In lieu of a review, here is Michael Totten’s case for seeing Zero Dark Thirty. His piece primarily addresses the controversy surrounding the movie’s depiction of the use of torture, and whether or not such practices led to actionable intelligence.
While ZDT’s action is presented in a matter of fact way, it was engrossing. So now, at least, you too can view a fictionalized version of bin Laden’s end.
In its portrayal of CIA professionals and Seal Team Six there were no overly dramatic scenes where someone freaks out or whines or expresses moral indignation. Rather we see highly talented and dedicated people doing their job excellently.
BTW, Totten is the author of an excellent journalistic account of war and terrorism in Lebanon called The Road to Fatima Gate.
January 26th, 2013 | 12:23 pm
[...] In lieu of a review, here is Michael Totten’s case for seeing Zero Dark Thirty. His piece primarily addresses the controversy surrounding the movie’s depiction of the use of torture, and whether or not such practices led to actionable intelligence. While ZDT’s action is presented in a matter of fact way, it was Source: Postmodern Conservative [...]
January 26th, 2013 | 1:13 pm
1. Michael Totten’s blog is great. His books are basically collections of his blog posts, minus the wonderful photos, so they really lose a lot, but it’s a good way to support his work.
2. I confess I have no desire to see ZDT, mostly out of stubbornness that it’s the first time H’wood has deigned to make anything even remotely positive regarding the GWOT. When they make movies about the invasion, about the hunt for Saddam, about the battle(s) for Falujah, etc., then I’ll make time to watch this one.
3. My understanding is that the movie was in the works before they actually got OBL. So the “torture” scenes were supposed to be shown to lead nowhere. But then history intervened, and now poor Kathryn Bigelow is on the outs in H’wood.
January 26th, 2013 | 5:46 pm
Not only should you see Zero-Dark-Thirty but it ought to be a requirement for anyone who wants to understand the predicament of our present geopolitical situation.
As I understand it, Bigelow’s early edits had footage of both Bush and Obama that eventually got edited out. It’s speculative as to why, but I suspect at some point Bigelow’s sense of artistic integrity overcame the propagandist in her which was on full display in her forgettable anti-Iraq War tirade “The Valley of Elah”.
According to interviews of Bigelow and Boal, the screenplay writer, they wanted to tell the story straight and explore the moral ambiguities entailed in the search for OBL. What they did, no doubt unintentionally, was reveal that the whole dispensation given by the Obama administration that the OBL hit was the result of his administrations initiative was thoroughly crap and so we are now watching the results as cognitive dissonance ensues among the creative class as well as various political activists.
Let me list the inconvenient details the movie emphasizes:
1.The key initial intelligence, the discovery that OBL relied on one courier as his messenger to the outside, was acquired as a result of enhanced methods used in the detainee program.
If you want to entertain yourself I recommend going to Rotten Tomatoes and read the variety of reviews of the movie. There are two categories. The first are the anti Zero-Dark-Thirty reviews which to-a-one are essentially diatribes at Bigelow for daring to portray enhanced methods without moralizing against said methods. The other type are the pro Zero-Dark-Thirty reviews which give Bigelow artistic cudo’s and then attempt to engage in an exercise of creative exegesis explaining how technically the first clue was found not by enhanced methods but because the interrogators pulled a sleight of hand on the detainee.
Set aside the fact that the detainee is a composite, such an interpretation is empirically incorrect. You can see the movie for yourself but the trick they played only worked because the detainee was so compromised by the accumulative effects of his treatment that they were actually able to convince him that he had already succumbed and given them key intelligence already so why doesn’t he just tell them the rest that he knows?
That and the fact that the CIA protagonist, Maya, successfully cross references the new intelligence with numerous tapes of other detainees in the film that visibly leave very little doubt about the role of enhanced methods played in allowing her to draw the conclusion that OBL appeared to rely on this single courier to reach out to all his various agents.
2.The reason why OBL was found on Obama’s watch was circumstantial.
The intelligence trail went cold for three years. It only got hot again when a key piece of intelligence was finally discovered that was in the CIA’s possession all along but was lost in a pile of un-sifted intelligence that took years to work through. Maya herself was upset in the scene for not having gotten the intelligence three years earlier. This intelligence was a tape of the courier talking to his mom and successfully identified the courier by his actual name.
