Zero Dark Thirty (Kathryn Bigelow, 2012)

[domino harvey]

It's, like, you don't think the thread can get any worse and then, man, there it goes

[swo17]

So...Glenn Greenwald was right, as proven by an article written by Gleen Greenwald?

That's lazy.

His piece is chock full of thorough research, facts, citations. Feel free to rebut them if you've the wherewithal. Few do; it's so much easier to attack the messenger when won't can't refute the message.

I'm not arguing for or against anything he says in the article. I'm just saying that "Greenwald after watching the movie agrees with Greenwald before watching the movie" would have been a more accurate headline than "Turns out Greenwald was right, as usual."

[triodelover]

It's called confirmation bias and Greenwald's no more immune than any of the rest of us.

[Jack Phillips]

The best available evidence suggests that the identity of the courier -- his true name -- came much later, possibly through a tip from a liaison intelligence service in the Middle East. With that detail and a little old fashioned detective work, the NSA was able to watch his family's phones, waiting for him to call, which he eventually did, so they could backtrace the signal to Pakistan.

The mere existence of the courier, his relationship with Bin Laden and his nom de guerre, was first established in a legal conventional interrogation by an FBI agent very early on. This information was corroborated by a number of detainees -- high and low in the ranks -- who were subjected to torture in CIA prisons. In retrospect, almost none of that mattered much to the analysts, like the Jen/Maya character who later began the renewed focus on the courier. But at least one somewhat important bit did seem to matter. It was the way that the higher ranking detainees like KSM seemed to be lying about the courier, about his relative importance and about whether he was even still working for Bin Laden or not in 2001 -- information that many of the lower ranking detainees readily confirmed.

So I'd say that the truer formulation would be this: Neither the identity nor the fact of the courier's existence was first established in interrogations tainted by torture. But some measure of the courier's importance may have been. If the film presents/dramatizes details that suggest otherwise, then it could be guilty of at least some of the distortions it's being accused of.

The film pretty much gives Maya all the major finds. She's present when the courier is "identified" the first time; she is the one who determines later that that identifcation was misleading and with further research is able to deduce the courier's correct name; and she is the one who finally makes the point that all the lying about the courier is an indicator of his importance. It makes dramatic sense to give the lead character in a feature film all these discoveries. But from the get-go I assumed she was a composite anyway.

[who is bobby dylan]

Small correction to Warren Oates. Peter Bergen is NOT the only Westerner to ever interview Bin Laden. Robert Fisk interviewed him for the Independent at least three times, the first of which was in 1993 before Bergen interviewed Bin Laden for television.

Also, if memory serves, Fisk was the only western journalist Bin Laden agreed to be interviewed by after 9/11, but (for obvious reasons) it was impossible to establish a meeting.

[hearthesilence]

Jonathan Miller, formerly of ABCNews, also interviewed Bin Laden in 1998.

[HistoryProf]

Turns out Greenwald was right, as usual. His detractors will no doubt prefer to continue dismissing him as 'shrill' and 'strident' rather than admit they were wrong and apologize.

Again, this is the first i've knowingly read anything he's written, but the guy is so over the top that it's difficult to take him seriously. He really likes bold text too. He seems incapable of considering for only a moment that torture was indeed part of the story, so it must be included in the story. That doesn't make it a de facto glorification of it. All that piece looks like to me is "I WAS RIGHT!! HA HA!! SUCK IT WIMPY LIBERALS!!!" It's like an onion article: "Reporter agrees with himself after seeing film he bashed before seeing it." Keith Olberman and Bill O'Reilly would be proud.

[who is bobby dylan]

I doubt Bill O'Reilly would be proud of Glenn Greenwald. I also, don't understand your "seeming" objection to someone using bold text to break up the static in a 4,000 word piece.

I agree with other comments that those having biases going into the movie are likely to have them confirmed coming out of it, but don't have any problem with people like Greenwald raising objections to the film, his chief objection being, based on my read that the film takes the side of those within the CIA who didn't question the practice of torture and that it doesn't accurately reflect the internal debate within the intelligence community over torture. I haven't seen the movie and am not familiar enough with the historical events to know how much debate about torture was going on among the characters focused on in the film. In that sense, I think Greenwald's case is somewhat lacking, he claims rightfully, that some people raised objection to torture here and there, but doesn't cite any information that it was objected to within the context of the characters or time frame focused on. In that sense, he seems to be actually encouraging the filmmakers to take journalistic liberties with the actual events, just in the opposite direction of the way he (and many others) accuse the filmmakers of already doing.

[Brian C]

Yes, Greenwald's reasoning is extremely thin:

1) Killing OBL was a very popular event in the US.
2) The film shows torture as part of the process of catching OBL.
3) Therefore, the film is glorifying torture, simply by virtue of its association with a popular event.

