(Don't Fear) The MQ-9 Reaper: The Department of Justice White Paper and the Targeted Killing of American Citizens

Disclaimer: this blog post is not meant to be a sign of support for the overarching policy of targeted-killings-by-drone that the United States has pursued in the Middle East, the Asian Subcontinent, and Africa over the past nine years.  There are certainly significant consequences to the use of drones - including civilian casualties, missed targets, and the effects of drone use on foreign public opinion - that go well beyond any strictly legal analysis of drone-based targeted killing.  That said, these issues will not be addressed in this blog post, which strictly discusses the rationale of the DoJ whitepaper that was recently released.

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Unless you've been hiding under a rock (or just busy) for the past few days, you've no doubt heard about the Department of Justice memo on targeted killing that was leaked to NBC news on Monday.  And hoo boy what a stink it's caused, especially in the Right Wing Blogosphere and among a host of (*cough* hypocritical *cough*) conservative pundits.   I mean, did you know that the Obama Administration thinks it's honkey-dorey to ASSASSINATE AMERICAN CITIZENS without DUE PROCESS?!  For all the subtlety of their headlines and arguments, the whole lot of them may as well have pooled together and said, in the immortal words of Antoine Dodson: "Hide yo' kids, hide yo' wife, and hide yo' husband, cuz they dronin' e'erbody out here."

Conservative Punditocracy to the Average American: "Do
not ask for whom the Predator drone hums . . . it hums for thee."

Source: PolicyMic, "Predator Drone Strikes"

(As an aside, left wing pundits have been no less hypocritical in their *support* for the DoJ whitepaper.  MSNBC's typically far-left punditocracy - including "people's rights come from the government" Touré, Chris "Tingles" Matthews, and Rachel Maddow - weighed in in favor of the targeted killing policy, and the network's Krystal Ball went full hack and decided to just come out and say what everyone who listened to the original MSNBC slobberfest already knew: that these same pundits would *not* have supported the *exact same* policy had it been implemented by George W. Bush. So, yes, there's plenty of hackery and hypocrisy to go around . . .)

But, back to business.  The level of hysteria over the targeted killing memo has somewhat confused me, and not just because of its mystical ability to turn cable news into a "Through the Looking Glass" topsy-turvy laugh-fest (as if it wasn't already).  This is largely because, even from reading the first page of the memo, the DoJ's central caveat is obvious: the memo *does not* provide a legal justification for the targeted killing of Americans.  It provides a legal justification for the targeted killing of Americans . . . who are operational leaders of al-Qaeda, who are residing in a foreign country, and who, for whatever reason, cannot be captured.  Which, of course, is not necessarily a good thing or a good policy.  But there is a world of difference between "The DoJ Believes the Government Can Kill American Citizens Without Due Process!" and "The DoJ Believes the Government Can Kill al-Qaeda Leaders, Who Happen to be American Citizens, with Minimal Due Process."

Literally the end of the very first paragraph of the DoJ memo.
Note the phrase "only where the following three conditions are met."

I was relieved to find that I was not the only person who picked up the distinction, and, luckily, those who did are a lot smarter and more articulate than I am.  In fact, why are you even reading this blog when you could be reading:

• "Just Calm Down About That DoJ White Paper" (Lawfare, Benjamin Wittes and Susan Hennessey)
• "Americans: If You Don’t Want To Get Killed By A Drone, Avoid These 4 Things!" (Selected Wisdom, Clint Watts) <== This post is especially brilliant.

The point is that the DoJ memo doesn't give the Obama Administration a license to kill any thought-criminal or Republican that it happens to be annoyed with this week.  It's a limited legal opinion, applied in limited circumstances, to a relatively small group of individuals.  

