"The CIA is a nest of spies and murderers who are responsible for crimes
throughout history—assassinations, fomenting coups, torturing people in
the sickest of ways and other crimes throughout the globe… in the
service of U.S. imperialism." --Annie Day
I was shaking as I walked out of Zero Dark Thirty, the new film
about the CIA’s 10-year search for Osama bin Laden. Shaking and queasy.
Wanting to hear from others in the audience, I asked people questions as
they streamed out… What did they think of the film? Overwhelmingly,
people answered positively… with smiles.
Did they think the film upheld or condemned torture? Some
answered that it didn’t take a stand, just showed the facts. But many
said they felt it upheld torture, that it portrayed it as essential to
Osama Bin Laden’s capture. And what did they think of torture? While a
couple people answered that they supported it outright, many said they
didn’t think it was right, that America shouldn’t use torture. So how
did they feel about liking a film that upholds something they would
otherwise find deplorable? Several people said it’s just a movie and
shouldn’t be taken so seriously. One woman said she appreciated coming
to understand, from the CIA’s perspective, why they used torture. And
far too often, the answer was, “It’s complicated.”
And here you have the point of this highly ideological film: to
make acceptable, or perhaps “complicated,” to people who consider
themselves progressive the acts of this empire, to celebrate revenge
against “America’s enemies,” to get you to sympathize with the criminal
monsters who are carrying out these acts and to cheer for the
“protection of the homeland,” no matter the price. “For god and
country,” says the Navy SEAL after killing Osama bin Laden.
While there has been some controversy about the film from
different quarters, and a too small handful of sharp critics, it’s
getting rave reviews from a whole range of liberal journalists. It’s
already being nominated for awards, and there is buzz about Oscar
nominations.
Zero Dark Thirty begins with harrowing audio recordings from people inside the World Trade Center as it’s on fire and about to collapse.
It portrays the CIA in a heroic fight to get the bad guys, with one
agent in particular, Maya (played by Jessica Chastain), with enough grit
and determination to see it through. After hearing the voices from
9/11, we are transported to a CIA black site where a detainee is being
tortured, strapped up by the arms. The torturer in charge, Dan (played
by Jason Clarke), explains to Maya that the detainee “has to learn how
helpless he is.” And then we watch as he is thrown to the ground and
waterboarded.
And what is waterboarding, exactly?
A towel is thrown over the man’s face and a jug of water poured
directly into his throat without pause. This makes the tortured feel as
if they are drowning to death, suffocation by water.
New York magazine
quoted a doctor who works with survivors of torture: “Some victims were
still traumatized years later.” One patient he described couldn’t take
showers, and panicked when it rained. “The fear of being killed is a
terrifying experience.”
But if you are watching
Zero Dark Thrity, and have begun to
feel uncomfortable, you are reminded that the person that this is
happening to helped to “murder 3,000 people” on September 11. “Your
Jihad is over, this is what defeat looks like,” says Dan. No need for
concern, these are the just deserts. And if the detainee wanted it to
stop, he could just give Dan the information he wants.
It doesn’t stop there. There is sleep deprivation, stress positions,
the use of dog collars, humiliation and shoving a man into a tiny box
where you can hear only his screams.
There has been a great deal of controversy about whether the film
shows a connection between this torture and the supposed victory in
capturing Osama bin Laden (including from sections of the bourgeoisie
who want to disassociate themselves from the Bush regime while
furthering his policies with a different face). But if you watch the
actual film, it is undeniable. The way the story line goes, the
detainees give information because they’ve been tortured. While the film
portrays the first detainee we witness being tortured only giving the
needed information over a quiet lunch, it is the fear of being tortured
again that gets him to speak. Another detainee is told he can stay
imprisoned in Pakistan or be sent to Israel. “I have no wish to be
tortured. Ask me a question, I’ll answer.”
And what do the filmmakers say? Director Kathryn Bigelow said: “We
depicted a variety of controversial practices and intelligence methods
that were used in the name of finding bin Laden. The film shows that no
single method was necessarily responsible for solving the manhunt, nor
can any single scene taken in isolation fairly capture the totality of
efforts the film dramatizes.”
