Word: instrument
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...organization headquartered in London, estimates that in the last decade torture has been officially practiced in 60 countries; last year alone there were more than 40 violating states. From Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay to Guinea, Uganda, Spain, Iran and the Soviet Union, torture has become a common instrument of state policy practiced against almost anyone ruling cliques see as a threat to their power. Torture, says Marc Schreiber, director of the U.N.'s Commission on Human Rights, "is a phenomenon of our times...
Overwhelming Evidence. Governments that routinely use torture as an instrument of state policy generally deny that such practices exist. At the same time, the difficulty of making unhindered investigations of conditions in closed societies and police states virtually guarantees that many abuses remain uncovered. Torture, moreover, is a most murky area, rife with exaggerated claims, politically motivated propaganda and just plain misinformation. Nonetheless, independent human rights organizations, reporters and others have managed through interviews and on-the-scene investigations to compile a credible and apparently accurate record of torture in many parts of the world...
...triumph of style over substance. Vilmos Zsigmond's camera, constantly on the move with a sinuous grace, is romantic in a manner seldom seen now in the movies. The late Bernard Herrmann's score, like the many he did for Hitchcock and Welles, is an instrument of flight, lifting the viewer up and over such resistance as he may have to the movie's patent improbability...
...jammed and enabling the lander to begin its historic life-seeking experiments. Some 19 minutes later, as telemetry confirming that the arm was no longer jammed appeared on the console screens at JPL, scientists and engineers broke into cheers. Said Meteorologist Seymour Hess: "Happiness is a functioning instrument in a spacecraft...
...experience of the visual arts was much wider than it really was. He did not have the automatic overview of a modern museumgoer; nor was he a kind of Yankee Kenneth Clark, mellifluously discoursing among the servants and mockingbirds of Monticello. He believed, correctly, that he was an instrument of history; but he did not imagine himself as a character in a cultural saga. Jef ferson's tough, ambitious self-teaching, in all its patchiness, cannot have been the smooth inheritance of masterpieces that his show suggests. It was won, not inherited, and in that sense was profoundly American...