Interrogators used techniques U.S. soldiers were taught to withstand if captured by enemies, the film reports. Above: prisoners rounded up in Afghanistan and Pakistan on a U.S. plane bound for Guantanamo. (Photo: Washington Media Associates.)
Stations airing torture doc that PBS delayed ’til January
The buzz over PBS’s decision to offer Sherry Jones’ documentary Torturing Democracy an Jan. 21 air date — well after the election and the day after the Bush administration leaves office — may get the doc near-national carriage this fall.
Jones took the film, which by May was nearly completed, to another distributor — the Virginia-based Executive Program Services — to try for timelier broadcast.
The film traces how the Bush administration disregarded laws and promoted harsh interrogation techniques that led to torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.
PBS, which offered Jones the January slot after working with her to prepare the doc in the spring, says its fall schedule was jammed with election-related fare, other specials and pledge programs. The post-inaugural date was coincidental, top PBS programmer John Wilson tells Current.
Citing the network’s carriage of Frontline docs that questioned the administration’s present wars, Wilson rejects assertions that timidity delayed the broadcast: “I just don’t think there’s a pattern there that you can point to and say that’s how we do business.”
About 30 stations have aired or plan to air the doc before the Nov. 4 election, says Alan Foster, head of EPS. More than 30 others say they’ll air it within the next few months, and at least a dozen more are considering it.
After articles in Tina Brown’s megablog The Daily Beast and the New York Times highlighted the absence of the main Washington-area station from the carriage list, WETA aired it within days, on Oct. 17.
Based on his conversations with programmers, Foster expects the doc eventually will reach about 85 percent of TV households. It can also be seen at www.torturingdemocracy.com.
Jones, an indie who often makes docs for Frontline, produced Torturing Democracy in collaboration with the National Security Archives, a nongovernmental research institute at George Washington University that has been amassing documents about U.S. detention and interrogation practices deployed in the government’s “war on terror.”
The doc draws on more than 30 primary-source documents and on interviews with former detainees and top government and military officials. Richard Armitage, deputy secretary of state from 2001 to 2005, talks for the first time about being waterboarded during his Vietnam-era military training and says the tactic “absolutely” is torture.
Armitage and other officials talk about their discomfort with practices the White House sanctioned. “The surprising thing to me,” Jones says, “was how many people on the inside were in fact fighting these policies.”
Journalist Ken Bode, ombudsman for CPB, wrote in an Oct. 20 column that PBS had “dropped the ball” on an important programming decision. “If fear of criticism was a factor in the delayed air date, PBS acted badly,” he said.
Stephen Segaller, v.p. for content at WNET, which aired the doc Oct. 16, told the Times that PBS would have caught flak if it distributed the program before the election and expects that stations’ broadcasts before the election could be criticized for their motive rather than for the program’s content.
The road to an airdate
Jones, who has won eight Emmys and numerous other awards for docs in Frontline and Bill Moyers’ series, began talking with PBS about Torturing Democracy more than a year ago, she says. She sent the fine cut to network execs in May, when WNET came on board as presenting station for what Jones assumed would be a national broadcast.
Around that time, she had the film vetted by ”one of the toughest libel lawyers” in the country, she says. The resulting 50-page transcript of the film, annotated with sources, is posted on its website.
PBS and WNET suggested several changes to improve the doc’s narrative, such as clarifying sources, Jones says, and she was glad to make the changes. She also agreed to add a WNET-produced half-hour panel discussion with experts at the end of the doc to provide alternative views and additional context. The big sticking point with PBS was the title, which some PBS and WNET advisors thought was “unnecessarily provocative” and didn’t accurately represent its solid journalism, Jones says. She told them the title would be expensive to change — it was already embedded in promotional materials. She wanted a guaranteed airdate before she spent the money.
Throughout the summer she sent e-mails to PBS and WNET execs about the timeliness of the topic — Congress was holding hearings on torture, and journalist Jane Mayer’s book, The Dark Side, about the administration’s anti-terrorism policies, was released in July. (Mayer also consulted on the film.)
PBS told Jones Aug. 28 that the first open airdate for Torturing Democracy was Jan. 21.
“We were working toward a national slot,” says John Wilson, chief TV programming executive for PBS. By the time the doc was in shape, he says, the fall schedule was already packed.
Maybe he was naïve, Wilson says, but he didn’t think the post-Bush date, which was coincidental, would raise eyebrows. If PBS shrank from scheduling programs that challenge the White House, he says, it would have delayed most recent Frontlines until after the election. Unfortunately, he observes, Jones’ subject would still be relevant in January.
Climate of timidity?
Jones takes PBS executives at their word but wishes she had switched to another distributor earlier. “Had I realized in July that after having gone through this process the proposed airdate was still going to be after the first of the year ... I would have gone the alternative route earlier,” she says.
With the help of longtime PBS producers Moyers and Alvin Perlmutter, Jones approached Foster about distributing the film, who offered it to stations Sept. 9.
Foster, a former PBS programming exec and WGBH producer, connects the network’s seeming caution with the conditioning that PBS leaders get from all sides: They learn to avoid flaps with Congress, stations or the press.
“Those jobs are really hard, and the days are really busy,” Foster says. “And when there’s a public flap . . . you find yourself dealing with nothing else but controversy.” This makes people jumpy and timid, he says, which “doesn’t make public TV cutting-edge.”
A climate of timidity has long enveloped PBS programmers and leadership, says B.J. Bullert, author of Public Television: Politics and the Battle Over Documentary Film and a professor with the Center for Creative Change at Antioch University Seattle. “As an institution, public television is less relevant than it was 10 years ago, because there are more alternative resources for information on the Web and cable,” Bullert says.