That's incredibly weak, but of course it's then easy for Greenwald to "prove" himself right, because all he then has to do is demonstrate that torture is in the movie. Which of course it is.

But it's all a really transparent logical parlor trick on Greenwald's part. He's like a magician who doesn't know how to hide the extra card up his sleeve, and everyone can see it poking out of his jacket.

[zedz]

And, as I noted above, since it's established that the US employed torture, omitting that activity from the film would attract outraged accusations - presumably from Greenwald and people like him - that the film was whitewashing the facts, and glorifying the torture-lovin' administration even more. It's a no-win situation, and suggests that Bigelow's real 'crime' was having the temerity to make a film on this subject in the first place.

That said, I must admit that I found Greenwald's "I AGREE WITH MYSELF! I WIN!!!" argument pretty funny too. As I recall we saw Nothing do exactly the same thing several times on this forum.

[Jean-Luc Garbo]

"Can torture really be turned into morally neutral entertainment?" - Jane Mayer of New Yorker has seen the film and answers in the negative.

Yet what is so unsettling about “Zero Dark Thirty” is not that it tells this difficult history but, rather, that it distorts it. In addition to excising the moral debate that raged over the interrogation program during the Bush years, the film also seems to accept almost without question that the C.I.A.’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” played a key role in enabling the agency to identify the courier who unwittingly led them to bin Laden.

[flyonthewall2983]

This feels like the liberal inverse of the controversies around Million Dollar Baby when it came out. It absolutely annoyed me then when the conservatives rankled on something that nearly ruined the movie for me before I'd even seen it. This is a minor annoyance in comparison (because we all know how the film ends anyway), but it bugs me when people trample art in order to grandstand and soapbox us.

[Black Hat]

I don't have anything more to add to the specifics of the discussion until I see the flick for myself but, do have a couple of general things to mention. First, why are many so averse, bordering on offended, at having this discussion? If it's a result of a 'wait 'till you see the movie' philosophy I can respect that position but, I get the sense (could be completely wrong) that there's more than a few who even ever after everyone's seen the film want no part of such a back and forth. That somehow the political issues the film raises, that I'm assuming go far beyond our 'torture' kerfuffle of this week, have no place in analysis of the film. Whatever your personal beliefs are, what can not be denied is that this is a political film and as such, if anyone's going to examine it seriously, it must be placed within that context.

As for Greenwald, I've been a longtime reader of his from about 2007 and this episode is the first time I've found his process as a journalist to be lacking. It's even more confounding because Greenwald's best work (others might say it's on civil liberties or his extensive studies on drug policy) is in examining how the media operates, journalistic ethics and accountability. He should have seen the film before commenting, the fact that he didn't showed a great arrogance that he is always the first to point out in the journalists/politicians he often criticizes.

Since some of you said you have never heard of him, I'll try to give some background. Greenwald's most certainly not a partisan hack in the vein of a Bill O'Reilly or an Ed Schultz. Say what you will about the tone of which the man expresses his views but, he does his research and knows his shit. I sometimes end up reading his citations whether it's another article, an NGO report or what have you, more than his column because as things have not changed much they do tend to get redundant. The last thing I'd like anyone unfamiliar to understand is that he's not a leftist. Greenwald made his name during Bush's second term by eviscerating that administration's policies, specifically regarding the Iraq War, indefinite detention, torture and other civil liberty violations. Naturally, the institutional left, who at the time were saying many of the same things, embraced him and thus, he was hired by Salon. Greenwald himself identifies as an independent. If you ask me, having read his columns, seen numerous television appearances plus the topics he's most passionate about, law, foreign policy, personal accountability, I would say there's a stronger libertarian strain to his writing than a leftist one.

[flyonthewall2983]

I don't have anything more to add to the specifics of the discussion until I see the flick for myself but, do have a couple of general things to mention. First, why are many so averse, bordering on offended, at having this discussion? If it's a result of a 'wait 'till you see the movie' philosophy I can respect that position but, I get the sense (could be completely wrong) that there's more than a few who even ever after everyone's seen the film want no part of such a back and forth. That somehow the political issues the film raises, that I'm assuming go far beyond our 'torture' kerfuffle of this week, have no place in analysis of the film. Whatever your personal beliefs are, what can not be denied is that this is a political film and as such, if anyone's going to examine it seriously, it must be placed within that context.

It's entirely possible some of us here are apolitical. I can't speak for them, but maybe to them Bin Laden's death represents something more than left/right. It did for me, at least. 9/11 didn't affect me nearly as deep as it did others, but it was an enormous thing to comprehend when I was watching it unfold on television. I would describe myself then as very apolitical, and had all the knee-jerk reactions a teenager would have.

