by Mark Bowden
His American imprisonment must have been a brief and bittersweet sojourn for Saddam on his road to retribution. After his capture he was cleaned up, fingerprinted, fed, and housed like an important prisoner. All his adult life he was used to people doing things for him, and here, when he was confined alone in the Baghdad Operations Center, his basic needs were all covered. He grew plants. He wrote. He ate regular meals and received good medical care. Piro listened to him and complimented his verses. After eight months of hiding in a hole, it must have been a pleasant respite.
At least compared with his own harsh world, where his many local enemies waited. His death was a horror, but a fitting final scene for the saga that was his life, and an end he had foreseen. He once predicted that his enemies, if they ever got hold of him, would tear him apart. As Saddam stood brave and defiant on the scaffold, exchanging insults and taunts with those who had come to see him hang, his final moments would have merely confirmed what he already knew. He was leaving a world ruled by brute force, by cruelty and cunning and vengeance, where, for a time, he had prevailed.
Zero Dark Thirty Is Not Pro-Torture
The Atlantic, January 2013
In the opening minutes of Zero Dark Thirty there are two ugly interrogation scenes, which haunt the rest of the experience and which have come to haunt critical reception of the film itself.
After we hear, against a black screen, the terrified voices of Americans trapped on the upper floors of the doomed, burning towers on 9/11, the movie opens on a character named Ammar, suspended from the ceiling by chains attached to both wrists. It is two years later. Ammar is bloody, filthy, and exhausted. We learn quickly that he is an Al Qaeda middleman, and a nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, architect of the 9/11 attacks. Ammar is believed to know details of a pending attack in Saudi Arabia, and he is uncooperative.
His questioning by CIA officer Daniel is uncomfortable to watch. It is brutal and ultimately futile. As his tormenters fold him into a small punishment box, demanding the day of the attack, Ammar murmurs “Saturday,” then “Sunday,” then “Monday,” then “Thursday,” then “Friday.”
In the script, referring to the frustrated Daniel, the scene closes with the words, “Once again, he’s learned nothing.”
The subsequent Saudi attacks occur. Daniel accepts responsibility for the failure, along with his new associate, the film’s heroine, Maya. This is all in the first minutes of the movie. Torture has been tried, and it has failed. It is Maya then who then proposes something different. Why not trick him?
“He doesn’t know we failed,” says Maya. “We can tell him anything.”
And it is cleverness, coated with kindness, that produces something useful. The Saudi attack can no longer be prevented, but Ammar offers them a name. More correctly, a pseudonym, what in Arabic is called a kunya, a nom de guerre: Abu Ahmad al-Kuwait, the father of Ahmed from Kuwait. Maya doesn’t know it yet—indeed, she won’t find out for years—but this is the first small clue on the long trail to Abbottabad.
Zero Dark Thirty, or ZD30, by director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal, is an extraordinarily impressive dramatization of the ten-year hunt for Osama bin Laden, which I wrote about in far more detail in my book The Finish. Warmly praised by many film critics and a box office hit, ZD30 is sure to be in the running for major recognition during the coming awards season. But it has also been attacked by some as a false version of the story that effectively advocates the use of torture. To put it simply, they argue that the film, while brilliant, shows torture to have played an important role in finding Osama, which they say is not true. It is reminiscent of the late movie critic Pauline Kael’s memorable put-down of director Sam Peckinpah as a virtuoso of “fascistic” art.
This no doubt has come as a shock to Bigelow, whom I have never met, but who has been described to me as “someone who will stop to lift a snail off the sidewalk.” The criticism is unfair, and its reading of both the film and the actual story is mistaken.
A screenplay is more like a sonnet than a novel. Action onscreen unfolds with visceral immediacy, but any story with sweep—this one unfolds over nearly a decade—can be told only with broad impressionistic strokes. The challenge is greater in trying to tell a true story. It is easy to see how the interrogation scenes in the beginning color the entire tale, but they are necessary. They are part of the story. Without them, I suspect some of the same critics now accusing it of being pro-torture would instead be calling ZD30 a whitewash.
