Same Old Song and Dance

Conditions: Hot.

Cheney Comes Clean. Yawn.

In an interview the former Vice President Dick Cheney talked about waterboarding of detainees, and how much he had to do with it:

On Sunday, in an exclusive interview with Jonathan Karl of ABC News' "This Week," Cheney proclaimed his love of torture, derided the Obama administration for outlawing the practice, and admitted that the Bush White House ordered Justice Department attorneys to fix the law around the administration's policy interests.

"I was a big supporter of waterboarding," Cheney told Karl, as if he were issuing a challenge to officials in the current administration, including President Barack Obama, who said flatly last year that waterboarding is torture, to take action against him. "I was a big supporter of the enhanced interrogation techniques..."
[...]

The US has long treated waterboarding as a war crime and has prosecuted Japanese soldiers for using it against US troops during World War II. And Ronald Reagan's Justice Department prosecuted a Texas sheriff and three deputies for using the practice to get confessions.

But Cheney's admissions back then, as well as those he made on Sunday, went unchallenged by Karl and others in the mainstream media. Indeed, the two major national newspapers--The New York Times and The Washington Post--characterized Cheney's interview as a mere spat between the vice president and the Obama administration over the direction of the latter's counterterrorism and national security policies.

- truthout.org

See, call me crazy but I think that might be an admission of a war crime. So therefore justice should be swift and sure, yes?

Well, no. Despite this and many other disclosures pointing to some terrible miscarriages of justice by American authorities the Obama administration has decided to paper over the whole thing, and Dick Cheney bragging about it on television isn't going to change a thing. And if that isn't astonishing enough, the media seems to have decided to so the same thing. It truly is a brave new world.



Film Review: Edge Of Darkness

Martin Campbell directs Mel Gibson in a Boston Detective thriller film, where Mel plays a veteren detective who's daughter is killed in front of him. Initially everyone thinks he was the target, but gradually Mel comes to realise his daughter was the actual target, and it's up to him to figure it all out and get some kind of justice. Apparently this film was originally a British television series that Campbell directed, and it kind of still feels like it. It takes a long time to get going, because we the audience already know what's going on, and it's frustrating to watch the characters spend a lot of time figuring out the obvious. Hence things tend to drag for the first half.

However once Mel gets the bit between his teeth things sharpen up nicely, and he goes after his daughters employers with a vengeance. It's good to have Mel back, even if it is a distinctly older and quieter Mel Gibson here. All he really has is grief and anger to work with, so it's kind of a fairly stark movie. And while the plot is reasonably simple, the characters are kind of weird. You've the big bad boss who just keeps making the wrong decisions, and Ray Winstone's character, who is supposed to be some kind of Governmental secret Cleaner who eliminates evidence and covers up conspiracies. However on this one Ray seems to take a stand on the side of Mel's grieving father, in light of his own situation.

In fact the underlying theme of the film and it's characters is loss, pain and inevitable death. I can't think of anyone having a happy ending here. It's actually kind of a bummer. It's definitely cast in the "revenge is the best kind of revenge" sort of deal, but it's a particular kind of all-costs revenge that leaves us at the end feeling rather glum. Still, it's a well-made film, and worth watching. Three twangy accents out of five.


- Peace out