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.

Torture and Art in Wars on Terror: A Comparative Analysis of "Zero Dark Thirty" and "The Battle of Algiers" (Part 3 - Zero Dark Thirty)

And now, ladies and gentlemen, we come to the finale of our examination, although, ironically, the subject is the basis of our whole discussion.  Having discussed the depiction of torture in The Battle of Algiers, we finally turn to Zero Dark Thirty.  Given my thesis that The Battle of Algiers succeeds in portraying terror in a nuanced way and that ZD30 does not, we now have to compare the two movies to determine where, exactly, the difference lies.

Let me start out by acknowledging that ZD30 is very good movie.  Katheryn Bigelow is an exceptional director, and the Oscar she won for The Hurt Locker was well deserved.  ZD30 is yet more evidence (as if any were needed) of her skills: the film is slick, well-paced, and many of its shots are downright beautiful.  And, of course, the climactic storming of bin Laden's Abbottabad compound was a cinematic thrill unlike any that is likely to be seen on the silver screen for some time.

But the aspects of the film that some people have claimed gives the movie the moral complexity to be a masterpiece - specifically, its focus on "enhanced interrogation" and its obvious message that torture provided the leads that led to Osama bin Laden's killing - in my mind, at least, do precisely the opposite.  If the use and depiction of torture in The Battle of Algiers provides an example of a film that treats torture in both a morally and situationally complex way, the depiction of torture in ZD30 provides merely an illusion complexity.

As an initial matter, for the purpose of this analysis let us begin by crediting (whether we believe them or not) three of the core presumptions that ZD30 seems to make:

• First, that none of the detainees who are tortured in the course of the "enhanced interrogation" program are innocent - all are, in some way or another, connected to al-Qaeda
• Second, that torture is effective - it results in accurate, actionable intelligence
• Third, that, more specifically, torture was essential to the discovery and elimination of Osama bin Laden himself

OK.  So . . . if we credit these points, we, the viewers, are left in roughly the same situation in which we found ourselves at the beginning of The Battle of Algiers.  Torture works, and torture helps you succeed.  So what is it that makes the movies so utterly different?

Failure to Seriously Examine Torture-as-Tactic:
I'll begin with an observation based more on artistic style and story-telling than anything else.  As I noted in the previous post, The Battle of Algiers provides the viewer with the movie's (quasi) outcome at the beginning of the film: the French eliminate the FLN and "win" the Battle of Algiers.  The rest of the film is a deeper, darker journey through the struggle between the FLN and the French - the roots of the FLN's urban guerilla campaign, the atrocities committed by both sides, the strikes, the press conferences, the torture, the systematic elimination of the FLN's executive bureau.  And then, at the very end, we have the historical version of the classic "twist" ending: despite Colonel Mathieu and his troops' destruction of the FLN's organization, the Algerian people rise up and France eventually has to abandon its former colony.  The entire movie, then, is not only an attempt to understand the complexity of the conflict in the city Algiers; it is, itself, an explanation for the eventual failure of France's colonial venture in Algeria.

Contrast this with ZD30, which is not, and, granted, is not meant to be, an overarching examination of the United States' War on Terror.  ZD30 is, above all else, a detective story and thriller.  Thus, it follows the typical detective story/thriller plot layout: a crime is committed (9/11); which sets in motion an investigation; which results in leads/clues, but also leads to obstacles; these obstacles are overcome, and the leads/clues are used to solve the crime or capture the criminal. Or, in this case, kill the criminal. In this kind of set-up, there is no reflection.  There is only forward momentum.  Whereas torture in The Battle of Algiers was both a device for propelling the plot and a central moral theme, torture in ZD30 is simply the former: it's the tool that gets the leads, sets further detective work in motion, and, eventually, results in the killing of bin Laden.

Worse still, torture is not merely a tool: it is an unexamined one.  ZD30 contains none of the back-story or explanation that makes up a significant portion of The Battle of Algiers.  ZD30's CIA personnel never really discuss torture - no justification is given for its use, no defense of the tactic is employed, indeed, its use and efficacy are never questioned by anybody.

