Thanks so much to all who came!  My sincere apologies to everyone we had to turn away.  Thanks for supporting the project, and thanks for your financial support of Live Girls! Theatre.

-Wes

Via the ACLU Blog:

In a memo signed by Jay Bybee, Assistant Attorney General, the Justice Department concludes that the CIA has not violated the ban on torture codified in U.S. law.

Of the 18-page memo, 11 are redacted to the point of being nothing but a series of black rectangles.

The memo also reaches the absurd conclusion that CIA interrogators did not intend to inflict severe harm.

It is believed that the redacted portions of this memo describe precisely what the CIA did to detainees. The fight for accurate information continues.

h/t Wilder, good eye buddy

Wondering what those shadow puppets look like in the light?  Here’s the monster – more after the jump.

The Monster

The Luminous Maple Tree

Overhead Projector

The Old Man Who Wouldn't Leave His House

Puppet Director Nick Hubbard and Little Cartoon Baby Bob Dylan

The Rat

The Old Man's House and Neighbors

The Occasional Hungry Wolf

The Chair...of Motivation!

We referred to these scenes collectively as the “History of Torture,” because all three were actually used in Medieval times. In addition to satirically addressing the (all-too-true) story of a Utah man who was waterboarded at work as a motivational technique, these scenes also call attention to the moral equivalence of waterboarding and the more gruesome techniques of the past.

Waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and ritual humiliation can seem more harmless than The Rat Cage, The Brank, or The Chair of Torture simply because they are less blunt and generally aren’t bloody. On a moral level, however, the tortures of the past and the tortures of the present are indistinguishable.

The Rat Cage

The Brank

The Chair of Torture (Chair of Motivation!)

Throughout The Lady Liberty Blues we perform dramatized excerpts from a leaked government document. It is introduced thusly:

On the 23rd of November in 2002, a man named Mohammed al-Kahtani was arrested in the Orlando airport and brought to Camp X-Ray at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He was accused of being an accomplice to the September 11th hijackers.

In March of 2006, TIME Magazine published a classified, 84-page log detailing a minute-by-minute account of al-Kahtani’s interrogation at Camp X-Ray over the course of 49 days.

You can read the TIME Magazine article and download the entire interrogation log as a pdf at this link.

All charges against Mohammed al-Kahtani have been dropped by the Pentagon.

Mohammed al-Kahtani is only one of hundreds of detainees at Guantanamo Bay. None have access to the court system that you and I have access to, as they are tried via military tribunal according to the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which eliminates the right of habeus corpus and grants the President the power to unilaterally declare someone an “enemy combatant.”

It was determined in 2002 that at least one-third of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay were wrongly imprisoned. The White House was given this information, and chose not to review the detention status of prisoners.

The International Committee of the Red Cross has reportedly determined that abuse of detainees by the U.S. Government was “categorically torture” and “constituted war crimes.” It has also been reported that these “coercive management techniques” were reverse-engineered from Communist Chinese methods of extracting false confessions from American soldiers during the Korean War.

To take action against government-sponsored torture, please visit the American Civil Liberties Union or Amnesty International.

This scene was a satirical interpretation of the story of Brer Rabbit and the Tar Woman. I used as source material the adaptation by Julius Lester, as published in The Tales of Uncle Remus; The Adventures of Brer Rabbit. It is available through the Seattle Public Library.

The Tales of Uncle Remus; The Adventures of Brer Rabbit. Lester, Julius. Dial Books, New York, 1987.

The Lady Liberty Blues opens with the image of a boy in a jar whose parents are reading him a bedtime story.

The story, Naked Truth and Resplendent Parable, is taken from an anthology of Yiddish folktales edited by Beatrice Silverman Weinreich. It is available at the Seattle Public Library.

Yiddish Folktales, ed. Weinreich, Beatrice Silverman. Pantheon Books, New York, 1988.

This is a clip of an interview done by 60 Minutes with former CIA Director George Tenet. The interview was aired April 29, 2007.

In the clip, Tenet defends the CIA in general, while not admitting that the agency he headed waterboarded detainees. He attempts to contextualize the discussion of waterboarding in the high-stress aftermath of September 11th, despite evidence that the move towards torture was systematic at the highest levels of government and went on for years.

Indeed, an influential panel with the British Parliament has determined that U.S. Government assurances that it does not torture should no longer be trusted.

This is the clip we used in the show:

Here is the full interview, divided into four segments:

1 of 4

2 of 4

3 of 4

4 of 4

We added music.

This is a true news item, read verbatim by the actors. It was edited for length. You can read the full story here.

No one really disputes that Chad Hudgens was waterboarded outside a Provo office park last May 29, right before lunch, by his boss. There is also general agreement that Hudgens volunteered for the “team-building exercise,” that he lay on his back with his head downhill, and that co-workers knelt on either side of him, pinning the young sales rep down while their supervisor poured water from a gallon jug over his nose and mouth.

And it’s widely acknowledged that the supervisor, Joshua Christopherson, then told the assembled sales team, whose numbers had been lagging: “You saw how hard Chad fought for air right there. I want you to go back inside and fight that hard to make sales.”