Shamefully Shallow: Zero Dark Thirty

Shamefully Shallow: Zero Dark Thirty

As the razzmatazz of the Film Industry's birthday bash for itself, the Academy Awards, rushes upon us, let's take a look at a leading contender that is disturbingly symbolic of our times.

Much of Hollywood is currently just a Government propaganda system, and Kathryn Bigelow is one of the leading exponents of that dark art. There's no denying that she's a skilled filmmaker. Her last movie, “The Hurt Locker”, was highly acceptable as a dramatic study of a team of American bomb-disposal specialists in the pathetic ruins of Baghdad. It was nail-bitingly tense, at the same time as being empathetic and humanly moving. And I strongly doubt that the Pentagon had a single second's unease about its effect on recruitment.

Bigelow's latest film, “Zero Dark Thirty”, about the CIA's hunt for, and eventual killing of

Osama bin Laden, has been nominated for the Best Picture, Original Screenplay, Leading Actress, Editing and Sound Editing Academy Awards, although after an initial flurry of excitement among the Oscar-chattering classes, in the last month they seem to have shifted their allegiances to an earlier, quieter, American triumph over Moslems, in the shape of Ben Affleck's “Argo”. Perhaps a dark, pro-torture movie is deemed to be more than the Academy can stomach.

In an excellent article on the film's release, Karen Greenberg, Director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School, says :

On January 11th, 11 years to the day after the Bush administration opened its notorious prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow’s deeply flawed movie about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, opens nationwide. The filmmakers and distributors are evidently ignorant of the significance of the date -- a perfect indication of the carelessness and thoughtlessness of the film, which will unfortunately substitute for actual history in the minds of many Americans.

“Zero Dark Thirty”goes into detail about American torture of Al Qaida suspects in Guantanamo Bay and in the CIA's secret “black sites” dotted around Europe and the Mid-East, including water-boarding. Details which many viewers apparently found disturbing. But graphic as it was, the film's depictions of US interrogation methods actually trod lightly on our feelings. Omitted was the medieval practice of chaining prisoners in unbearable “stress positions” for long periods; the desecration (real or simulated) of the Koran.

Also omitted was the practice of having American women smear Muslim detainees with what the victims believed to be menstrual blood. That would be disgusting to a Westerner, but to a devout Muslim it would be the vilest moral and spiritual degradation. These practices were endorsed, to its shame, by the professional body, the American Psychological Association.

One of “Zero Dark Thirty”'s major contentions, allegedly based on leaks from the CIA, is that without these torturous methods of interrogation, the vital information that led to Bin Laden would not have been forthcoming.

Yet the alleged mastermind – need we explain that it is necessary to say “alleged”, because this “nation of laws, not of men”, has not yet allowed him to come to court? - the alleged mastermind of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who's been in captivity for almost 10 years, was waterboarded 183 times and revealed no significant information.

(When he was brought before a Military Commission in 2008, journalists reported that “Mohammed was careful not to interrupt.... He lost his composure only after the Marine colonel ordered several defense attorneys to keep quiet "It's an inquisition. It's not a trial," Mohammed said in broken English, his voice rising. "After torturing they transfer us to inquisition-land in Guantanamo."”

The mysterious proceedings are still dragging on, with no resolution in sight. For an account of the strange deliberations of this dubious court, check out http://www.vice.com/read/strange-things-are-happening-at-khalid-sheikh-mohammeds-trial. And a British account of the shambolic proceedings, from the Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jan/27/khalid-mohammed-us-appeals-court. (Note that there seems to be a typo in the last paragraph of the Guardian piece; I think “conspiracy is likely to be the major charge against them because of a evidence of direct participation in 9/11” should read “because of a lack of evidence of direct participation in 9/11”)

Now what about the most evil man in the world, the leader of every terrorist group that has operated in the world since 2001 and before? Firstly, the most forgotten fact in the whole story: Osama bin Laden was a CIA asset, recruited in the early 80s.

