i wonder if kathryn bigelow knew, when she was giving direction to keanu reeves and gary busey on the set of point break, that she would one day become the leni riefenstahl of the next century.
man, you're doing it wrong.
you're *not* supposed to make cheap Nazi analogies in formulating your argument.
idiot.
that's actually one of the better nazi analogies i have ever heard (although as a general rule i think the trope is offensive)...
like LR, KB is a talented technical, perhaps visionary, director and filmaker but there is some faustian aspect to her recent work. she gets access, and in return glorfies those who would engage in an inhuman, completely immoral practice like torture.
i have read a few glowing reviews where it says the movie takes no stand for or against torture and it is that complexity that the what makes it so brilliant. i disagree, i think the take-away from the movie is that torture was/is a justifiable means to an end.
the movie very clearly made the torture = dead Osama connection.
i wonder if kathryn bigelow knew, when she was giving direction to keanu reeves and gary busey on the set of point break, that she would one day become the leni riefenstahl of the next century.
man, you're doing it wrong.
you're *not* supposed to make cheap Nazi analogies in formulating your argument.
idiot.
that's actually one of the better nazi analogies i have ever heard (although as a general rule i think the trope is offensive)...
like LR, KB is a talented technical, perhaps visionary, director and filmaker but there is some faustian aspect to her recent work. she gets access, and in return glorfies those who would engage in an inhuman, completely immoral practice like torture.
i have read a few glowing reviews where it says the movie takes no stand for or against torture and it is that complexity that the what makes it so brilliant. i disagree, i think the take-away from the movie is that torture was/is a justifiable means to an end.
the movie very clearly made the torture = dead Osama connection.
pretty unclear to this viewer.
They tortured the hell out of that dude >> he gave up the name of the courier >> they followed the courier to bin Laden's house and killed him.
Maybe you got up to go the bathroom at some point?
wow if it's that obvious i wonder what all the fuss is about.
i just remember dude getting tortured and him not saying anything.
i remember thinking "this is bad and it should stop, i can't believe people actually do this".
basically... i left the theater thinking torture is a terrible option.
iand yes, i did go take a leak. i can't handle pop like i used to.
Is it that hard to imagine that the film is not pro-torture, nor anti-torture? Does everything have to have a glaring political agenda like a big nerf hammer that goes around pounding people in the head? That's binary thinking.
Does everything have to have a glaring political agenda like a big nerf hammer that goes around pounding people in the head?
in the real world, no.
on soulstrut, yes.
to be clear: I think the movie can be viewed either way.
my only point is that the narrative of the movie very clearly draws a line from torture >> dead Osama.
was killing Osama worth using torture? could the intel have been obtained without torture? the movie doesn't answer either question. alls I'm saying is the story told in the movie draws a clear line between torture and locating UBL.
i really intended to avoid this thread, but i just read this great piece and wanted to share it:
Zero Conscience in ???Zero Dark Thirty???
Posted by Jane Maye
At the same time that the European Court of Human Rights has issued a historic ruling condemning the C.I.A.???s treatment of a terror suspect during the Bush years as ???torture,??? a Hollywood movie about the agency???s hunt for Osama bin Laden, ???Zero Dark Thirty??????whose creators say that they didn???t want to ???judge??? the interrogation program???appears headed for Oscar nominations. Can torture really be turned into morally neutral entertainment?
???Zero Dark Thirty,??? which opens across the country next month, is a pulse-quickening film that spends its first half hour or so depicting a fictionalized version of the Bush Administration???s secret U.S. interrogation program. In reality, the C.I.A.???s program of calibrated cruelty was deemed so illegal, and so immoral, that the director of the F.B.I. withdrew his personnel rather than have them collaborate with it, and the top lawyer at the Pentagon laid his career on the line in an effort to stop a version of the program from spreading to the armed forces. The C.I.A.???s actions convulsed the national-security community, leading to a crisis of conscience inside the top ranks of the U.S. government. The debate echoed the moral seriousness of the political dilemma once posed by slavery, a subject that is brilliantly evoked in Steven Spielberg???s new film, ???Lincoln???; by contrast, the director of ???Zero Dark Thirty,??? Kathryn Bigelow, milks the U.S. torture program for drama while sidestepping the political and ethical debate that it provoked. In her hands, the hunt for bin Laden is essentially a police procedural, devoid of moral context. If she were making a film about slavery in antebellum America, it seems, the story would focus on whether the cotton crops were successful.
After some critics called Bigelow a torture apologist, she defended the fairness and historical accuracy of her movie. ???The film doesn???t have an agenda, and it doesn???t judge. I wanted a boots-on-the-ground experience,??? she told my New Yorker colleague Dexter Filkins, who interviewed her for a Talk of the Town piece. At a Los Angeles press junket, the film???s screenwriter, Mark Boal, complained that critics were ???mischaracterizing??? the torture sequences: ???I understand that those scenes are graphic and unsparing and unsentimental. But I think that what the film does over the course of two hours is show the complexity of the debate.??? His point was that because the film shows multiple approaches to intelligence gathering, of which torture is only one tactic, and because the torture isn???t shown as always producing correct or instant leads, it offers a nuanced answer to the question of whether torture works.
But whether torture ???worked??? was far from the most important question about its use. I???ve seen the film and, as much as I admired Bigelow???s Oscar-winning picture ???The Hurt Locker,??? I think that this time, by ignoring the full weight of the dark history of torture, her work falls disturbingly short. To begin with, despite Boal???s contentions, ???Zero Dark Thirty??? does not capture the complexity of the debate about America???s brutal detention program. It doesn???t include a single scene in which torture is questioned, even though the Bush years were racked by internal strife over just that issue???again, not just among human-rights and civil-liberties lawyers, but inside the F.B.I., the military, the Justice Department, and the C.I.A. itself, which eventually abandoned waterboarding because it feared, correctly, that the act constituted a war crime. None of this ethical drama seems to interest Bigelow.
To establish a baseline of moral awareness, she shows her heroine???a C.I.A. counterterrorism officer called Maya, played by Jessica Chastain???delicately wincing as she hands the more muscled interrogators a pitcher of water with which to waterboard a detainee. Maya is also shown standing mutely by when the detainee is strung up by ropes, stripped naked, and forced to crawl in a dog collar. In reality, when the C.I.A. first subjected a detainee to incarceration in a coffin-size ???confinement box,??? as is shown in the movie, an F.B.I. agent present at the scene threw a fit, warned the C.I.A. contractor proposing the plan that it was illegal, counterproductive, and reprehensible. The fight went all the way to the top of the Bush Administration. Bigelow airbrushes out this showdown, as she does virtually the entire debate during the Bush years about the treatment of detainees.
The lone anti-torture voice shown in the film is a split-second news clip of President Barack Obama, taken from a ???60 Minutes??? interview, in which he condemns torture. It flashes on a television screen that???s in the background of a scene set in Pakistan; the movie???s terrorist-hunters, who are holding a meeting, barely look up, letting Obama???s pronouncement pass without comment. ???By this point in the film,??? as the CNN national-security analyst Peter Bergen wrote recently, ???the audience has already seen that the C.I.A. has employed coercive interrogation techniques on an al Qaeda detainee that produced a key lead in the hunt for bin Laden. In the film, Obama???s opposition to torture comes off as wrongheaded and prissy.???
