MovieChat Forums > État de siège (1973) Discussion > Dan Mitrione

Dan Mitrione

posted 15 years ago by nfalcone1
8 replies | jump to latest

Regarding Dan Mitrione, the basis for the character portrayed by actor Yves Montand in "State of Siege", I would invite those interested to research Mitrione's background. The US history of training Brazilian and Uruguayan police in interrogation techniques have been heavily documented.

To quote the book The Shock Doctrine: "According to court testimony quoted in the country's truth commission report, "Brazil: Never Again", published in 1985, military officers attended formal "torture classes" at army police units where they watched slides depicting various excruciating methods. During these sessions, prisoners were brought in for "practical demonstrations" - brutally tortured while as many as a hundred army sergeants looked on and learned. The report states that "one of the first people to introduce this practice into Brazil was Dan Mitrione, an American police officer. As a police instructor in Belo Horizonte during the early years of the Brazilian military regime, Mitrione took beggars off the streets and totured them in classrooms so that the local police would learn the various ways of creating, in the prisoner, the supreme contradiction between body and mind." (see footnote 73, page 113, The Shock Doctrine for references).

Thereafter, Mitrione moved on to conduct police training in Uruguay, where, in 1970, he was kidnapped by Tupamaro guerrillas. I won't give away the movie but suffice it to say that the Tupamaros were well aware of who Mitrione was.

[–] Eumenides_0 15 years ago

What I wondered about, watching the movie, was how the Tupamaros knew so much about Philip Michael Santore. If he took so many precautions to pretend to be a simple American citizen, how did they discover who he truly was?

This world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel.

[–] driverop 14 years ago

Maybe they had a mole inside the goverment, I think.

[–] pstivlyfmk 11 years ago

My guess is they had people in the security forces. The presidential candidate of the Broad Front (Frente Amplio which ran from Christian Democrats at the center to Communists on the left) at the time was a retired General Liber Seregni. Doubtless he was not the only patriotic soldier in Uruguay. I used to have the companion paper back to the film. It included an interview with the chief of police of a "large South American city" who was identified as clandestinely involved with the revolutionary left. The moles were there and in high places. Such that General Pinochet's coup in Chile started with the arrests and massacres of hundreds of military and police of all ranks including General Bachelet, the father of a recent Chilean president, who died under torture.

[–] kosmikino 12 years ago

Dan Mitrione's CIA torture methodologies are also outlined in the three part series 'Inside The CIA' from 1987 by the late great director Allan Francovich (who like many critics of the deep black intelligence and military structures died prematurely of a heart attack, standard executive action operating procedure along with plane/car crashes).

In this documentary, you also discover how Mitrione and other CIA ghouls ordered hundreds of WWII field radios that generated electricity through two wires which were then used in the field of operations across the entire span of Latin America.
The Francovich documentary features victims recounting their torture with the "Mitrione" methods - It also confirms the Brazil testimony that Mitrione snatched poor people randomly off the streets and used them to teach domestic counter-insurgency army and police agents the "skills" of torture.

Apparently, Mitrione was very "proud" of his abilities to extract information and cause maximum suffering. What is really sick about this is the way Mitrione was portrayed as a "victim" of the "terrorist" violence and a "humanitarian" who just wanted to help the people - this complete twisting of the truth included a burial with full honours and television footage of his grieving family (shown in the documentary).

State Of Siege is one of the greatest political films of the seventies and yet it is hardly remembered today just like the films of Allan Francovich actually. State sponsored amnesia.

[–] liutenantsalt 9 years ago

other CIA ghouls

But like a good little Useful Idiot, you have absolutely no problem with the indistinguishable (and infinitely more rampant) torture, terrorism (sorry, but putting "terrorism" in quotations doesn't magically make it not terrorism) and mass murder committed by the Communist dictators established as Soviet-via-Cuba puppet states, right?

[–] activista 8 years ago

That's not even what the posters were talking about. Stop trying to discredit them by switching the subject. I'll be checking out the film real soon.

[–] greenbanzanas 12 years ago

Does anyone doubt this is what went down when the guy from Philly, John Timoney, or the British Metropolitan police guy, Yates, went to Bahrain last summer?

[–] pstivlyfmk 11 years ago

After Abu Ghraib and the Church committee of the 1970s who can have doubts. In my home town of Chicago we have a classic example of "pigeons coming home to roost" as Malcolm X used to day. Police Commander Jon Burge and subordinates he trained have been proven in court to have tortured dozens of mostly Black suspects into giving false confessions. Subsequent legal actions have overturned many convictions and cost the taxpayers tens of millions of dollars.