Greenwald: Drone filmmaker denied visa ("the behavior of an insecure, oppressive nation")

[Karmadillo]

Last edited Sun May 20, 2012, 02:09 PM - Edit history (1)

http://www.salon.com/2012/05/18/drone_filmmaker_denied_visa/singleton/

Muhammad Danish Qasim is a Pakistani student at Iqra University’s Media Science and is also a filmmaker. This year, Qasim released a short film entitled The Other Side, a 20-minute narrative that “revolves around the idea of assessing social, psychological and economical effects of drones on the people in tribal areas of Pakistan.” A two-minute video trailer of the film is embedded below. The Express Tribune provided this summary of the film, including an interview with Qasim:

The Other Side revolves around a school-going child in Miranshah, the capital of North Waziristan. The child’s neighborhood gets bombed after the people of the region are suspected for some notorious activities. He ends up losing all of his loved ones during the bombing and later becomes part of an established terrorists group who exploit his loss and innocence for their own interests.

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Banning filmmakers, lawyers, political activists, and scholars from entering your country out of fear of their criticisms is the behavior of an insecure, oppressive nation. It’s also natural behavior for political leaders eager to maintain an impenetrable wall of secrecy around their conduct.

Just to underscore how extreme is the Obama administration’s reflexive secrecy in such matters: yesterday, ABC News‘s Jake Tapper asked National Security Advisor Tom Donilon whether the U.S. Government compensates the innocent victims it kills outside of Afghanistan, and Donilon simply refused to answer (“I’m just not going to go there”). There’s no legitimate reason that this information should be concealed, but for a government that views disclosure as inherently unnecessary, that is enamored of its own secrecy power for its own sake, and that is desperate to prevent its citizens from knowing what it is doing, this sort of imperious decree of secrecy is the natural course (for an even more egregious case, see this amazing summary from the ACLU’s Ben Wizner on how Obama DOJ lawyers defend the U.S. government’s secret, definitively Kafkaesque, unappealable no-fly and Terrorist watch lists).

more...

[Karmadillo]

1. Kick

[hedda_foil]

2. A link to ACLU summary of how DOJ defends Kafkaesque watch lists

http://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security-technology-and-liberty/ninth-circuit-presses-government-lawyer-watch-lists

Thanks for posting this excellent piece.