Yet there is a brutal symmetry between the film’s opening moments—a black screen, just the sounds of 911 calls from the smoking towers—and its denouement: the raid against the architect of their deaths, the killing that was meant to avenge them. These cinematic stanzas are punctuated with last gasps and desperate pleas. An office worker sobs to a 911 operator who can only advise her to calm down; just before the line cuts out, her voice gets impossibly small: “I’m going to die, aren’t I?” A decade later, in Abbottabad, a young girl cries “Daddy” through a volley of gunshots; her brothers and sisters weep and scream as combat boots thunder up stairwells.

Anyone who enters the theater expecting “Call of Duty: We Got Bin Laden” will be gravely disappointed with the somber, meditative film that unfurls in front of them. Zero Dark Thirty doesn’t indulge in breathless reveling; it’s a brooding, muscular piece about obsession and vengeance. There are certainly very real, very vital questions about whether torture (we’re way past kidding ourselves with terms like “enhanced interrogation techniques”) should ever be employed; however, these are not questions that the movie’s characters—analysts and operatives, soldiers and guards—ever debate on-screen (or even internally). Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal treat torture through the vantage point of their protagonist, a young CIA agent named Maya (Jessica Chastain): It is a means to an end. Detainees are water-boarded and rammed into hot boxes, but we’re standing on the side of the men and women holding the hoses, clicking the dog collars shut. And for them, it’s positively quotidian, par for the course. Dan, the agent who first schools Maya in “enhanced interrogation techniques,” downs an ice cream cone before setting to work (A guard quips, “You agency guys are twisted.”).

Various be-suited higher-ups pound their fists on conference tables and yell about protecting the homeland, yet the very first interrogation scene—the first real scene in the movie—immediately follows that black screen, the cries of doomed Americans. What we see next—a suspected al-Qaeda financier strung up from the ceiling—is about “gathering intelligence,” but it is also about punishment. “This,” Dan tells the financier, “is what defeat looks like.”

Though we are, as a nation, ostensibly engaged in a “war on terror,” we don’t often, as individuals (or, at least, civilians) feel particularly embattled (or even inconvenienced). Still, our history has, by and large, been divided into a before and after. Simone de Beauvoir, writing from a freshly-liberated, still-tattered France, wondered if vengeance could ever serve as restitution: “All of us have more or less felt it: the need to punish, to avenge ourselves … Is it well-founded? Can it be satisfied?”

These are clearly not questions that Maya, a feminine exemplar of Eastwoodian grit, loses sleep over. At one point, then-CIA director Leon Panetta (a rumpled, weary James Gandolfini) asks her if, in her twelve years with the agency, she’s done anything other than search for bin Laden. “No,” she says, simply, forcefully. She is singular in her pursuit, an arrow shot from a taut bow. But Maya is no hero; she is, as she tells Panetta, “the motherfucker” who found bin Laden’s compound, and it is this identity—not the “God and country” invoked by the Navy Seal who calls in bin Laden’s death—that compels her. When a suicide bomber murders her only real friend, a slow-talking Southerner who bakes a birthday cake for an al-Qaeda operative she hopes to flip as an asset, Maya vows to “smoke everyone involved in this op, and then I’m going to kill bin Laden.” 

A national grievance is writ small, making the partisan hoopla over Zero Dark Thirty’s original pre-election release date particularly insipid. President Obama only appears as a talking head on a TV screen, promising that, “America doesn’t torture” with what seems, in hindsight, to be a willful naiveté. We all know that Gitmo doesn’t close. We all know about the drones.

However, the film’s amended December-January release situates it in an oddly appropriate cultural moment, one in which a spate of very public crimes—a murder that Indian authorities didn’t prosecute until the country exploded in protest; the gang-rape of a sixteen-year-old that Ohio authorities simply buried until Anonymous intervened—has challenged us to decide if we can sleep at night knowing that our peace of mind was delivered “by any means necessary.”

