Troy Davis was convicted of murdering a Georgia police officer in 1991. Nearly two decades later, Davis remains on death row – even though the case against him has fallen apart. Davis’ conviction was not based on any physical evidence, and the murder weapon was never found. Since his trial, seven of the nine eyewitnesses have recanted or contradicted their testimony, and one of the remaining witnesses has been implicated by nine others as the actual murderer.
BREAKING NEWS: On April 16, by a 2-1 vote, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals denied Troy Davis' petition.
The Court extended Davis' stay of execution for 30 days to give him a chance to file a habeas corpus petition with the US Supreme Court.
I know it's been kind of a bummer around here lately---but sometimes it's just overwhelming, all the sadness out there. We can help, and at the very least, we can care.
[...] In a series of high-level meetings in 2002, without a single dissent from cabinet members or lawmakers, the United States for the first time officially embraced the brutal methods of interrogation it had always condemned.
This extraordinary consensus was possible, an examination by The New York Times shows, largely because no one involved — not the top two C.I.A. officials who were pushing the program, not the senior aides to President George W. Bush, not the leaders of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees —investigated the gruesome origins of the techniques they were approving with little debate.
According to several former top officials involved in the discussions seven years ago, they did not know that the military training program, called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, had been created decades earlier to give American pilots and soldiers a sample of the torture methods used by Communists in the Korean War, methods that had wrung false confessions from Americans.
Even George J. Tenet, the C.I.A. director who insisted that the agency had thoroughly researched its proposal and pressed it on other officials, did not examine the history of the most shocking method, the near-drowning technique known as waterboarding.
The top officials he briefed did not learn that waterboarding had been prosecuted by the United States in war-crimes trials after World War II and was a well-documented favorite of despotic governments since the Spanish Inquisition; one waterboard used under Pol Pot was even on display at the genocide museum in Cambodia. [...]
Leaked to the news media months after they were first used, the C.I.A.’s interrogation methods would darken the country’s reputation, blur the moral distinction between terrorists and the Americans who hunted them, bring broad condemnation from Western allies and become a ready-made defense for governments accused of torture. The blowback has only intensified since Justice Department legal memos released last week showed that two prisoners were waterboarded 266 times and that C.I.A. interrogators were ordered to waterboard one of the captives despite their belief that he had no more information to divulge. [...]
Government studies in the 1950s found that Chinese Communist interrogators had produced false confessions from captured American pilots not with some kind of sinister “brainwashing” but with crude tactics: shackling the Americans to force them to stand for hours, keeping them in cold cells, disrupting their sleep and limiting access to food and hygiene. [*]
* Hmmm, these methods sure do sound familiar. Even if you have a bacterium-sized heart, and can't see why torture is wrong---does it really take a genius to figure out that people will say anything if they think it will get them out of hell?
Alex Gibney's Oscar-winning documentary, Taxi to the Dark Side, is incredibly disturbing---it had me sobbing in that angry/devastated way---but I think it should be required viewing in all U.S. high schools.
PS---I was really moved by the interview at the end of the film, with Alex Gibney's father, Frank Gibney. Here's an excerpt from a Six Questions interview at Harper's:
3. Some of the most compelling footage of the film comes in the closing credits in which you include scenes from an interview you conducted with your father, who was a Navy interrogator, and who was obviously distressed about the changes in military tradition that the Bush Administration introduced. Can you tell us about your discussions with your father and how they influenced the film?
My father—Frank Gibney — was a big influence on my life. A longtime journalist and old “Asia hand,” he had learned Japanese during the war so that he could interrogate Japanese prisoners — something he did on Okinawa, one of the bloodiest battles of the Pacific campaign in World War II.
At the time, there had been many reports of Japanese torturing Americans. Further, there was a pervasive view that the Japanese were a new kind of enemy, one that was so fanatical that some of its soldiers (kamikaze) would use airplanes to fly suicide missions. (Sound familiar?) But my father and his fellow interrogators were not taught “coercive interrogation techniques.” They didn’t waterboard anyone as a matter of policy. Just the opposite, they practiced rapport building techniques that were extremely effective in eliciting information despite the supposed “fanatical nature” of the prisoners.
Most important, my father felt that, by not engaging in retribution, he was adhering to a higher standard. “We never forgot,” he says in the film, “that behind the facade of wartime hatreds, there was a central rule of law which people abided by. It was something we believed in. It was what made America different.”
As a former Navy interrogator, he was furious about the Abu Ghraib scandal. As more details emerged about the way that torture appeared to be part of a wide-ranging policy, he was even more enraged. He encouraged me to take on this project. While I was working on “Taxi,” I visited him in Santa Barbara just before he died. One day, he said: “Go get your video camera; I have something I want to say.” We had to turn off the oxygen machine so he would be audible. A foreign policy conservative, he raged against Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush for upending the very values that he had defended as a soldier. His anger, and his belief that we could — and did — do better offered a ray of hope in a bleak film.
Hello, World! Thanks for stopping by. Before you go any further, you should know that sometimes this blog is just a silly self-indulgence. It's possible that there's actual content in here somewhere, but I'm not making any guarantees. Comments make my day, hint hint. Suggestions, questions, friendly rants---all are welcome.
This color= link. Good luck out there! Contact: foundinfiction [at] gmail [dot] com
When it is genuine, when it is born of the need to speak, no one can stop the human voice. When denied a mouth, it speaks with the hands or the eyes, or the pores, or anything at all. Because every single one of us has something to say to the others, something that deserves to be celebrated or forgiven by others.
We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love [...] There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. [...] Hate is just as injurious to the person who hates [but love is] capable of transforming an enemy into a friend.
Still and all, why bother? Here's my answer: Many people need desperately to receive this message: "I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people don't care about them. You are not alone."
-Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake
Worldview
Because we all share an identical need for love, it is possible to feel that anybody we meet, in whatever circumstances, is a brother or sister. No matter how new the face or how different the dress and behavior, there is no significant division between us and other people. It is foolish to dwell on external differences, because our basic natures are the same. -Tenzin Gyatso, The Fourteenth Dalai Lama "Compassion and the Individual"
Worldview
Ubuntuis very difficult to render into a Western language. It speaks of the very essence of being human. [We] say, "Yu u nobuntu"; "Hey, so-and-so hasubuntu." Then you are generous, you are hospitable, you are friendly and caring and compassionate. You share what you have. It is to say, "My humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound up, in yours." We belong in a bundle of life. We say, "A person is a person through other persons."
[...] A person withubuntuis open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed, or treated as if they were less than who they are.
The true writer has a great advantage [...] He knows the great tradition of literature, which has always been the cutting edge of morality, religion, and politics, to say nothing of social reform. * To write with taste, in the highest sense, isto write [...]so that no one commits suicide, no one despairs; to write [...] so that people understand, sympathize, see the universality of pain, and feel strengthened, if not directly encouraged to live on. * If there is good to be said, the writer should say it. If there is bad to be said, he should say it in a way that reflects the truth that, though we see the evil, we choose to continue among the living. * The true artist is never so lost in his imaginary world that he forgets the real world [...] He gets his sense of worth and honor from his conviction that art is powerful--
