Bigelow told The New Yorker‘s Dexter Filkins, “What we were attempting is almost a journalistic approach to film,” and screenwriter Mark Boal told the Los Angeles Times, “I wanted to approach the story as a screenwriter but do the homework as a reporter.” The words “journalistic approach” and “homework as a reporter” imply facts and yet, approaching “the story as a screenwriter” means adapting those facts to a narrative that can be told in a matter of hours rather than presenting a nine year documentary.
Peter Bergen at CNN offers up information on just what exactly I mean:
In real life, the character known as Ammar in the film is quite similar to Mohammed al-Qahtani, a Saudi whom al Qaeda was grooming to be the 20th hijacker in the months before the 9/11 attacks. It was al-Qahtani who supplied the CIA with what may have been the first clue that [the courier] Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti [which in Arabic means “the father of Ahmed from Kuwait”] had some importance inside al Qaeda.
Between November 23, 2002, and January 11, 2003, al-Qahtani was interrogated for 48 days at Guantanamo more or less continuously, kept awake for much of that time by loud music being blasted when he was falling asleep, doused with water and subjected to cold temperatures, kept naked and forced to perform tricks as if he were a dog. However, he wasn’t waterboarded or beaten.
From the secret summaries of al-Qahtani’s Guantanamo interrogations made public by WikiLeaks, at some point, it’s not exactly clear when, he told interrogators about a man known as Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti who was part of the inner circle of al Qaeda’s leaders.
Another al Qaeda member named Hassan Ghul who was also subjected to coercive interrogation techniques in a CIA secret prison told his interrogators at some point — when, it is also not clear — that the mysterious Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti was one of bin Laden’s couriers.
Balanced against this, harsh techniques including waterboarding were also used by the CIA on two of the most significant leaders of al Qaeda: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was the operational commander of the 9/11 attacks, as well as his successor as No. 3 in al Qaeda, Abu Faraj al-Libi. Both these al Qaeda leaders gave up disinformation about the Kuwaiti to their interrogators. (“Zero Dark Thirty” shows al-Libi lying to his interrogators about the Kuwaiti.)
While showing how a character in the film is an amalgam of several real-life people and perhaps even more, there are three words I’d like you to notice in that first paragraph — “may have been”.
No one knows for sure where all the information came from or when it came. A lot is being said of a 6,000-page report on CIA interrogations by the Senate Intelligence Committee, based on a study of some six million pages of agency documents, which is currently under debate as to whether or not it will be made public. The findings of this report, said Feinstein, was that brutal treatment was not “a central component” in finding bin Laden. It’s also important to note this report was made based on agency documents and not interviews with agency members. It does lead me to wonder, what wasn’t documented?
Many will probably read this article and determine that I’m advocating torture the same way they will believe Zero Dark Thirty endorses torture rather than observing all the details the film covers. This is to ignore the forest for the trees. The question, for me, is not the efficacy of torture, the question is whether or not we can morally accept torturing human beings at all?
I can’t answer what information torture provides, but I can tell you I don’t advocate torture. Never have or will. Its effectiveness is something I will let others with more knowledge than me debate, but effective or not, it’s wrong in my eyes and should not be used.
Does Zero Dark Thirty open up a debate whether or not torture is effective? Perhaps. Does it advocate it? My answer is “no”, but I say that because I see it as presenting a condensed look at what happened leading to the killing of bin Laden. Torture happened. Torture was condemned. The courier was investigated and lead to Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts.
The efficacy of torture will likely be debated for years to come and it seems as if Zero Dark Thirty will now be a part of that conversation the same way “24” was in the past. What I question is whether or not the columnists attacking Zero Dark Thirty were actually looking to Bigelow to solve the torture debate. It’s one of those rare occurrences where I see people disagreeing with Bigelow and Boal’s attempts to remain apolitical. That amazes me.
Boal recently told The Wrap, “Everything we did has been misinterpreted, and continues to be… Our agenda isn’t a partisan agenda — it’s an agenda of trying to look behind the scenes at what went down. Hopefully art or cinema can present a point of view that’s a little above the political fray, but that doesn’t mean the political narrative doesn’t try to assert itself and pull you back in.”
Bigelow adds, “The point was to immerse the audience in this landscape, not to pretend to debate policy. Was it difficult to shoot? Yes. Do I wish [torture] was not part of that history? Yes, but it was.”
I think it’s safe to say most everyone writing about this issue is against the use of torture and their anger and/or frustration with Zero Dark Thirty stems from the perception the narrative presented could be interpreted as saying torture provided valuable information. This perception could then possibly lead audiences to believe there is an efficacy for torture, which could, therefore, change the course of the conversation. I want to say I can understand this frustration and I can see their side of the argument, but at the same time instead of attacking the film in terms of black-and-white, perhaps approach it from a more constructive angle. Hammering on your keyboard in rage is no way to be taken seriously.
All told, considering the film will only play in limited theaters in New York and Los Angeles on December 19 and then expand nationwide in mid-January the conversation will most likely be over before it ever has a chance to begin, but such is the way of the world today.