First, let’s consider whether the film is pro-torture. This is the easiest charge to debunk. I have already noted the dramatic failure depicted in the opening scenes with Ammar. The futility of the approach is part of the more general organizational failure depicted in the movie’s first half, culminating in a dramatization of the tragic 2009 bombing of Camp Chapman, in Khowst, Afghanistan, where an Al Qaeda infiltrator wiped out an entire CIA field office. The agency is shown to be not only failing to find bin Laden and dismantle Al Qaeda, but on the losing end of the fight. In case the point hasn’t been made clearly enough, a visit from an angry CIA chief to the U.S. embassy in Pakistan in the next scene underlines it:
“There’s nobody else, hidden away on some other floor,” he says. “This is just us. And we are failing. We’re spending billions of dollars. People are dying. We’re still no closer to defeating our enemy.”
The work that leads to Abbottabad in the second half of the film unfolds as dramatic detective work in the office and the field, and ends with a faithful and detailed reenactment of the raid on the Abbottabad compound. Through it all, Maya is playing a long game, in dogged pursuit of a lead, battling those in command more preoccupied with short-term goals—finding and killing Al Qaeda operational figures. Torture is presented as part of this story, something Maya accepts as necessary, but to the extent it is portrayed it is shown to be, at best, only marginally useful and both politically and morally toxic.
So, how true is it? I think it was a mistake for those involved in the film to suggest that ZD30 is “journalistic,” and to have touted their access to SEAL team members and CIA field officers. No matter how remarkable their research and access, the film spills no state secrets, and no feature film can tell a story like this without aggressively condensing characters and events, fictionalizing dialogue, etc. Boal’s script is just 102 pages, not even ten thousand words, the length of a longish magazine article.
Within these limits the film is remarkably accurate, certainly well within what we all understand by the Hollywood label “based on a true story,” which works as both a boast and a disclaimer. There apparently was a female CIA field officer who performed heroic service in the-ten year hunt for Osama, and whose fixation on “Ahmed from Kuwait” helped steer the effort to success. In the film she is seen butting heads with an intelligence bureaucracy that regards her fixation on Ahmed as wishful thinking. This makes for some dramatic scenes, and gives Jessica Chastain a great many chances to brood with ethereal intensity. The real-life “Maya” may be even more beautiful than Chastain, but she was just one of many officers and analysts fixated on “Ahmed,” in an agency that never stopped regarding him as an important lead. The Saudi attacks in the beginning of the film, identified as the “Khobar Towers” incident, actually occurred in 1996, six years prior to the action in the film. The raid itself involved four helicopters—two Chinooks and two Black Hawks—not the three Black Hawks shown. Key planning sessions that occurred in the White House Situation Room, chaired by President Obama, are depicted as having happened at Langley with CIA director Leon Panetta—indeed, those who have accused the current administration of rolling out the red carpet for Bigelow and Boal in the hope of hyping its role may be surprised to find that the president, whose participation was central throughout, has been almost completed edited out. The list could go on. The same is true of any film “based on a true story,” whether it’s the Jerry Bruckheimer/Ridley Scott version of my book Black Hawk Down, or Stephen Spielberg’s Lincoln.
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br /> Everyone understands the rules of this game. Theater is theater. It is a show, not a scrupulous presentation of fact. We ought to feel betrayed only when a filmmaker departs egregiously and deliberately from the record, the kind of thing Oliver Stone has made his trademark, substituting what he thinks might be true, or perhaps would prefer to believe, for what is known. One of the attractions of a true story is, after all, that it be at least … sort of … true. But filmic truth will always stumble over the sheer complexity of reality, which is messy, often contradictory and confusing, and which only rarely lines up neatly enough for a two-hour script. Hollywood’s “true story” aims only to color safely inside the lines of history.