Bigelow has portrayed herself as a reluctant truth-teller. She recently described the film???s torture scenes as ???difficult to shoot.??? She said, ???I wish it was not part of our history. But it was.???
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. But this claim has been debunked, repeatedly, by reliable sources with access to the facts. As the Washington Post???s Greg Sargent first reported, shortly after bin Laden was killed, Leon Panetta, then the director of the C.I.A., sent a letter to Arizona Senator John McCain, clearly stating that ???we first learned about ???the facilitator / courier???s nom de guerre??? from a detainee not in the C.I.A.???s custody.??? Panetta wrote that ???no detainee in C.I.A. custody revealed the facilitator / courier???s full true name or specific whereabouts.???
The Senators Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat and the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat and the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, have undermined the film???s version of events further still. ???The original lead information had no connection to C.I.A. detainees,??? they wrote in their own letter, revealed by the Post last year. Feinstein and Levin noted that a third detainee in C.I.A. custody did provide information on the courier, but, importantly, they stressed that ???he did so the day before he was interrogated by the C.I.A. using their coercive interrogation techniques.??? In other words, contrary to the plotline of ???Zero Dark Thirty,??? and contrary to self-serving accounts of C.I.A. officers implicated in the interrogation program, senators with access to the record say that torture did not produce the leads that led to finding and killing bin Laden.
Top senators on the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Senate Armed Services Committee have amplified that position in additional interviews this week. Speaking with the Huffington Post, Feinstein said of the movie???s narrative, ???Based on what I know, I don???t believe it is true.??? Republicans, too, criticized the movie???s plot. ???It???s wrong. It???s wrong. I know for a fact, not because of this report???my own knowledge???that waterboarding, torture, does not lead to reliable information ??? in any case???not this specific case???in any case,??? said John McCain, the top Republican on the Armed Services Committee, who was himself tortured during the Vietnam War. The Huffington Post also quoted South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, another Republican member of the Armed Services Committee, saying, ???I would argue that it???s not waterboarding that led to bin Laden???s demise. It was a lot of good intelligence-gathering from the Obama and Bush administrations, continuity of effort, holding people at Gitmo, putting the puzzle together over a long period of time???not torture.???
As Scott Shane wrote in the Times on Thursday, so little is publicly known about the C.I.A.???s erstwhile interrogation program that it is nearly impossible for outsiders to assess the facts with total confidence. But for the past three years, Democratic staffers at the Senate Intelligence Committee have been compiling six thousand pages of records related to the secret program, and in doing so they have found little to celebrate. It is hard to understand, then, why the creators of ???Zero Dark Thirty??? so confidently credit the program.
In addition to providing false advertising for waterboarding, ???Zero Dark Thirty??? endorses torture in several other subtle ways. At one point, the film???s chief C.I.A. interrogator claims, without being challenged, that ???everyone breaks in the end,??? adding, ???it???s biology.??? Maybe that???s what they think in Hollywood, but experts on the history of torture disagree. Indeed, many prisoners have been tortured to death without ever revealing secrets, while many others???including some of those who were brutalized during the Bush years???have fabricated disinformation while being tortured. Some of the disinformation provided under duress during those years, in fact, helped to lead the U.S. into the war in Iraq under false premises.
At another point in the film, an elderly detainee explains that he wants to co??perate with the U.S. because he ???doesn???t want to be tortured again.??? The clear implication is that brutalization brings breakthroughs. Other ways of getting intelligence, such as bribing sources with expensive race cars, are shown to work, too. But while those scenes last only a few minutes, the torture scenes seem to go on and on.
The filmmakers subtly put their thumb on the pro-torture scale, as Emily Bazelon put it, in another scene, too. A C.I.A. officer complains that there is no way for him to corroborate a lead on bin Laden???s whereabouts now that the detainees in Guant??namo all have lawyers. The suggestion is that if they are given due process rather than black eyes, there will be no way to get the necessary evidence. This is a canard, given that virtually all suspects in the American criminal-justice system have lawyers, yet their cases proceed smoothly and fairly every day.
Bigelow has stressed that she had ???no agenda??? when she made ???Zero Dark Thirty.??? Unsurprisingly, though, those who have defended the brutalization of detainees have already begun embracing the film as evidence that they are right. Joe Scarborough, the conservative host of MSNBC???s show ???Morning Joe,??? said recently that the film???s narrative, ???whether you find it repugnant or not,??? shows that the C.I.A. program was effective and ???led to the couriers, that led, eventually, years later, to the killing of Osama bin Laden.??? My guess is that this is just the beginning, and that by the time millions of Americans have seen this movie, they will believe that, as Frank Bruni put it in a recent Times column, ???No waterboarding, no bin Laden.???
Perhaps it???s unfair to expect the entertainment industry to convey history accurately. Clearly, the creators of ???Zero Dark Thirty??? are storytellers who really know how to make a thriller. And it???s true that there are no rules when it comes to fiction. As Boal, the screenwriter, has protested in recent interviews, ???It???s a movie, not a documentary.??? But in the very first minutes of ???Zero Dark Thirty,??? before its narrative begins to unspool, the audience is told that the story it is about to see is ???based on first-hand accounts of actual events.??? If there is an expectation of accuracy, it is set up by the filmmakers themselves. It seems they want it both ways: they want the thrill that comes from revealing what happened behind the scenes as history was being made and the creative license of fiction, which frees them from the responsibility to stick to the truth.
Knowing the real facts???the ones that led the European Court of Human Rights to condemn America for torture this week???I had trouble enjoying the movie. I???ve interviewed Khaled El-Masri, the German citizen whose suit the E.C.H.R. adjudicated. He turned out to be a case of mistaken identity, an innocent car salesman whom the C.I.A. kidnapped and held in a black-site prison for four months, and who was ???severely beaten, sodomized, shackled, and hooded.??? What Masri lived through was so harrowing that, when I had a cup of coffee with him, a few years ago, he couldn???t describe it to me without crying. Maybe I care too much about all of this to enjoy it with popcorn. But maybe the creators of ???Zero Dark Thirty??? should care a little bit more.
Is it that hard to imagine that the film is not pro-torture, nor anti-torture? Does everything have to have a glaring political agenda like a big nerf hammer that goes around pounding people in the head? That's binary thinking.
i really intended to avoid this thread, but i just read this great piece and wanted to share it:
Zero Conscience in ???Zero Dark Thirty???
Posted by Jane Maye
At the same time that the European Court of Human Rights has issued a historic ruling condemning the C.I.A.???s treatment of a terror suspect during the Bush years as ???torture,??? a Hollywood movie about the agency???s hunt for Osama bin Laden, ???Zero Dark Thirty??????whose creators say that they didn???t want to ???judge??? the interrogation program???appears headed for Oscar nominations. Can torture really be turned into morally neutral entertainment?
