The new documentary, Our Disappeared/Nuestros Desaparecidos, examines the disappearance of 30,000 people during Argentina’s military dictatorship of 1976-1983. Though Argentina’s history differs from ours, we can still take away a valuable lesson: those who participated in state-sponsored torture must be held accountable.

This moving film was written and directed by Juan Mandelbaum. Mandelbaum fled Argentina in 1977 to escape the growing repression in his country. He returns thirty years later after an accidental discovery. Through a Google search, Mandelbaum learned that Patricia Dixon, a college girlfriend, was one of the “disappeared.”

Patricia Dixon

Mandelbaum returns to Argentina to see what happened to Dixon and to others who had also disappeared. He weaves the national narrative—Peron’s return to power and the military junta’s deliberate attempt to destroy the left—with personal ones. We hear from the mothers, fathers, siblings, and even the children of the disappeared. The pain in people’s faces when talking about their missing loved ones is heartbreaking.

The director doesn’t shy away from the violence perpetrated by leftist armed radicals. “But the film leaves no doubt that there was no equivalency between the actions of the left and the repression by the military,” Mandelbaum writes in his director’s statement. “The military represented the State of Argentina, and were obligated to follow the law.”

Instead, people were kidnapped, tortured, and held in secret detention centers. Mandelbaum visits the infamous Navy Mechanics School, which housed a detention center and five torture rooms. It was here that pregnant women were kept alive until the birth of their children, who were then adopted by military and police families. It was here that Mandelbaum’s ex-girlfriend was probably taken.

In an interview on the PBS website, Mandelbaum recounts the this experience:

“Filming at the Navy Mechanics School, where up to 5,000 people were detained, tortured and later thrown alive into the river from airplanes, and where Patricia was almost surely taken, was really tough. There was a moment when I was on the central staircase. I was climbing the stairs and realized that the detainees like Patricia, shackled and blindfolded, would have held the same rail. A small thing like that hit me really hard.”

Mandelbaum incorporates homemade movies, black and white photos, and archival footage into his film. There’s damning footage of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in 1977 endorsing the military’s president, saying that he hoped they got their terrorist problem under control as soon as possible.

Blanket amnesty laws for those who tortured were passed in the 1980s. In 2005, the Argentine Supreme Court revoked the amnesty laws.

At a time when President Obama keeps repeating that he wants “to look forward and not backward” regarding human rights abuses committed during interrogations, Mandelbaum’s film offers a different take.

“Without opening up the past and facing the truth, there can be no healing,” says Juan Mandelbaum. “Terror will have won.”

Our Disappeared airs this week on PBS.

Opponents of abortion are backing legislation across the country that would give legal rights to embryos from the instant of conception.

These efforts might be wrapped up in the rhetoric of dignity, but make no mistake: “Personhood” laws would weaken women’s rights.

This week, anti-abortion activists in Missouri launched their campaign for “personhood” for fertilized eggs. The Missouri campaign follows on the heels of efforts to create a “personhood’ amendment in Colorado and Florida.

These proposals would ban abortion in all cases, including incest and rape, and criminalize some forms of contraception.

The state legislatures of Montana and North Dakota have already rejected proposed “personhood” laws this year. Petition drives are also under way in Mississippi, Montana, and Nevada.

Personhood USA says it’s working to get “personhood” measures on 2010 ballots or in front of state legislatures in 29 states, according to AP.

Given the Supreme Court’s new makeup, it’s unlikely that Roe v. Wade will be overturned during the Obama Administration. But that doesn’t mean anti-abortion activists are quitting. In 2008 alone, state legislatures nationwide considered about 400 measures to restrict abortion.

Last year in Colorado, a “personhood” amendment made the ballot, but it was overwhelmingly defeated by 73% of voters. Yet the backers of these  “personhood” initiatives  aren’t discouraged. They are intent on raising and re-raising the issue.

Their goal is clear: it’s about limiting the rights of women, especially pregnant women.

We can’t let them win.

On the anniversary of 9/11, Attorney General Eric Holder should scrutinize our counter-terrorism policies. The seemingly endless revelations of detainee abuse, which began shortly after 9/11, demand no less.

It’s reasonable to believe that the torture and abuse of detainees have “made us less safe,” says Elizabeth Goitein, director of the Liberty and National Security Project at  the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU law school. The center has been calling for an independent commission of inquiry to examine recent counter-terrorism policies that may have violated the rule of law.

Here’s an excerpt of an interview with Goitein. (She was interviewed on the Wednesday Eight O’clock Buzz, a show I co-produce on WORT-FM.)

Q: Just a couple of weeks ago the CIA re-released a 2004 report on detainee treatment. Can you talk about that?