3.Obama’s decision to green light the hit was hardly decisive. His administration sat on the intelligence identifying OBL’s position in Obadobad for over 210 days. The portrayal in the film was rather skillful in that you only saw his staffers push back saying they needed more proof. What Bigelow did not portray in the film but what we also know is that during this time Obama was counseled against the hit by his guru Valery Jarret and his comedic sidekick Biden. It required Panetta, Petreus and Hillary, among others to finally convince the Messiah in chief to say go. This detail is important since during this entire time, intelligence could have gotten to Al Queda and enemy number one could have gotten away again.
4.Ultimately, the anti-war, anti-torture constituency that so was so loud and numerous during the Bush administration was phony. Rather these movements existed for their political usefulness in getting a president that plays for team D into the oval office.
I can argue this last point based on something that occurred around the time Zero-Dark-Thirty first came to the screen. His name is John Brennan, and he is given credit for being the architect of the detainee program as well as the Drone attack program and was, around the same time that this movie came to screens, nominated by the Obama administration to be the next CIA director.
So who is taking more fire right now? Bigelow for portraying the inconvenient events that lead to OBL’s successful assassination, or the Obama administration who has just promoted the man responsible for making said events, including the enhanced methods Bigelow merely dramatized, possible? The answer is as obvious as its implication. Bigelow is taking heat because she committed the unforgivable sin of revealing that the sanctimonious arguments that were so effectively used were simply a politically useful contrivance.
I give Bigelow credit because she didn’t need to tell the story the way she did, though I suspect a part of her is regretting the decision now. Every once in a while moments exposing inconvenient truths emerge within view of the public. It should be our responsibility to see them for what they are and point them out as best we can.
On a related note, AEI is having a talk scheduled this Tuesday on the fact and fiction behind the movie Zero-Dark-Thirty. They’ll have the discussion available on streaming video on their website a few days later. As a public service, here’s the link:
http://www.aei.org/events/2013/01/29/watching-zero-dark-thirty-with-the-cia-separating-fact-from-fiction/
January 26th, 2013 | 6:10 pm
Pseudo, Thanks for all these points–and the AEI link. Apart from ZDT being a good movie, I kind of enjoy seeing the Hollywood hissy fit (its “cognitive dissonance”) in response to it.
I’m not so sure that this movie is absolutely requisite to understanding the geopolitical predicament of today, except insofar as that predicament relates to the hidden world of intelligence in the war on terrorism. The choice to depict 9/11 with black screen and audio only indicates that Bigelow, et al., sought to shed light on what remains behind the scenes in fighting terrorist groups.
An account of the overt events of the prosecution of that war (in tandem with ZDT) would go a long way to show the geopolitical predicament. But as Brian suggests, that movie would not be made–or made as well as this one.
It is remarkable that two of this years most critically acclaimed movies show the CIA in a good light (ZDT and Argo). No more Three Days of the Condor (which is a pretty good movie nonetheless).
January 26th, 2013 | 7:12 pm
“I’m not so sure that this movie is absolutely requisite to understanding the geopolitical predicament of today, except insofar as that predicament relates to the hidden world of intelligence in the war on terrorism.”
That’s the sense that I intended, or perhaps to expand on that, that the prosecution of the war on terror and its successes occur in ways that the people in the know refuse to acknowledge to the general public – leaving the public conveniently naive and uninformed. President Obama can simultaneously preach against the policies prosecuted under the Bush administration, promote those who under Bush are respondible for the execution of those policies and take credit for the sucesses that are produced from those policies and eliminate those policies without the general voter even being aware of the implications. The predicament is that the gap between what is happening and the perception of what is happening is virtually unbridgeable.
So you both are correct that as a result, a straight forward telling of the War on terror is unlikely, atleast in the near term. If it were told it’s arc would likely resemble that of Charlie Wilson’s War, some difficult but substantial successes followed by political decisions that virtually neutralize those hard fought successes.
Having said that, if I were to pull together a series of movies that do successfully tell their parts of the larger history of this civilizational conflict it would include Charlie Wilson’s War, Black Hawk Down, United 93, and Zero-Dark-Thirty. But the noticeable missing film would be the story of the prosecution of the War on Terror itself. I’m not holding my breath any more than you or Brian.
