Wednesday’s high-volume Internet traffic to Olivia Rousset’s SBS Dateline report, Abu Ghraib – The Sequel, made viewing the segment impossible that day. Either traffic has subsided or bandwidth has been extended because it doesn’t seem to be a problem now. Link TV is pre-empting regularly scheduled shows to include it in the current rotation and on 23 February will include, in a four hour programme examining “torture and killing of prisoners, rendition, and extralegal imprisonment – even against our own citizens,” other material previously aired by the innovative, award-winning Dateline. Rousset’s Lifting the Hood, and Bronwyn Adcock’s The Italian Job, originally aired by Dateline on 9 November 2005, will be featured in the first two hours. The second half will feature journalist Carmela Baranowska’s Taliban Country, a film presented in a Dateline report on 11 August 2004, to show that there were “allegations of bizarre tactics being used by US marines in Afghanistan, as recently as June,” as U.S. officials were blaming torture on a few bad apples in Abu Ghraib and claiming it stopped there.
Baranowska has since been tracking U.S. interrogation and detention policies on the blog, truth and consequences, where co-blogger Janet Gunter tells of a film that has yet to be scheduled for release in the U.S. but will debut 6 March in the UK. Michael Winterbottom’s The Road to Guantanamo is the true story of four British Muslims who’d travelled to Pakistan for a wedding where three of the young men were captured by bounty hunters and eventually shipped to Guantanamo Bay. One of the group fell behind in Kunduz as the friends attempted to escape an ensuing battle and has not been heard from since. The Tipton Three were first heard from in a series of reports by David Rose published in 2004 by the Guardian Observer. They tell of the “truck container” massacre by the Northern Alliance they survived and the torture and other horrors endured first in an Afghan jail then during their more than two year detention in Guantanamo.
As I’m writing this I’m listening to Robert Fisk speak about his new book The Great War for Civilisation, a speech that is part of the special Iraq: Beyond the Green Zone. In the second half of that four hour presentation, Dahr Jamail will discuss his first-hand accounts during the airing of The Dreams of Sparrows. If you don’t have Link TV, you can purchase a copy of the documentary from the IraqEYE group, the Iraqi filmmakers who intend to use the profits to make more films.
To better understand U.S. torture policies and why there is no reason to believe they ended with Abu Ghraib and John McCain’s bill, watch Democracy NOW!’s Professor McCoy Exposes the History of CIA Interrogation, From the Cold War to the War on Terror. Just one of many examples, page 44 of the 1983 KUBARK manual (pdf) reveals corrections made to the text that acknowledge techniques used today were considered illegal. A copy of the 1963 manual can be read here. The self-inflicted pain, stress positions and sensory disorientation that Professor McCoy referred to are described in this section.