rendition

Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA's Rendition Flights
$23.00
Trevor Paglen and A. C. Thompson, Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA's Rendition Flights (Melville House, 2006)

I can't remember the last time I read a general nonfiction book in the space of twenty-four hours; I'm not sure it's ever happened before. But I did it with this one (while at the same time blazing through a novel that was almost as good). And it's not because I know (if tangentially) one of the authors; it doesn't matter if you're my mom, if your book's unreadable, I'm not going to be able to read it. It's because Torture Taxi is a fast-paced, exceptionally well-written book.

I'm something of an egalitarian when it comes to reading; I can read about subjects that I know nothing or care nothing about-- or even actively dislike (cf. review of Richard Bak's Yankees Baseball, a sport I loathe)-- as long as the information is presented in an interesting way. I knew Paglen was capable of this long before he put pen to paper, as I was a big fan of his musical project Noisegate back in the day. One often wonders whether artists are capable of crossing media. In this case, it worked like a charm.

Torture Taxi, as the subtitle tells you, is a book about the CIA's Extraordinary Rendition program, a previously-secret initiative that was brought out into the open by regular folks around the globe who started wondering about the odd flight patterns of a certain group of planes. Using these, they tracked down ghost corporations, secret prisons, survivors of the program, and a host of scary, scary documents. This book, to be blunt, is a conspiracy theorist's most beautiful dream. I've never been a conspiracy theorist, but I've got to say that Paglen and his co-author, investigative journalist A. C. Thompson, make a very compelling-- and damning-- case that Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib are only the tip of this polluted iceberg. They interview the survivors. They visit the sites. They quote, and sometimes show pictures of, the documents. The picture that emerges is not pretty.

This is a book that seems to have gotten very little notice. (Noisegate's music didn't, either, and that's equally criminal.) I guess I shouldn't be surprised at this, but I'm now going to attempt to change that, Torture Taxi is going to be one of the books I start recommending to everyone within earshot. Will likely find its way onto my ten best reads of the year list. **** ?

In the Valley of Elah
$19.98
With the fresh spate of suicidal bombings violating the impending election in Iraq, my viewing of Haggis's terrifying, Valley' has added resonance. Yes, so many war films have urged us to outrage, to sense the futility, the heroics, the cruelty, the power plays and their perversions. But not since, 'The Deerhunter', has the chilling consequences of violence been so devastatingly enunciated. It is no surprise that the tale has connexions to an actual event (albeit tenuously, as a lead reviewer notes. And I don't mind that Haggis even uses the actual dad as a surrogate authority for his own film's moral integrity).We need feel the sympathy and ramifications of of all characters caught in the malestrom(though I do think the young woman found murdered in the bath is stacking the cards too high even for these dramtic ends. And the inverted flag is a flawed in its overstatement).T L jones, whose grity and sullen fdemanour has made him the perfect messenger for late mid-life crises, the causes in which he eventually will tally his own contribution, is magnificent. The old-boy's network is unravelling. The new kid's deal with their stresses in unprecedented ways, and the lines once drawn in the sand have been erased.

Michael Clayton (Widescreen Edition)
$14.98
This is a dark, brooding, moody corporate thriller about a lawyer who works as a "fixer," a roving troubleshooter who does everything from going after runaway housewives to fixing high stakes corporate lawsuits when problems crop up. In this case the story revolves around the case of a corrupt agribusiness company that is fighting a multi-billion dollar class action suit stemming from their marketing of a dangerous pesticide which it manufactures and has concealed evidence of its harmful effects.

George Clooney is utterly convincing as the conflicted fixer who wants to get out but who desperately needs the money to pay off his gambling debts, and Tom Wilkinson is possibly even greater as the brilliant but wacked out attorney who is defending the agribusiness company. When he goes off his medication and has a psychotic break and temporarily goes AWOL, it's Clooney's job to find him and get him back on his meds. I'm not familiar with the woman who played the company's chief counsel but she is excellent too. All the main leads do a fine job, in fact, and the slow pacing allows the story to unfold unhurriedly as the suspense builds to the satisfying climax.

It's a suspenseful and intense movie from beginning to end. Overall a good flick and especially if you're a Clooney fan you'll want to give this one a look.

Rendition
$14.98
Extraordinary rendition as a tool in the war on terror and its implications for due process and the rule of law, the issue of torture, and the fundamental problem of individual rights versus public safety are all serious and important topics that deserve a better treatment than this movie. Actually, the brief documentary about rendition cases which accompanies the movie on the DVD does a much better job than the movie itself in addressing these issues.
The cast represents considerable talent, and the acting is just fine. The problem is with the writing. This would've been a much better movie if it had focused on the rendition case itself; instead, that almost becomes a sideshow in the drama of the subplot involving the interrogator's daughter and her boyfriend. It is understandable that the writer felt the necessity to include a real terrorist plot alongside the extraordinary rendition and torture in order not to be accused of being completely one-sided, but this dilutes the impact of the rendition story. And in the end, the rendition plot is "solved" in a very unsophisticated manner. So while being mildly entertaining, this film was a disappointment overall.