I didn't celebrate on the streets singing "We Are The Champions" when he died, but I did feel some solace and vindication that we'd finally gotten him. We had to mire through the shit of two unjust wars, thousands of dead Americans, etc, etc. I hold GWB responsible for that, but it was Bin Laden's actions that set this whole twisted cycle up again (unless you believe 9/11 was an inside job, but that's another discussion).

[tavernier]

It's called confirmation bias and Greenwald's no more immune than any of the rest of us.

Of course, confirmation bias plays a role in the film as well, when one of Maya's superiors tries to calm her down when she insists that more needs to be done with her hunch about bin Laden's courier's identity.

[Brian C]

Since some of you said you have never heard of him, I'll try to give some background. Greenwald's most certainly not a partisan hack in the vein of a Bill O'Reilly or an Ed Schultz. Say what you will about the tone of which the man expresses his views but, he does his research and knows his shit. I sometimes end up reading his citations whether it's another article, an NGO report or what have you, more than his column because as things have not changed much they do tend to get redundant. The last thing I'd like anyone unfamiliar to understand is that he's not a leftist. Greenwald made his name during Bush's second term by eviscerating that administration's policies, specifically regarding the Iraq War, indefinite detention, torture and other civil liberty violations. Naturally, the institutional left, who at the time were saying many of the same things, embraced him and thus, he was hired by Salon. Greenwald himself identifies as an independent. If you ask me, having read his columns, seen numerous television appearances plus the topics he's most passionate about, law, foreign policy, personal accountability, I would say there's a stronger libertarian strain to his writing than a leftist one.

Greenwald is certainly not a partisan hack, that is true. If nothing else, he's shown abundant willingness to train his guns on the Obama administration with equal zeal as he did on the Bush administration, so accusations of partisan hackery (not that any have been made here as far as I can tell) are definitely way off-base. If anything, his political stance has a lot in common with the "pox-on-both-houses" Naderites.

But saying that he's not a leftist is getting a little bit lost in the semantic weeds, I think. However he identifies himself, his attacks on both administrations have come from the left on every issue that I can think of, certainly the foreign policy/civil liberties/law issues. Obviously the left/right labels mean different things to different people, especially on an international scale, but here in the US he occupies a rhetorical space that I think can fairly be described as firmly on the left. It's entirely typical for American lefties (or what passes for lefty here in the US, at any rate) to have a strong civil libertarian streak, and in fact advocacy for civil liberties these days (aside from 2nd Amendment debates) is almost exclusively the province of the American left. So using that as the basis for saying that he's an "independent" or "libertarian" probably creates more confusion than it clarifies.

[Black Hat]

Fly, I agree Bin Laden's killing transcended the left/right lines but, I'm also of the belief that all the issues raised along with it do the same.

Brian, the attacks Greenwald makes don't solely fall under the 'from the left' heading, they can also easily be classified as attacking from a libertarian position. His focus is mostly on foreign policy, civil liberties and the drug war which are also the three issues libertarians rant and rave about the most, where many of the same arguments are made. His rhetorical space, MSNBC, Salon, Democracy Now are firmly on the left but, I'd say that's more a marriage of convenience than indicative of where he leans politically. The show he appeared on the most on MSNBC was the Dylan Ratigan show who is a libertarian and he's also had a big platform on Anti War radio who are also firmly libertarian. I'm not saying he's not a leftist, it's possible but, I think a good case can be made that he's got some libertarian in him. All that said, I don't think there's enough evidence on either front to attach an unequivocal label on him. In all likelihood he's a mix of the two philosophies and thus why he identifies himself as an independent.

[Jean-Luc Garbo]

Glenn Kenny with a lengthy response to Greenwald.