???Zero Dark Thirty,??? which opens across the country next month, is a pulse-quickening film that spends its first half hour or so depicting a fictionalized version of the Bush Administration???s secret U.S. interrogation program. In reality, the C.I.A.???s program of calibrated cruelty was deemed so illegal, and so immoral, that the director of the F.B.I. withdrew his personnel rather than have them collaborate with it, and the top lawyer at the Pentagon laid his career on the line in an effort to stop a version of the program from spreading to the armed forces. The C.I.A.???s actions convulsed the national-security community, leading to a crisis of conscience inside the top ranks of the U.S. government. The debate echoed the moral seriousness of the political dilemma once posed by slavery, a subject that is brilliantly evoked in Steven Spielberg???s new film, ???Lincoln???; by contrast, the director of ???Zero Dark Thirty,??? Kathryn Bigelow, milks the U.S. torture program for drama while sidestepping the political and ethical debate that it provoked. In her hands, the hunt for bin Laden is essentially a police procedural, devoid of moral context. If she were making a film about slavery in antebellum America, it seems, the story would focus on whether the cotton crops were successful.
After some critics called Bigelow a torture apologist, she defended the fairness and historical accuracy of her movie. ???The film doesn???t have an agenda, and it doesn???t judge. I wanted a boots-on-the-ground experience,??? she told my New Yorker colleague Dexter Filkins, who interviewed her for a Talk of the Town piece. At a Los Angeles press junket, the film???s screenwriter, Mark Boal, complained that critics were ???mischaracterizing??? the torture sequences: ???I understand that those scenes are graphic and unsparing and unsentimental. But I think that what the film does over the course of two hours is show the complexity of the debate.??? His point was that because the film shows multiple approaches to intelligence gathering, of which torture is only one tactic, and because the torture isn???t shown as always producing correct or instant leads, it offers a nuanced answer to the question of whether torture works.
But whether torture ???worked??? was far from the most important question about its use. I???ve seen the film and, as much as I admired Bigelow???s Oscar-winning picture ???The Hurt Locker,??? I think that this time, by ignoring the full weight of the dark history of torture, her work falls disturbingly short. To begin with, despite Boal???s contentions, ???Zero Dark Thirty??? does not capture the complexity of the debate about America???s brutal detention program. It doesn???t include a single scene in which torture is questioned, even though the Bush years were racked by internal strife over just that issue???again, not just among human-rights and civil-liberties lawyers, but inside the F.B.I., the military, the Justice Department, and the C.I.A. itself, which eventually abandoned waterboarding because it feared, correctly, that the act constituted a war crime. None of this ethical drama seems to interest Bigelow.
To establish a baseline of moral awareness, she shows her heroine???a C.I.A. counterterrorism officer called Maya, played by Jessica Chastain???delicately wincing as she hands the more muscled interrogators a pitcher of water with which to waterboard a detainee. Maya is also shown standing mutely by when the detainee is strung up by ropes, stripped naked, and forced to crawl in a dog collar. In reality, when the C.I.A. first subjected a detainee to incarceration in a coffin-size ???confinement box,??? as is shown in the movie, an F.B.I. agent present at the scene threw a fit, warned the C.I.A. contractor proposing the plan that it was illegal, counterproductive, and reprehensible. The fight went all the way to the top of the Bush Administration. Bigelow airbrushes out this showdown, as she does virtually the entire debate during the Bush years about the treatment of detainees.
The lone anti-torture voice shown in the film is a split-second news clip of President Barack Obama, taken from a ???60 Minutes??? interview, in which he condemns torture. It flashes on a television screen that???s in the background of a scene set in Pakistan; the movie???s terrorist-hunters, who are holding a meeting, barely look up, letting Obama???s pronouncement pass without comment. ???By this point in the film,??? as the CNN national-security analyst Peter Bergen wrote recently, ???the audience has already seen that the C.I.A. has employed coercive interrogation techniques on an al Qaeda detainee that produced a key lead in the hunt for bin Laden. In the film, Obama???s opposition to torture comes off as wrongheaded and prissy.???
Bigelow has portrayed herself as a reluctant truth-teller. She recently described the film???s torture scenes as ???difficult to shoot.??? She said, ???I wish it was not part of our history. But it was.???
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. But this claim has been debunked, repeatedly, by reliable sources with access to the facts. As the Washington Post???s Greg Sargent first reported, shortly after bin Laden was killed, Leon Panetta, then the director of the C.I.A., sent a letter to Arizona Senator John McCain, clearly stating that ???we first learned about ???the facilitator / courier???s nom de guerre??? from a detainee not in the C.I.A.???s custody.??? Panetta wrote that ???no detainee in C.I.A. custody revealed the facilitator / courier???s full true name or specific whereabouts.???
The Senators Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat and the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat and the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, have undermined the film???s version of events further still. ???The original lead information had no connection to C.I.A. detainees,??? they wrote in their own letter, revealed by the Post last year. Feinstein and Levin noted that a third detainee in C.I.A. custody did provide information on the courier, but, importantly, they stressed that ???he did so the day before he was interrogated by the C.I.A. using their coercive interrogation techniques.??? In other words, contrary to the plotline of ???Zero Dark Thirty,??? and contrary to self-serving accounts of C.I.A. officers implicated in the interrogation program, senators with access to the record say that torture did not produce the leads that led to finding and killing bin Laden.
Top senators on the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Senate Armed Services Committee have amplified that position in additional interviews this week. Speaking with the Huffington Post, Feinstein said of the movie???s narrative, ???Based on what I know, I don???t believe it is true.??? Republicans, too, criticized the movie???s plot. ???It???s wrong. It???s wrong. I know for a fact, not because of this report???my own knowledge???that waterboarding, torture, does not lead to reliable information ??? in any case???not this specific case???in any case,??? said John McCain, the top Republican on the Armed Services Committee, who was himself tortured during the Vietnam War. The Huffington Post also quoted South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, another Republican member of the Armed Services Committee, saying, ???I would argue that it???s not waterboarding that led to bin Laden???s demise. It was a lot of good intelligence-gathering from the Obama and Bush administrations, continuity of effort, holding people at Gitmo, putting the puzzle together over a long period of time???not torture.???
As Scott Shane wrote in the Times on Thursday, so little is publicly known about the C.I.A.???s erstwhile interrogation program that it is nearly impossible for outsiders to assess the facts with total confidence. But for the past three years, Democratic staffers at the Senate Intelligence Committee have been compiling six thousand pages of records related to the secret program, and in doing so they have found little to celebrate. It is hard to understand, then, why the creators of ???Zero Dark Thirty??? so confidently credit the program.
In addition to providing false advertising for waterboarding, ???Zero Dark Thirty??? endorses torture in several other subtle ways. At one point, the film???s chief C.I.A. interrogator claims, without being challenged, that ???everyone breaks in the end,??? adding, ???it???s biology.??? Maybe that???s what they think in Hollywood, but experts on the history of torture disagree. Indeed, many prisoners have been tortured to death without ever revealing secrets, while many others???including some of those who were brutalized during the Bush years???have fabricated disinformation while being tortured. Some of the disinformation provided under duress during those years, in fact, helped to lead the U.S. into the war in Iraq under false premises.
At another point in the film, an elderly detainee explains that he wants to co??perate with the U.S. because he ???doesn???t want to be tortured again.??? The clear implication is that brutalization brings breakthroughs. Other ways of getting intelligence, such as bribing sources with expensive race cars, are shown to work, too. But while those scenes last only a few minutes, the torture scenes seem to go on and on.
