Normalisation of torture?

The movie “Zero Dark Thirty” (ZD30) was nominated for five Oscars last week. It claims to ‘tell the story’ of how the CIA hunted down and finally assassinated Osama bin Laden, the head of Al Qaeda,  behind the World Trade Centre destruction. By boasting that it is “based on first-hand accounts of actual events,” and intermittently using footage of real-life events such as voices of victims of 9/11, it clearly intends to tell the story ‘as it is’.
From this perspective, we cannot escape the question that the ‘story’ places on centre stage: what is the role of torture in modern warfare? While the question might seem to be an academic one for us in the Caribbean, it most definitely is not. The tactics of terrorists have been imported into every country in the world by ambitious political adventurers, even in democracies, who grow impatient with the rigours of that method of securing state power.
In Guyana, for instance, five convicted criminals were ‘sprung’ from prison and ensconced into a village from where they targeted the police in a war against the Guyanese state. They claimed to be ‘freedom fighters’ killing on behalf of African Guyanese. In classic terrorist style, they targeted innocent civilians who in many instances were kidnapped, tortured and killed. In one spectacular instance the US Chief Security Officer was kidnapped and allegedly tortured. In retaliation, private squads were recruited, which also engaged in torture and murder. There were also allegations that the police used such methods in seeking to root out the ‘freedom fighters’.
Torture in all forms is banned by the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which the United States participated in drafting, and made illegal and punishable if committed on its territory. But this did not stop the latter country from engaging in the practice in the wake of 9/11, which was infamously exposed at their Guantanamo Bay holding facility in 2009. President Obama’s subsequent Executive Order banning the practice seems to have shifted it onto friendly third countries such as Egypt, according to WikiLeaks cables.
The danger that ZD30 poses is that it normalises and normativises torture as an instrument of “the war against terrorism”. In an extensive and elaborate scene, the female protagonist who eventually tracks down OBL (as he is dubbed) is exposed to a most horrific torture of a detainee in a CIA ‘Black Site’ in Pakistan. The detainee “Ammar” is subjected to waterboarding, stress positions, sleep deprivation, and confined in a small box. Responding to the torture, he divulges the name of the courier who ultimately leads the CIA to bin Laden’s location and assassination.
The protagonist is initially shown as expressing revulsion at the torture but eventually she deploys the technique with great aplomb. By connecting the technique of torture with the success at the end, when every other method has failed, the conclusion is inevitably drawn that while the means may be despicable – the ends justify them. Everyone is expected to cheer the heroine who ‘did what she had to do.’
But three Senators from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Senators John McCain, Dianne Feinstein and Carl Levin requested and reviewed information and documents related to the CIA’s cooperation with the filmmakers. They wrote that they were “concerned by the film’s clear implication that information obtained during or after the use of the CIA’s coercive interrogation techniques played a critical role in locating Osama Bin Laden (OBL).” They concluded bluntly: “this information is incorrect.”
Many other studies have also demonstrated that ultimately, torture offers more ‘revenge’ than valid information. But ultimately, the use of torture is a moral question and every civilised state has banned its use. We cannot now, under the cover of a ‘well-made’ film, justify its use because it ‘works’ or that ‘they’ use it against ‘us’. That is the slippery slope that dooms us all.