[W]hat I saw when I watched to movie was a very well-constructed narrative that, to my mind, was concerned with knowing and with the action taken as a result of knowing, or “knowing.” I saw a movie that subverted a lot of expectations concerning viewer identification and empathy, including the use of a lead character who in a conventional good-guy-versus-bad-guy scenario would raise objections to torture but who instead, a few queasy looks and pauses aside, rolls with it as an information gathering policy. In 1976 Robert Christgau wrote this about the first Ramones record: “I love this record--love it--even though I know these boys flirt with images of brutality (Nazi especially) in much the same way ‘Midnight Rambler’ flirts with rape. You couldn't say they condone any nasties, natch--they merely suggest that the power of their music has some fairly ominous sources and tap those sources even as they offer the suggestion. This makes me uneasy. But my theory has always been that good rock and roll should damn well make you uneasy.” I agree with Bob in all these particulars, and even more so if you substitute “good art” for “good rock and roll.” Zero Dark Thirty made me uneasy. Greenwald’s evocations of amorality are not entirely inapt. There’s a sense in which the film at least skirts outright amorality by refusing to assign any definite values to the various Xes and Ys in the equation that makes up its narrative. Its perspective, from where I sit, is sometimes flat to the point of affectlessness. There is an almost cynical mordancy in its depiction of events, and this to me is entirely clear from the film’s visual grammar (not to mention the entirely deliberate lack of ostensible multi-dimensionality in some of its characters, which moves Greenwald to make an unfavorable comparison of Jessica Chastain’s Maya to Claire Danes’ “let-me-show-you-my-tic-collection” Carrie on Homeland, which is pretty funny). But Greenwald sees none of this, and insists: “There is zero doubt, as so many reviewers have said, that the standard viewer will get the message loud and clear: that we found and killed bin Laden because we tortured The Terrorists."

[matrixschmatrix]

Is it true, at this point, that in a standard good guy vs bad guy scenario, the hero would object to the use of torture? It seems like Kenny is examining the movie on the assumption that the viewer is coming in with the assumption that torture is evil and that all uses of it signify an act of evil, but certainly in something like 24 it's represented as part of the mythology of the hard choice, something tough but necessary done to protect the rest of us.

[jbeall]

And, as I noted above, since it's established that the US employed torture, omitting that activity from the film would attract outraged accusations - presumably from Greenwald and people like him - that the film was whitewashing the facts, and glorifying the torture-lovin' administration even more. It's a no-win situation, and suggests that Bigelow's real 'crime' was having the temerity to make a film on this subject in the first place.

Manohla Dargis praises ZDT claims that Bigelow was right to include these scenes:

In his 2012 book, “Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden from 9/11 to Abbottabad,” Peter L. Bergen asks, “Did coercive interrogations lead to Bin Laden?” Mr. Bergen reasons that “since we can’t run history backward, we will never know what conventional interrogation techniques alone might have elicited from” four important prisoners. However unprovable the effectiveness of these interrogations, they did take place. To omit them from “Zero Dark Thirty” would have been a reprehensible act of moral cowardice.

[matrixschmatrix]

That seems uncompelling to me. Obviously, the choice to include or exclude any particular element of the story isn't going to be based on 'did this happen', but 'is it relevant to the narrative we're creating'- and while not having seen the movie, I can't comment on the specific effect of Bigelow's choice, it certainly seems as though including torture in a narrative that self evidently isn't designed to be about blind alleys and dead ends (like Zodiac) implies that the torture was part of the process of reaching the conclusion of the movie.

The justification Dargis is presenting could be used to justify virtually any panicked emergency security measure, no matter how useless or how far over the line- of course one can't prove that torture wasn't necessary without a time machine, but one can't prove that the Patriot Act didn't prevent doomsday. That doesn't mean that uncritically including a scene wherein crucial information for how to find the little-girl threatening bomb is gotten through Patriot Act enabled measures should be in every post-2001 movie, lest one be indulging in 'moral cowardice'.

The crux of the issue, to me, is the degree to which Bigelow's presentation of the use of torture is critical, or allows sufficient distance for the viewer to be critical of it. That question is the primary reason I think it would be a mistake to comment on the political effect of its use without seeing the film, and I think the main place that Greenwald's preemptive condemnation became problematic.

[jbeall]

I agree with you, matrixschmatrix, though you put it more articulately than I could. I posted the link as further evidence of zedz's point that Bigelow was going to get attacked--or praised--regardless of whether or not her film depicts torture. As you say, it's how the torture scenes (and every other scene, for that matter) functions within the larger film that's most important here. Since I haven't seen the film yet, I'm not weighing in myself, though I am very interested in and following this thread closely.

[matrixschmatrix]

Scott Tobias of the AVClub weighs in, both on the film itself and the depiction of torture element (with further detail in the Spoiler Space section.) I'm somewhat reassured, as Tobias is a critic whose view I trust, and he actually does liken the film to Zodiac (though more in the sense of following a lengthy investigation than in the sense of being an ultimately frustrating one, of course.) I'm happy to know at least that it's possible for a good critic to go in and see a movie that isn't primarily about praising the heroism of the people who killed Bin Laden, as that sounds like a movie I would never care to watch.

[tavernier]

McCain weighs in

[Cold Bishop]

he actually does liken the film to Zodiac (though more in the sense of following a lengthy investigation than in the sense of being an ultimately frustrating one, of course.)

Perhaps, but one wonders if some of the residue is left over from the film's first incarnation, prior to the Bin Laden raid, which was precisely about a failed attempt to bring him to justice.