The filmmakers subtly put their thumb on the pro-torture scale, as Emily Bazelon put it, in another scene, too. A C.I.A. officer complains that there is no way for him to corroborate a lead on bin Laden???s whereabouts now that the detainees in Guant??namo all have lawyers. The suggestion is that if they are given due process rather than black eyes, there will be no way to get the necessary evidence. This is a canard, given that virtually all suspects in the American criminal-justice system have lawyers, yet their cases proceed smoothly and fairly every day.
Bigelow has stressed that she had ???no agenda??? when she made ???Zero Dark Thirty.??? Unsurprisingly, though, those who have defended the brutalization of detainees have already begun embracing the film as evidence that they are right. Joe Scarborough, the conservative host of MSNBC???s show ???Morning Joe,??? said recently that the film???s narrative, ???whether you find it repugnant or not,??? shows that the C.I.A. program was effective and ???led to the couriers, that led, eventually, years later, to the killing of Osama bin Laden.??? My guess is that this is just the beginning, and that by the time millions of Americans have seen this movie, they will believe that, as Frank Bruni put it in a recent Times column, ???No waterboarding, no bin Laden.???
Perhaps it???s unfair to expect the entertainment industry to convey history accurately. Clearly, the creators of ???Zero Dark Thirty??? are storytellers who really know how to make a thriller. And it???s true that there are no rules when it comes to fiction. As Boal, the screenwriter, has protested in recent interviews, ???It???s a movie, not a documentary.??? But in the very first minutes of ???Zero Dark Thirty,??? before its narrative begins to unspool, the audience is told that the story it is about to see is ???based on first-hand accounts of actual events.??? If there is an expectation of accuracy, it is set up by the filmmakers themselves. It seems they want it both ways: they want the thrill that comes from revealing what happened behind the scenes as history was being made and the creative license of fiction, which frees them from the responsibility to stick to the truth.
Knowing the real facts???the ones that led the European Court of Human Rights to condemn America for torture this week???I had trouble enjoying the movie. I???ve interviewed Khaled El-Masri, the German citizen whose suit the E.C.H.R. adjudicated. He turned out to be a case of mistaken identity, an innocent car salesman whom the C.I.A. kidnapped and held in a black-site prison for four months, and who was ???severely beaten, sodomized, shackled, and hooded.??? What Masri lived through was so harrowing that, when I had a cup of coffee with him, a few years ago, he couldn???t describe it to me without crying. Maybe I care too much about all of this to enjoy it with popcorn. But maybe the creators of ???Zero Dark Thirty??? should care a little bit more.
Because the movie shows torture leading to the courier does that mean it happened that way in the real world?
seriously, geeeez
based on real events
now with 10% real juice
the fuck is wrong with you people?
can you show me in this thread where I said the movie was accurate?
the movie says torture led to UBL. I never said I believed it. I offered it up as a counterpoint to people claiming the movie was "torture neutral" or whatever. it's only neutral insofar as Bigelow doesn't come out and say "gee I'm sure glad we did that torture thing or else we wouldn't have caught UBL!" But it sure as fuck is not "neutral" as in "ambiguous as to the utility of torture." The msg is very clear: the use of torture led us to Osama.
just so we can move forward, why do you believe that my comparison of kathryn bigelow and leni riefenstahl is so innaccurate/unfair/reactionist/contrarian?
the movie says torture led to UBL. I never said I believed it. I offered it up as a counterpoint to people claiming the movie was "torture neutral" or whatever. it's only neutral insofar as Bigelow doesn't come out and say "gee I'm sure glad we did that torture thing or else we wouldn't have caught UBL!" But it sure as fuck is not "neutral" as in "ambiguous as to the utility of torture." The msg is very clear: the use of torture led us to Osama.
just so we can move forward, why do you believe that my comparison of kathryn bigelow and leni riefenstahl is so innaccurate/unfair/reactionist/contrarian?
The Nazi regime was uniquely evil and destructive. It defies comparison. When you invoke Nazis, you cheapen your argument. It's a shortcut. It renders your rhetorical skills highly suspect (is 'Nazi' all you got?), and (as has happened here) inevitably derails/distracts from what could otherwise be a valid point.
Your I-wasn't-talking-about-Nazis-I-was-talking-about-Riefenstahl defense rings hollow. Riefenstahl was a committed Nazi. Was she also a talented filmmaker? Perhaps. And Albert Speer was a great architect.
An apples-to-apples comparison of Riefenstahl and Bigelow necessitates either (a) focusing solely on their talents as filmmakers (i.e. analyzing Riefenstahl in isolation from her Nazi involvement) or (b) focusing on alleged similarities between the two regimes they depicted in their art (i.e. somehow equating the evilness of the two regimes that Riefenstahl and Bigelow depicted in their respective films).*
I think attempting to do either is insane; that's why I objected to your comparison.
*I guess there exists a third possible line of argument: that both were *unwitting* champions of their respective governments, both striving to make great art without a view toward the consequences. But, again, that ignores Riefenstahl's deep Nazi involvement.
personally i found the comparison accurate if only for the sense that they were and are both tools of regimes used to dilute the greater evil occurring beneath the surface. the artistic merits and fecundity of their output is inline with one another, whereas the only difference in political leanings is that one openly came out as a supporter and the other is hiding behind the "dont shoot the messenger" line of cowardice. riefenstahl claimed to have no working knowledge of what was happening behind closed doors whereas bigelow nudges and winks her way to showing that she knows exactly what's going on. these are points that you yourself have argued in favor of.
and i wasn't bringing her up to invoke the hysterical leanings of a nazi-sympathizer or iraqi condemner, i was bringing it up from a strictly artistic standpoint. to put my comparison further under a microscope, one could even say that i was comparing hienrich himmler to anthony kiedis.... which despite my literal hate for one and lack of taste for the other, couldn't be further from the truth.
Army intelligence officer concludes: 'Zero Dark Thirty' is more right than wrong
Posted By Thomas E. Ricks Monday, February 25, 2013 - 10:40 AM
By Lt. Col. Douglas Pryer, U.S. Army
Best Defense department of war movie reviews
Torture has once again become a matter of noisy public debate. This time (thank goodness!), the reason has nothing to do with new revelations of U.S. servicemembers or CIA employees going amuck on prisoners. Instead, the cause de c??l??bre is a movie, Zero Dark Thirty. Critics of the movie say that it promotes the use of torture by linking torture to a piece of evidence that proved indispensable in America's search for bin Laden. This, critics like Senators McCain, Feinstein, and Levin say, is a dangerous fiction not rooted in historical reality.
Fans of the movie disagree. They argue that the movie portrays this evidence as far less valuable than that obtained by clearly legal means. What is more, they say, the movie performs a service by leaving no doubt in the audience's mind that so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" (EITs) were torture, and also by shocking the conscience of these same viewers, causing them to wonder how the U.S. government could so easily surrender founding national values to such little good effect.
I agree with the movie's apologists. The movie does not depict torture as producing indispensable evidence. It shows morally repugnant torture producing a piece of evidence that the CIA already had but had tucked away in a file and forgot about. Seven years of torture, the movie says, produced little if any intelligence that clearly legal methods could have (and did) provide. The real narrative of the movie: A new sheriff (President Obama) comes to town who outlaws torture; subsequent CIA detective work relies exclusively on more cunning, ethical techniques involving, not just humane interrogations, but other intelligence methods; and -- presto! -- in two short years, bin Laden's hideout is found and, a few months later, he is killed. Even if the movie gets many details wrong, it at least gets the basic story right.
