The Nuremburg trials left us two legacies. First, no matter what your rank, you are responsible for your actions. As one Nazi after another said, "I was just following orders", we made it clear this was no excuse for war crimes. Second, given the winners get to write history, we have a deluded mindset that war crimes are things other people commit, not us.
Alex Gibney has tried to send a message about America's hypocritical sacrifice of longstanding principles by focusing on a single man, a taxi driver tortured to death by American forces in Afghanistan. This focus never allows us to forget that these victims are people just like us, and they are the victims of terrible crimes for which no one has been held accountable.
Gibney reveals how high up knowledge and sanction of these crimes goes. Bush, Cheney and Rumsfield are directly responsible for the official policy allowing torture, increasing the number of people who have never faced war crimes charges but should do so.
It is confronting, saddening and maddening to watch. But what undermines Gibney's effort is that he doesn't give us the full context. Instead he allows the soldiers' own words to absolve them of responsibility by allowing claims of "just following orders" to go unchallenged. Worse, he allows the miserable excuse of being "poorly trained", as if an adult needs to be told that torturing people, especially people they know are innocent, is wrong.
This is a cop-out. Our failed humanitarian intervention in Somalia revealed that torturing civilians (often to death) for sport and photographing it is a popular hobby among many military forces, and those of many Western democracies including the US are no exception. Yet we insist on seeing them as one-off instances of "a few bad apples" out of control, rather than an indication of a systemic, ingrained culture that urgently needs to be dealt with. All Bush and Co did was sanction activities many soldiers were already engaging in, but Gibney cannot or will not acknowledge this.
I can't fault his technical skills, it's methodical and well-edited. But I cannot add "well researched" or "thorough". By not giving us the broader context and by not looking at the culture that encourages war crimes among US soldiers, he let these guys off lightly.
Alex Gibney has tried to send a message about America's hypocritical sacrifice of longstanding principles by focusing on a single man, a taxi driver tortured to death by American forces in Afghanistan. This focus never allows us to forget that these victims are people just like us, and they are the victims of terrible crimes for which no one has been held accountable.
Gibney reveals how high up knowledge and sanction of these crimes goes. Bush, Cheney and Rumsfield are directly responsible for the official policy allowing torture, increasing the number of people who have never faced war crimes charges but should do so.
It is confronting, saddening and maddening to watch. But what undermines Gibney's effort is that he doesn't give us the full context. Instead he allows the soldiers' own words to absolve them of responsibility by allowing claims of "just following orders" to go unchallenged. Worse, he allows the miserable excuse of being "poorly trained", as if an adult needs to be told that torturing people, especially people they know are innocent, is wrong.
This is a cop-out. Our failed humanitarian intervention in Somalia revealed that torturing civilians (often to death) for sport and photographing it is a popular hobby among many military forces, and those of many Western democracies including the US are no exception. Yet we insist on seeing them as one-off instances of "a few bad apples" out of control, rather than an indication of a systemic, ingrained culture that urgently needs to be dealt with. All Bush and Co did was sanction activities many soldiers were already engaging in, but Gibney cannot or will not acknowledge this.
I can't fault his technical skills, it's methodical and well-edited. But I cannot add "well researched" or "thorough". By not giving us the broader context and by not looking at the culture that encourages war crimes among US soldiers, he let these guys off lightly.