The Great Debate

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.

Although widely praised by critics, the film gives the wrong impression about the value of enhanced interrogation. The Senate Intelligence Committee has completed a 6,000-page report, based on a three-year investigation and 6 million pages of CIA records, that flatly declares that “enhanced interrogation techniques” played no role in the bin Laden killing and are of no value. That report remains classified.

Yet the film was quickly attacked by Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) “because it’s wrong” about the efficacy of torture. Senators Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chairwoman of the Intelligence Committee, Carl Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the Armed Forces Committee, and McCain in January announced that they would jointly investigate the CIA’s communication with the filmmakers.

As the Oscars approach, two of the most ambitious and remarkable Best Picture nominees — Lincoln and Zero Dark Thirty — are reeling from criticisms that they are historically inaccurate. Though both are fiction, audiences, critics, commentators, scholars and even politicians are troubled that the movies don’t meet the standards of documentary or reported journalism.

The role of great works of drama, however, is to compress a larger national narrative into a clear dramatic arc. The facts are transformed, and a single event or character becomes the vehicle by which a larger truth is revealed.

The history presented in each film is about the achievement of a long-fought, hard-won goal. In Lincoln, it is the fight to pass the 13th Amendment, ending slavery; in Zero Dark Thirty, it is the killing of Osama bin Laden.

The thriller Zero Dark Thirty has exposed a wide gap between film critics and their counterparts in politics. Nearly every American film critic has lauded and rewarded it, including the New York Film Critics Circle, which tapped it as the best film of the year, making it a front-runner for Oscar nods. In sharp contrast, a number of major political writers have reviled the film, including New Yorker writer Jane Mayer and Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald, while Senators Dianne Feinstein, John McCain and Carl Levin wrote a letter of complaint to the film’s distributor, Sony Pictures, calling the movie “grossly inaccurate and misleading in its suggestion that torture resulted in information” that led to the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. The division between political writers, politicians and critics only got more pronounced as the CIA’s acting director, Michael Morell, published an unusual disavowal of the film. When it comes to torture, Morell wrote, “the film takes significant artistic license, while portraying itself as being historically accurate.”

All these skirmishes make me wish we could weave these two forms of commentary — film criticism and political thought — together again more strongly. In the postwar decades, the best reviewers of the day saw addressing the politics within the cultural works they reviewed as part of their jobs. Such writers included Dwight McDonaldMacdonald, Mary McCarthy, James Agee, Parker Tyler, Robin Wood and even Pauline Kael, whose critique of films on the right (the classic The Deer Hunter, of which she said, “It has no more moral intelligence than the Clint Eastwood action pictures, yet it’s an extraordinary piece of work …”) and on the left (Missing) didn’t cleanse them of their political agendas.

Writers like McCarthy, who was both a theater critic and a political writer, were more attuned to the ideological sources behind play and film, as they came up in the Depression and the war years, according to Hunter College Professor Richard Kaye, who is working on a project about McCarthy. After all, art was explicitly tied to politics within fascism as well as within communist states. Watching the power of ideology at work within fascism made writers more likely to combine politics with aesthetics. They understood the propagandistic potential of overwhelmingly dramatic popular entertainment.

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.

Paul van Zyl is the former executive secretary of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In this presentation to the Poptech conference, he argues that America must confront its own legacy of torture:

A new America must confront this dark chapter openly and publicly. It must give victims a chance to testify and allow the American people to hear a firsthand, unvarnished account of the crimes committed in their name. It is only then that America will be able to say to itself in unambiguous terms: “We are not a nation that tortures its enemies. We regard torture as immoral and criminal. We will never justify or condone torture and we will punish those who commit these criminal acts.”

Watch the video below or click here to read van Zyl’s speech in full.

Click here for more Reuters coverage of Poptech.

- Moazzam Begg is Director for the British organisation, Cageprisoners. The opinions expressed are his own. -

Little seems to have changed regarding the treatment of prisoners held at the U.S. military-run Bagram prison since I was there (2002-2004). The recent study conducted by the BBC shows allegations of sleep deprivation, stress positions, beatings, degrading treatment, religious and racial abuse have gone unabated. On a personal level though, I can’t help wonder if British intelligence services are still involved.

In April this year, a report issued by Cageprisoners entitled Fabricating Terrorism II highlighted through eyewitness testimony the cases of 29 people, all of them either British residents or citizens, who had allegedly been tortured and abused in the presence of British intelligence agents or at their behest.

-Clara Gutteridge is renditions investigator at Reprieve. The opinions expressed are her own.-

The big surprise in Tuesday’s revelations of prisoner abuse at Bagram is how long these stories have taken to reach the international media, given the scale of the problem.

Bagram Airforce Base is Guantanamo Bay’s lesser known - but more evil - twin. Thousands of prisoners have been "through the system" at Bagram, and around 600 are currently held there. Meanwhile President Obama’s lawyers are fighting to hold them incommunicado; stripped of the right to challenge the reasons for their imprisonment.

The following piece was co-written by Matthew Alexander, Joe Navarro and Lieutenant General Robert Gard (USA-Ret.) They are pictured from left to right.

Matthew Alexander led an interrogations team assigned to a special operations task force in Iraq in 2006. He is the author of “How to Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq.” He is writing under a pseudonym for security reasons.

Joe Navarro, a former FBI counterintelligence and counterterrorism expert, is an adjunct faculty member at the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division.