But far more important than the movie's historical accuracy is the deeper debate it has resurrected: Does torture work? And, even if it does work, is torture something Americans ought to be using on "hardened" terrorists (or on anyone else for that matter)?
This debate is sorely needed since most opinion polls show Americans' support for torture steadily climbing. A 2011 Pew Research Center survey reported that 53 percent of Americans believe that torture should often (19 percent) or sometimes (34 percent) be used against terrorism suspects to gain information. That marked a steady 10 percent climb from 2004. A recent YouGov poll commissioned by a Stanford University professor indicated that, over a five-year period, the number of Americans approving of torture climbed 14 percent to 41 percent in 2012.
This trend is something that those against "torture as American policy" should be watching carefully. U.S. legislation, military regulations, and Army doctrine -- most notably the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 and U.S. Army Field Manual 2-22.3 Human Intelligence Collector Operations -- now enshrine prisoner treatment that is in keeping with international standards and the national values expressed by such principled American leaders as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. In our republic, though, all laws are subject to change -- even those in the Constitution -- if enough Americans support this change.
There is no question which side of the torture debate I fall on. First and foremost, it is clear to me that torture fails as a tactic within the most important domain of war, the moral one. It is thus something that we Americans simply ought not to do.
When people see images of torture, most empathize with the tortured rather than the torturer. This is especially true for those who identify strongly with the tortured in the first place because of in-group, out-group bias, say, because the tortured is a fellow Muslim or a fellow Iraqi. The moral judgment that this empathy has naturally generated -- the judgment that those torturing are "cruel," "evil," or worse still, "inhuman" -- has inspired legions of America's enemies to fight us. At the same time, shame has decreased the will to fight of some Americans within the ranks and at home and damaged the political ability of coalition allies to support America's military adventures abroad. Choosing torture as policy is thus rightly seen as a kind of slow moral suicide, strengthening the fighting spirit of our enemies while sapping our own fighting spirit and that of our allies.
It is also clear to me that torture is an extremely poor method for collecting reliable intelligence. This clarity derives in part from military doctrine, training, and professional reading. But it is also rooted in personal experience.
During the summer and fall of 2003, my boss and I managed interrogation operations for Task Force 1st Armored Division (TF 1AD) in Baghdad. My boss was Major Nathan Hoepner, who wrote an email in August 2003 that would one day be quoted by Tom Ricks in Fiasco. When told by the highest command in Iraq that "the gloves are coming off" and that our unit must provide a "wish list" of harsh interrogation techniques, Major Hoepner emailed a passionate rebuttal: "We need to take a deep breath and remember who we are...It comes down to standards of right and wrong -- something we cannot just put aside when we find it inconvenient." He concluded: "BOTTOM LINE: We are American soldiers, heirs of a long tradition of staying on the high ground. We need to stay there."
Tragically, his impassioned plea fell on deaf ears. Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez soon signed a policy memo encouraging the use of EITs on prisoners, tactics employed at U.S. military Survival, Escape, Resistance, and Evasion (SERE) schools to teach trainees how to survive torture with honor. Sanchez replaced this memo with another in October that ostensibly required interrogators to obtain his approval for non-doctrinal techniques. However, it actually reinforced the belief of some interrogators that they themselves had the authority to order that clothing, food, shelter, light, and warmth be withheld from detainees. Thus it was that degrading, formally promulgated tactics laid the foundation for more serious crimes at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere in Iraq.
At the height of the worst abuses at Abu Ghraib, I regularly communicated with an interrogation chief working at the prison. The reason was to press him to have TF 1AD detainees re-interrogated. Despite his team's conducting numerous interrogations for us, we did not receive ANY useful intelligence whatsoever from Abu Ghraib. Sure, they produced reports on our detainees, but invariably, these reports contained either useless information or different versions of the same stories we had already extracted using humane, rapport-based approaches.
I was not alone in my frustration with Abu Ghraib. For example, Kyle Teamey, the S2X (senior human intelligence officer) for 1st Brigade, 1st Infantry Division, in Ramadi at the time, said: "The folks at Abu Ghraib not only failed to provide any intel of value, they turned the entire Sunni population against us. Meanwhile, we were getting actionable intel by giving detainees Skittles and a cup of coffee."
Despite our nation's and military's gross failures at Abu Ghraib and several other detention facilities, most interrogators at Gitmo, Iraq, and Afghanistan did not choose to torture. Why is this the case? One reason is that many shared the idealism expressed by Major Hoepner, which holds that torture is just something that Americans should not do.
But we should not dismiss professional competence as a reason, either. Those interrogators who had done their professional reading were less likely to engage in torture. In a future guest column, "Top 10 Books on U.S. Interrogation," I will provide a list of some of these books. Interrogators had also learned doctrine and conventional wisdom at the military intelligence schoolhouse that taught that torture is an ineffective intelligence tool. This conventional wisdom included the proverb, "The longest list of lies in the world is that given by the tortured." Many interrogators had taken doctrine and such conventional wisdom to heart, before they deployed.
Lieutenant Colonel Douglas A. Pryer is a military intelligence officer who has served in various command and staff positions in Iraq, Kosovo, Germany, the United Kingdom, the United States, and, most recently, Afghanistan. He is the author of the Command and General Staff College Foundation Press's inaugural book, The Fight for the High Ground: The U.S. Army and Interrogation During Operation Iraqi Freedom, May 2003 - April 2004. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.
If given a choice between torturing our enemies (usually with doctors present), using a method that we subject our own soldiers to during training, of which no enemy has ever died from and given it might have a very small chance of producing valuable information. Versus using unmanned drones to kill their asses, gimme the former every time.
Is it that hard to imagine that the film is not pro-torture, nor anti-torture? Does everything have to have a glaring political agenda like a big nerf hammer that goes around pounding people in the head? That's binary thinking.
One of the most entertaining things I've witnessed this year was the Facebook chatter amongst people during the Super Bowl analyzing each and every commercial and pointing out their political incorrectness and what special interest group should be insulted/offended by them.
If given a choice between torturing our enemies (usually with doctors present), using a method that we subject our own soldiers to during training, of which no enemy has ever died from and given it might have a very small chance of producing valuable information. Versus using unmanned drones to kill their asses, gimme the former every time.
But you must realize that the "choice" you've put together is silly, since no one, anywhere, has ever been asked to choose between those two things, or ever will be.
You can call it whatever you want.....Our current administration has made the "choice" that one of these things should not be done and one of them is just fine.
If given a choice between torturing our enemies (usually with doctors present), using a method that we subject our own soldiers to during training, of which no enemy has ever died from and given it might have a very small chance of producing valuable information. Versus using unmanned drones to kill their asses, gimme the former every time.
That's a false dichotomy. The purpose of torture and drone attacks are completely different. And in case you missed the guy's argument it has been made by U.S. intelligence and FBI interrogators many times, all torture gets you is people saying whatever they can to stop the torture. The people pushing torture are politicians, bureaucrats and generals making knee jerk decisions after catastrophic events.
Comments
pretty unclear to this viewer.
They tortured the hell out of that dude >> he gave up the name of the courier >> they followed the courier to bin Laden's house and killed him.
