[Extensive coverage of the Zero Dark Thirty torture scandal here.]
Michael Moore, Inc.
by MARK EPSTEIN
I thought Michael Moore was supposed to be a director… I thought he was supposed to have made some documentaries…
I guess Michael Moore, having become “Inc.”, now has other priorities, such as propagandizing for those institutions that have “honored” him and his ‘fellow’ club-members (please don’t try any more “captatio benevolentiae”, Mike, of the kind my “fellow leftists” etc…; after the way you have treated Ralph Nader and even more after this piece, I doubt there will be any somewhat sane members of the human race who would consider you a ‘leftist’ of any kind…). I must say both the movie he defends and the essay he wrote to defend it are the ones that at this point should more appropriately be entitled “Sicko”…
Michael Moore has come out to “defend” Kathryn Bigelow’s “Zero Dark Thirty”. So let us take a look at this “defense” and contrast it with what is actually a careful, thorough, calm, balanced but devastating assessment, that of David Bromwich.
One of Moore’s chief arguments, following the desperate attempts to grab at straws by the director herself, is that actually “Zero Dark Thirty” is against torture, and in fact is an ethical film, a film that looks at the “morality” of torture instead of its “practicality”…
To ‘factually’ anchor this contention, Moore frames it by the alleged contrast in “torture” policies of the W Bush administration and those of the Obama administration.
For someone with the sort of background in documentary filmmaking and the at least partial investigative work this entails (at least done by others, consultants, etc.) this pseudo-factual architecture is perhaps the most egregious web of deceit in his whole essay… In fact its factual basis is as nonexistent as that in those political “vote for us, we have no achievements of our own to run on, but be scared, oh so scared of what the OTHER party could do…” ads, these days the bread-and-butter of autho-totalitarian electoral manipulation of fear that the one-party system with two right-wings the Empire has become (or party-politics as torture…)…
Has Michael Moore not been following any political news for the last 4 years? Has he digested even one story in the non-Korporate or “less-Korporate media”??
Moore’s essay is basically founded on the Obama promises (from his 2007-8 run) in the area of rights and foreign policy, vs. some of the W administration facts. Let’s start with torture: did the Obama administration actually stop the use of torture? Given what has leaked out of prisons in Afghanistan and those of proKonsular allies, that contention seems completely devoid of credibility and unfounded…
On the other hand what we DO know is that the Obama administration did everything it possibly could to NOT prosecute all those in the W administration that were guilty of masterminding, implementing, “legally” defending, etc. said practices of torture…
John Kiriakou, a former CIA agent, has instead been persecuted by the Obama administration, for REVEALING facts about the torture program(s). Kiriakou who, being a person who actually does have moral convictions, also was outraged by the government’s persecution of Aaron Swartz. Instead both the journalists and White House personnel guilty of revealing the identity of Valerie Plame Wilson, as in the case of those involved in the torture program(s), were never touched by US “justice” under either W Bush or Obama…
So much for the ‘moral high ground’…
One of the other major oppositions Moore tries to sell in this horror-travesty dressed as a fairy-tale, is that the film shows the opposition of: 1) the W administration, characterized by torture (immoral), no will to find or pursue Bin Laden, incapable of engaging in any “detective work”, and therefore complete lack of results vs. 2) the Obama administration, characterized by opposition to torture (moral), the will to find and pursue Bin-Laden, deeply engaged in “detective work”, and therefore … hey presto, Bin-Laden’s head on a platter… (yes the biblical echo is intentional dear Mike…)
Well Mr. Moore must think his ‘pals’ on the “left” really all are embodiments of the insults that Rahm Emanuel hurled at them… if he thinks his story amounts to any “detective work” of any kind whatsoever…
I think virtually any (I mean literally any) issue of “CounterPunch” in the last four years would have at the very minimum one article that would totally disprove Moore’s fantasies about the Obama administration.
Let’s start with those issues most closely related to torture and human rights in foreign policy, in other words Moore’s much touted alleged “morality”.
* Guantanamo? Never closed, still open for business, complete betrayal of electoral promises.
* Similar prisons, as for instance at Bagram in Afghanistan, or similar facilities in Pakistan, other third party proKonsular “allies” (i.e. accomplices): Open for business as usual, same as under W. (For one of many accounts cf. Andy Worthington “Bagram and Beyond”.)
* Renditions? Continue as before, or rather, more secretively than ever… Again, absolutely no prosecution or even the faintest attempt at enforcing legal accountability in this area…
*Drone strikes (remember the Nazi V1 and V2 programs: those are the sort of powers that like state-terror and legal non-accountability): at their acme under Obama, with the overwhelming majority of victims being innocent civilians (except in the tyrannical Obama administrations serial lies about the results and consequences). Decidedly Mr. Moore’s moral arguments are getting more ballistic by the minute…
* Targeted assassinations: the exact opposite of the Moore narrative. It is Obama who has introduced them, boasts of personally approving them, and in the processes has put the Constitution through the shredder (he has on so many different issues it is difficult to keep count…), something the W administration, at least officially, did not engage in. Obama actually has a US citizen assassinated without any proof or having to defend (as if it really could be defensible in any case, unless Mr. Moore’s morality comes with a defense of the death penalty, etc.) its proofs, decisions, courses of action, etc. in a court of law… In fact Obama has reversed to worse than Richard Nixon, since it was the Church committee and other similar developments that led to the exposure and shut-down (at least from what we know overtly) of the sorts of programs that the Obama administration is now pursuing with a vengeance (Bigelow’s kind of ‘vengeance’…). For a discussion of some of these continuing practices cf. Noah Gimble “Obama and Rendition”.
