A multi-media production fusing live theater and journalism for a gripping evening on accountability and the U.S. policy of torture in the “War on Terror.”
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Some of us, when we look back at the horrific war crimes Nazi Germany committed during World War II, like to imagine that something like that would never happen again. In 1949, new laws were created at the Geneva Convention to protect the basic rights of people involved in military conflict. Regardless of age, sex, race, religion, and political affiliation, anyone – either a prisoner or civilian near a war zone – should be humanely treated and torture is strictly prohibited.
The Culture Project produces provocative works that blend moral drama with political conversation. Its first major play was The Exonerated, about six Iraqi exonerates who aided American forces but were wrongfully imprisoned and later released without compensation. Blueprint was more of a roundtable discussion between panelists Vince Warren, Executive Director of Center for Constitutional Rights, Valerie Plame, a former CIA agent, Lt. General Ricardo Sanchez, a former Iraq commander), Ron Suskind, Pulitzer prize winning journalist, Jeremy Scahill, journalist and author of Blackwater, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., author and environmental activist, Rose Styron, poet and activist, Dr. Allen Keller, director of the Bellevue/NYU program for Survivors of Torture, and several actors such as Liev Shrieber, Mariska Hargitay and James Spader.
The play was divided into four sections and started off addressing the laws against torture promulgated at the Geneva Convention. Video clips and photographs taken of torture victims at Guantanamo followed. There were images of graphic content, such as waterboarding, dogs attacking prisoners and prisoners being sexually abused. Vince Warren acted as a moderator to the panel and lead the discussion with the other panelists. Each section was punctuated with news media accounts and readings pertaining to the discussion were read by actors.
Asked if the panelists were unpatriotic, former CIA agent Plame admitted she had been accused of it but her intentions were always to preserve the moral dignity of the state through truth. Scahill cited an example within the military when General Antonio Taguba wrote a report on the abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib. Schreiber performed an excerpt of Taguba’s correspondence to Seymour Hersh, an investigative journalist; Taguba was forced to retire after the report was submitted and deemed a threat to national security. “I’d been in the army thirty-two years by then, and it was the first time that I thought I was in the Mafia,” he said.
Blueprint for Accountability qA an excellent thought-provoking performance that shed light on a secret RHr the Bush administration tried to hide; it was intelligent without being convoluted on a very complicated subject. One important point was made by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who observed that the Iraq War felt like a far-off war to Americans because it was in a foreign land and that Americans are less involved now than they have been in past American wars.
“People paid more attention to Vietnam because the draft was still in effect,” he said.
The main point of the play was to encourage the public to demand more from their news media and their politicians, to demand that their government take responsibility for the crimes committed, from the soldiers directly involved to the upper echelons of the military that orchestrated these violations of the Geneva convention.
Alexandra Lau, who graduated in June, majored in theater and media studies. She contributes occasionally for the WORD.