Maybe you got up to go the bathroom at some point?
i just remember dude getting tortured and him not saying anything.
i remember thinking "this is bad and it should stop, i can't believe people actually do this".
basically... i left the theater thinking torture is a terrible option.
iand yes, i did go take a leak. i can't handle pop like i used to.
in the real world, no.
on soulstrut, yes.
to be clear: I think the movie can be viewed either way.
my only point is that the narrative of the movie very clearly draws a line from torture >> dead Osama.
was killing Osama worth using torture? could the intel have been obtained without torture? the movie doesn't answer either question. alls I'm saying is the story told in the movie draws a clear line between torture and locating UBL.
seriously, geeeez
based on real events
now with 10% real juice
Zero Conscience in ???Zero Dark Thirty???
Posted by Jane Maye
At the same time that the European Court of Human Rights has issued a historic ruling condemning the C.I.A.???s treatment of a terror suspect during the Bush years as ???torture,??? a Hollywood movie about the agency???s hunt for Osama bin Laden, ???Zero Dark Thirty??????whose creators say that they didn???t want to ???judge??? the interrogation program???appears headed for Oscar nominations. Can torture really be turned into morally neutral entertainment?
???Zero Dark Thirty,??? which opens across the country next month, is a pulse-quickening film that spends its first half hour or so depicting a fictionalized version of the Bush Administration???s secret U.S. interrogation program. In reality, the C.I.A.???s program of calibrated cruelty was deemed so illegal, and so immoral, that the director of the F.B.I. withdrew his personnel rather than have them collaborate with it, and the top lawyer at the Pentagon laid his career on the line in an effort to stop a version of the program from spreading to the armed forces. The C.I.A.???s actions convulsed the national-security community, leading to a crisis of conscience inside the top ranks of the U.S. government. The debate echoed the moral seriousness of the political dilemma once posed by slavery, a subject that is brilliantly evoked in Steven Spielberg???s new film, ???Lincoln???; by contrast, the director of ???Zero Dark Thirty,??? Kathryn Bigelow, milks the U.S. torture program for drama while sidestepping the political and ethical debate that it provoked. In her hands, the hunt for bin Laden is essentially a police procedural, devoid of moral context. If she were making a film about slavery in antebellum America, it seems, the story would focus on whether the cotton crops were successful.
After some critics called Bigelow a torture apologist, she defended the fairness and historical accuracy of her movie. ???The film doesn???t have an agenda, and it doesn???t judge. I wanted a boots-on-the-ground experience,??? she told my New Yorker colleague Dexter Filkins, who interviewed her for a Talk of the Town piece. At a Los Angeles press junket, the film???s screenwriter, Mark Boal, complained that critics were ???mischaracterizing??? the torture sequences: ???I understand that those scenes are graphic and unsparing and unsentimental. But I think that what the film does over the course of two hours is show the complexity of the debate.??? His point was that because the film shows multiple approaches to intelligence gathering, of which torture is only one tactic, and because the torture isn???t shown as always producing correct or instant leads, it offers a nuanced answer to the question of whether torture works.
But whether torture ???worked??? was far from the most important question about its use. I???ve seen the film and, as much as I admired Bigelow???s Oscar-winning picture ???The Hurt Locker,??? I think that this time, by ignoring the full weight of the dark history of torture, her work falls disturbingly short. To begin with, despite Boal???s contentions, ???Zero Dark Thirty??? does not capture the complexity of the debate about America???s brutal detention program. It doesn???t include a single scene in which torture is questioned, even though the Bush years were racked by internal strife over just that issue???again, not just among human-rights and civil-liberties lawyers, but inside the F.B.I., the military, the Justice Department, and the C.I.A. itself, which eventually abandoned waterboarding because it feared, correctly, that the act constituted a war crime. None of this ethical drama seems to interest Bigelow.
To establish a baseline of moral awareness, she shows her heroine???a C.I.A. counterterrorism officer called Maya, played by Jessica Chastain???delicately wincing as she hands the more muscled interrogators a pitcher of water with which to waterboard a detainee. Maya is also shown standing mutely by when the detainee is strung up by ropes, stripped naked, and forced to crawl in a dog collar. In reality, when the C.I.A. first subjected a detainee to incarceration in a coffin-size ???confinement box,??? as is shown in the movie, an F.B.I. agent present at the scene threw a fit, warned the C.I.A. contractor proposing the plan that it was illegal, counterproductive, and reprehensible. The fight went all the way to the top of the Bush Administration. Bigelow airbrushes out this showdown, as she does virtually the entire debate during the Bush years about the treatment of detainees.
The lone anti-torture voice shown in the film is a split-second news clip of President Barack Obama, taken from a ???60 Minutes??? interview, in which he condemns torture. It flashes on a television screen that???s in the background of a scene set in Pakistan; the movie???s terrorist-hunters, who are holding a meeting, barely look up, letting Obama???s pronouncement pass without comment. ???By this point in the film,??? as the CNN national-security analyst Peter Bergen wrote recently, ???the audience has already seen that the C.I.A. has employed coercive interrogation techniques on an al Qaeda detainee that produced a key lead in the hunt for bin Laden. In the film, Obama???s opposition to torture comes off as wrongheaded and prissy.???
Bigelow has portrayed herself as a reluctant truth-teller. She recently described the film???s torture scenes as ???difficult to shoot.??? She said, ???I wish it was not part of our history. But it was.???
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. But this claim has been debunked, repeatedly, by reliable sources with access to the facts. As the Washington Post???s Greg Sargent first reported, shortly after bin Laden was killed, Leon Panetta, then the director of the C.I.A., sent a letter to Arizona Senator John McCain, clearly stating that ???we first learned about ???the facilitator / courier???s nom de guerre??? from a detainee not in the C.I.A.???s custody.??? Panetta wrote that ???no detainee in C.I.A. custody revealed the facilitator / courier???s full true name or specific whereabouts.???
The Senators Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat and the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat and the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, have undermined the film???s version of events further still. ???The original lead information had no connection to C.I.A. detainees,??? they wrote in their own letter, revealed by the Post last year. Feinstein and Levin noted that a third detainee in C.I.A. custody did provide information on the courier, but, importantly, they stressed that ???he did so the day before he was interrogated by the C.I.A. using their coercive interrogation techniques.??? In other words, contrary to the plotline of ???Zero Dark Thirty,??? and contrary to self-serving accounts of C.I.A. officers implicated in the interrogation program, senators with access to the record say that torture did not produce the leads that led to finding and killing bin Laden.
Top senators on the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Senate Armed Services Committee have amplified that position in additional interviews this week. Speaking with the Huffington Post, Feinstein said of the movie???s narrative, ???Based on what I know, I don???t believe it is true.??? Republicans, too, criticized the movie???s plot. ???It???s wrong. It???s wrong. I know for a fact, not because of this report???my own knowledge???that waterboarding, torture, does not lead to reliable information ??? in any case???not this specific case???in any case,??? said John McCain, the top Republican on the Armed Services Committee, who was himself tortured during the Vietnam War. The Huffington Post also quoted South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, another Republican member of the Armed Services Committee, saying, ???I would argue that it???s not waterboarding that led to bin Laden???s demise. It was a lot of good intelligence-gathering from the Obama and Bush administrations, continuity of effort, holding people at Gitmo, putting the puzzle together over a long period of time???not torture.???