He founded Al Qaeda, Arabic for “The Base”, to organize and train the Mujaheddin, guerrilla fighters who played a significant part in driving the Russian military out of Afghanistan, using billions of dollars provided by the CIA and Saudi Intelligence.

It has been repeatedly observed that “once you're a CIA asset, you're always a CIA asset.” In 2001, the British Guardian reported, “Two months before September 11 Osama bin Laden flew to Dubai for 10 days for treatment at the American hospital, where he was visited by the local CIA agent, according to the French newspaper Le Figaro.”

He came from a family that is probably the wealthiest in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, after the far-flung Royal Family itself.

The bin Laden family were (and are) enormously influential with the leaders of the Western world, especially the Bush dynasty and its Carlyle Group of companies with their huge investments in Defense projects. Want to know how influential? Days after the 9/11 tragedy, when not a single civilian aircraft was allowed to operate in US airspace, a special exception was made for an aircraft which criss-crossed the United States, collecting members of a single family from their American homes, and taking them safely out of the country. No prizes for guessing which family received such special, kid-glove treatment.

FBI Agents who were scrambling to unearth any and all information that might lead them to the perpetrators of the NY and Washington horrors, were expressly instructed that they might not question anyone on that plane. Would it have been so traumatic for those exalted passengers to have been politely asked, “Do you happen to know where Osama is?”

Even at the time of the attacks on New York and Washington, 10 years before his death, bin Laden was seriously ill, and required kidney dialysis every day. And yet we were told that he was hiding out in a cave near the Afghan-Pakistani border, some of the harshest terrain in the world – at the same time as he was being held responsible for every terrorist incident from Bali to the clearly deranged “shoe-bomber”, Richard Reid.

Now let's turn to the night of May 1^st, 2011, the night the world's most dangerous terrorist died.

The 2 dozen Navy SEALs, some of the toughest and most skilful warriors in the world, clearly had no intention of capturing this frail man alive. (Remember that back in 2001 he was so ill that he reportedly could not survive a day without the aid of medical technology.) Think what a coup it would have been for the rule of law, to have put this vilest of international criminals on trial to face his accusers!

We have been shown photographs of our most powerful leaders biting their lips in awestruck suspense as they watched on a live TV feed, the process of Osama bin Laden's dispatch. Yet we have never been allowed to see that video.

The body was loaded onto a high-tech stealth helicopter, and DNA samples were taken to prove that we had killed the right man. And then... the body was taken out to sea and dumped!

A few words of explanation were muttered, to the effect that “we didn’t want to create a martyr” - and the media duly forgot all about it. Whatever happened to “If it bleeds, it leads”? Perhaps Osama didn't bleed.

There are plenty of good questions here: was it indeed Osama who was killed? Was he dead before the SEALs arrived? Did his kidneys finally conk out? How did he manage to disappear so finally, only to hole up in a garrison town in our ally's backyard? And having disappeared, how did he continue to mastermind, according to the movie, a vast network of ruthless assassins and bombers with tentacles reaching all around the globe?

None of this is touched in Kathryn Bigelow's film. Her story ends as the American helicopters (minus one which was destroyed) whisper away into the Arabian night.

The mainstream media have indeed reported a storm of controversy over “Zero Dark Thirty”, but it has revolved around whether the filmmakers were leaked classified information by the CIA. The more liberal end of the media spectrum have rightly latched on to the CIA lie that vital information leading to Osama was obtained by torture.

As Karen Greenberg, Director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School in New York, said in her Tomgram essay, How Zero Dark Thirty Brought Back the Bush Administration:

How many times does the American public need to be told that torture did not yield the results the government promised? How many times does it need to be said that waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, 183 times obviously didn’t work? How many times does it need to be pointed out that torture can -- and did -- produce misleading or false information, notably in the torture of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the Libyan who ran an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan and who confessed under torture that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?

But there has been no discussion, that I've seen, of the questions I raise here. This is after all, the story that goes to the heart of our entire military and foreign policy for the last decade. Strange, ain't it?