The Act of Killing
As a major new documentary about the Indonesian genocide goes on national release, an AHRC film looks at the research behind ‘The Act of Killing’
To mark the national release of the film ‘The Act of Killing’, the AHRC is today releasing a film of an interview with Professor Joram ten Brink of the University of Westminster, Principal Investigator of the AHRC-funded Genre and Genocide research project, of which the new documentary is a major output.
‘The Act of Killing’ depicts a group of unrepentant former members of Indonesian death squads being challenged to re-enact some of their many murders in the style of the American movies they love. The film focuses particularly on one individual, Anwar Congo, whose initial enthusiasm for the re-enactments slowly gives way to outward expressions of unease and remorse.
When the government of Indonesia was overthrown by the military in 1965, Congo and his friends were promoted from small-time gangsters who sold movie theatre tickets on the black market to death squad leaders. They helped the army kill more than one million alleged communists, ethnic Chinese and intellectuals in less than a year. As the executioner for the most notorious death squad in his city, Congo himself killed hundreds of people with his own hands.
‘The Act of Killing’ is a journey into the memories and imaginations of the perpetrators, offering insight into the minds of mass killers. The film is a nightmarish vision of a frighteningly banal culture of impunity in which killers can joke about crimes against humanity on television chat shows, and celebrate moral disaster with the ease and grace of a soft shoe dance number.
The Act of Killing CLIP
The Act of Killing Director’s Cut — Clip 1
The Act of Killing Director’s Cut — Clip 2
The Act of Killing – final scene
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Ronald Reagan’s Torture
By Robert Parry | Consortium News | September 8, 2009
The 2004 CIA Inspector General’s report, released in August 2009, referenced as “background” to the Bush-era abuses the spy agency’s “intermittent involvement in the interrogation of individuals whose interests are opposed to those of the United States.” The report noted “a resurgence in interest” in teaching those techniques in the early 1980s “to foster foreign liaison relationships.”
The report said, “because of political sensitivities,” the CIA’s top brass in the 1980s “forbade Agency officers from using the word ‘interrogation” and substituted the phrase “human resources exploitation” [HRE] in training programs for allied intelligence agencies.
The euphemism aside, the reality of these interrogation techniques remained brutal, with the CIA Inspector General conducting a 1984 investigation of alleged “misconduct on the part of two Agency officers who were involved in interrogations and the death of one individual,” the report said (although the details were redacted in the version released to the public).
In 1984, the CIA also was hit with a scandal over what became known as an “assassination manual” prepared by agency personnel for the Nicaraguan Contras, a rebel group sponsored by the Reagan administration with the goal of ousting Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinista government.
Despite those two problems, the questionable training programs apparently continued for another two years. The 2004 IG report states that “in 1986, the Agency ended the HRE training program because of allegations of human rights abuses in Latin America.”
While the report’s references to this earlier era of torture are brief – and the abuses are little-remembered features of Ronald Reagan’s glorified presidency – there have been other glimpses into how Reagan unleashed this earlier “dark side” on the peasants, workers and students of Central America. … continue
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