Alex Gibney (pictured above) came to speak at Pomona's commencement on Sunday. Gibney is the creator of Taxi to the Dark Side, a film in which a supposedly innocent Afghan was picked up and killed by his American interrogators.
Naturally, it's a difficult subject matter and Gibney has used it as a cudgel to beat it over the head of the Bush Administration for allowing torture or some such nonsense.
He's suggested that the U.S. and her allies use torture all over the world, without the flimsiest of proof for his assertions. He's even gone so far as to say that we need to "move away from the dark side" in our foreign policy in his Academy Award acceptance speech.
Gibney, who also produced hit documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, said in his acceptance speech that his wife had wanted him to make a romantic comedy.
"But honestly after Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and extraordinary rendition that simply wasn't possible," the film-maker said, before dedicating the film to Dilawar and his own father.
. . .
"Let's hope we can turn this country around, move away from the dark side and go back to the light."
Funny. I thought the guys who cut off heads, use children as suicide bombers, and were the ones who murdered several thousand innocents on 9/11 were on the dark side. Guess I'm just not Academy Award winning material.
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4 comments:
Interesting that you lump all these terrorists together... since the terrorists who committed the heinous act of 9-11 were Saudi's, and we're not exactly crushing Saudi Arabia, are we? Nope, we're buddies!
Oh ok. We're less evil than Al-Quaeda, so it's all hunky-dory?
I thought part of patriotism was holding your country to the highest standards, and not being content with simply being better than the lowest common denominator.
I can see a bumber sticker coming on:
"McCain '08 - Better than bin Laden!"
But then, if I remember correctly, you think McCain is a closet Democrat, so I'm not sure where that leaves us.
At least you're openly satirical now. This is a Stephen Colbert-type thing, right?
Because you couldn't actually believe that there is only one way of being on the "dark side". You couldn't actually be justifying abandoning human rights when they're inconvenient. No, you're not the kind of guy that would make such a base and simplistic appeal that completely ignores the subject at hand.
Would you?
You think I'm wrong? Funny, I thought that the people who fry newborns into delicious, delicious meat pies when they're not even hungry were the wrong ones.
I think the dark side is debatable. I'm pretty sure the guys who blow themselves up consider us to be on the dark side...
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