So torture, what she calls an “intelligence method,” wasn’t
solely responsible for bin Laden’s capture, it was
partially
responsible. Jessica Chastain admitted that there was a link made in
the film to the needed information and the torture to get it, but went
on that this was a “murky, gray area we’re still learning about.”
And once again we find ourselves feeling that “it’s complicated.”
There is nothing complicated about torture.
To quote from Alan Goodman in
Revolution newspaper: “Let’s
make it plain: torture is, literally and in essence, a crime against
humanity. Like rape, it is a systematic attempt to violently degrade
people and rob them of their very humanity. Any government which not
only tolerates such things but which, from its highest offices,
justifies and insists on them as ‘instruments of policy’… any government
which does not, once this has been exposed, prosecute the perpetrators
but instead provides them in advance with immunity…reveals itself as a
system that requires such crimes, and such criminals, for its
functioning. Any people that does not resist such crimes, and demand
prosecution of the torturers and, even more so, those who formulated the
policy at the highest levels, reveals themselves to be
complicit in those crimes. And in passively allowing the humanity of others to be degraded and attacked, they lose their own.”
(“
The Torture Memos … And the Need for Justice,”
Revolution, May 17, 2009, online at revcom.us
)
To go along with this, to obfuscate this with a haze of “complexity,” is to let great crimes take place in your name.
Who Is the CIA?
But there is a larger question that has to be asked about the whole
premise and point of the film. Who the hell is the CIA anyway? The
filmmakers have tried to argue that this is a film that doesn’t take a
stand, they’re just showing the facts.
In an interview, Kathryn Bigelow said: “I think it was important to
humanize the hunt… These are people who have sacrificed a great deal,
live in arduous conditions, risk their life in some cases for our
safety. So I think it’s an interesting portrait of dedication.” Or
elsewhere, Bigelow has said: “at the heart of this story is a woman with
tenacity, dedication and courage.” Chastain gushed about the character
she played: “She’s such a bad-ass, capable and strong, standing on her
own, it was an honor to play her.” And she later called her character a
hero.
Let’s get real. The CIA is a nest of spies and
murderers who are responsible for crimes throughout
history—assassinations, fomenting coups, torturing people in the sickest
of ways and other crimes throughout the globe… in the service of U.S.
imperialism.
In 1953, working with the British, the CIA engineered a coup against
Iran’s elected president, Mohammad Mossadegh, in part because he
threatened U.S. and British oil interests. They then went on to install
the Shah of Iran who created a special police force which tortured
people for decades.
What was heroic about that? In 1960, the
CIA helped stage a coup in the Congo to get rid of the nationalist
government headed by Patrice Lumumba, which came to power after decades
of colonial rule. With the CIA’s assistance, Lumumba was murdered by
Mobutu Sese Seko, who brutally presided over the newly named Zaire as a
U.S. neocolony, violently crushing attempts to build rebel movements.
What was heroic about that?
In 1965 in Indonesia, as a military regime headed by General Suharto
came to power in a CIA-engineered coup, hundreds of thousands of people
(up to a million according to some accounts) were massacred—communists
and people accused of being communists.
What was heroic about that? On
a different September 11, in 1973, the CIA orchestrated the overthrow
of the elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile by the fascist
general Pinochet. Mainstream sources document the death of some 3,000
people at the hands of Pinochet, and Chilean revolutionaries have said
that 30,000 people were killed. Many more were tortured or forced into
exile during Pinochet’s 17-year rule.
Again I ask, what was heroic about that? And I could keep going… Vietnam, Laos, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Nicaragua…
Or look at the CIA in relation to Afghanistan and how Osama bin Laden got his start in the first place:
The fact is that the U.S., and the CIA’s “work” in
particular, had everything to do with the growth of the Taliban and al
Qaeda in Afghanistan and the spread of Islamic fundamentalism in the
whole region. In 1979, the former Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. The
Soviet Union at the time was a revisionist (that is, a phony
“communist”) country, an imperialist superpower that was seriously
contending with the U.S. for dominance in many parts of the world. The
U.S. deliberately provoked the invasion of Afghanistan, in
order to (in the words of Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security advisor
to then-President Jimmy Carter) give the Soviet Union “its Vietnam
War.”
