The controversy of art imitating life

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I saw Zero Dark Thirty last night.  Ever since I heard it was coming out I have been dying to see it.  I thought Kathryn Bigelow did a great job on The Hurt Locker and was wondering how she would handle the capture and killing of the world's most wanted terrorist.

It is hard to separate a movie review from the controversy surrounding it as well as the controversy of the subject matter it covers.  For example, how can I say this was a phenomenal movie, when it included torture and very strategic spying and murder?  Mostly because I think the movie soundly represented the amount of work, talent and time that it took to track the Al Qaeda network all the way to UBL, hiding down the street from Pakistan's West Point.

The whole terrorism/Middle East policy thing isn't my area of expertise.  At all.  I'm like, "Islamabad?  Was he a character in Lord of the Rings?" and, "Karachi?  Is that the Tex-Mex place down the street?" 

But I will say that the reason I wanted to see this movie is so that I would be able to picture the invasion of UBL's compound.  I mean, can you imagine?  When the news came out, I devoured every picture, every map, because it was such an incredible event.  He was hiding in plain sight AND we figured it out AND we tracked him AND we invaded under Pakistan's nose AND we were successful...and the average American citizen didn't really get much info about the whole thing.  **sigh**  So for that reason alone, I went to the theater so I could suspend my disbelief, chomp on my popcorn and just watch the good guys get the bad guy.  I'm simple that way.

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Controversy about the movie itself:

*  Those involved in making the movie were allowed access to classified materials.

(Caveat:  It is because of this allegation that G refuses to see the movie.)

This can be denied and there is really no way we will ever know if it is true.  If it is true, then it is not only illegal, but morally wrong on many levels.  Those cleared to work with classified information know that even at very high security levels, they are only given access to what they need to know, for a specific purpose.  They are not given access across the board to any and all classified materials just because of their level of clearance.

I have a hard time being cynical enough (& this surprises even me) to believe that anyone in the government, at any level, would allow film makers access to such phenomenally sensitive information.  If they did, shame on them.  And shame on the film makers for attempting to get it.  Americans risk their lives daily to obtain and analyze sensitive data, and I can understand the average citizen's zeal for more information.  But rules are there for a reason, and there should be no exceptions to this one.

*  The movie presented a blatant pro-torture stance.

The movie has been accused of portraying the torture of captured prisoners as a good method of information-gathering.  Critics say the movie implies quite strongly that torture of individuals was instrumental in tracking down USL; meanwhile the government and its agencies vehemently deny the use of torture in American facilities at home or abroad.

Again with the whole not ever knowing the truth about this one (in reality).  After watching the movie, I can say that there is prevalent torturing, but I can't remember that it led directly to valuable intelligence.  Of course, I was double fisting the popcorn so I could have just missed it.

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Some topics of interest within the movie (depicting real-life events):

These are issues I'm raising as a viewer, not necessarily issues the movie is or is not trying to address.

*  Does torture work?
How much true and useful information can we get from beating someone half to death?  Will torture make prisoners hate us and therefore withhold or falsify information?  Will it cause them to say anything at all in order to make us stop?  Or is it a language forceful enough to break through cultural barriers and lead to truth?  Is torture perhaps an effective way to "reach" a culture that is bred upon and breeds violence itself?

*  Is torture wrong?
With our arguably Judeo-Christian national philosophical background, with our whole innocent-until-proven-guilty outlook, can we justify torture?  What about on the odd chance it will help us prevent imminent attacks?  What about if 3,000 people just died?

*  It can take a frakkin long time to catch the bad guy.
Holy cow this movie was fascinating.  It's worth it just to watch dead ends turn into leads and the amount of patient observation that takes place in order to remove doubt, collect intelligence, formulate a plan, and then act on it.

*  The bad guys are REALLY BAD.
It's easy to get caught up in the intellectual arguments of torture, intelligence gathering, methods of surveillance and tradecraft.  It's easy to lose sight of the terrorists who want to kill, who want to destroy lives, who laugh in the face of suffering.  Let's not forget that there is true evil in the world, whether or not as a nation we handle it correctly 100% of the time.

*  Accurate depiction of American agency workers.
Anytime Hollywood portrays agency workers (even though I am not one myself) I automatically roll my eyes and think, here we go.  The vast majority of the time, as we all know, nothing is as sexy in real life as they make it in the movies, especially government work.  It just doesn't get any un-sexier than that.  The actors in this movie (and ARGO, btw) were so believable.  It was easy to picture them with normal families at home.  It was easy to watch them and realize just how hard it would be to process all that information in their environment, under that pressure.  The settings were believable; musty desks with big binders of info in the background.  In other words, it wasn't Vin Diesel barging through a door and threatening the President to take action now or else.  Um, no.

*  It's a new war.
There was pre-911 terrorist behavior and post-911 terrorist behavior.  There are different ideologies and motivations at work than there were in the past.  How do we deal with this?  How do we get ahead of it?

*  What is actionable intelligence?
There are many arguments about this and I'm going to tackle exactly none of them.  But I do want to make a comment about the main character (the young female).  The story is that she was recruited into the CIA straight out of high school.  For twelve solid years she did nothing but track down some of the main players in AQ/UBL's network.  The movie portrays her as intelligent and intuitive.  However, it makes me wonder about spending that amount of time and focus on one target area: on the one hand, yes, you will know a wealth of information made even more valuable over time.  The time is crucial; it's not like she crammed for a test in 24 hours.  Her surveillance was almost like spending her life with these culprits, day in and day out.  Watching them, waiting them out, getting to know them.  That type of knowledge is gold. 

On the other hand, how much do you overlook or simply not see anymore when it is right in front of you?  Particularly once you form biases and thought frameworks?  (Which is natural; it's the way the brain works to process information and we are all but powerless to stop it.) We can get so trapped inside our own mental frameworks that it becomes almost impossible to escape them, and what if the frameworks are wrong?  Sometimes new eyes on a problem set become much more valuable than eyes that have been on it for years.  Just food for thought.

So there you have it:  a very long review of a very long movie.  I enjoyed it more than I thought I would, and I would recommend it if you are curious and/or interested in UBL's capture or the intelligence world and what it involves.  I'm so exhausted I'm going to have to revert to The Good Wife and Revenge tonight...

Enjoy!