Now, one could argue that, surely, the film's brief opening scene (a blank screen with real, heartbreaking audio from 9/11 emergency calls playing in the background) provides the justification for the torture we see committed by the CIA seconds later.  But I find this argument unpersuasive.  The 9/11 attacks were terrible.  But so was Pearl Harbor.  So was every battle during World War II (and many of these battles involved death tolls far in excess of 9/11).  I can understand the visceral terror and shock of watching as the heart of America was attacked on national television - hell, I remember it, I was there watching with everyone else.  But tell me this: have you ever seen a World War II film (that is, one that's not directed by Quentin Tarantino) in which American troops make a habit of torturing Nazi or Japanese prisoners?  I can't think of a single WWII film in which American troops are portrayed as torturers, much less one in which atrocities or violence by America's enemies was used as a justification for widespread torture.  What is it that makes the 9/11 attacks so different that ZD30 can take the US from Ground Zero to torture in the span of about two minutes?

I'll grant the possibility that Bigelow's juxtaposition of 9/11 and torture at the beginning of the movie was artistic, perhaps meant to symbolize the panicked and unreflective speed with which the Bush Administration instituted the "enhanced interrogation" program.  But given the ultimate trajectory of the film and its overwhelmingly positive portrayal of torture (see above and below), I can't say that this artistic choice was successful, if, indeed, it was intended at all.  And so the viewer is left with torture that simply is.  There is no explanation for it; no justification for it.  Why did we do it - was it out of malice (revenge), fear, an honest belief that it was the only way we could present future attacks?  The movie comes closest to endorsing the third possibility - or, at least, that's my interpretation of Bigelow's continuous use of depictions of real-life terrorist attacks (the London 7/7 bombings, the Islamabad Marriott Hotel bombing, the Camp Chapman suicide attack, and the attempted bombing of New York's Times Square) to punctuate the plot at various points in the movie.  But we don't know, because, throughout, the use of torture is simply unexamined.

Lack of Moral Complexity:
ZD30's failure to seriously examine the roots of torture in the aftermath of 9/11 leads to my second point: unlike many of the critics who have lauded ZD30 for its "brave" and "honest" portrayal of torture, I would disagree with the proposition that the movie is morally complex.  It isn't.  While you could argue this point at some theoretical level, reading into the movie's so-called "subtext," the film itself is unequivocally pro-torture.  In fact, to the extent that it is mentioned or recognized at all, nearly every reference to "enhanced interrogation" in the movie is laudatory: as Noah Millman writes in a mostly positive review of the film for "The American Conservative,"

"Down the line, top to bottom, nobody ever says anything critical about the torture of prisoners. Multiple times, after torture ceases, CIA officers complain that they can’t get good information anymore now that they can’t torture suspects. Nobody contradicts them."

And so it is.  The only negative things said about torture in the film come not from any moral or philosophical opposition to the tactic, but, much more practically, from political considerations. At one point in the film, Dan, the CIA operative who acts as ZD30's torturer-in-chief (ironically, also my favorite character... though for entirely different reasons), tells Maya that the political winds are changing and that she ought to consider getting out of the torture business because she won't "want to be the last one holding a dog-collar."  In another scene, of a strategy session between Maya and two of her CIA colleagues, a television in the background is playing a speech by President Obama decrying the use of torture and issuing an executive order halting the "enhanced interrogation" program.  The looks on the faces of Maya and her colleagues are completely non-plussed.  They may as well have rolled their eyes.  "Of course those politicians would be saying such things," they seem to think, "but us, here on the ground? We know better."

I'll end this section with a block-quote from Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi.  Although he is writer with whom I frequently disagree, and vociferously, he pretty much nailed his review of ZD30 (ominously entitled "Zero Dark Thirty Is Osama bin Laden's Last Victory Over America"), in which he writes,

"Bigelow put [torture] in, which was "honest," but it seems an eerie coincidence that she was "honest" about torture in pretty much exactly the way a CIA interrogator would have told the story, without including much else.

There's no way to watch Zero Dark Thirty without seeing it as a movie about how torture helped us catch Osama bin Laden. . . . . This was definitely not a movie about two vicious and murderous groups of people killing and torturing each other in an endless cycle of increasingly brainless revenge. And this was not a movie about how America lost its values en route to a great strategic victory. No, this was a straight-up "hero catches bad guys" movie, and the idea that audiences weren't supposed to identify with Maya the torturer is ludicrous."

This is absolutely correct.

