open Democracy News Analysis - Taxi to the Dark Side: an open letter, Sidney Blumenthal - Comments

bfearn on "Taxi to the Dark Side: an open letter"

bfearn — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 05:09:23 +0000

The 'good' guys must tread carefully in America. If you step right up and speak as if the truth will be accepted you will be marginalized as quickly as Obama's former pastor. As an actor once said, referring to America in general, "You don't want the truth" and he was surprised how it worked out for him and he wasn't even close to the truth. The anti-truth factions are so powerful in America that real change is impossible and I don't use the word impossible lightly. It's all too bad and very sad but then America never got off to a very good start did it?
Try any one of the 50 chapters in this book for some of the 'truths'.
www.amoralamerica.info

SamEllison on "Taxi to the Dark Side: an open letter"

SamEllison — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 04:41:48 +0000

Well I guess if Bill Maher has to put up with 9-11 conspiracy hecklers we do too. Please don't blame the 49.9 percent of Americans that never voted for Bush/Cheney. Sidney Blumenthal has been speaking truth to power through-out the Bush43 admin when few people would. His words rang true and carried with them the weight of a former White House official under Clinton42. I would hope there is a position with-in the Executive Branch for him under Clinton44. Another open letter; Madame Ambassador, One of my favorite White House reporters once called you the Ambassador of Propaganda, he now reports from Rome, Italy. Did you have anything to do with Mr Dinmore's reassignment? Do you think weakening the power of the press has made America stronger or weaker? Our government has in the past benefited by having four strong pillars, Congress, Executive, Judicial and a free press. Presently three of the four pillars have been weakened by the admin that you are a member of. Would you please explain how this could make America stronger?

paul.carline on "Taxi to the Dark Side: an open letter"

paul.carline — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 10:35:08 +0000

A largely admirable letter (though, as gautams has pointed out, one not free of the common self-delusions about the tradition of American integrity and honour) but one which, perhaps predictably, is flawed by its unquestioning acceptance of the official myth of 9/11. That 9/11 was an inside job is now so well evidenced that it is really a "no-brainer". I have recently been challenging people to list one single verifiable fact which supports the official story. I have even offered them £100 if they can do so. No-one has taken up the challenge. I'm happy to repeat the challenge here because I am completely confident that not a single core element of the official story can be shown to be true - leaving it as merely a theory (a conspiracy theory), one which is wholly unsupported by the facts. If Mr. Blumenthal thinks that the Bush administration's endorsement of torture damages America's reputation, just imagine what the acknowledgement that the 9/11 attacks were planned and executed by elements within the US administration (with the likely assistance of agencies of other countries) would do to that reputation - both inside America and globally. Mr. Blumenthal could be accused of being preoccupied more with America's image than with the actual physical and mental pain inflicted on those tortured, who are thankfully relatively few in number. Perhaps he should now address the moral (and image) issue of the reliably estimated 5.2 million deaths directly attributable to US and UK actions in Afghanistan and Iraq since 9/11 (see www.mwcnews.net/Gideon-Polya/ ) - the direct consequence of the public and media acceptance of the myth of Islamic terrorism and al-Qaeda (a database of CIA assets, as Robin Cook pointed out before his untimely death). Media complicity in the bogus 'war on terror' is one of the most disgraceful aspects of this sorry tale. It continues. Did any of these stories make the headlines? - last year the FBI publicly admitted that it had no evidence linking Osama bin Laden to 9/11; - this year NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology - the body charged with producing a report on the collapse of the Twin Towers) conceded that it had no explanation for their collapse; - Scottish engineer Gordon Ross carried out a mathematical analysis of the official 'pancake' collapse theory and demonstrated conclusively that it was impossible; - the US Pilots for 911 Truth organisation decoded the flight data recorder information from the black box which NTSB claims was on Flight 77 (the one which allegedly hit the Pentagon). The data prove conclusively that whichever plane the box was on, it could not have hit the Pentagon. Much of the clear evidence for government complicity attaches to 9/11 and the US government. But it would be a mistake to believe that our own UK government is any less corrupt. We have our own 'home-grown terror myth' in the inconsistent official account of the London bombings of 7/7. 9/11, 7/7, Bali, Madrid, Mumbai and Istanbul all fit into the pattern of state-sponsored false-flag terrorism which has been the propaganda weapon of choice for corrupt regimes since at least the Reichstag fire of 1933 and the 'Operation Himmler' actions of 1939.

gautams on "Taxi to the Dark Side: an open letter"

gautams — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 02:35:02 +0000

In an otherwise truthful and compelling letter, Blumenthal says: "Since the revolutionary war, at the order of George Washington, Americans have consistently opposed torture as a policy. Only one president, George W Bush, has adopted torture as a policy. This administration stands outside more than the international treaties we have signed and previous presidents have upheld. This administration stands beyond the American tradition and values." This is not only false within the US (see the Channel 4 video at http://informationclearinghouse.info/article8451.htm) but as is well known, outside as well. The School of the Americas didn't write up a torture manual for nothing. Just ask the people of various countries in Central and South America.