Goitein: What it showed was that the abuses that happened under the interrogation program went far beyond what people believed and outside of practices the Justice Department had authorized, such as water boarding. Specifically, what the report showed, was there were mock executions, detainees were threatened with power drills and loaded firearms. Their families were threatened. Some really shocking things like that.

Q: And for the purpose of what?

Goitein: That is an excellent question. There is a default assumption that the purpose was to prevent another 9/11 by getting very valuable intelligence from the detainees. There is still, after all of this debate, no evidence that any valuable information was gained from these detainees relating to an imminent terrorist attack. And there’s certainly no evidence that any of the information that was gained could not have been gained through legal techniques.

Beyond that, there is some evidence from a Senate Armed Services Committee report that was released back in 2007 that one of the main purposes of this interrogation program was to try to get detainees to say there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda in order to justify the war in Iraq. To the extent that there’s some evidence of that is really quite shameful.

Part of the problem with practices like torture and some of the unlawful conduct that happened after 9/11 is that there is really a lot of reason to believe that it has made us less safe. It’s provided a recruiting tool for terrorists. It’s alienated our allies. There are instances when allies have refused to cooperate with us because of our practices. And I think to some degree it’s put our own troops at greater risk. Because when the United States plays fast and loose with the Geneva Conventions, it takes away our ability to insist on other countries respecting those Conventions. So that when American soldiers are captured I think they are at greater risk today.

There is no evidence that these practices have made us more safe. But there is evidence that they have made us less safe. It’s not just about civil liberties; it’s about our national security and the best way to preserve that security going forward.

It’s time for us as a nation to take a serious look at what went wrong and what went right so we can have the systems in place to ensure that our policies are smart, effective, and respectful of basic human rights and civil liberties.

Unfortunately, when you had a history of the kind of widespread government-sanctioned abuses that we saw, that’s an indicator that something has gone wrong at a systemic level. It’s not as simple as some rogue actors disobeying the law. It’s more a case of institutional safeguards that are supposed to prevent that sort of thing from happening having failed. So in order to make sure that we don’t find ourselves in that situation again, it’s very important to figure out what went wrong and how we need to reform our system to put those safeguards back in place.

Q: What about Attorney General Holder’s naming a prosecutor to investigate alleged CIA interrogation abuses?

Goitein:  One important point to be made is that the Attorney General has said he’s asking the prosecutor to only focus on conduct that went beyond what the Justice Department authorized.  I think that’s a real mistake. It doesn’t really serve anyone well to focus on the so-called bad apples and to ignore the fact that government policy itself crossed the line. So to make sure that going forward we have respect for the rule of law, it’s important to look at the government-sanctioned abuses that happened. It’s my view that the most comprehensive way to do that is through an independent commission of inquiry.

Q: What about the Obama Administration’s assertion of state’s secrets privilege?

Goitein: That’s been a real disappointment. One of the most troubling abuses of the Bush Administration was its misuse of the state’s secrets privilege, which is a privilege that enables the government to shield certain evidence that could harm national security of released. But instead of using that in a narrow way, the Bush Administration would use it as a way to shut down cases at the very outset before the evidence had even been identified. They would say this case is so sensitive that we can’t even find out what the evidence is, not even behind closed doors, with the highest security precautions. And not coincidentally, these were all cases where very serious government misconduct had been alleged.

There was real hope that the Obama Administration would take a different position and a more narrow view of the privilege. So far in every case, the Obama Administration has taken exactly the same position as the Bush Administration in terms of the state’s secrets privilege and asserting that it can’t allow cases to go forward.

In one particular case, the plaintiff’s attorneys had already seen a document and the Obama Administration argued that if the court allowed the plaintiff’s attorneys to see the document again, the government would actually come to the court and take the  document away from the judge essentially rather than allow that to happen. So it’s a very extreme form of the privilege. It’s unfortunate that the [Obama] Administration has continued it.

The President has this mantra about wanting to look forward and not back. It’s unfortunate that he takes that view because it’s a false choice, much like the false choice between our safety and our values that he talked about in his Inaugural address. You can’t responsibly look forward without understanding what happened in the past.

This past Sunday goes down as a great day for biking in Madison. From 8 am to 2 pm, Madison closed off major avenues to cars, and opened up a whole new public space.

Dangerous intersections became car-free zones. Art projects clogged the streets. Cyclists, and at least one skeptical skateboarder, owned six lanes of traffic rather than the measly strip of concrete between moving cars and parked cars or the curb.

It was our first ciclovia!

Bogotá, Colombia, is often credited with starting ciclovias, which means “bike path” in Spanish. Every Sunday more than 70 miles of Bogotá’s streets are off limits to cars from 7am to 2pm. The city of Madison marked off 6 miles, including the scenic John Nolen Drive, which lies between Monona Bay and Lake Monona.