Earlier I attended the screening of “A legacy of Torture” at Hahn. I went because it seemed interesting and I thought we would get extra credit for it, but I’m wondering if I went to the right event now because I did not see anybody else from our class there. Anyway, either way, I’ll write my blog post on it.
I have never taken an ethnic studies course, nor a course in civil rights movements, US history in this century, or power dynamics. Thus a lot of what I saw in the film was completely unexpected. Call me naive, but I had not fully realized that people in this country had been treated so harshly in the last 40 years.
The African-American men that were the subject for this movie certainly had a devastating experience. Some of the worst of the film includes interviews where the men talk about:

• Having cattle prods stuck on their private parts, under their neck, under their arm pits
• Being hit them on in the back of the head and in the shins with a ledger book and a small blackjack.
• Having a plastic bag put over their head while the police beat them, then the police taking it off right when they were passing out, and the police beating them and spitting on them while they tried to catch they breath.
• Hearing the police laughing throughout the torture

Apparently, when these men didn’t answer the police’s questions in the way the police wanted, the police would continue to torture them. They would even stop the tape recording and say, “we’ll tell you what happened; this is what we want you to say.” The men thus confessed to a murder that they had probably known nothing about.
A California court struck down their confessions as they had been coerced. However, none of the police or detectives involved in the torture were ever prosecuted.
These events occurred in 1973, and in 2003 many of the men who had been tortured were again arrested. There had been no additional evidence found in those 40 years. What instead had happened was that some of the FBI agents involved in the torturing had been promoted to deputies, and then under the patriot act they had been given the power and resources to again harass and imprison these men.
I had never supported the Patriot Act, but on some level I had assumed that the worst harm it had caused was the irrelevant wiretapping of many people, which may have deprived their personal liberty but didn’t seem to do much harm. However, I now understand a concrete way that this act has been used for a purpose which I consider morally abhorrent. Thus watching the movie has changed my opinions on the importance of resisting laws, such as the Patriot Act, which give the government additional power with little oversight.
What struck me most about the men themselves in the movie was the dignity with which they handled themselves. They were not vindictive, or consumed with the injustice that had been done to them, but they sounded very factual in both their descriptions of what had happened and their opinions on the power structure of the police and FBI.