The New York Review of Books |
October 21, 2020
Tags: Donald Trump | Trump | Election 2020 | New York Review of Books | Mark Danner
The New York Review of Books |
June 01, 2020
Tags: foreign policy | Human Rights
Telluride FilmWatch |
September 2018
Tags: Telluride Film Festival
Telluride FilmWatch |
September 01, 2017
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The New York Review of Books |
November 10, 2016
All American elections tend to be touted as historic, for all American culture tends toward the condition of hype. Flummoxing, then, to be confronted with a struggle for political power in which, for once, all is at stake. We have long since forfeited the words to confront it, rendering superlatives threadbare, impotent. No accident that among so many other things Donald J. Trump is the Candidate of Dead Words, spewing “fantastic” and “amazing” and “huge” in all directions, clogging the airtime broadcasters have lavished upon him with a deadening rhetoric reminiscent of the raving man hunched beside you on the bar stool.
Tags: Donald Trump | Election 2016 | Republicans | President | New York Review of Books | Mark Danner
The New York Review of Books |
May 11, 2016
We are told again and again: his is the most improbable political story in decades, perhaps in history. And yet that a reality television megastar, as Trump might put it, could outpoll sixteen dimly to barely known politicians, some new faces, many also-rans, seems less than shocking. Did tens of millions ever cast their eyes on the junior senators from Florida or Tennessee or Texas, or the governor of Ohio, not the mention the ex-governors of Arkansas of Florida, or the ex-CEO of Hewlett Packard, before they chanced to mount the stage for a debate with Donald J. Trump last August, a television event that drew the unheard-of viewership of 24 million? Those 24 million tuned in to see trump. Only one man on stage gad a name as famous and by then it was in such disrepute that he had seen fit to replace it with an exclamation point on his campaign posters.
Tags: Donald Trump | Election 2016 | Republicans | President | New York Review of Books | Mark Danner | Trump
Telluride FilmWatch |
September 01, 2015
In November 2013, the Ukrainian government abruptly canceled plans to
join the European Union, a shock for citizens who dreamed of escaping
Russian domination to become part of the West. Thus began one of the
most inspiring revolutions of modern times. Evgeny Afineevsky's
documentary WINTER ON FIRE follows, from week one, the Ukrainian
protests known as the Maidan. For three months, the Ukrainian
people—800,000 at the demonstration’s heights—took to the streets to
protest. The protestors stayed even as government forces turned to
violence—on one day, the police killed 50 citizens—remaining until
Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was removed from office in
February 2014. Mark Danner spoke to Afineevsky about the movement’s
geopolitical implications and the film’s on-the-spot portrayal of
revolution, political violence and deep cultural change.
Tags: Evgeny Afineevsky | Telluride | film | Q&A | Ukraine | Ukrainian Revolution | Revolution | War | Civil War | Winter On Fire | Europe | Viktor Yanukovych | European Union | Maidan | Otto van Bismark
Telluride FilmWatch |
September 01, 2015
When Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, the Al Qaeda terrorist with a $25 million bounty on his head, decided to show to the world videotapes of the planning and execution of his terror attacks, he delivered them to Michael Ware. Ware, a reporter for Time magazine and CNN, brought the grisly footage to the world’s attention, making it clear that for the U.S. any victory in Iraq was very far off.
At the 2015 Telluride Film Festival, Ware and co-director Bill Guttentag spoke with Mark Danner about the film.
Tags: Michael Ware | Bill Gutentag | Telluride | film | Al Qaeda | Terrorism
The Criterion Collection |
May 27, 2015
Revolutionary times are times of revelation: they uncover and flood with light what has long been darkly buried. Implicit in the above exchange between a kidnapped Philip Michael Santore (Yves Montand) and his masked Tupamaro inquisitor, Hugo (Jacques Weber), in Costa-Gavras’s State of Siege (1972) is the unassailable conviction that politics forms the hidden skeleton of our world. Anyone who can be bothered to dig beneath the surface quickly strikes his shovel against these grim, intractable bones, the ossified determinants of who holds power and who does not. Looming invisibly over the interrogation is Costa-Gavras, supremely aware that he wields in his lens a uniquely effective kind of shovel. Indeed, this to him is what the cinema is: “a way of showing, exposing the political processes in our everyday life.”
Tags: State of siege | Terror | Torture
The New York Times |
January 20, 2015
"On or about Sept. 11, 2001, American character changed. What Americans had proudly flaunted as “our highest values” were now judged to be luxuries that in a new time of peril the country could ill afford. Justice, and its cardinal principle of innocent until proven guilty, became a risk, its indulgence a weakness. Asked recently about an innocent man who had been tortured to death in an American “black site” in Afghanistan, former Vice President Dick Cheney did not hesitate. “I’m more concerned,” he said, “with bad guys who got out and released than I am with a few that, in fact, were innocent.” In this new era in which all would be sacrificed to protect the country, torture and even murder of the innocent must be counted simply “collateral damage.”
Tags: Guantanamo | Torture | Terror | CIA
The New York Review of Books |
2/5/2015
"Hugh Eakin: Nearly six years ago, you published the secret report by the International Committee of the Red Cross documenting the CIA’s torture of more than a dozen “high-value” detainees. And now we have the Senate’s extensive investigation of the torture program itself. What are some of the most revealing findings of the Senate report?"
Tags: CIA | Hugh Eakin | Torture | Terror
Democracy Now |
January 03, 2015
"We move on to a breaking story, the International Committee of the Red Cross concluding in a secret report, yes, it was two years ago that the Bush administration’s treatment of prisoners “constituted torture” in violation of the Geneva Conventions—the findings based on interviews with prisoners once held in the CIA’s secret black sites."
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The New York Review of Books |
August 14, 2014
"Early 2007: American troops are pinned down in the fourth year of a losing war in Iraq and in the fifth of an increasingly desperate one in Afghanistan, crises that still loom over the country and its foreign policy more than half a dozen years later, as Iraq, beset by a jihadist insurgency that sprang from the American invasion, splinters into pieces..."
Tags: Robert Gates | Forever War
The New York Review of Books |
05/08/2014
"Self-directed, restrained, disciplined, Cheney was concerned not with words but with power and what it brought. In the aftermath of September 11, the silent vice-president, serving a fledgling president who had won half a million fewer votes than his Democratic opponent, who knew little of the workings of government and less of the world, and who had just failed to prevent the most damaging attack on the homeland in the history of the United States..."
Tags: Cheney | Bush | Guantanamo | Torture | Terror
The New York Review of Books |
March 17, 2014
"Almost exactly a decade ago, Vice President Dick Cheney greeted President George W. Bush one morning in the Oval Office with the news that his administration was about to implode. Or not quite: Cheney let the president know that something was deeply wrong, though it would take Bush two more days of increasingly surprising revelations, and the near mass resignation of his senior Justice Department and law enforcement officials, to figure out exactly what it was..."
Tags: Mark Danner | Dick Cheney | nyrb | Terror
The New York Review of Books |
February 14, 2014
"And yet we live still in Cheney’s world. All around us are the consequences of those decisions: in Fallujah, Iraq, where al-Qaeda-allied jihadis who were nowhere to be found in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq have just again seized control; in Syria, where Iraqi jihadists play a prominent part in the rebellion against the Assad regime; in Afghanistan, where the Taliban, largely ignored after 2002 in the rush to turn American attention to Saddam Hussein, are resurgent. And then there is the other side of the “war on terror,” the darker story that Cheney, five days after the September 11 attacks, was able to describe so precisely for the country during an interview on Meet the Press..."
Tags: New York Review of Books | Dick Cheney | Cheney
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