As Scott Shane wrote in the Times on Thursday, so little is publicly known about the C.I.A.???s erstwhile interrogation program that it is nearly impossible for outsiders to assess the facts with total confidence. But for the past three years, Democratic staffers at the Senate Intelligence Committee have been compiling six thousand pages of records related to the secret program, and in doing so they have found little to celebrate. It is hard to understand, then, why the creators of ???Zero Dark Thirty??? so confidently credit the program.
In addition to providing false advertising for waterboarding, ???Zero Dark Thirty??? endorses torture in several other subtle ways. At one point, the film???s chief C.I.A. interrogator claims, without being challenged, that ???everyone breaks in the end,??? adding, ???it???s biology.??? Maybe that???s what they think in Hollywood, but experts on the history of torture disagree. Indeed, many prisoners have been tortured to death without ever revealing secrets, while many others???including some of those who were brutalized during the Bush years???have fabricated disinformation while being tortured. Some of the disinformation provided under duress during those years, in fact, helped to lead the U.S. into the war in Iraq under false premises.
At another point in the film, an elderly detainee explains that he wants to co??perate with the U.S. because he ???doesn???t want to be tortured again.??? The clear implication is that brutalization brings breakthroughs. Other ways of getting intelligence, such as bribing sources with expensive race cars, are shown to work, too. But while those scenes last only a few minutes, the torture scenes seem to go on and on.
The filmmakers subtly put their thumb on the pro-torture scale, as Emily Bazelon put it, in another scene, too. A C.I.A. officer complains that there is no way for him to corroborate a lead on bin Laden???s whereabouts now that the detainees in Guant??namo all have lawyers. The suggestion is that if they are given due process rather than black eyes, there will be no way to get the necessary evidence. This is a canard, given that virtually all suspects in the American criminal-justice system have lawyers, yet their cases proceed smoothly and fairly every day.
Bigelow has stressed that she had ???no agenda??? when she made ???Zero Dark Thirty.??? Unsurprisingly, though, those who have defended the brutalization of detainees have already begun embracing the film as evidence that they are right. Joe Scarborough, the conservative host of MSNBC???s show ???Morning Joe,??? said recently that the film???s narrative, ???whether you find it repugnant or not,??? shows that the C.I.A. program was effective and ???led to the couriers, that led, eventually, years later, to the killing of Osama bin Laden.??? My guess is that this is just the beginning, and that by the time millions of Americans have seen this movie, they will believe that, as Frank Bruni put it in a recent Times column, ???No waterboarding, no bin Laden.???
Perhaps it???s unfair to expect the entertainment industry to convey history accurately. Clearly, the creators of ???Zero Dark Thirty??? are storytellers who really know how to make a thriller. And it???s true that there are no rules when it comes to fiction. As Boal, the screenwriter, has protested in recent interviews, ???It???s a movie, not a documentary.??? But in the very first minutes of ???Zero Dark Thirty,??? before its narrative begins to unspool, the audience is told that the story it is about to see is ???based on first-hand accounts of actual events.??? If there is an expectation of accuracy, it is set up by the filmmakers themselves. It seems they want it both ways: they want the thrill that comes from revealing what happened behind the scenes as history was being made and the creative license of fiction, which frees them from the responsibility to stick to the truth.
Knowing the real facts???the ones that led the European Court of Human Rights to condemn America for torture this week???I had trouble enjoying the movie. I???ve interviewed Khaled El-Masri, the German citizen whose suit the E.C.H.R. adjudicated. He turned out to be a case of mistaken identity, an innocent car salesman whom the C.I.A. kidnapped and held in a black-site prison for four months, and who was ???severely beaten, sodomized, shackled, and hooded.??? What Masri lived through was so harrowing that, when I had a cup of coffee with him, a few years ago, he couldn???t describe it to me without crying. Maybe I care too much about all of this to enjoy it with popcorn. But maybe the creators of ???Zero Dark Thirty??? should care a little bit more.
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/12/torture-in-kathryn-bigelows-zero-dark-thirty.html#ixzz2IzeRNhNt
Or maybe severely beaten, sodomized, shackled, and hooded for 4 months would improve her mood.
I love you. Same thing with Django.
Thanks CMF.
I too am trying to avoid political threads.
But this is not politics. It is basic morality.
Excellent - Thanks for posting.
the fuck is wrong with you people?
can you show me in this thread where I said the movie was accurate?
the movie says torture led to UBL. I never said I believed it. I offered it up as a counterpoint to people claiming the movie was "torture neutral" or whatever. it's only neutral insofar as Bigelow doesn't come out and say "gee I'm sure glad we did that torture thing or else we wouldn't have caught UBL!" But it sure as fuck is not "neutral" as in "ambiguous as to the utility of torture." The msg is very clear: the use of torture led us to Osama.
RIF people.
Just the same, thank you for the clarification.
You see the movie?
SPOILER ALERT ^^
No. I most likely will never see it, war, torture, etc is not my thing. Most of the time.
In a less realistic movie like True Grit, I can enjoy.
True Grit was great.
The Nazi regime was uniquely evil and destructive. It defies comparison. When you invoke Nazis, you cheapen your argument. It's a shortcut. It renders your rhetorical skills highly suspect (is 'Nazi' all you got?), and (as has happened here) inevitably derails/distracts from what could otherwise be a valid point.
Your I-wasn't-talking-about-Nazis-I-was-talking-about-Riefenstahl defense rings hollow. Riefenstahl was a committed Nazi. Was she also a talented filmmaker? Perhaps. And Albert Speer was a great architect.
An apples-to-apples comparison of Riefenstahl and Bigelow necessitates either (a) focusing solely on their talents as filmmakers (i.e. analyzing Riefenstahl in isolation from her Nazi involvement) or (b) focusing on alleged similarities between the two regimes they depicted in their art (i.e. somehow equating the evilness of the two regimes that Riefenstahl and Bigelow depicted in their respective films).*
I think attempting to do either is insane; that's why I objected to your comparison.
*I guess there exists a third possible line of argument: that both were *unwitting* champions of their respective governments, both striving to make great art without a view toward the consequences. But, again, that ignores Riefenstahl's deep Nazi involvement.
and i wasn't bringing her up to invoke the hysterical leanings of a nazi-sympathizer or iraqi condemner, i was bringing it up from a strictly artistic standpoint. to put my comparison further under a microscope, one could even say that i was comparing hienrich himmler to anthony kiedis.... which despite my literal hate for one and lack of taste for the other, couldn't be further from the truth.
Watch 'Zero Dark Thirty' Catches Criticism Over Torture Depictions on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.
B/W
torrent (incl english subs) : http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/5846570/Leni_Riefenstahl_Biopic_Docu._(Nazi_Filmmaker_-_Triumph_of_the_W
Posted By Thomas E. Ricks Monday, February 25, 2013 - 10:40 AM
By Lt. Col. Douglas Pryer, U.S. Army
Best Defense department of war movie reviews
Torture has once again become a matter of noisy public debate. This time (thank goodness!), the reason has nothing to do with new revelations of U.S. servicemembers or CIA employees going amuck on prisoners. Instead, the cause de c??l??bre is a movie, Zero Dark Thirty. Critics of the movie say that it promotes the use of torture by linking torture to a piece of evidence that proved indispensable in America's search for bin Laden. This, critics like Senators McCain, Feinstein, and Levin say, is a dangerous fiction not rooted in historical reality.
