The controversy around Zero Dark Thirty: As misleading as the film itself
Ramzi Kassem is Associate Professor of Law at the City University of New York.
January 19, 2013
The controversy surrounding Zero Dark Thirty has been as misguided as the film itself, which opened nationwide on Friday. Much of the debate has centred on whether Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow's latest opus leaves viewers with the false impression that torture led to the killing of Osama bin Laden. That both the means employed and the ends achieved in that equation are illegal and repugnant seems all but forgotten. Both torture and extrajudicial executions are anathema to civilised society, irrespective of their possible efficacy or expediency. More importantly, both the film and the controversy it has ignited treat torture at secret CIA prisons as though it were a thing of the past, masking the reality of an enduring practice.
The first third of Zero Dark Thirty is unadulterated torture porn, a display of medieval cruelty at various CIA and affiliated prisons. Strappado, drowning, sexual abuse, beatings, stress positions, loud music, stuffing people into boxes, sleep deprivation, but also - and this is not acknowledged enough as torture - threats to send prisoners to countries where they would face further abuse (in the film, Israel). My clients at Guantánamo and Bagram survived such savagery at the hands of their American captors. I can attest that its traces on their bodies and minds are real and lasting. But the film cares not an ounce for those consequences, lingering instead on the torturers' feelings about their crimes.
The film alludes to one of President Obama's first acts in office: ordering the closure of CIA "detention facilities" and forbidding the agency from operating prisons again. An often-overlooked provision, however, exempts "short-term, transitory" facilities from the order. In a statement last month regarding CIA detention, Senator Dianne Feinstein lamented as "terrible mistakes" only "long-term, clandestine 'black sites'." The effect of these verbal gymnastics is to preserve the CIA's ability to hold prisoners directly, albeit short-term.
And while Obama limited interrogation techniques to those listed in the Army Field Manual, that document was modified in 2006 to permit stress positions, sleep deprivation, and isolation - methods amounting to torture that are depicted in Zero Dark Thirty. The notion that the CIA no longer tortures prisoners, then, can only result from real or feigned ignorance.
remainder: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/01/20131191566253143.html
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