Note: this critique from March by Richard Duffee originally ran on the site of the American-Iranian Friendship Committee. Zero Dark Thirty is currently available on DVD. In light of the accumulated
testimonies of Bradley Manning (U.S. Army, pfc), Edward Snowden (NSA
contractor) and, in particular, John Kiriakou (see videos at the end of this post) regarding
the CIA’s torture activities, it’s vital to dissect the differences between why
these insiders acted as they did in defiance of the unforgiving hierarchies of
which they were a part and how Zero Dark, Argo, Olympus Has Fallen and similar hyper-nationalistic fare rationalize for
the rest of us support of the practices/policies they exposed—not to
mention what it says about our society if it proves itself unworthy of their
sacrifices in defense of truth and humanity.
I
saw Zero Dark Thirty yesterday. The film reveals the heart of what our imperialist
government likes to think of as its ethical system. The system is so simple
it’s terrifying. It has two parts: 1) obey your superiors and 2) tell the truth
to them. If you do those two things, you are supposed to be entitled to honor
and to feel your purpose in life is fulfilled.
The
film’s website, www.zerodarkthirty-movie.com and the other sites on Google will tell you
loads I don’t need to bother with. The heroine, Maya, (Jessica Chastain) joins
the CIA and arrives in Pakistan with the job of finding bin Laden and having
him killed. More than 80% of the film follows her activities. She’s like
Clarisse Sterling but her relationship to bureaucrats is portrayed as if it
were more like Rambo’s: she cares much more about finding bin Laden than anyone
else does and has to take extreme measures to get bureaucrats to act. Enough basic plot.
What Circumstances are Supposed to Make Torture
Ethical?
I’m
interested in the portrayal of ethics. First, the CIA thinks torture is OK because it is supposed to be necessary. Necessary for what? To pump information
out of Al- Qaeda guys. Why is that necessary? 9/11. But why did Al-Qaeda
destroy the World Trade Center (assuming it did)? Not one word. Did 9/11 have
anything to do with US support for Israel and its treatment of Palestine? With
covertly driving the USSR out of Afghanistan? With
backing the Saudis? With our
backing Iraq’s attack on Iran? With our efforts to control oil
and keep its
price down while selling it for enormous profits? With our installing and
keeping dictators all through the Middle East? With our refusing to pay our
share of the UN’s expenditures? With our blocking the Law of the Sea’s
provisions for technology transfer? With our refusal to sign crucial
international human rights treaties? With our refusal to sign on to the
International Criminal Court but instead to treat international crimes as cause
for war? Not one word.
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| Lynndie England holding a leash to a prisoner at Abu Ghraib, Iraq, 2004 |
What does “Might Makes Right” Mean?
Would
changing any of those things have prevented 9/11? Not one word. The assumption
is that we need oil and power and so we have the right to occupy the Middle
East, to dominate the economics and politics of the region, and, if that’s not
enough, to kill and steal. Might is supposed to make right: the standard
doctrine of Machiavelli and Fascists. What does “might makes right” actually
mean? Really, that there is no such thing as “right”: what people call “right”
is only what the most powerful say right is—in their own interests—and the rest
of us just repeat their nonsense because we’re terrified not to. Greed and the
lust for power are presumed to be sacred, so if pursuing them gets you into a position
where, to continue on your path, you have to torture, murder, and steal, that’s
understandable, so torture, murder, and theft are OK so long they’re approved
from above. Being approved from above is all that counts. Of course, the people
at the very top may arrange “plausible deniability” for themselves because it’s
OK if their underlings are fired or jailed, but not them. It’s OK for the
people at the top to be liars and cowards. They’re too big to allowed to fail.
What Bothers the System about Torture?
Torture,
the characters admit, has two problems. A) It shouldn’t be publicized. Sooner
or later it’s going to get out, and you don’t want to be the one holding the
bag when it does. B) It wears the torturers out. Dan (Jason Clarke), the
torturer-in-chief, tells Maya he wants to leave because he’s “seen” a hundred
naked men now, a euphemism meaning he has stripped them to exhibit their pricks
and balls to women, the best way to humiliate a Muslim man—so
that, his dignity
gone, he’ll spill the beans. (This is more effective than agony and the threat
of death—the facing of which, of course, never results in Muslim men being
given any credit for courage. It’s just a problem for poor Dan; after all, he
has a PhD, so he must be sensitive, right? But it doesn’t seem to be a problem
for Maya: just after we’re introduced to her, we’re informed, “Washington says
she’s a real killer.” A point for Women’s Lib, right? So when you look at
torture in the film’s context, its drawbacks are supposed to be pretty small.
 |
| Explaining her participation with Charles Graner in torture and humiliation of prisoners, England said in a Der Stern interview: "I didn't want to lose him." |
How the System Handles its Problems with Torture
Again,
being approved from above is what counts. Those above you can handle both
problems. A) They can keep everything secret, or they can let the press in—as
Bush did when he “outed” Valerie Plame to punish her husband. One’s superiors
have a wide range of latitude in this, but not quite wide enough for them:
folks like Bradley Manning
and Julian Assange can infringe on their privileges,
so they should get the worst possible punishment. B) Torturers and killers can
get worn down. The SS got worn down shooting Jews, piling them in pits, and
burning them, so crematoria had to be built in concentration camps. Dan’s
superiors know perfectly well he’s a competent torturer, so the blame isn’t
going to fall on him. Either some adequate replacement for him will be found or
some other method will have to be devised. Another occasion for Yankee
ingenuity. Worthy of Krupp.