Grand Scale (or "Second-Tier") Consequences:
My final critique in this comparison of ZD30 with The Battle of Algiers lies in the realm of what I'll call "second-tier consequences."  In my mind, the term "first-tier consequences" would describe the negative consequences that occur during or as an immediate result of torture - for instance, the moral degradation of the torturer; the risk of torturing an innocent person or one who does not have/know the information the torturer is seeking; the obtaining of false or exaggerated intelligence, given simply to make the torture stop; and similar problems.  Note that, because we have accepted ZD30's presumptions about torture - that it works, that it produces useful and actionable intelligence, and that none of its victims are actually innocent - we have wholly eliminated a discussion of the "first-tier consequences" that would obviously be integral to any analysis of the real-life "enhanced interrogation" program.

But the "second-tier consequences"?  Whole different ballgame.  These are the negative secondary effects of torture: the loss of stature and support for the United States among its allies, the cementing of the US image as "oppressor" to those already predisposed to think of it as such, the domestic horror and subsequent decline in public support for America's international actions.  And it is in this realm that ZD30 truly falls short.

Sure, in ZD30-land torture helped Maya and the CIA find and kill bin Laden.  But this is a cause-and-effect relationship that occurs only in the film's detective/manhunt/thriller vacuum.  In the movie's single-minded focus on Maya's hunt for bin Laden, nobody - not Bigelow, not Maya, not any other character - mentions or even considers the effects that torture might have in the wider world.  Which, in the context of a global War on Terrorism, is actually pretty freaking important.

Recall, as we saw in my last blog post, that the French military's use of torture in The Battle of Algiers resulted in a deeper level of alienation among the Algerian populace and a marked increase in their anti-French and anti-colonial sentiments.  Eventually, the film insinuates, it was these factors, bubbling to the surface in widespread public demonstration, and not the FLN's bombs and assassinations that doomed France's colonial control over Algeria.

As those of us who live in the real world know from painful experience, the United States and its interests around the world have suffered less dramatic, but by no means unimportant, repercussions as a result of the "enhanced interrogation" program.  The infamous images of torture at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison decimated the United States' image as Iraq's liberator, poured fuel on the flames of the growing Iraqi insurgency, and jilted the American public's support for the war.  Reports of prisoner abuse and Qur'an desecration at Guantanamo resulted in deadly riots in Afghanistan and in other locations around the Arab World.  And with each report of torture in Iraq, in Afghanistan, at Guantanamo, or at some secret CIA black site, more American stature was lost and the United States' insistence that it merely sought to bring freedom and democracy to the world rang more hollow.  There is a quote in the U.S. Army's Counterinsurgency Handbook (circa 2007):

"Any human rights abuses or legal violations committed by U.S. forces quickly become known throughout the local populace and eventually around the world. Illegitimate actions undermine both long- and short-term COIN [counter-insurgency] efforts."

Talk about an understatement.

But just as ZD30 fails to examine any other aspect of torture, so, too, does it fail to examine torture's second-tier consequences.  Iraq is never mentioned.  Global public opinion is never mentioned.  The Muslim world's opinion of the United States is never mentioned.  Neither Maya nor any of her CIA superiors seem to consider or care about whether their efforts are really the best strategy for eliminating global terror - whether they are really effectively preventing attacks and knocking off terrorists, or are merely nurturing the resentments that will lead to greater anti-American sentiment, strengthen radical Islamists, and result in yet more terror.

It is questions like that that a serious, nuanced examination of torture would have produced, and it is questions like that which fall by the wayside in the heady, heart-thumping adrenaline rush of the film's ending.  Because, hey, they got bin Laden.

Torture & Art in Wars on Terror: A Comparative Analysis of "Zero Dark Thirty" and "The Battle of Algiers" (Part 1 - Introduction)

Last night, I finally got around to seeing the movie that has dominated online discussion on Twitter, in various periodicals, and on a good many blogs for the past week and a half - or, indeed, almost month and a half when you count the reviews and articles published in the wake of the movie's limited, December release.  Yes, friends, I have finally taken the time, laid my money down, and watched Kathryn Bigelow's "Zero Dark Thirty."

In the wake of its release, "Zero Dark Thirty" (henceforth ZD30) - the tale of the CIA's ten-year manhunt for Osama bin Laden, culminating in the (spoiler!) May 2011 Navy SEAL raid on bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan - has inspired thousands of words of criticism from journalists, online commentators, Tweeps, bloggers, politicians, and even members of the intelligence community itself.  While each individual commenter has his/her own personal take on the movie and its problems, the common thread between all the criticisms of the movie can be communicated in one word: torture.  

