Torture and Art in Wars on Terror: Epilogue

I wrote in my initial post that I wasn't going to go on a long-winded tirade about "how torture is wrong."  And I feel like I held myself to that pretty well.  But, now that that's done, it's time to rant, because during my research (*cough* reading Twitter and online news *cough*) for this series of blog posts, I came across a Tweet that I think perfectly exemplifies one of the most significant moral problems that arises from ZD30.

My first response upon reading this tweet was to do the most epic Picard Facepalm since the good Captain immortalized that time-honored technique.  My second was to immediately screenshot the damn thing, because surely the author would realize the all-kinds-of-stupid nonsense she/he had just written and try and delete the evidence as quickly as possible.  In this, however, I was wrong... the tweet is currently still online; even after some more charitable tweeps corrected this person's misperception, she/he maintained that waterboarding didn't look much like torture compared to "the stuff you see in real movies." Again, cue Captain Picard.

But then I had a terrible realization.  Contrary to my initial perception, this tweet (while still pretty stupid) might not be all that unsurprising for two reasons: 1) many individuals, and even some who still wield political power in the United States government, continue to parse a distinction between "enhanced interrogation" and torture; and 2) many individuals know about waterboarding on a theoretical level, but they don't fully understand what it is or what its effects are.

Source: "Torture on Trial," Link TV Documentary

This probably is not helped by the oft-repeated explanation that waterboarding merely "simulates the sensation of drowning."  To say that the technique simply "simulates" this terrifying sensation gives the impression that there is really no danger to the individual being waterboarded - in the same sense as, say, a paintball game "simulates" the sensation of being in a gun-battle with none of the attendant risks of serious injury or death.  This makes waterboarding out to be more of a ruse or a trick than a torture technique.  The reality is much grimmer.  As the late Christopher Hitchens - who allowed himself to be waterboarded for a Vanity Fair story - described it: "You feel that you are drowning because you are drowning — or, rather, being drowned, albeit slowly and under controlled conditions and at the mercy (or otherwise) of those who are applying the pressure."  Feel free to watch Mr. Hitchens being waterboarded; the footage is on YouTube.  See how long he lasts, and how very little water it takes for a man to break.

Many reviews of Zero Dark Thirty have lauded the fact that Bigelow pulled no punches in the scenes depicting the United States' "enhanced interrogation" practices.  It is impossible to view the movie, these reviewers insist, without being able to understand that the waterboarding, sexual humiliation, physical restraint, beatings, stress positions, and other practices shown are clearly acts of torture.  To a large extent, I agree with this analysis.  I know that I found those scenes to be difficult to watch, and the film's opening interrogation sequence chilled me, a feeling that I was unable to shake throughout the entire movie.  Most horrible of all was the scene in which Ammar, sexually humiliated ("You don't mind if my female colleague sees your junk?") and left alone with Maya, begs her to help him.  Her cold response, "You can help yourself by being truthful," and the fear and pain in his puffy, sleep-deprived eyes made me disgusted and ashamed.  Perhaps it was meant to.  As the reviewers I've cited note, it certainly seems hard to imagine that anyone could watch these scenes and not believe that what they were seeing was torture.

And yet . . .  And yet I wonder.  Because it is still hard for me to imagine that, over a decade after the waterboarding/"enhanced interrogation" debate began, anyone could have written the Tweet I posted above.  And I see the rave reviews that people have given Zero Dark Thirty, the "hooah!" audience response, the thrilled Tweets of "best movie ever, OMG!!! <3", and the gleeful "I-told-you-sos" in some quarters that yes, of course, enhanced interrogation made the difference in the hunt for bin Laden - and, again, I wonder.