January 26th, 2013 | 8:57 pm
In case you want to actually learn something, watch this video. It shows how the CIA created Al Qaeda and used it to attack Egypt:
Vimeo:
vimeo.com/55980866
Youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8Lam9V_9tE
January 27th, 2013 | 8:06 pm
It really astounds me that so many people are incapable of judging 00:30 on its artistic merits, from Sen McCain to the far left. It’s not a documentary. It’s a movie. I think Bigelow did a masterful job of exploring the moral implications of torture. Maya is visibly shaken by the process. The movie is as much a character study of Maya as anything else.
Other aspects were less artful, like the pacing. As a comparison I thought of The Battle of Algiers. I also found it less emotionally engrossing as Argo or The Hurt Locker.
Great artists often manage to create great art despite their lesser, propagandistic inclinations. The Mission is a good example. If you watch the documentary on the making, they were all rabid liberation theology types. The movie itself transcends that trap, quite beautifully.
January 27th, 2013 | 9:25 pm
“It really astounds me that so many people are incapable of judging 00:30 on its artistic merits … It’s not a documentary. It’s a movie.”
Well the short answer to the question why this is is simply because everything is political now, especially movies that purport to be about events of recent historical moment such as ZDT. The longer answer is that Bigelow doesn’t give us the luxury of ignoring the political aspects of her film because her style was deliberately documentarian in aspiration.
She managed to portray the events frontally without any real hint as to what is virtuous, sinister, prudent, or justified. It was as close as you could get to a camera in the room style of filming. And this is a significant achievement considering the subject.
I agree that the film didn’t achieve the degree emotional immersion as other films. But I think this would have cut against the documentarian intentions of the film makers. My sense is that Bigelow chose to leave it to the viewer to decide what was perverse or justified considering the circumstances – grounds for heresey in today’s political-artistic climate.
In an age where just about every filmaker wants to stylistically pummel us into seeing things according to their own, inevitably narrow, moralistic vision, it’s to Bigelow’s credit that she resisted the temptation. She’ll pay big time though and will likely have to do penance for it in her next choice of film. It’ll be interesting to see what she does next.
January 30th, 2013 | 10:34 pm
So having watched the streaming video of the talk at AEI I posted above the events in ZDT appear to deviate on a couple of interesting points.
1. It seems the Maya character was a composite, interestingly enough, of a team of very determined women CIA analytsts on the Osama Bin Laden beat.
2. Bigelow takes artistic license with how enhanced interrogations were deployed and even their purpose. The portrayal in the movie gives the appearance that the interrogators had license to use any methods they saw fit in the moment when in fact each method that was used required explicit approval from lawyers and supervisors before deployed.
The other primary difference was that enhanced methods were never used as a means of getting information, but rather as a means of coercing the detainee to sufficient degree that they eventually become cooperative afterwich they enter the debriefing stage when they are presented with questions of interest. The only questions they asked during enhanced interrogations were questions for which the answers are already known.
3. Of all the detainee’s that underwent enhanced methods all but two experienced enhanced methods for at most a couple of days. The two exceptions were Khalid Sheik Mohhamed, and another whose name I did not recognize, both of which experienced enhanced methods for as long as two weeks.
On the matter of whether the detainee program and enhanced methods provided key intelligence all three panelists were emphatically positive. An extended discussion was had on an official report written during the first years of the Obama administration saying in effect the opposite, that no serious intelligence was acquired through this program. Interestingly, it was mentioned that none of the panelists were interviewed as part of that assessment.
In the end of the discussion, mention was made that much of the covert activity happening even now under the Obama administration is based on intelligence having its origin in the detainee program, particularly intelligence relating to Al Queda’s operation in Pakistan. However, the panelists note, as off shoots emerge outside of Al Queda’s traditional center of operations such intelligence becomes largely less useful, and since there is no comperable detainee program now, its unlikely any such intelligence is being acquired presently. In short, the implication is our operations are flying blind when it comes to these new offshoots popping up in Libya, Mali, etc.
On a note regarding John Brennan’s candidacy for the CIA directorship, it appears his background during the detainee program and his role in developing the present drone strike program is becoming increasingly prominent due in large part to a number of left of center information sources. One irony of ZDT coming out now is it just may make Mr. Brennan’s hearings far more difficult than they otherwise would have been. I’m looking forward to seeing if ZDT and the controversy about enhanced methods and the detainee program goes sufficiently viral that it disrupts Mr. Brennan’s candidacy. I believe his hearing will be next week…
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