Bigelow's depictions of the Bush Administration's "enhanced interrogation" techniques is brutal, deeply unsettling, and has created more ire from critics and (some) movie-goers than George Lucas's decision to put aliens in the fourth "Indiana Jones" movie. (NOTE: that's an exaggeration - from what I've seen of movie-goers' comments, it's apparent that the Indie aliens were far worse).  In addition to the gallons of journalistic ink spilled criticizing Bigelow's portrayal of torture, three United States Senators (John McCain (R, AZ), Diane Feinstein (D, CA), and Carl Levin (D, MI)) also put their thumbs in a decidedly downward position, writing a public letter to Sony Pictures lambasting the movie as "grossly inaccurate and misleading in its suggestion that torture resulted in information that led to the location of Usama bin Laden."  Senator McCain, a Vietnam war veteran and torture survivor, had especially harsh words for the movie, stating that watching the film made him physically "sick."

Bigelow has responded to her critics by insisting that torture played an undeniable role in the hunt for bin Laden and that, regardless of whether it was the primary intelligence method that led to bin Laden's death, it was something the screenwriters couldn't ignore.  "War, obviously, isn't pretty," she says, "and we were not interested in portraying this military action as free of moral consequences."  She has also stated that she personally finds torture to be "reprehensible," and, in a written statement/article published in the Los Angeles Times, she went on to say:

"Those of us who work in the arts know that depiction is not endorsement. If it was, no artist would be able to paint inhumane practices, no author could write about them, and no filmmaker could delve into the thorny subjects of our time."

Which, of course, is true - as far as it goes.  But, as I watched ZD30, I fully understood the points being made by the movie's critics, and my personal opinion is generally one of agreement: Bigelow's film comes dangerously close to, not legitimizing, not promoting, but . . . sanitizing the "enhanced interrogation" tactics employed by the CIA.  Baptized in the endorphin-drenched victory of a successful hunt and a dead enemy, the torture tactics seen by the viewer in the early parts of the film fade into the background - grim, but necessary, component parts of America's victory.  As the credits roll and the movie theater crowd begins to clap, who, then, remembers the suffering of Ammar earlier in the film?

But my goal here is not to write a long-winded criticism of the film in the "why torture is bad" or "how torture doesn't work" or "why this movie is factually inaccurate" veins (although these points will certainly be discussed or touched on to some extent).  Plenty of people have already done that.  Nor is my purpose to prove that Ms. Bigelow or even the film itself is pro-torture.  No, no.  My goal is to write an even more long-winded critique of ZD30 and its depiction of torture from an artistic/realistic perspective by comparing ZD30 with another film - one of my favorites: The Battle of Algiers.  It is my opinion that defenses of ZD30's torture scenes as being merely "nuanced" or showing "the whole picture" are wrong.  While it can certainly be argued that the film holds an accusatory mirror up to American society in the post-9/11 era (e.g. "look what you have become"), if the film sought to show any deeper perspective on the strategic or moral consequences of torture, it fails miserably.  To put it another way, merely showing American CIA agents torturing captured al-Qaeda members is not particularly deep or nuanced.  And this is what ZD30 does: while there are certainly some stricken looks from ZD30's main character, Maya, during the early torture scenes, no one challenges the enhanced interrogation techniques, no discussion takes place about why they are - or even could be - bad/immoral/ineffective, and no negative results arise from their use in the course of the movie.  Even this brief scene from the Batman movie The Dark Knight (on the topic of surveillance) is more nuanced than the treatment of torture in ZD30:

And this is where The Battle of Algiers comes in.  I believe that, unlike ZD30, the Battle of Algiers actually succeeds in examining the issues involved in a Western nation's fight against terrorism - whether employed for nationalist or trans-nationalist purposes - from a nuanced perspective that actually allows the viewer to think more deeply about these issues.  And, over a series of posts that examines what each movie did right and what each movie did wrong when it comes to artistic portrayals of torture, I hope to show why.  We will begin (hopefully soon) with a post about The Battle of Algiers, with a background primer on that film and an examination of its treatment of torture within the context of the French-Algerian conflict.