"A Wilderness Of Tigers": The Core of Imperial Ethics

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

Lynndie England holding a leash to a
prisoner at Abu Ghraib, Iraq, 2004

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.

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

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."

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.

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 

What is approved besides torture? Affairs, for instance. Maya’s one on-the-scene female superior recommends she have a fling with Dan. That would be good for her. Just a fling, of course. Maya has a prior commitment: she’s adopted the project of finding and killing Bin Laden. Nothing can trump that. In fact, the problem with Maya’s associates may be that they allow other commitments and interests in life to interfere with their primary commitment in some way, but not Maya. She is the perfect CIA agent, absolutely single-minded. For the ideal agent, the rest of life is not really supposed to count. Maya doesn’t let it. An affair may be all right, but it’s not the best. The best is killing Bin Laden.  

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 most telling scene is the day the CIA Director (James Gandolfini) shows up. He asks everyone the likelihood that Bin Laden is actually in the compound. Most say 60%. Maya says, “100%, but since you guys don’t like certainty, 95%, but really it’s 100%.” The Director is intrigued, so he approaches her in the cafeteria and asks, “How long have you been in the CIA?” She says, “Eleven years.” He asks, “Besides chasing Bin Laden, what else have you done for us?” She says, “Nothing.” She’s passed the test. In her own case, when it counts, she’s honest. He figures if she’ll answer that honestly when the chips are down—when she knows that what is at stake is whether the Director is going to recommend that the President have the compound attacked—as well as whether she be promoted, demoted, or fired—he can afford to trust her judgment despite the fact that it looks like hubris.

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?

Being the best servant to one’s superior. You don’t have to be good to anyone else. No one else counts, just one’s superior—plus, of course, whomever one’s superior wants to protect. That is the ethic the rich and powerful have to inculcate in their underlings in order to run the world.

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...