael Moore, finding him impossible to reach for an interview himself, and revealing that he actually held on-camera interviews with Roger Smith during the making of "Roger & Me" and left them out of the final cut (which was really about him trying to interview Roger Smith and getting stiffed), will undoubtedly get a lot of play on the right. But this is kind of a well-known thing; I remember a Might Magazine article in 1995 about this exact same subject. They even dressed up a guy like a gorilla and followed around Moore, trying to get an interview with him, a tactic Moore then used HIMSELF for TV Nation.

Michael Moore is pretty deeply flawed as a filmmaker and an individual, something he knows; in The Big One, he shows himself flying first-class while the crew flies coach and signing a book deal with a major publisher the likes of which he criticizes in his work. His films are polemics and he structures them purposefully to further his goals. He's known to be fairly belligerent to his staff.

And, so? Michael Moore speaks for himself and doesn't even speak that loudly. Since Fahrenheit 9/11 he's pretty much gone underground. Moore is a filmmaker who rabble-rouses to get publicity for his films. But even the filmmakers of this hit piece on him recognize his impact:

The two were and still are fans of all his movies — including the polarizing "Fahrenheit 9/11," which grossed over $119 million and won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival — and initially wanted to do a biography on him. They traveled to his childhood home of Davison, Mich., visited his high school and traced his early days in politics and journalism.

"The fact that he made documentaries entertaining was extremely influential and got all kinds of people out to see them," said Melnyk, whose previous films with Caine include 1998's "Junket Whore." "Let's face it, he made documentaries popular and that is great for all documentary filmmakers."

"All of these films — `Super Size Me,' `An Inconvenient Truth' — we've all been riding in his wake," said Caine. "There's a nonfiction film revolution going on and we're all beneficiaries of that. For that point alone, he's worth celebrating."

It's not Moore so much as the other fine creators of documentary filmmaking - who have been there all along, but only now can get people out to the theaters - that are the real threat to conservative propagandists. They focus on Moore because he's an inviting target, easy to caricature and therefore dismiss, and there are some legitimate criticisms. But he's an individual who speaks for himself alone.