The street rioting in India and online vigilantism of Anonymous has, arguably, yielded results: arrests have been made and conspirators have been shamed. Zero Dark Thirty’s Maya might say that her interrogations serve a similar purpose. She’d also likely agree with de Beauvoir’s assertion that, “one hates only men, not because they are material causes of material damage, but because they are conscious authors of genuine evil.” Or, as a commenter on a Huffington Post piece condemning the film, succinctly put it: “I have no sympathy for torture. Then again, I have no sympathy for the people being tortured.”

Though it’s structured like a traditional procedural, Zero Dark Thirty is a shifting inkblot of a film: A myriad of meanings float up from its white spaces. A battered detainee refuses to yield information about an attack in London: Days later, on July 7, 2005, a series of coordinated suicide bombings will kill fifty-two people. Just before we’re able to knit a tidy conclusion about the ineffectiveness of such brutality, the filmmakers pivot: Once ninety-six hours of sleep deprivation has weakened the detainee, Maya is able to trick him into giving up the name of bin Laden’s courier; this is the lead that pitches her down the rabbit hole, until she emerges again on a desert air field, watching twin helicopters rise toward Pakistan.

Those of us who might not normally support violence or vigilantism have, perhaps, felt a moment of pause, a slowness to condemn the Indian rioters or Anonymous; perhaps this is because they’re striking out against laws and cultures that have, so oppressively, so systematically, denied so many vulnerable people any semblance of justice, or hope. But Maya and her cohorts aren’t shattering any paradigms—they’re cogs in a government wheelhouse. “I want targets,” bellows one of the top brass. “Do your fucking jobs. Bring me people to kill.” Yet the movie’s most chilling line of dialogue isn’t a threat, it’s a bit of banter between co-workers: “You don’t want to be the last one holding a dog collar when the oversight committee comes.”

Maya may or may not be the last one holding a dog collar, but she is, above all else, a woman alone. Chastain endows her with an artic reserve that is compelling, not inscrutable. She is, at times, astoundingly arrogant: screaming in the face of a section chief who asks her to redirect her energies toward preventing another attack, not hunting bin Laden; haranguing another higher-up who can’t get the White House to okay a raid fast enough for her liking; telling the Navy Seal squad leader that she’d have preferred to bomb the compound, but that he and his team will have to “kill bin Laden for me.” Yet she is still very much a young twentysomething with a photo of her and her friend as her screensaver; there is underbelly beneath the brittleness. Hours before her fellow citizens will swarm the streets, singing “God Bless America,” Maya sits alone, crying. Her tears are not of exhaustion, or even relief; her face breaks open with loss.

De Beauvoir cautioned her countrymen against believing that they could ever find succor in vengeance. The common refrain of the aggrieved, “they must pay,” betrays a desire for a “balancing of wrongs,” to see their aggressors suffer a comparable horror. This is a truth born out in Bigelow’s bravura staging of that May raid, especially the claustrophobic effect of shooting in night vision. The sickening intimacy of the sequences—tight huddles of men charging narrow stairways, narrow rooms—makes the whole endeavor seem small. There’s no grand, cathartic showdown, no real firefight. There is only a man poking his head out of a room before he’s shot between the eyes. There is nothing that could conjure back 3,000 lives and bring them, like Lazarus, out of the rubble.

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In their latest volume, The London Review of Books has published the story of Mohammed el Gorani, the youngest person held at Guantánamo Bay.

(Via Maud Newton)

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Once I met her, I understood; her enormous brown eyes, demure manner, and sweet voice instantly make her someone you want to talk to. Though she may seem soft-spoken, Tortured is anything but. With her shrewd research and unyielding tenacity, Sharrock paints a searing portrait of the disturbing circumstances that lead soldiers to torture. She also takes a look at how torture scars its perpetrators and why America’s engagement in torture has forever changed its international reputation. Tortured is a must-read for those who have not been closely following the ramifications of the Iraq war just as it is essential for those with any interest in the Guantanamo Bay detention disaster.

***

The Rumpus: Why did you focus on lower-ranking soldiers as subjects for your book?

Justine Sharrock: One big difference with what is happening with the current war is that the military is relying on low-level soldiers who don’t have the same training to engage in torture. They’ve used no-touch torture before, but it was CIA agents who were more trained and more prepared to do this, whereas the low-ranking soldiers had no idea that this is what they were going to get into. So I think it had more of a profound effect on them, but I also think it’s an interesting way to look at how the torture regime has affected all of us as Americans.