In this broader sense, ZD30 is remarkably true. The hunt for Osama bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders began with efforts that were clumsy, costly, and cruel. We wrongly invaded Iraq, for instance. We stupidly embraced a regime of torture in our military prisons. Some of the steps we took were tragic and are likely to be enduring national embarrassments. But over the years, tactics, priorities, personnel, even administrations changed. The nation learned how to fight this new enemy intelligently. Through it all, the search for Osama proceeded with bureaucracy’s unique talent for obduracy. This isn’t as sexy or dramatic as watching Jessica Chastain paling before the stink and blood of rough interrogation, a red-tressed Ahab pursuing her lead through bullets, bombs, and boneheaded bosses … but it stays within the lines. For two hours or so I’m willing to munch my popcorn and enjoy.
As for the real story, the question of what role torture played is more difficult. Torture, or coercive interrogation, is a subject I wrote about at length in this magazine—“The Dark Art of Interrogation,” in October 2003.I argued then, before the revelations of Abu Ghraib and other scandals, that the use of such morally repugnant tactics may yield important information, and may even be morally compelling in certain rare circumstances, but that it ought to be banned, and that interrogators who practiced it should do so only at risk of being disciplined or prosecuted. The word itself, torture, is pejorative, in that it equates keeping a prisoner awake with the most sordid practices of the Inquisition. But even mild pressure does tend to lead rapidly to severe mistreatment, as we saw during the Bush administration, which made the mistake of authorizing it—a step that predictably led to tragic and widespread abuses. These have been ably documented by, for one, Alex Gibney (a prominent critic of ZD30) in his stirring “Taxi to the Dark Side”; by tenacious journalists like Seymour Hersh; and by the candid snapshots of depraved American military jailers. Former vice president Dick Cheney and others have argued that this coercive regimen produced vital information, which prevented terror attacks; but so far we have only their word for it, and plenty of other informed voices that contradict it. I do not know the answer, although the reluctance of the current professedly anti-torture administration to explore and punish past abuses may suggest that such practices were not altogether useless. The one certain thing is that they happened, and on a large scale. They became such a scandal that the practices were halted by the Bush administration itself in 2004. But by then the early interrogations that put “Ahmed from Kuwait” on the CIA’s radar had all happened, and nearly all had involved torture.
These are facts, most of which were unearthed by reporters seeking to expose the abuses. Critics of these practices, and of the film, now find themselves in the curious position of arguing that torture played no role in the intelligence-gathering that led to Abbottabad. This is presumably because if the opposite were true, then the hunt’s successful outcome might lead weak minds to conclude that torture has been proved effective.
Their logic has become, forgive the word, tortured. The key interrogation that focused the CIA’s attention on “Ahmed” concerned Mohammed al-Qhatani, whose relentless months-long ordeal was detailed in a particularly gruesome Wikileaks disclosure, a case that prompted the Department of Defense to rewrite its guidelines for interrogation—part of that overall course correction in 2004. Qhatani said “Ahmed” was a key player in Al Qaeda, and one of Osama bin Laden’s prime couriers, a fact that elevated him to prime importance in the search. Those who now say that torture played no role in Qhatani’s revelations argue that he offered the information before the rough stuff started. I don’t know if this is true, but I’ll accept it for argument’s sake. It hardly removes torture from the mix. The essential ingredient in any coercive interrogation is not the actual infliction of pain or discomfort, but fear. There can be little doubt that well before Qhatani was actually tortured, he knew damn well that he was in trouble. In the film ZD30, Ammar, who is a fictional amalgam, gives up the name after his torture sessions. Does this mean that the prior pain and discomfort played no role? In either case, real or fictional, torture creates a context. It creates fear. The only way to know if Qhatani would have been cooperative without being pressured is to have conducted a torture-free interrogation, which did not happen.
Fear was a part of the climate of American interrogations in those years. I detailed for this magazine in May 2007, in a story entitled “The Ploy,” the clever and essentially nonviolent interrogation of a detainee in Iraq that led to the successful targeting of Al Qaeda’s leader in Mesopotamia, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The story was later told in even greater detail in a book, How to Break a Terrorist, by the interrogator himself, who wrote under the pseudonym Matthew Alexander; he has offered the story as proof that an artful interrogator need not employ coercion. Yet the detainee in his own story voluntarily submitted to questioning in part to avoid being sent to Abu Ghraib, which by then had a fearful reputation.