Taxi to the Dark Side: an open letter, Sidney Blumenthal

Wed, 17 Oct 2007 16:52:43 +0000

Karen Hughes
Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs
U.S. Department of State
2201 C St. NW
Washington, DC 20520

Dear Karen Hughes:

You may recall that we met briefly in January 2001, during the transition to the Bush administration, when you dropped by my office in the White House. You were filled with enthusiasm and I wished you good luck. Now I am writing you as the executive producer of a documentary, Taxi to the Dark Side (directed by Alex Gibney), to invite you to a private preview in Washington on 18 October 2007. The film has been described by the New York Times as "a meticulous examination of American policy on the interrogation of prisoners. It traces the scandals at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere to official changes of policy originating in the vice president's office and approved by the secretary of defense. We see documents listing approved methods of interrogation, including waterboarding, which simulates drowning."

The film includes interviews with military interrogators, victims and families of those tortured, and with members of the Bush administration who opposed the policy, such as former general counsel of the navy, Alberto Mora, and Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief-of-staff to secretary of state Colin Powell.

Sidney Blumenthal is a former assistant and senior adviser to President Clinton. He is the author of How Bush Rules: Chronicles of a Radical Regime (Princeton University Press, 2006).

He writes a column for Salon.

Among Sidney Blumenthal's recent articles in openDemocracy:

"The Libby cabal" (13 June 2007)

"A legal noose around Bush" (27 June 2007)

"Lady Bird Johnson: a political journey" (16 July 2007 )

"The politics of protection" (1 August 2007)

"Colin Powell's responsibility" (15 August 2007)

"After the White House: discordant tunes, fading glory" (29 August 2007)

"The American politics of Iraqi war" (17 September 2007)

"Dan Rather, CBS, and George W Bush" (3 October 2007)

Taxi to the Dark Side has won the prizes for best documentary at the Tribeca, Newport and Ojai film festivals, will be aired this month on major television channels throughout Europe, is being shown by special request at the European Union's annual ministerial meeting, and will be distributed commercially by Think Films in theatres throughout the United States and Europe in January 2008, after which it will be broadcast on the Discovery Channel. The Times calls Taxi "devastating." The Guardian of London says its documentation is "irrefutable".

One defence-department official, believing the administration policy on detainees and torture to be illegal and counterproductive, told me that in his and others' efforts to reverse it they approached you as a last hope. After all, you have virtually unrestricted access to the president. But he recounted that you rebuffed them, and described your attitude as dismissive.

Your complicity in the torture policy is one reason that I am writing you. Despite the futility of those inside the administration in bringing the problem to you, you still remain in place to redress it. As the under-secretary of state for public diplomacy, responsible for defending America's reputation in the world, you must engage the issue that has most seriously damaged our image. Your obligation will continue so long as you hold your post. Those who care about the good name of the United States will not cease viewing you as a last resort, even if you disdain or ignore them, because they cling to the desperate hope that a nagging conscience or its sudden awakening will compel you actually to do your job.

If you were to start performing your mission in earnest, you would have to persuade the president and his spokespeople to acknowledge the truth of their policy. On 4 October, the New York Times reported that in 2005 the justice department under former attorney-general Alberto Gonzales issued a secret opinion justifying torture despite President Bush's repeated claim, "We do not torture." According to the Times: "The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures." Then deputy attorney-general James Comey opposed the policy and "told colleagues at the department that they would all be 'ashamed' when the world eventually learned of it." When the Times's story broke, White House press secretary Dana Perino responded with a familiar refrain: "We do not torture."

Yet the revelations in the Times fit with those disclosed by the former head of the justice-department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), Jack Goldsmith, in his new book, The Terror Presidency. Goldsmith was appointed to this highly sensitive position because he was trusted politically as a conservative, a member in good standing of the Federalist Society and an ardent believer in President Bush's policies. Upon assuming office in October 2003, Goldsmith began a review of existing opinions, including those on torture. As White House counsel, Gonzales had called the Geneva convention against torture "quaint", and the president had affirmed two opinions abrogating the convention. In a now notorious opinion, written on 1 August 2002, deputy assistant OLC counsel John Yoo declared that torture consisted of pain "associated with a sufficiently serious physical condition or injury such as death, organ failure, or serious impairment of body functions." In other words, torture was whatever the president said it was. Goldsmith writes that the message of the OLC opinion was clear: "The torture law doesn't apply if you act under color of presidential authority."