Low-ranking soldiers also have the least amount of power. If you speak to an officer, they have more ability to make their own decisions, and to refuse orders, and they are more involved in the planning process. Low-ranking soldiers lack a lot of agency.

Rumpus: Are there instances of high-ranking officials coming out against the tactics used at Guantanamo?

Sharrock: Yeah, there are. [In Tortured, Sharrock writes about Lieutenant Commander Matthew Diaz, a Navy JAG Officer, who was imprisoned for leaking names of detainees in attempts to help lawyers file cases. A recent article in Mother Jones, “Is the Army Forcing Out a Gitmo Whistleblower?” takes a look at Lieutenant Colonel Darrel Vandeveld, who spoke out against injustices at Guantanamo and may be expelled from the military as a result].

Rumpus: What do you think made you so successful in extracting all the painful memories from the soldiers you interviewed? How do you think you were able to earn their trust?

Sharrock: A lot of it is the willingness to listen. I think oftentimes when journalists interview people, they try and push their ideas on the person. My goal was just to get inside their heads. I spent a lot of time trying to understand the pro-torture point of view. I had to suspend my own beliefs. I thought a lot of what some of the soldiers did was pretty abhorrent, but I withheld judgment.

Chris Arendt

But the soldiers also are just so desperate for someone to talk to who is a neutral party. Also, speaking with a journalist comes with the idea that it’s a form of whistleblowing, that they are doing a larger form of good by getting the message out there and speaking out against the war. Whereas if they are speaking with their wives, they have to face the fact that their wives will think differently of them, think lesser of them. Or if they talk to other vets or other soldiers, then they are just seen as total pussies, or being traitorous. Speaking with a psychiatrist in the VA, they are afraid of being deemed crazy or just given anti-depressants. Even Chris (Chris Arendt, one of Sharrock’s four main subjects in Tortured) was afraid that they would “cure him” and he would be sent back to war.

Rumpus: Tortured argues that the acceptance of torture tactics, even though they may be disguised, is widespread.

Sharrock: Yeah, and I mean that’s something that living in San Francisco and New York, I was really surprised by.  Obviously it’s stronger in certain pockets of America.

Rumpus: And you focus on very conservative areas in your book– Texas, Appalachia– but how widespread do you think the acceptance of the use of torture was before there was a spotlight on Guantanamo?

Sharrock: Immediately post-9/11, people were calling for the use of torture. I went back to do LexisNexis search and I think it was September 12th, 2001, there was an article about the discussion in classrooms where people were arguing for the use of torture.

It’s not just conservative areas. I took a counter-terrorism class at the International Policy School at Columbia, and we had a discussion about whether or not to use torture, and no one raised their hand protesting it. Everyone there agreed. And this was New York City, Columbia University, and these are also people who were considering jobs going into government. And look at the people in the Bush administration, that’s not Appalachia. The patriotism and the anger post-9/11 was so strong, and it really did shape people’s beliefs. But even now, you look at Obama’s decision to continue indefinite detention, and there’s still a lot of sentiment proposing that. Or you have Dick Cheney on network news supporting war crimes. And there isn’t outrage.

Rumpus: The question I found myself asking, and this is a really tough question, was that if you were a soldier in the circumstances of the soldiers in your book, would you have acted differently?

Brandon Neely

Sharrock: That’s a hard question because no one wants to say that they would do that. Especially when you are using the word torture. My editor actually asked that of me and I mean, I am so foreign from the military world that if I got drafted I would try and run away or get pregnant or something. It’s hard for me to get into that mindset, so a lot of the reporting was trying to understand that military world. In some ways, since I was so foreign to it, it helped–there’s an argument about whether it’s better to do insider journalism verses outsider reporting. The fact that they didn’t fully understand what they were doing could lead me to do those things. For instance, when Brandon Neely was asked to check for weapons every hour and didn’t realize that that was a way to implement sleep deprivation. That’s something I could see myself getting into.