In fact, with the deaths of Anwar al-Awlaki (who, as Clint Watts points out, was likely the very person whose targeting the DoJ white paper was written to justify) and Inspire magazine editor Samir Khan, I don't know if there are currently *any* American members of al-Qaeda who are sufficiently "senior" to fall within the white paper's definition of who could be legally targeted.  A case might be made for targeting Adam Gadahn, al-Qaeda Central's Oregon-born media advisor, spokesperson, and propagandist . . . but even this might be stretching the definition of "senior operational leader" a bit far.  While there are certainly other Americans who have joined al-Qaeda or its regional affiliates (Somalia's al-Shabaab seems to be a particularly popular choice for American terrorist wannabes, though some have found the experience to be a lot less fun than they were expecting), they are all comparatively small fry.  I would personally be curious to hear just who - if anyone - still falls within the ambit of this DoJ memo.

As for the memo's legal reasoning, well . . . it might be a little strained, but I don't think it's necessarily unreasonable.  The "Mathews v. Eldridge Balancing Test" referenced at several points throughout the memo is a somewhat arcane (to non-lawyers/law students) test that is very, very significant in the field of administrative law.  The test is used to determine what level of process is due to a person who is being deprived of liberty, property, or now, apparently, life resulting from the action of an administrative agency.  The test stipulates that three factors must be considered:

1. The private interest that would be effected by government actions
2. The risk of an erroneous deprivation and the likely benefit of additional procedural safeguards
3. The government's asserted interest

Typically, a less significant private interest, a low risk of erroneous deprivation, a low probability that additional procedural safeguards will lead to a greater degree of certainty with respect to an action, and a high government interest are all factors that cut in favor of a lower level of due process (for example, no constitutional requirement that a hearing take place prior to the deprivation of liberty/property).  The opposite, of course, cuts in favor of more significant procedural safeguards (e.g. pre-deprivation hearings that operate more like a traditional trial).

Now what, you might ask, does some administrative law mumbo jumbo have to do with the laws of war?  Good question, and the answer lies in the case of Hamdi v. Rumsfeld (2004), which, as you might have noticed, is also cited throughout the DoJ white paper.  In Hamdi, a case in which an American citizen held at Guantanamo Bay sued the Bush Administration challenging his detention and demanding access to the evidence against him, the Supreme Court pulled the Mathews Test completely out of its bag of tricks (NEITHER party had cited Mathews in its briefs to the Court!) to effect a compromise between Hamdi's position and that of the US government.  Based on Hamdi's important liberty interest in, you know, not being imprisoned in Gitmo for the rest of his life and due to the moderate risk of an erroneous deprivation (e.g. was Hamdi really al-Qaeda? He, like hundreds of others, was picked up by Afghanistan's Northern Alliance and turned over to the US later...), the Court ruled that American citizens like Hamdi who were challenging their enemy combatant status need to be provided with a greater amount of due process.  Specifically, they ought to 1) receive notice of the factual basis of their classifications as enemy combatants, and 2) receive a fair opportunity to rebut the Government’s factual assertions before a neutral decision-maker.  Recognizing that the Government, too, had important interests, however, the Court also ruled that at such hearings before a neutral decision-maker, there would be a rebuttable presumption in favor of the government’s evidence and hearsay evidence would be allowed.  It's not a perfect decision, by any means, but it incorporated (bizarrely) a key administrative law tool into a wartime scenario, laying the groundwork for a (somewhat) more clear-cut way of making procedural due process determinations with respect to armed conflicts.

By extending the reasoning in Hamdi and applying the Mathews balancing factors, the DoJ memo is drawing two central conclusions: 1) the US Government's interest in protecting its citizens and homeland from attack outweighs the interests that American citizen "senior operational leaders of al-Qaeda" have in continuing to live and plot, and 2) the risk of erroneous targeted killings (e.g. the targeting and killing of an American citizen who is not a "senior operational leader of al-Qaeda) is low and will not be made any lower by the creation of additional procedural safeguards.  It's a pretty big jump from Hamdi, but, again, it's not completely unreasonable.  And let me reiterate that, by its very language, the memo only applies this logic to "senior operational leaders" of al-Qaeda "in a foreign country."

This, however, is where the ACTUAL arguments against the DoJ white paper can really come into play, because, at least in my opinion, the idea that additional procedural safeguards - say, the creation of a special court that reviews the evidence against an al-Qaeda leader and issues the final decision on whether to drone or not to drone - are unnecessary comes off as at once naive and a little sinister.  I'm no fan of al-Qaeda, but, if we're going to keep the drone program, I'd at least like to see a greater degree of judicial oversight with respect to who deserves to have a Hellfire missile dropped on them.