Because there's that statement, lingering on the tweetdeck of our unfortunate Tweep subject, above: that what was portrayed in Zero Dark Thirty "didn't look much like torture compared to the stuff you see in real movies."  I wonder how many of the film's viewers agree with that statement.  Because, at some level, it's true, isn't it?  Nothing in ZD30 seems quite as brutal as James Bond getting his testicles pounded on with a length of rope in Casino Royale.  No detainees' body parts are cut off, there are no mock executions, and there are no forms of penetrative torture (e.g. gunshots, stabbing, etc.) à la 24.  Nobody is tortured via electric shock, as Liam Neeson tortures his daughter's kidnapper in Taken.  Are these the only kinds of things that rise to the level of "real" torture?  Certainly not.  As the great anti-Soviet novelist and crusader Aleksander Solzhenitsyn wrote in the first volume of his expansive Gulag Archipelago, even such a seemingly mundane thing as sleep deprivation - one of the comparatively "lighter" forms of "enhanced interrogation" that the viewer witnesses in Zero Dark Thirty - can be an extremely potent form of torture:

"Sleeplessness (yes, combined with standing, thirst, bright light, terror, and the unknown — what other tortures are needed!?) befogs the reason, undermines the will, and the human being ceases to be himself, to be his own "I." . . . .

. . . . Here is how one victim . . . describes his feelings after this torture [e.g. sleep deprivation]: ". . . . Irises of the eyes dried out as if someone were holding a red-hot iron in front of them. Tongue swollen from thirst and prickling as from a hedgehog at the slightest movement. Throat racked by spasms of swallowing."

Sleeplessness was a great form of torture: it left no visible marks and could not provide grounds for complaint even if an inspection — something unheard of anyway — were to strike on the morrow.

'They didn't let you sleep? Well, after all, this is not supposed to be a vacation resort. The Security officials were awake too!'" (The Gulag Archipelago: 1918 - 1956 Vol. 1, pg. 112)

But . . . it doesn't look like the torture you see in "real" movies.  It doesn't seem as brutal as the cinematic depictions of torture I've described above.  And, after all, we got bin Laden . . . .

How many people, then, are willing to view the torture scenes in Zero Dark Thirty and think to themselves, like Solzhenitsyn's imaginary NKVD agent (the NKVD preceded the KGB as the Soviet Union's secret police force), "they didn't let you sleep and played loud music?  Well, this isn't supposed to be a vacation resort!"  "Oh, they stuffed you in a box?  But, after all, you are a Very Bad Person and, really, it's not SUCH a terrible thing."  "Sure, you were put in a collar and paraded about half-naked like a dog, but it's not like we subjected you to Real Torture™like you see in the movies."

Compounding the effects of these sorts of justifications is the fact that all of the detainees who are tortured in Zero Dark Thirty are portrayed as being connected, in one way or another, to al-Qaeda.  This brings to mind another Solzhenitsyn reference: the chilling title to his book We Never Make Mistakes.  It is comparatively easy to justify torture in the world of Zero Dark Thirty, where the tactic not only works, but is only ever employed against people who we know, 100%, to be actual terrorists.  In the real world, however, everyone - even, and perhaps especially, US intelligence - makes mistakes.  Not everyone who was interrogated during the "enhanced interrogation" program was guilty, either by association or otherwise; indeed, some unfortunate, innocent people paid the ultimate price as a result of their mistaken arrest and "interrogation" by the United States.

This is not to denigrate the ultimate conclusion of Zero Dark Thirty.  I certainly believe that bin Laden got what was coming to him, and for those who want to dismiss the SEAL raid that killed him as a mere "assassination" I have nothing but contempt.  But at what moral cost was this great victory obtained?  Zero Dark Thirty, as we've seen over the course of the past few blog posts, certainly doesn't examine this question in any meaningful way.  Instead, it provides an action movie apologia for torture that at least some people (those who don't view the "enhanced interrogation" methods as rising to the level of Real Torture) seem to be interpreting as, "what we did wasn't so bad . . . and it worked!"  The vocal, visceral positive responses to the film that I've seen both online and in person (my entire theater applauded at the end of the movie; I'm willing to bet cash money that yours did, too) seem to indicate that, whatever the moral cost of torture might be, it's a cost that by the end of the film most, or, at least, many, are willing to bear.