It’s hard for civilians to understand the extremity of the repercussions [of refusing orders or speaking out against torture]. It’s not just that you are letting down your friends, but what you’re doing is treasonous, you could go to prison. It’s hard to imagine saying no with all those circumstances.

Rumpus: So, you don’t have a military background. What do you think compelled you to stick with this project?

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Why does everyone think artists are terrible at governing?

Andrew Sullivan posts the full report from the Office of Professional Responsibility on “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques,” otherwise known as torture. He also wants your help translating the legalese and getting the word out about what he calls “a critical piece of information for history and for future prosecution of the war criminals involved.”

In the department of good questions, “Why Do All National Anthems Sound the Same?”

According to Al Jazeera, there are now 120,000 refugees from the fighting in the Congo, and that number’s growing. That’s a lot of people.

Speaking of that last link, has anyone else noticed how exceptionally good Al Jazeera English‘s international news coverage is? You should give it a chance, if you haven’t already.

Does saying this make me a terrorist? Let’s just ask the Pomona student who was detained by the TSA and the FBI at an airport for studying Arabic on a plane so he could translate Al Jazeera.

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England and her longtime attorney-turned-agent Roy Hardy claim that Winkler conducted all book-related business from his home, refusing to list England as co-author, provide access to online sales and revenue accounts, or let her deal directly with promoters.

Winkler denies any wrongdoing and said he welcomes the Sept. 23 hearing. He said his relationship with England and Hardy has been difficult from the start: Hardy regularly interfered with their LA-based publicist to broker separate deals for England, and the pair carelessly withdrew money from their joint checking account. Winkler claims he formed his own Virginia-based publishing company, Bad Apple Books LLC, to handle administrative issues and protect himself.

Things “crashed and burned pretty fast” after the Library of Congress canceled England’s scheduled August appearance, Winkler said. The lecture was nixed over safety concerns after opposition from library employees produced violent threats. According to Winkler, he’s sold only 20 copies of the book through his website and perhaps a few hundred through other online retailers.

“I think there’s this impression I’ve been sitting on this cash,” Winkler said. “I wish it were true. … Nobody’s getting rich here. I’m in the hole.”

The book, titled Tortured: Lynndie England, Abu Ghraib and the Photographs That Shocked the World, details England’s youth and her twisted relationship with Corporal Charles Graner. As England’s only authorized biographer, Winkler had unprecedented access to the soldier, her family, and friends. England, now 26, said she hopes the book will help people understand that she had a limited role in the abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib.

While eager to salvage her reputation, England remains unapologetic about her role in the prison scandal.

“Sorry? For what I did?” she said in an interview with the UK’s Daily Mail. “All I did was stand in the pictures. Saying sorry is admitting I was guilty and I’m not. I was just doing my duty.”

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If you’re under 40, you may not have much awareness of this history, unless you’ve seen the 1985 film Kiss of the Spider Woman (from the 1976 novel by Manuel Puig) or read the seminal account Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number by Jacobo Timerman. Timerman was a newspaper editor who was imprisoned and tortured for three years, during which the police and intelligence agents who interrogated him made clear the fascist, anti-Semetic basis of the regime’s ideology. (Timerman’s book — reviewed by the New York Times here — was excerpted at length in the New Yorker, bringing the regime’s crimes to the view of many Americans for the first time. And only a few weeks ago, the Dirty War was recently the focus of a short story by Guillermo Martinez, “Vast Hell,” in the April 27, 2009 issue of the same magazine.)

The story of another newspaper editor — Robert Cox, the editor of the English-language Buenos Aires herald — has just been published. Dirty Secrets, Dirty War — The Exile of Editor Robert J. Cox was written by the son of the man who courageously published lists of the names of the disappeared, until threats against his family forced him to flee the country in 1979, three years after the coup. In an AP interview, Cox, now 75, says that part of his life is still too painful for him to write about, so his 42-year-old son, CNN Web producer David Cox, wrote it.

When we think about the crisis in the mass media industry and the death of newspapers, we should remember the role they play in exposing government and corportate crimes to the light of day. Without the courageous editors of Buenos Aires in the 1970s, and Cape Town in the 1980s, and innumerable other places through the last hundred years, what hope would people have struggling under oppression?