In his review, Goldsmith found that the legal analysis behind these opinions on torture displayed an "unusual lack of care and sobriety" and was "deeply flawed." The stakes, moreover, put at risk the United States's "decades-long global campaign to end torture, relations with the Muslim world and the nation's moral reputation and honor." Goldsmith decided that the opinions underpinning the administration's interrogation regime could not be legally defended, and he withdrew them. While Comey supported him, "important people inside the administration had come to question my fortitude for the job, and my reliability." Goldsmith resigned on principle after serving less than a year.

You are the last member of the so-called "iron triangle" of the president's Texas political team still in government. The others have departed. In an article in the Washington Post on 7 October, former members of the administration gave interviews presenting themselves as increasingly embittered, disenchanted and alienated. The newspaper reports: "The long-term ideals that many of them came to the White House to pursue appear jeopardized, even discredited to many. They tell themselves that they have acted on principle, that the decisions they helped make will be vindicated. But they cannot be sure." You alone remain to alter the course of events that might somehow change the historical perception of the Bush presidency and those who served him, a legacy already deeply engraved.

The genius of your appointment is that the president and his advisors understood ahead of time that they would need your services to repair the nation's reputation. After all, this position has never existed before; and it has never been so drastically needed. While it is true that there have been organisations within the government, such as the US Information Agency, under directors such as Edward R Murrow and John Chancellor, that built libraries and conducted international educational exchanges, the idea of a public diplomacy czar is novel. Having someone to paper over the country's mistakes by telling people what they should think despite the reality would in the past have been considered undemocratic. Form and content, it would have been said, needed to complement each other. But your position is one in which form and content (words and deeds) stand in opposition to each other. Ironically, therefore, your job has never been more important than now.

So far, to be honest, you have earned a reputation for being out of touch, for spouting platitudes without understanding the underlying issues. You are seen as oblivious to the concerns and sensibilities of groups of foreigners with whom you have met. However noble the abstractions of your rhetoric, your speeches are uniformly received as irrelevant propaganda. Even after objective observers have called attention to this pattern, you have done little to adjust. While it would be unfair to put the entire burden of transforming the image of the United States on you, it is a sad fact that your actions have deepened cynicism about American motives. And your inability to change has been consistent with the administration's unwillingness to shift course in the face of demonstrable failure.

If you still wish to succeed, you must finally come to terms with how you and the administration are perceived. Self-awareness is the first step to recovery. Denial has been more than this administration's pervasive state of mind; it has become its prevailing strategy. When other rationales have been shown to be false, hollow or self-undermining, denial has invariably become the last defence. Even when presented with irrefutable facts - there were no weapons of mass destruction, there were no links between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, and torture has indeed been the official policy - the administration resorts to transparent gestures of denial: "We do not torture." But repeating a falsehood does not make it true. As one American president who was a keen student of public opinion put it: "You cannot fool all of the people all of the time." But this truism does not seem to have come to the attention of the White House or of your office. I hope it is not a shock to you that the strategy of denial is not working. It is your job, after all, not only to take into account the considered views of others but to assess objectively what works and what does not. Acknowledging that this persistent reaction is not achieving its goal is essential to learning from failure.

The issue of torture is a special case. Torture is state-sanctioned deviant behaviour. It is degrading, arbitrary, cruel and illegal. As all responsible intelligence officers know, torture is the least productive technique of all, and torture yields inherently tainted information. Torture destroys the humanity of more than those tortured. It destroys the souls of those performing the torture. When Americans torture, Americans are shattered. Torture feeds secrecy. It undermines democracy. And it is shameful. Even the Gestapo and the KGB tried to hide their torture. Torture is considered uncivilised by most of the world's nations. At the Nuremberg war-crimes tribunals, the US tried, convicted and executed Nazi leaders for engaging in torture. Those that do not adhere to international treaties against torture are rightly branded rogue nations. Torture is the mark of tyrannies.

Moral authority is an impalpable but measurable quality in US foreign policy. From our founding, the idea that the nation should be an example to the world has been central to our identity and leadership. When we have fallen short of our ideals, our willingness to engage in self-examination and self-reform has been critical to our reputation as a special nation. Our credentials for leadership have depended upon our capacity for change.

