PRI: Public Radio International

Zero Dark Thirty, out this weekend, 'remarkably accurate' yet still controversial

Sat, 12 Jan 2013 10:30:00 -0600

Zero Dark Thirty, the critically acclaimed film that looks at the events leading up to the death of Osama bin Laden. The film, though, has not been without controversy, particularly on Capitol Hill, where several senators have been outspoken critics.

Peter Ferenbach

Sat, 12 Jan 2013 12:32:59 -0600

The problem with the film is that there is no public evidence that torture worked. None. Only the self serving argument of those who are culpable. By contrast, D's and R's alike with access to the definitive account of detainee treatment say it did NOT work. Even the past two CIA directors have stated for the record that torture did not produce evidence leading to bin Laden.

Meanwhile, it's time to end the obfuscating once and for all. Waterboarding was invented during the Spanish Inquisition. The US prosecuted Japanese officers who used the technique for war crimes following WWII. The Khmer Rouge further refined the practice. Waterboarding is torture. Unfortunately, much of our media willfully avoids calling the practice by its name as this site demonstrates - http://www.coveringtorture.org/
Torture is torture. It's also against the law.

Frank

Sun, 13 Jan 2013 02:37:20 -0600

So, was a single woman the real brains and motivation behind the killing of Osama Bin Laden aks UBL? This movie would have us believe it is so. Jessica Chastain has been nominated for best Actress, but Sally Field has a better chance.

I don't even know if Jessica Chastain played an actual, historical character, or whether this was the portrayal of events as directed by Kathryn Bigelow.

Bill

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 00:43:22 -0600

Peter, the waterboarding (enhanced interogation) was never intended to directly produce truthful intel. The purpose was to get the "high value detainee" to talk about anything. At first they refused to talk, zero, nothing. The waterboarding got them talking so that the information could be used against and among the other detainees. The movie makes that point. Low level say they know the courier and the high level detainees deny or de-emphasize his importance which, as the movie depicts, was significant intelligence.

Ella

Sun, 27 Jan 2013 17:12:03 -0600

Peter is making a mistake in his analysis and Bill is illuminating a subtle difference.

It's like the game Clue: You are able to elicit information because of the cards you hold in your hand and holding those against information discussed with other subjects.

The film doesn't show that torture results in a subject giving up a central, crucial plot or figure in the movement, or coughing up everything they know in a confession.

In fact, the most brutal torture results in ZERO information of use being elicited during the physical torture process itself. Some information comes out later, when the torturers go easier on the guy.

If you, Peter, don't think that is likely, that people can be broken that way, then you are living in a dreamworld.

If you think "breaking" people is wrong, that I understand, and if your point is to say that it's been criminalized and is illegal fine, but either take a moral / legal stand or don't: By saying "torture is ineffective" you are parroting a meme put out there by the political wing of the certain members of the U.S. government and of some members of the CIA -- other members just as close or closer to the truth would insist on the factual reality being closer to the more nuanced portrait of the role that torture has played in the process of intelligence gathering.

As an opponent of torture, I found the "torture is ineffective" meme to be seductive and comforting.

The movie made me question whether I'd been sold something. Imagining myself a subject of it, I personally don't see how undergoing water-boarding that caused me, over and over again, to lose total control over my body and experience the panic of drowning on a primal level, how I would not eventually weaken and respond to kind, civil treatment by eventually sharing some useful information with my captors.

Especially if they were intelligent, intense, detective / psychologists and knew how to work it out of me psychologically.

Again, it's comforting to hope that this is not true, and it's also comforting to imagine those engaging in torture as animals and pure sadists, to get on a high horse about them and condemn their illegal acts and to pull out tropes like "we're becoming worse than the assailants themselves and compromising our own humanity in the process," but I thought the film adequately portrays a sort of "tool" kind of person, obsessed and single-minded in pursuit of a goal, not doing it for glory, or for patriotic self-sacrifice, but likely because of some other deeper, more obscure psychological motive.

I found the movie to be deeply spooky in a way because it refused to moralize and because of it's neutral stance on everything that happened. I dislike Bigelow's two movies on the 9-11 wars because they don't question the premises or pull the camera back to the point where we see the senselessness of the situation more clearly, but of the two, Hurt Locker upset me more because this neutral portrayal was made of a situation where we were, by many more bullet points, engaged in an unjust war. Zero Dark Thirty is about a criminal, military, intelligence manhunt for a person who did make a conscious choice to support flying commercial aircraft filled with people into enormous buildings filled with people, most of whom were non-combatants except when looking at the world in a Marxist or radical Islamic fundamentalist point of view.