**

Previously: Newspapers dying? maybe just the cities they mythologized

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Glen Duncan’s new novel, A Day and a Night and a Day, is an intense and involving story of a man pressed violently against his own limitations.It’s a brilliant book – in terms of voice, structure, and current relevance – and it proves once again why Duncan is so highly regarded in his native Great Britain. This novel should make us Americans take note.

I didn’t come to this novel thinking I was going to like it. It’s about torture, and not just any torture but “extraordinary rendition,” the practice of outsourcing our dirtiest work so we can keep the old-school, electrodes-clipped-to-the-private-parts variety of interrogation off the books. (Can the resemblance to Enron’s accounting practices be coincidental?) Plus, the novel is about Americans torturing other Americans – but Duncan is a Brit, making me fear I was in for a lot of finger wagging, however deserved it may be.

Within the first five pages you know Duncan’s project is not admonitory. He’s much too smart for easy moralizing, and though it will probably hurt his chances for the Nobel Prize, he doesn’t come down on one side of any argument. Instead, he writes a novel. In it he portrays with accuracy and engagement both the tortured and the torturer. Augustus Rose is our main character, and we get to know him with biographical depth. He grew up a mixed-race child in 1950s New York, with the attendant benefits and humiliations; by the late 60s he’s a war protester, student, and inappropriate boyfriend of a WASPy young woman. This passion, more than anything during the day and the night and the day that Augustus is tortured, is what returns to him. It’s a compelling story on its own.

Rose’s torturer, a man named Harper, is a wonderful villain, a psychopath-as-dorm-room-philosopher. Here’s Harper during the interrogation:

“This stuff you can’t even have the conversation. Morality, meaning, truth, the terms are embarrassments. They’re like bloated old aunts who should shuffle off and die. The prerequisite for intellectuals now is the acknowledgement of the absurdity of the intellectual life. Philosophy is to politics what boxing is to total war.”

Dostoevsky is Duncan’s predecessor here – Harper is a kind of unrepentant Raskolnikov, full of the monstrous logic of young men. He’s a full bore existentialist, and not the good kind.

For all of Harper’s Nietzschean tropes, the interrogation has deep shades of theology. For Rose, who was raised Catholic, torture is kind of purgatory, and Harper is the dark angel in charge of scouring Rose’s life, uncovering his sins, and burning them away. Though the book makes comments to the contrary, torture is framed here as purification. A purification with no purpose, maybe, but a purification nonetheless.

This is the unsettling side of A Day and a Night and a Day: it somehow suggests something attractive about torture. Not the pain, but the idea of being called to account for one’s life. Can you imagine anyone – any god, any soulless government spook – breaking your bones, maiming you, for the secrets inside you? I can’t. And at the end of this book, this ordinariness felt strangely like a loss.

However topical it might seem, the novel isn’t about extraordinary rendition, per se. You won’t find insights into the nuts and bolts of smuggling suspects off to sites where human rights are, shall we say, a deregulated market. These details are sacrificed in favor of something more universal – and it’s hardly a trade-off. A Day and a Night and a Day is a beautiful novel about power, pain, and abuse in a world beyond good and evil. Sadly, nothing could be more relevant.

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A U.S. Special Operations soldier sits by a speaker mounted on a Humvee, near Basra, Iraq (2003)

From Frieze Magazine: “As reported by the BBC, the Guardian, the Associated Press, Newsweek, The Nation, Mother Jones, SPIN and others (while mocked by right-wing columnists from the Chicago Tribune and The New York Sun), Western pop music has been employed to disorient, ‘prolong capture shock’ and ‘break’ detainees into confession, often through a strategic mixture of high volume, repetition and cultural offensiveness. Shafiq Rasul, of the ‘Tipton Three’ – British Muslims detained in Guantánamo for over two years after being captured by the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan – tells of being short-shackled to the floor in a dark cell while Eminem’s ‘Kim’ (2000) and pounding heavy metal played incessantly for hours, augmented by strobe lights.” …read more

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