Other Approved Activities
 |
| Charles “Look-what-I-made-Lynn- die-do!” Graner, England's superior officer and lover while at Abu Ghraib |
Since “Might Makes Right” Approval Creates
“Morality”
Being
approved from above is what makes something moral. You obey. Of course, if you
don’t obey, you lose your job. That’s a given. It could be worse, and it might be,
but we’re not shown that. All the characters we’re shown obey. Sometimes they
have to be threatened into obeying. Maya realizes that to get things done, she
sometimes has to threaten to report her immediate superiors to their superiors.
She’s skilled at this. She knows just how aggressive she can afford to get
under different circumstances. She knows when she has winning cards and how to
get her immediate superiors to recognize that she does.
What Creates Credibility with Superiors
 |
The Moral Toll on the Servants of the Assassination
System
In
the final scene, Maya gets on a huge transport. The pilot says, “You must be
awfully important. You’re the only item on the manifest. Where do you want to
go?” She doesn’t answer: she’s too exhausted to know where she wants to go. For
eleven years she has thought of nothing but killing Bin Laden. She has to start
life over and doesn’t have a clue. A single tear slides down her cheek.
The Underlying Questions
Now
the real questions start. What does it mean that all that matters is that one
obeys one’s superior and tells him the truth?
Who does one’s Superior Actually Represent?
The
Director of the CIA reports to the President. Is the President one’s ultimate
superior? This, of course, is what everyone in the government is supposed to
believe. They are all supposed to believe it because, more than anyone else,
the President is supposed to represent the majority of “the people.” But does
he actually represent the people? Let’s count some of the equivocations. 1) If
the election was honest, 2) he may represent the majority of those who voted,
but that’s not the majority of the electorate. 3) The majority of the
electorate is not the majority of the people. 4) The vast majority of those who
voted took only two candidates seriously. 5) They thought the sole significant
act they had in the choice was to vote down one pre-chosen candidate by voting
for the other. 6) The choices were made by the duopoly, the Republicrats. 7)
The leadership of the Republicans now has positions Barry Goldwater held in
1964. The leadership of the Democrats has domestic positions to the right of
Nixon’s and Rockefeller’s. 8) Both parties are flooded with money the Supreme
Court allows to come from anywhere unreported and unchecked, so that the rich
control both candidates. 9) 1% of the people have 41% of the wealth, 2% have
50%, while 40% have 0.3%. The wealth of 2%, being equal to everyone else’s
together, is at the disposal of the rich while most of the wealth of the rest
of us is committed in some way to enabling us to survive. It is not possible
for 98% of us—even if we all agreed—to outspend 2% on politics. 10) The result:
the President is dependent on the money of 2% of us. He knows it. About
all of this, of course, not one word.
Let’s
assume the President represents an oligarchy of 2% of us. Lots of scholars who
study power closely argue for a much smaller figure, often between 200 and 1500
people. But no matter whether the figure is as large as 6 million or as small
as 200, the essential problem remains a problem of human time.
Assume
the largest plausible figure, 2%, since 2% have as much as the rest of us, and
so have the power to hire the rest of us to do their will, or else marginalize
us so we can do virtually nothing at all. If it’s 2%, the question is “How can
1 person control 49?” One person can’t watch everything 49 do. The only way to
manage so many people is to choose a couple of people to manage a few more
people and get those to manage a larger group. What is crucial in this system
of domination? Loyalty. The people on top cannot make the decisions that will
keep them on top without accurate information. And they can’t get people to follow
their decisions unless the followers obey. Those are exactly the two “ethical”
issues over and over in Zero Dark Thirty: obedience and truthfulness to one’s
superior.
So what does this “ethical system” boil down to?
The Problem of Maintaining Such a System
For
the maintenance of the system, the problem is: “How do you convince the
servants of the system that they are gaining honor and fulfilling their purpose
in life by being servile? For they are servile. They are only truthful with
their superiors and the people their superiors allow them to be truthful with.
They stonewall everyone else, or they lie. And they force their rule on people
to whom it is entirely alien: over and over again, Dan tells Ammar, (Reda
Kateb), the man he waterboards, “Whenever you lie to me, I hurt you.” He tells
Ammar, “I own you”: that is, in Ammar’s case, Dan understands perfectly well
that the relationship he is acting out is one of slavery. Dan just can think
the same thought about himself; he can’t allow himself to think that the reason
he outrages prisoners is that he is a slave to his superior, but his slavery is,
supposedly, chosen, so he doesn’t call it that.
The
difference is involuntary slavery versus voluntary slavery. Dan is allowed to
say showing off the “stuff” of a hundred naked men is enough but Ammar can only
say “enough” by betraying his own superiors, friends, associates, and family.
Dan’s slavery is supposed to be dignified because he chose it, while Ammar’s is
supposed to be degrading because he didn’t. This is the real reason Dan needs a
break: the more extreme the polarities of power, the harder it is to keep the
double standard.
The System’s Real Problem with Torture Cannot be
Mentioned within the System
Ultimately
the problem with torture is that it threatens Dan’s hypocrisy. We see this in
the scene in which Dan finds that his monkeys have been killed. He wanted to
treat his monkeys kindly. He wanted SOMETHING he could be kind to so that he
wouldn’t be totally reduced to being the transmission belt between the absolute
domination of his superiors and the absolute humiliation of his prisoner.
And
this too is the meaning of Maya’s single tear. What has she given up to kill
Bin Laden? For eleven years she has failed to be a human being.
Of
course by far the greater suffering is that of those we conquer and force to
betray themselves. But there’s also a cost to the conquerors. It’s in her tear.
“Maya”
means “illusion.” She’s given her life to inhuman illusions of empire, the
illusion that mere power is authority, the illusion that conceals the mortality
of all of us.
--Richard Duffee 3/16/2013
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Meanwhile, in the real world...