Nations may blunder and presidents may miscalculate. But nations that commit crimes against humanity and presidents who authorise torture have been deemed pariahs, subject to international quarantine and opprobrium. After the second world war, the US was widely admired for its leadership in establishing the Geneva conventions and the United Nations charter for universal human rights. The American conduct at the Nuremberg tribunals set the highest standards and respect for human rights, justice and the rule of law. When US officials such as yourself ask foreign peoples to embrace the ideals and values that they clearly see being violated by the administration's behavior, you succeed only in fostering cognitive dissonance at best and contempt for hypocrisy at worst.

Since the revolutionary war, at the order of George Washington, Americans have consistently opposed torture as a policy. Only one president, George W Bush, has adopted torture as a policy. This administration stands outside more than the international treaties we have signed and previous presidents have upheld. This administration stands beyond the American tradition and values.

The terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 were heinous and barbarous. But they and subsequent threats are no reason for abandoning our commitment to the rule of law. Other nations that have been subjected to terrorist attacks since 11 September - Spain and Britain - have not succumbed to torture. Even in the dark hours after Pearl Harbour torture was not adopted as a policy. During the cold war, when the US faced the potential existential threat of nuclear annihilation, torture was never adopted as a policy. Goldsmith writes: "The Bush administration's go-it-alone approach to many terrorism-related legal policy issues is the antithesis of Roosevelt's approach in 1940-1941 ... The Bush administration has operated on an entirely different concept of power that relies on minimal deliberation, unilateral action, and legalistic defense."

Not a week goes by without President Bush citing Saddam Hussein's cruelty and butchery as a justification. The tragic irony of pursuing his torture policy while denouncing Saddam's appears to be lost on him and on you. But it is not lost on the rest of the world.

Of course, as someone who has spent years in politics, you must be aware of the polls. According to the most recent Pew poll of global public opinion, taken in June 2007 the downward trend since 2002 of the image of the United States has continued "in most parts of the world. Favorable ratings of America are lower in 26 of 33 countries for which trends are available. The U.S. image remains abysmal in most Muslim countries in the Middle East and Asia, and continues to decline among the publics of many of America's oldest allies. Favorable views of the U.S. are in single digits in Turkey (9 percent) and have declined to 15 percent in Pakistan. Currently, just 30 percent of Germans have a positive view of the U.S. - down from 42 percent as recently as two years ago - and favorable ratings inch ever lower in Great Britain and Canada."

Perhaps if you look closely at the problem, the solution to your dilemma may appear. Your words are not forging a new reality. Lying about the war in Iraq, or torture, is not building the bridges of understanding you are so fond of talking about in your speeches. Instead, empty words only fritter away at your ability to influence. There is power in truth.

You might also use your acquired skills in diplomacy among your colleagues in the inner circle of the White House. Perhaps you could talk to them about the dangers of politicising and militarizing fear. They are a group, as Goldsmith has pointed out, consumed with "fear bordering on obsession." When he informed the White House that one of its counter-terrorism programmes was illegal, vice-president Cheney's then counsel, David Addington, angrily lashed out, "If you rule that way, the blood of the hundred thousand people who died in the next attack will be on your hands." As Addington demonstrated, when legal artifice falls, bullying takes its place. Fear has become a license for quelling not only political criticism but also the rule of law.

As you know only too well, fear-mongering, though it has worked well politically at home, has backfired abroad, breeding hatred throughout Muslim and Arab lands. Public diplomacy should assuage fear, not fan its flames; enable understanding, not hostility. Perhaps, while you're talking to your colleagues, you might explain that the opinion of the world matters, and that while it might be "soft power", not "hard power" like a piece of military equipment, it directly impinges on global stability. You might tell them that persisting in a policy of torture has threatened our national security.

While you are rethinking how to calm fears and rebuild America's image as a global leader perhaps you ought to begin to think of yourself not as a tool of the Bush administration but as a citizen of the world, not as a propagandist, constantly trying to formulate a hollow ideological phrase or distraction, but as someone who can admit mistakes and correct them.

If you receive this letter as simply a partisan broadside and can't envision your transformation into a true diplomat at large, an envoy of healing, perhaps you should just resign. Nothing will be served by continuing on your current course. Nothing different will happen. You might as well return to Texas now. To date, your diplomacy has consisted of excuses for leaving the damage to the next president to remedy.

Soon you will be reminiscing about the Bush presidency. Will you be agitated and depressed like your former colleagues described in the recent Washington Post report? Will you persist in fantasies of denial? Or you will be, as Comey suggested you should be, "ashamed"?

If you can attend the screening of Taxi to the Dark Side please let me know. Otherwise, I can send you a DVD and you can share it with the president.

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