Fans of the movie disagree. They argue that the movie portrays this evidence as far less valuable than that obtained by clearly legal means. What is more, they say, the movie performs a service by leaving no doubt in the audience's mind that so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" (EITs) were torture, and also by shocking the conscience of these same viewers, causing them to wonder how the U.S. government could so easily surrender founding national values to such little good effect.
I agree with the movie's apologists. The movie does not depict torture as producing indispensable evidence. It shows morally repugnant torture producing a piece of evidence that the CIA already had but had tucked away in a file and forgot about. Seven years of torture, the movie says, produced little if any intelligence that clearly legal methods could have (and did) provide. The real narrative of the movie: A new sheriff (President Obama) comes to town who outlaws torture; subsequent CIA detective work relies exclusively on more cunning, ethical techniques involving, not just humane interrogations, but other intelligence methods; and -- presto! -- in two short years, bin Laden's hideout is found and, a few months later, he is killed. Even if the movie gets many details wrong, it at least gets the basic story right.
But far more important than the movie's historical accuracy is the deeper debate it has resurrected: Does torture work? And, even if it does work, is torture something Americans ought to be using on "hardened" terrorists (or on anyone else for that matter)?
This debate is sorely needed since most opinion polls show Americans' support for torture steadily climbing. A 2011 Pew Research Center survey reported that 53 percent of Americans believe that torture should often (19 percent) or sometimes (34 percent) be used against terrorism suspects to gain information. That marked a steady 10 percent climb from 2004. A recent YouGov poll commissioned by a Stanford University professor indicated that, over a five-year period, the number of Americans approving of torture climbed 14 percent to 41 percent in 2012.
This trend is something that those against "torture as American policy" should be watching carefully. U.S. legislation, military regulations, and Army doctrine -- most notably the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 and U.S. Army Field Manual 2-22.3 Human Intelligence Collector Operations -- now enshrine prisoner treatment that is in keeping with international standards and the national values expressed by such principled American leaders as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. In our republic, though, all laws are subject to change -- even those in the Constitution -- if enough Americans support this change.
There is no question which side of the torture debate I fall on. First and foremost, it is clear to me that torture fails as a tactic within the most important domain of war, the moral one. It is thus something that we Americans simply ought not to do.
When people see images of torture, most empathize with the tortured rather than the torturer. This is especially true for those who identify strongly with the tortured in the first place because of in-group, out-group bias, say, because the tortured is a fellow Muslim or a fellow Iraqi. The moral judgment that this empathy has naturally generated -- the judgment that those torturing are "cruel," "evil," or worse still, "inhuman" -- has inspired legions of America's enemies to fight us. At the same time, shame has decreased the will to fight of some Americans within the ranks and at home and damaged the political ability of coalition allies to support America's military adventures abroad. Choosing torture as policy is thus rightly seen as a kind of slow moral suicide, strengthening the fighting spirit of our enemies while sapping our own fighting spirit and that of our allies.
It is also clear to me that torture is an extremely poor method for collecting reliable intelligence. This clarity derives in part from military doctrine, training, and professional reading. But it is also rooted in personal experience.
During the summer and fall of 2003, my boss and I managed interrogation operations for Task Force 1st Armored Division (TF 1AD) in Baghdad. My boss was Major Nathan Hoepner, who wrote an email in August 2003 that would one day be quoted by Tom Ricks in Fiasco. When told by the highest command in Iraq that "the gloves are coming off" and that our unit must provide a "wish list" of harsh interrogation techniques, Major Hoepner emailed a passionate rebuttal: "We need to take a deep breath and remember who we are...It comes down to standards of right and wrong -- something we cannot just put aside when we find it inconvenient." He concluded: "BOTTOM LINE: We are American soldiers, heirs of a long tradition of staying on the high ground. We need to stay there."
Tragically, his impassioned plea fell on deaf ears. Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez soon signed a policy memo encouraging the use of EITs on prisoners, tactics employed at U.S. military Survival, Escape, Resistance, and Evasion (SERE) schools to teach trainees how to survive torture with honor. Sanchez replaced this memo with another in October that ostensibly required interrogators to obtain his approval for non-doctrinal techniques. However, it actually reinforced the belief of some interrogators that they themselves had the authority to order that clothing, food, shelter, light, and warmth be withheld from detainees. Thus it was that degrading, formally promulgated tactics laid the foundation for more serious crimes at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere in Iraq.
At the height of the worst abuses at Abu Ghraib, I regularly communicated with an interrogation chief working at the prison. The reason was to press him to have TF 1AD detainees re-interrogated. Despite his team's conducting numerous interrogations for us, we did not receive ANY useful intelligence whatsoever from Abu Ghraib. Sure, they produced reports on our detainees, but invariably, these reports contained either useless information or different versions of the same stories we had already extracted using humane, rapport-based approaches.
I was not alone in my frustration with Abu Ghraib. For example, Kyle Teamey, the S2X (senior human intelligence officer) for 1st Brigade, 1st Infantry Division, in Ramadi at the time, said: "The folks at Abu Ghraib not only failed to provide any intel of value, they turned the entire Sunni population against us. Meanwhile, we were getting actionable intel by giving detainees Skittles and a cup of coffee."
Despite our nation's and military's gross failures at Abu Ghraib and several other detention facilities, most interrogators at Gitmo, Iraq, and Afghanistan did not choose to torture. Why is this the case? One reason is that many shared the idealism expressed by Major Hoepner, which holds that torture is just something that Americans should not do.
But we should not dismiss professional competence as a reason, either. Those interrogators who had done their professional reading were less likely to engage in torture. In a future guest column, "Top 10 Books on U.S. Interrogation," I will provide a list of some of these books. Interrogators had also learned doctrine and conventional wisdom at the military intelligence schoolhouse that taught that torture is an ineffective intelligence tool. This conventional wisdom included the proverb, "The longest list of lies in the world is that given by the tortured." Many interrogators had taken doctrine and such conventional wisdom to heart, before they deployed.
Lieutenant Colonel Douglas A. Pryer is a military intelligence officer who has served in various command and staff positions in Iraq, Kosovo, Germany, the United Kingdom, the United States, and, most recently, Afghanistan. He is the author of the Command and General Staff College Foundation Press's inaugural book, The Fight for the High Ground: The U.S. Army and Interrogation During Operation Iraqi Freedom, May 2003 - April 2004. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.
http://ricks.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/02/25/army_intelligence_officer_concludes_zero_dark_thirty_is_more_right_than_wrong
One of the most entertaining things I've witnessed this year was the Facebook chatter amongst people during the Super Bowl analyzing each and every commercial and pointing out their political incorrectness and what special interest group should be insulted/offended by them.
You can call it whatever you want.....Our current administration has made the "choice" that one of these things should not be done and one of them is just fine.
That's a false dichotomy. The purpose of torture and drone attacks are completely different. And in case you missed the guy's argument it has been made by U.S. intelligence and FBI interrogators many times, all torture gets you is people saying whatever they can to stop the torture. The people pushing torture are politicians, bureaucrats and generals making knee jerk decisions after catastrophic events.