It Can Happen Here
Posted on Jun 12, 2007
By Marie Cocco
WASHINGTON—There was a time when the dark, political drama was my preferred weekend movie. That was before kids and suburbs and serial viewings of “Shrek.”
The films were almost always about some exotic country gripped in a vise of poverty and dictatorship, where human life is cheap and strongmen unaccountable for crimes that shock the conscience. The genre was popularized in the 1982 film “Missing,” by the master director Costa-Gavras. It was a fictionalized account of the kidnapping and murder of a young American journalist in Chile, and the political awakening that his conservative father and the journalist ‘s wife undergo when they come to understand that the American government refuses to aide their search and somehow appears complicit in the horrors they see unfolding around them.
No matter where these dramas were set—in Latin America or in Africa or the Soviet Union or Northern Ireland—you would leave the theater stunned and silent, for a time. But safe, it seemed, in the knowledge that it could not happen here. Now it has.
It is not only that the United States has swept people off the streets and held them in secret overseas prisons where, by many credible accounts, they were tortured. Now a collaboration of six domestic and international human rights groups has concluded that 39 of those who were in U.S. custody at one time or another since the 9/11 attacks still are unaccounted for. These are not the 14 “high-value detainees” transferred in the past few months to the military penal colony at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. No one knows where these 39 are—or if they are still alive.
They are missing. Or, in the language of international law, they have undergone a “forced disappearance.” ......(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070612_it_can_happen_here/
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