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Sunday, 27 October 2013

Wounds Of Waziristan (2013)



This is a link to Madiha Tahir's latestdocumentary. It examines the fallout from the lengthy (and supposedly ending) drone strikes that Bush, Obama and the US have been carrying out over the Waziristan region of western Pakistan; makes for horrible viewing. Tahir brutally reveals the lies of those central administrations and their 'just' reasons for the murder of innocent civilians; not even that they die or that their family structures have been decimated by grief, but the psychological stresses that constant fear inevitably impresses on people. The US have exploited the fact that there are no official codes of law in that region, in much the way as the British did after the First World War.

The story is built on the harrowing interviews that Tahir conducts with the victims and journalists who have lived under the yoke of drone terror. And it is heartbreaking. Interspersed between these scenes are excerpts from a presidential address given by Obama. It's an evocative technique, designed to condemn the president and his policy even more; it’s one that is regularly applied in whistleblowing documentaries such as these as a way to show how flagrantly bullshit the official line is.


Of course Wounds Of Waziristan is only 25 minutes long: its potent and effective at such a short time, but nonetheless it's a shame that wasn't an hour or of feature length.

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