The Great Debate

The new icon of Hollywood is not a celebrity or a movie franchise — it’s the CIA. In 2012, the year’s most award-winning and popular “quality” films  – Argo, Zero Dark Thirty  – as well as 2012′s best television show (Homeland) were all about The Agency, usually bathed in quite a positive light. Why have the upper reaches of the entertainment business started to love the CIA, after years of offering more troubling images on screen?

One answer is that it has been a decade since the invasion of Iraq, and it would seem that the Iraq War itself (Abu Ghraib, civilian deaths, trillions of dollars) has sullied the image of the U.S. military. It has apparently become so tainted that Hollywood believes it can no longer assume officers are gentlemen. Military pilots no longer serve audience desire for moral clarity, as in the age of Top Gun — today, the star performers of the Air Force are pilotless drones, for one thing. And generally there are fewer soldiers and veterans on screen than after other recent wars; no equivalent of Jon Voight in a wheelchair in the Vietnam film Coming Home or World War Two’s The Best Years of Our Lives, which starred an actual double-amputee veteran.

Instead, today’s films have all-knowing agents, who tap, bug and lie with impunity yet somehow always wind up heroes. In Argo, it’s CIA operative Tony Mendez, smuggling American embassy workers out of Iran after the revolution. In Zero Dark Thirty, it’s a CIA employee who successfully hunts down Osama. If we throw MI6 into the mix in Skyfall, it’s a more realistic James Bond saving the agency itself from a plausible threat.

Venerating the CIA and secret agencies in the movies makes for lively, sensational cinema and TV, and seems consistent with their enlarged role in our military policy, through the massive increase in drones. But this glorification of spies is problematic. For one thing, it’s out of step with public opinion. According to a 2013 Pew Research Center study, 53 percent of the public are “very concerned” that drone strikes may endanger civilian lives. And on the tenth anniversary of the Iraq War, 53 percent of the population considers the war a mistake, according to a Gallup poll.

The new Hollywood CIA love fest not only flattens that public dissent. These shows and films are also celebrating people whose actions are usually clandestine. That means Hollywood has now become another front that supports opacity and secrecy. It smiles at the moral ambiguity that is inherently part of any undercover work. Spies played by Ben Affleck, Jessica Chastain and Daniel Craig are presented as the only people we can turn to for national protection. And we mustn’t forget the only woman who can save the free world in the show Homeland, played by mad-eyed, cry-faced Claire Danes. (The excellent new FX show The Americans takes a different but related position: Noah Emmerich plays a counterintelligence agent  for the FBI who in the Cold War early ’80s has the decency to try to save the beautiful Russian mole he is sleeping with.) Celebrities thanked those in the service in their awards speeches this year, as if traders in secrets are great humanitarians as well. This reveals a troubling amnesia about all the things the CIA has gotten wrong.

During the Iraq invasion the U.S. government and military posted its “Most Wanted” list of terrorists or fleeing officials, issued as a deck of cards, complete with a “Wanted: Dead or Alive” tag. The list went out to anyone and everyone, with hefty rewards advertised.

Now, however, the government’s kill list for drone strikes is opaque. It doesn’t even refer to actual people, and sometimes targets places where military-age males suspected of terrorist activity gather.

Congress will have an opportunity Thursday to hear from the man who, with the president, often helps decide who appears on that list. For John Brennan is due to face the Senate Intelligence Committee during his confirmation hearing to be the new director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Controversy over the U.S. use of torture erupted again with the release of Zero Dark Thirty, the movie about the hunt for Osama bin Laden. President Barack Obama has now added fuel to this fire by nominating John Brennan, his chief counterterrorism adviser, to be CIA director.

Brennan was deputy CIA director when the agency was engaged in rendition and torture. He was, as reported by Jane Mayer in The New Yorker, a supporter of enhanced interrogation techniques and in 2005 described the rendition program as “absolutely vital” ‑ though he has since condemned waterboarding.

Zero Dark Thirty opens with the words “based on firsthand accounts of actual events,” then quickly moves into a lengthy, horrific torture sequence. After a detailed dramatization of the hunt, the movie ends with Americans killing bin Laden ‑ leading many viewers to believe that torture was crucial to the successful outcome.

It’s rare for a judge to express regret over her own ruling.  But that’s what happened Wednesday, when Judge Colleen McMahon of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York reluctantly ruled that the Obama administration does not need to provide public justification for its deadly drone war.

The memos requested by two New York Times reporters and the American Civil Liberties Union, McMahon wrote, “implicate serious issues about the limits on the power of the Executive Branch under the Constitution and laws of the United States, and about whether we are indeed a nation of laws, not of men.” Still, the Freedom of Information Act allows the executive branch to keep many things secret.

In this case, McMahon ruled, the administration’s justifications for the killing of select individuals — including American citizens — without so much as a hearing, constitute an internal “deliberative process” by the government that need not be disclosed.

GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney talked about the United States’ “proud history of strong, confident, principled global leadership” in his foreign policy speech last Monday.

Yet Romney’s foreign policy advisers have written a private memo  recommending that the U.S. resume “enhanced interrogation techniques,” according to The New York Times. What these GOP advisers are saying is the U.S. should return to what former Vice President Dick Cheney called “the dark side” — using torture to interrogate suspected terrorists.

Cheney still defends his support of techniques such as  waterboarding, painful stress positions, extreme sleep deprivation, slamming detainees into a wall, sexual humiliation and mortal threats. So does his daughter, Liz Cheney — now a Romney adviser.

America’s spy agencies are spending more money on obtaining intelligence than the rest of the world put together. Considerably more. To what extent they are providing value for money is an open question.

“Sometimes we are getting our money’s worth,” says John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a Washington think tank. “Sometimes I think it would be better to truck the money we spend to a large parking lot and set fire to it.”

The biggest post-Cold War miss of the sprawling intelligence community was its failure to connect the dots of separate warnings about the impending attack on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001. It also laid bare a persistent flaw in a system swamped by a tsunami of data collected through high-tech electronic means: not enough linguists to analyse information.