Bill Moyers: Everyone Should See 'Torturing Democracy'

Everyone Should See 'Torturing Democracy'
by Bill Moyers | May 29, 2009 - 3:02pm Share

by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship



In all the recent debate over torture, many of our Beltway pundits and politicians have twisted themselves into verbal contortions to avoid using the word at all.

During his speech to the conservative American Enterprise Institute last week - immediately on the heels of President Obama's address at the National Archives - former Vice President Dick Cheney used the euphemism "enhanced interrogation" a full dozen times.

Smothering the reality of torture in euphemism of course has a political value, enabling its defenders to diminish the horror and possible illegality. It also gives partisans the opening they need to divert our attention by turning the future of the prison at Guantanamo Bay into a "wedge issue," as noted on the front page of Sunday's New York Times.

According to the Times, "Armed with polling data that show a narrow majority of support for keeping the prison open and deep fear about the detainees, Republicans in Congress started laying plans even before the inauguration to make the debate over Guantanamo Bay a question of local community safety instead of one about national character and principles. "

No political party would dare make torture a cornerstone of its rejuvenation if people really understood what it is. And lest we forget, we're not just talking about waterboarding, itself a trivializing euphemism for drowning.

If we want to know what torture is, and what it does to human beings, we have to look at it squarely, without flinching. That's just what a powerful and important film, seen by far too few Americans, does. Torturing Democracy was written and produced by one of America's outstanding documentary reporters, Sherry Jones.(Excerpts from the film are being shown on the current edition of Bill Moyers Journal on PBS - check local listings, or go to the program's website at PBS.org/Moyers, where you can be linked to the entire, 90-minute documentary.)

A longtime colleague, Sherry Jones and the film were honored this week with the prestigious RFK Journalism Award from the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights. Torturing Democracy was cited for its "meticulous reporting," and described as "the definitive broadcast account of a deeply troubling chapter in recent American history."

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I am blown away. I believe everyone should see this as well.

George Bush just got his first taste of his official legacy I think.

I am forwarding it to everyone I know, just in case they missed the program.

I've gone from thinking of Cheney as merely evil to believing that he and his cohorts are collectively the Antichrist in everything that they did ... and continue to do. Of course, they were aided and abetted by a dry-drunk, Christian zealot, business failure, frat-boy cheerleader who was custom-made for them to run the country into ruin.

If these people are not held to account, the United States will truly have lost its soul.

that should be on every network (yes even the Food Channel) in prime time

I have the feeling I would still be doing make-up seeing and doing in my next lifetime.

Will be watching tonight. After the kids go to bed.

Thank you for getting this front and center.

I just finished watching Moyers. He had a lot of "Torturing Democracy" on tonight. It was enough to make you sick. And scream for justice.

At the end of the show, he said go to PBS website, and his show sill link you to the film.

"If the Americans are doing this to us, and they are not accountable, then who will rescue us."

From British citizen Beg, one of the detainees.

Who indeed?

What hole did "our" interrogators crawl out of? And how quickly can we shove them back down it, and seal the hole with cement?

Everything about the Bush administration makes me want to swallow a political purgative and puke those bastards down my toilet.