Then through the 1980s, the CIA, in partnership with the reactionary
regimes in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, carried out a massive covert war
in Afghanistan by funneling more than $3 billion in arms and aid to the
reactionary Islamic fundamentalist fighters. The U.S. strategy was to
make the war much longer and more violent, destructive, and costly for
the Soviets. By the time the Soviets were forced to withdraw in 1989,
more than a million Afghans had been killed and one-third of its
population driven into refugee camps. This CIA-led insurgency against America’s imperialist rivals is where Osama bin Laden got his start. This is where the seeds of al Qaeda and the Taliban were first sown.
The current U.S. war in Afghanistan has never been simply a response
to 9/11. The 2001 invasion grew out of a decade of U.S. planning before 9/11
aimed at seizing greater initiative and hegemony in the Middle East and
Central Asia. In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union (in which
the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan was a big factor), the U.S.
imperialists faced a new obstacle in dominating this crucial region of
the world—the very same Islamic fundamentalists that the U.S. had built
up in the 1980s. The Taliban is a reactionary force that brings down
horror on the people. But that is not why the U.S. invaded Afghanistan
in 2001—and why Obama is now greatly expanding that war. And of the two
opposing reactionary forces, U.S. imperialism and Islamic
fundamentalism, the U.S. has done—and is doing—much greater harm in the
world, as even the partial list above of CIA crimes shows. (“CIA’s Decades of Criminal Service,” Revolution, February 7, 2010, online at revcom.us)
There is nothing to uphold about any of this! And let’s be clear:
this is not about “our safety”—this is about the extension and defense of the American empire.
But even if it were about the safety of American lives, letting all
this go down would be wrong and immoral. It would be to make a devil’s
bargain: “You can go do what you do to the people of the world, just
keep me safe and we’ll not only go along with it, we will cheer.” No! As
Bob Avakian has said, “American Lives Are
Not More Important Than Other People’s Lives.” (
BAsics 5:7)
CIA “Heroes” Raining Death From the Sky
In a quickly passing moment in the film, we watch Maya reviewing a
drone strike. Watching a missile fired from afar. Later in the film, the
CIA station chief in Pakistan, Joseph Bradley (played by Kyle
Chandler), has to be sent back to the U.S. because he’s been named in a
lawsuit filed by the family of a victim of a drone strike. We see
protesters but know nothing about what’s happened or really why they’re
protesting. “The ISI [the Pakistani intelligence agency] fucked you,”
says Maya, painting the station chief as the victim.
But what’s the real story here?
A Pakistani journalist sued the CIA station chief because his brother
and son, both government employees, were killed in a CIA drone strike
on their home in North Waziristan in December 2009. No warning, no due
process, the CIA rained death from the skies. Thousands of people have
been killed in these drone strikes, hundreds of civilians among them,
including children.
But the film does not tell this story. This is not about the blood on
the ground, the tears of the children who lost their parents, the lives
of the people who lost limbs… this is about “the heroes on the ground”
who are perpetrating these crimes.
And I have to say here that the filmmakers can’t have it both ways.
Bigelow said the film does not uphold torture, they are just showing
what happened, that it “doesn’t have an agenda and it doesn’t judge.”
Bullshit! While
it can actually be important to show what happened, this film is not
doing so to expose the crimes. If you call the criminals perpetrating
torture and war crimes “heroes” who sacrifice on our behalf, what are
you saying about the acts they are committing?!
History Did Not Begin With September 11
While this film begins with the events of September 11, 2001, and
this is the only context provided for the film, this is not where
history began. In a dramatic speech in the film, one CIA official says,
“They attacked us on land in ’98, by sea in 2000, and by air in 2001.
They murdered 3,000 of our citizens in cold blood. Your job is to bring
me people to kill.”
This is the logic of a wounded conqueror, the top-of-the-heap
gangsterism—you poke me in the eye, I have to burn down your whole
village. The death of 3,000 people is a genuine horror, but the
powers-that-be were not horrified at the loss of human life. That number
means nothing to people who preside over the deaths of many hundreds of
thousands times more than that as part of the normal workings of their
system worldwide.
Continue reading Zero Dark Thirty
Source: GlobalResearch