“Through the years,” Perlmutter says, “I’ve had several experiences in which public television or PBS has shown more caution than was warranted.” Perlmutter distributed the programs God in Government and the BBC’s A Brief History of Disbelief through EPS when PBS wasn’t interested in airing them. After they aired, he speculates, many of the folks at PBS probably felt their caution wasn’t justified.
Writes Bode: “This is precisely the kind of programming the network was created to provide: high-quality, timely, hard-hitting journalism. Ironically, five years ago PBS engaged Sherry Jones to produce a documentary called Watergate Plus 30, in which the network was extolled for its [1970s] role in bringing the issues of Watergate to the public through its live coverage of the hearings. PBS executives should remember the kudos it got then, both for public service and courage.”
Trained in torture
Torturing Democracy’s clear premise is that the harsh tactics used against prisoners in Iraq and at Guantanamo were wrong, even illegal, and Jones meticulously traces how these techniques came to be institutionalized.
She examines documents that confirm the administration’s approval of certain interrogation tactics. The practices come from a U.S. military training program, Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE), which teaches U.S. soldiers how to withstand torture from enemies who lack regard for human rights. Documents on the program’s website include a recently released brief on SERE procedures that was distributed to interrogators at Guantanamo.
The film suggests that ignoring the Geneva Conventions and denying captives access to the U.S. civilian and military justice systems was not a legitimate price to pay for the possibility of squelching terrorism. Says the narrator: “[Prisoners] were held in isolation and secrecy—locked into a system of punishment before any evidence of guilt was established.”
Maj. Gen. Thomas Romig, U.S. Army judge advocate general from 2001 to 2005, says, “There were a number of things that people were ready to jettison because these were different times. That’s a dangerous thing because then you can always have the excuse to jettison the law, the procedures, the due process, the [Geneva] Conventions, whatever you want, when it’s convenient.”
Jones portrays Romig and the other lawyers, doctors, investigators and intelligence leaders who questioned the implications of these new laws and practices as heroes. She interviews more than 10 men from the departments of Defense, State and Justice; each walks into view and poses silently as the narrator identifies them.
To represent the Bush administration’s point of view, Jones uses its documents that aim to justify the practices.
The producers underline points several times with text on the screen, such as: “The Uniform Code of Military justice prohibits U.S. Armed Forces from engaging in cruelty, oppression or maltreatment of prisoners, assaulting prisoners and communicating a threat to wrongfully injure a detainee.”
“What’s really new about Sherry’s film is how she nails down the transfer of the SERE techniques over to Guantanamo and Iraq,” says Tom Blanton, director of the security archive. “As Malcolm Nance, the former chief Navy [SERE] instructor, says on camera, we have adopted our enemy’s methods . . . never remembering that these techniques, born in the gulag, were meant to elicit false confessions, not actionable intelligence.”
Lt. Col. Stuart Couch, a senior prosecutor for the Defense Department’s Office of Military Commissions from 2003 to 2006, describes a visit to Guantanamo to gather evidence for the case against prisoner Mohamedou Slahi, who knew several of the 9/11 hijackers.
“I walked down the hallway and the door was open,” Couch says. “And I saw a detainee sitting on the floor. He was shackled. And the room was blacked out with exception of the strobe light. And he was just, he was rocking back and forth....It looked, for all the world, like an experience that I had gone through in SERE School. You know, the strobe lights, the heavy-metal music. I mean, that was right out of the SERE school playbook. There was an Air Force attorney that was accompanying me, giving me the tour. And I just said, ‘Did you see that?’ And he goes, ‘Well, yeah.’ And I said, ‘You know, I got a problem with that.’ And he goes, ‘Well, that’s approved.’”
Couch eventually concluded that Slahi’s interrogation had been “morally repugnant” and refused to prosecute him.
Too much passion?
Many reviewers have praised the journalism of Torturing Democracy, but Variety critic Brian Lowry called the doc “angry and compelling — a work whose sense of outrage clearly tilts toward the realm of advocacy journalism.” The program’s “stylistic excesses” only diminish a hard-to-dispute premise, he wrote. “Jones’ passion gets the better of her here, unnecessarily incorporating eerie Friday the 13th music and dramatic recreations to accentuate the bad deeds perpetrated by the Bush administration.”
“PBS is often bashed by both the right and left for perceived cowardice given its awkward status as a government-supported enterprise,” he continues, “but Torturing Democracy lacks any pretense of balance—an element admittedly made more elusive by the administration’s refusal to participate.” Lowry says, “PBS was probably right to avoid national carriage on an outlet such as Frontline.”
Though Jones has often worked with Frontline, she says she never talked with its producers about carrying the doc. From the beginning, Torturing Democracy was her collaboration with the National Security Archive, Jones says. However, the doc is no more damning than Michael Kirk’s series of Frontline films on the Iraq War and the Bush administration’s quest for unlimited executive power.
Like Kirk, Jones uses foreboding music and slowly pans documents and photos to create atmosphere, and she stages short, shadowy recreations of prisoners shackled in cells, based on reports of the Department of Justice inspector general, Army investigations and other sources.
Jones also offers firsthand accounts. “We were basically shackled to the floor sitting like this . . . and you’d be sitting there freezing,” says former detainee Shafiq Rasul, a British citizen of Pakistani descent who was imprisoned at Guantanamo from 2001 to 2004. “It seemed like it was an experiment just to see to what extent they could take a human.”
Web page posted Oct. 27, 2008
Copyright 2008 by Current LLC
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