Parallax View Sunday September 24 at The Victory Grill 1:00-5:00pm

program details:

ITS NOT MY MEMORY OF IT: THREE RECOLLECTED DOCUMENTS dir. Speculative Archive/Julia Meltzer and David Thorne
(US, 2003, 25 min, Video)
It's Not My Memory of It is a documentary about secrecy, memory, and documents. Mobilizing specific historical records as memories which flash up in moments of danger, the tape addresses the logic of the bureaucracy of secrecy in the current climate of heightened security.

OUTLAWED: EXTRAORDINARY RENDITION, TORTURE AND DISAPPEARANCES IN THE WAR ON TERROR dir. WITNESS
(US, 2006, 30 min, Video)
This film unveils the illegal practice of extraordinary renditions, the U.S. government-sponsored program in which suspects are illegally detained and secretly flown to third countries, where they are tortured. The documentary follows the harrowing stories of two men who survived extraordinary rendition, Khaled El-Masri and Binyam Mohamed, and places the post-9/11 phenomenon of renditions and the "war on terror" in a human-rights context to inspire global change.


Muckraking for the Masses
Investigative reporting isnt just for ink-stained Woodward and Bernstein-types. Muckraking skills are useful for activists, politically-oriented artists, agit-prop generators, bloggers, radio pirates, etc., etc., etc. This quick immersion in investigative reporting techniques will teach you how to unveil the activities of an intelligence agent, catch earth-wrecking corporations in the act, map the connections between politicians and their corporate masters, and spotlight the murky depths of the criminal justice system.

A.C. Thompson is an investigative reporter based in San Francisco and a staff writer at SF Weekly. His stories, covering everything from CIA to financial scams, have caused many problems for powerbrokers and garnered numerous accolades, including the prestigious George Polk Award for local reporting. Hes the co-author, with Trevor Paglen, of the forthcoming book Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIAs Rendition Flights.



N4467S: On the Trail of the CIAs Torture Planes

In order to sidestep international laws against torture, the CIA currently uses a fleet of unmarked airplanes to kidnap, render, and disappear suspected terrorists from around the world. The CIA then takes these people to a clandestine network of prisons in countries such as Syria, Afghanistan, Egypt, Morocco, Iraq, Poland, and Romania: places where they can be tortured.

Because the CIA uses civilian (rather than military) aircraft for these black operations, they leave a publicly-accessible trail of flight logs, registration papers, and other legal documents. These paper trails are filled with forgeries, lies, and cover-stories, but nevertheless contain important clues as to who the real people behind these operations and unmarked planes might be.

One of these planes is a Boeing 737. Its tail number is N4467S. It is the property of a company called Keeler and Tate Management, incorporated by a man named Tyler Edward Tate. Mr. Tate does not exist.

Over the course of this presentation, we will navigate through the fog of misinformation surrounding Mr. Tate. We will visit the street addresses of his front companies, observe the airfields from North Carolina to Afghanistan ö that his unmarked plane frequents, and introduce ourselves to some of the flesh-and-blood individuals who may have penned his name.


Trevor Paglen is an artist, writer, and experimental geographer working out of the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. His work involves deliberately blurring the lines between social science, contemporary art, and a host of even more obscure disciplines in order to construct unfamiliar, yet meticulously researched ways to interpret the world around us. His most recent projects take up secret military bases, the California prison system, and the CIAs practice of extraordinary rendition.

Paglens artwork has been shown all over the world and his articles have been published in Blu Magazine, Art Journal, Cultural Geographies, Clamor Magazine, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, the Leonardo Music Journal, and Cabinet Magazine. His first book, Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIAs Rendition Flights (co-authored with AC Thompson) will be published by Melville House in the Fall of 2006.

Paglen holds a BA from UC Berkeley, an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and is currently completing a PhD in the Department of Geography at the University of California at Berkeley.


"If you want a serious interrogation, you send a prisoner to Jordan. If you want them to be tortured, you send them to Syria. If you want someone to disappear never to see them again you send them to Egypt." CIA agent Robert Baer