The most prominent among those who now insist torture played no part in the hunt for Osama bin Laden are senators Dianne Feinstein, Carl Levin, and John McCain. All three serve on congressional committees with access to classified material, and are in a position to know what they are talking about. Indeed, in a letter protesting ZD30 to Sony’s chairman Michael Lynton earlier this month, they claim to have reviewed “six million pages” of intelligence records, which may help explain why Congress has such a hard time getting anything done.
But there is lawyerly subtlety here. In the letter, they raise the rather fine point about the timing of Qhatani’s mention of “Ahmed” as proof that torture was not involved, and write that the CIA “did not first learn” of the courier’s existence “from CIA detainees subjected to coercive interrogation techniques.” True. The CIA first heard the name from Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a Mauritanian who was arrested in 2001 at the behest of American authorities and questioned in Mauritania and in Jordan. He says he was tortured. I believe him. Acting CIA director Michael Morrell, another critic of the film’s veracity, has been more careful. He does not deny that torture is part of the story, although he uses different words to describe it:
“Some [information leading to Osama bin Laden] came from detainees subjected to enhanced techniques, but there were many other sources as well,” he wrote. “And, importantly, whether enhanced interrogation techniques were the only timely and effective way to obtain information from those detainees, as the film suggests, is a matter of debate that cannot and never will be definitively resolved.”
I’m with Morrell on this. Torture is part of the story, but not a key part of it, just as the film depicts. The story of finding and killing Osama bin Laden makes a good case neither for nor against torture. It makes a poor case for torture because neither of the original sources—neither Slahi nor Qhatani—necessarily realized he was giving up something terribly important by naming “Ahmed from Kuwait.” Probably, neither even knew who “Ahmed” really was. Neither Slahi and Qhatani nor their questioners could have imagined that “Ahmed” would end up sheltering Osama in Abbottabad. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed could not have known this either, but he certainly realized the man’s importance. Despite repeated waterboarding he lied about “Ahmed.” So much for torture producing a breakthrough. Ironically, Mohammed’s mendacity—his claim contradicted everyone else’s—further piqued
the agency’s interest. Under torture he lied, but his lies helped.
We don’t know much about the key breakthrough that led to Osama bin Laden. That came years later, when the CIA was finally able to connect the pseudonym “Ahmed from Kuwait” with a real person, Ibrahim Saeed Ahmed. In the film this moment is handled perfunctorily. A young CIA officer simply hands the information to Maya and says, “It’s him,” explaining that she happened across the nugget while “painstakingly” reviewing “old files.” My sources at the CIA refused to say how the connection was actually made, saying only that it involved sources from “a third country.” One high-level agency official told me, “You could write a book about how we [did it].” The agency says torture was not involved, and there’s no evidence to suggest it was.
If you start the story of finding Osama bin Laden from there, and only from there, then the hunt was torture-free. It’s almost a passable argument. Until then, after all, “Ahmed from Kuwait” was just one insubstantial lead among many, just a semi-fact in an ocean of facts. But torture was in the room when that semi-fact was delivered up, and belongs in any truthful telling of it.
Gibney, an especially influential critic given his standing as a filmmaker and as a principled opponent of such methods, agrees that it was right for Bigelow and Boal to show the torture, but argues that they ought to have used these scenes to more clearly demonstrate how futile and “ridiculous” such tactics were. He sees torture as “one of the great moral issues of our times,” and views this story as one that could have made a strong argument against the use of torture. This is something that Bigelow and Boal might well have intended. If the film leans in any direction on the subject, it is in this one. Gibney doesn’t see it that way. He is a passionate artist, and makes films that are shaped by his convictions. That is a fine thing to do. But pure storytelling is not always about making an argument, no matter how worthy. It can be about, simply, telling the truth. Because torture was in the mix during all of the early interrogations, it would be wrong to ignore it, and impossible to say it had no effect.