While, as I hope that I and others have shown, the average American has little to worry about with respect to the DoJ's targeted killing memo, I think that, perhaps, the memo has led to an important conversation about drones and their use (discounting, of course, the paranoid ramblings or the slobbering sycophancy of the punditocracy).  Because with John Brennan up for Director of the CIA, the US drone policy is - without the limits that a public conversation on the issue may potentially create - likely to continue apace.  Or, to put it another way: John Brennan and the counter-terror establishment have a fever . . . and currently the only prescription is more cowbell.

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.

The War on Terror in Yemen: A Review of Gregory Johnsen's "The Last Refuge"

Several days ago, I finished reading a book that I had been looking forward to reading for some time: The Last Refuge: Yemen, al-Qaeda, and America's War in Yemen, by Gregory Johnsen.  Published last fall (November 2012), The Last Refuge had to be laid aside while I finished my law semester and studied for finals.  But the Christmas holiday gave me the time I needed and, now, here we are.  Because of the importance of the topics addressed in Mr. Johnsen's book and the fact that Yemen is an often-forgotten front in the United State's continuing campaign against al-Qaeda, I've decided to write a brief review of the book.

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It is likely that, if most Americans were asked to name the central fronts in the continuing battle against al-Qaeda, to the extent they would answer at all, they would cite Afghanistan or Pakistan.  Perhaps those who were up on recent news would name Mali.  But, after the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki in a US drone strike in late September 2011 and the subsequent fading of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula from the headlines, comparatively few would name Yemen, the oft-forgotten country occupying the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula. 

At least one person, however, has not forgotten either Yemen or America's recent foreign policy forays in the country, nor underestimated the continuing significance of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.  This person, Gregory Johnsen - Yemen expert, former Fulbright Fellow (in Yemen), and PhD candidate in Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University - has written a splendid book on the topic: The Last Refuge: Yemen, al-Qaeda, and America's War in Arabia.  I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that Mr. Johnsen has written what is currently the preeminent book on al-Qaeda's expansion to Yemen; its early operations there; and its exploitation of the country's porous borders, tribal networks, and lack of strong central governance to expand its numbers and its strength.

Johnsen's story begins, like so many books about al-Qaeda, during the heyday of the Afghan-Soviet War, the 9-year conflict that proved to be the birthplace of the modern radical Islamist/jihadist movement.  Following the cast of characters that has become so familiar to counter-terrorism researchers - Abdullah Azzam, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and, of course, Osama bin Laden, as well as lesser-known (but no less significant) figures like Yemeni cleric Abd al-Majid al-Zindani - Johnsen weaves a fine narrative of the importance of the Afghan War to the Arab World, and, specifically, the Yemen, of the 1980s.  Additionally, he provides a primer on the development of Osama bin Laden's violent ideology, an offshoot (and significant expansion) of his mentor Azzam's theory that violent jihad in defense of Muslim territory was fard al-ayn (الفرض العين) - an individual duty incumbent on all Muslims.

Equally important to the tale of al-Qaeda in Yemen is bin Laden's post-Afghanistan development of his terrorist organization and the progressive expansion of his ideology from merely battling "non-Islamic" intruders in the Arab world, to attacking the "apostate" governments aligned with the United States; from attacking U.S. interests in the region, to attacking American civilians (regardless of their gender, age, or military/civilian status) in the heart of the United States.  Bin Laden had little interest in the United States until the first Gulf War, when, with the acquiescence of the al-Saud monarchy, American troops were deployed to Saudi Arabia as part of the American-led military campaign to expel Saddam Hussein's army from Kuwait.  Indeed, as Johnsen describes, bin Laden's first post-Afghanistan plot involved jihad against the communist government of what was then South Yemen, directly to the south of bin Laden's home country of Saudi Arabia:

"In the months after Azzam's assassination [e.g. late 1989/early 1990], bin Laden and Fadhli [e.g. Tariq al-Fadhli, a veteran of bin Laden's cadre of "Arab Afghans"] sat up late in the evening . . . as they sketched out the future of jihad in bin Laden's apartment. They were both drawn to Yemen, the land of their father . . . . Said to be the Arab world's Afghanistan, Yemen was full of tribes and mountains, and, at least in the south, was ruled by Socialists. But mostly it was a blank map onto which the two young jihadis could project their ambitions." (Pgs. 17-18)

While America's so-called "occupation" of the "Land of the Two Holy Places" quickly turned bin Laden's attention away from Yemen back to Saudi Arabia and beyond the sea to the United States, the seeds of the al-Qaeda organization he had planted in Yemen, with Tariq al-Fadhli as his regional lieutenant, would continue to grow.

And it is precisely here that we find the crux of Johnsen's story: the growth, decimation, and resurrection of al-Qaeda in Yemen.  With a few exceptions (events like the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000 and names like Anwar al-Awlaki), this story is an unfamiliar one.  But it is a fascinating and incredibly informative tale - a tale that should be required reading for anyone interested in al-Qaeda, the War on Terror, or counter-terrorism studies generally.  Johnsen details how Yemen's internal politics allowed al-Qaeda to grow and thrive during the early 1990s, as Ali Abdullah Saleh (the President of North Yemen who had recently overseen Yemen's unification with his Southern counterpart, Ali Salim al-Bid) twice allied with Tariq al-Fadhli, bin Laden's lieutenant, in order to strengthen his own power in relation to his rivals in southern Yemen.  As Johnsen writes,

"Fadhli was loyal to bin Laden and the plan they had made together, but he was also bound to his father's tribe and their lands in the south. . . . . But for the moment, at least, Fadhli didn't have to choose. In the early 1990s, Salih and the jihadists were on the same side." (Pg. 22)

But, for Yemen's al-Qaeda branch, all good things had to come to an end.  While facing some internal difficulties during the mid and late '90s, with the turn of the century and the terrorist attacks on the USS Cole in October 2000 and the Twin Towers and Pentagon on September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda in Yemen's grace period was over: the group was then firmly in the crosshairs of the United States.  Johnsen's depiction of the diplomatic back-and-forth between the US and Salih in the aftermath of 9/11, and the two allies' eventual destruction of al-Qaeda's Yemeni-based operations structure is a fascinating, and the final reversal of America and Yemen's initial success - the rebirth of al-Qaeda in Yemen as al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula under the leadership of Islamists like Nasir al-Wuhayshi, Said Ali al-Shihri, and Anwar Awlaki - chilling in its implications.

Perhaps just as interesting as Johnsen's overarching history of al-Qaeda in Yemen is a comparatively brief interlude in the book's fourth chapter, "Faith and Wisdom," describing the tribulations of Ayman al-Zawahiri's terrorist organization, al-Jihad (aka Egyptian Islamic Jihad), during the mid-1990s and the open revolt of many of the organization's members in the wake of Zawahiri's decision to align al-Jihad with Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda in 1998.  As Johnsen writes,

"Along with several other terrorist leaders, Zawahiri and bin Laden issued a fatwa entitled 'Jihad against the Jews and Crusaders.' The declaration of war urged 'every Muslim' to kill Americans and Jews wherever they found them. Zawahiri's followers in Yemen were stunned. They hadn't been consulted. What was their boss doing? Criticism poured in from around the Middle East, Africa, and Europe as members of al-Jihad struggled to come to terms with Zawahiri's about-face. They were supposed to be fighting Mubarak's regime, and now Zawahiri wanted them to kill Americans.

. . . Convinced their leader had lost touch, al-Jihad operatives around the world started announcing their resignation." (Pg. 52-53)

I found this particularly interesting simply because I was unaware that the alliance between bin Laden and Zawahiri resulted in such discord within the jihadi community.

Anyway, to wrap it up, I would highly recommend The Last Refuge to anyone interested in counter-terrorism or security studies, Yemen, al-Qaeda, or the Middle East in general.  It is an excellent read, and well worth your time and money.