by Larry Jones
Gavin Hood’s gripping film drives American terror home, for while its horrifying realism is not in documentary form, the message is torn from news that has finally broken through the lies of the Bush-Cheney regime.
“America does not torture,” we have been told by everyone from White House personnel to Attorney General nominee Mukasey. And we hear it again in this film on the lips of a powerful U.S. intelligence officer. Yet we have all come to know what “extraordinary rendition” means. People deemed possible terrorists, often with no proof whatsoever, mysteriously disappear and end up in a foreign country where torture is the norm. No matter if they are U.S. citizens or not.
And we”ve all been told about beatings, electric shock to the genitals, being left naked, cold and shackled. And we”ve heard about waterboarding. But in Rendition these are so graphic that some must turn away. When asked by a talk show host if he thought waterboarding was a no brainer if it produced intelligence, Dick Cheney said: “It’s a no brainer to me.” In the film we see that this method of torture not only makes the victims feel like they”re drowning, as we are often told, it actually brings them to the very brink of death.
In the unnamed country where all this takes place, Douglass Freeman, an inexperienced CIA agent (played by Jake Gyllenhall),replaces his superior who was killed in a bomb blast. When the experienced torturer, Abasi Fawal (Igor Naor) directs his henchmen to perform their utterly inhuman acts, Freeman quotes Shakespeare to the effect that torture not only does not produce valuable intelligence, it creates thousands of new terrorists.
The victim is Egyptian born Anwar El-Ibrahimi (Omar Metwally) who has lived with a green card in Chicago since he was a youth. When he does not return from a business trip to South Africa, his frantic wife, Isabella (Reese Witherspoon) seeks help from a friend who is an aide for a senior senator played by Alan Arkin. But every attempt by the senator to convince the high level intelligence officer, played convincingly by Merle Streep, to intervene is rebuffed and the senator’s future threatened.
Meanwhile torturer Abasi’s daughter Fatima (Zineb Oukach) is in love with a fellow student who turns out to be preparing for final denoument suicide bomb scene which both harks back to such an event early on and ties together the many strands of the plot.
Freeman effects a nerve wracking escape for Anwar and the film closes with a gripping reunion with his wife and son and a baby born while he languished near death.
In early November of 2006 s number of news stories began to appear on how American troops actually died in Iraq. One of them was about Specialist Alyssa Peterson of Flagstaff, Arizona. She had studied Arabic and then was trained in interrogation techniques at Fort Huachuca in Arizona, where training manuals were developed for the infamous School of the Americas in Georgia. The SOA has trained some of the most ruthless death squads for Central and Latin America and elsewhere. (See story on this site about two priests who got arrested for protesting at Ft. Huachuca.)
After extensive investigative reporting the truth was finally revealed that Alyssa Peterson had been assigned to the prison at an air base at Tel-Afar in Northwestern Iraq. There she witnessed firsthand the horrors which the U.S. is carrying out on other human beings.
On September 15, 2003, this normally cheerful and smiling woman took her Army rifle and shot herself. She was the first woman to die in Iraq. The Army reported the suicide as a “non-hostile weapons discharge.”