Who is the interrogator in zero dark thirty

While that might seem like compelling evidence for the technique's effectiveness, this conclusion presumes that prisoners have accurate and recent information. It also presumes that they are capable of relaying that information accurately while experiencing extreme stress, and that they do not resort to simply guessing at what the interrogator wants to hear. Factors such as these make the legitimacy of confessions extracted by waterboarding questionable. Putting semantics and questionable usefulness aside, many would argue that cruel treatment of prisoners, whether physical or psychological, is morally wrong under all circumstances.

What's more, it harms U. As framers of public opinion and debate, do directors and screenwriters have an obligation not to misinform their audiences about historical events? Upon reading director Kathryn Bigelow's own reflections on Zero Dark Thirty , one could easily be led to believe that the film constitutes an accurate historical reenactment of the CIA's decade-long hunt for Osama bin Laden. In fact, when she appeared on the Colbert Report , she referred to the film as a "first draft of history.

However, several government officials have emphatically disputed the film's version of events and what the film implies. Soon after Zero Dark Thirty's release, CIA's acting director Michael Morell issued a statement regarding the film's accuracy: "[The] film creates the strong impression that the enhanced interrogation techniques that were part of our former detention and interrogation program were the key to finding Bin Ladin.

That impression is false. Needless to say, it would be unreasonable to expect a two-and-a-half hour feature film to cover the year span from September 11, until Osama bin Laden's death in May without some lapses. However, Zero Dark Thirty 's list of omissions is not limited to minor historical details—some would say its single-sided portrayal of the debate on torture borders on absurdity.

While the film's protagonist, Maya, seems at first reluctant to partake in the harsh interrogation techniques established by her predecessors, it does not take her long to change her mind. In fact, the only voice of opposition to the CIA's interrogation regime comes in the form of a televised broadcast of President Barack Obama denouncing torture.

In Zero Dark Thirty , this broadcast marks the start of an era where all the clues seem to dry up, and frustrated agents cannot seem to get any closer to locating bin Laden. There is no doubt that Zero Dark Thirty has brought the debate over torture and "enhanced interrogation techniques" back to prominence, and this may be a good thing. As for Bigelow herself, here is how she answers her critics:.

However, the question remains: Is this really the impression that the viewer gets from the film, or does Zero Dark Thirty seemingly endorse torture? Did Zero Dark Thirty change your perceptions about "enhanced interrogation techniques"? If so, how did they change? Regardless of the semantic question of whether waterboarding is a form of torture, the fact remains that its use presents us with serious ethical dilemmas. Is it ever morally acceptable to subject a prisoner to pain, duress, or humiliation?

If so, what circumstances call for such drastic means? Moreover, if coercive modes of interrogation are ever permissible, where should we draw the line between acceptable and unacceptable interrogation methods, and what criteria should we use to establish that line? Who should have final say? Do filmmakers have a moral responsibility not to misinform their audiences about important issues, or do their artistic licenses trump such concerns? The film's conflict is resolved by the assassination of Osama bin Laden.

Should the U. Trivia The movie was originally about the unsuccessful decade-long manhunt for Osama bin Laden. The screenplay was completely re-written after bin Laden was killed. Goofs During the raid on Osama bin Laden 's compound, some neighboring houses are shown with lights going on in different rooms as the neighbors become aware of the activity in the compound.

In Mark Owen's book, "No Easy Day" and also in the reports on the raid from the New York Times, all the electricity in the neighborhood had been cut a short time before the start of the raid. We also wish to acknowledge and honor the many extraordinary military and intelligence professionals and first responders who have made the ultimate sacrifice.

Connections Featured in Chelsea Lately: Episode 6. User reviews Review. Top review. A companion piece for visiting UBL's compound. I've lived in the Muslim world for years and in Pakistan for a few months.

Now some friends came to stay and the one place they decided they HAD to see was the empty plot of land where once stood Osama Bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad. Three hours to go, three hours back, some pictures and a story to tell the movie says the city is 45 minutes drive from Islamabad, but that was back in - not now!

Once we came back we were so involved with the story of the raid that we had to see Zero Dark Thirty for the 2nd time for me, 1st for them. The killing of UBL is meticulously reconstructed, but only covers the last 30 minutes of the movie.

Information from detainees suggests Sayed is UBL's courier. Our hero figures that, wherever in Central Asia UBL is, the one thing he is sure to have is a courier. Track him, you get the big Kahuna. The Agency is initially unlucky to believe erroneous intelligence saying Sayed is dead. And then they are lucky to find out he is not dead.

With a lot of push from our hero, they allot the resources to find him. It is no easy task. That's my favorite part of the movie. Surveillance technology can find out from where he is calling his family busy districts in the Punjab , but it is a lot more tricky to follow him in the middle of the crowd to the place where he lives. But the mysterious inhabitant never shows his face. I don't think he was hiding from CIA cameras, he just knows he is so recognizable. So the decision is left to the higher-ups, to bomb the place, raid it, or just keep waiting for more definitive intel.

And that is the part where the Director has to make a dramatic decision. Does she show the President and his top aides deliberating? I think putting Obama, Clinton and Biden in the movie would suck all the air out of the room to the detriment of the focus on the field agents.

Leon Panneta shows up, but he is not even named. The final act wrote itself, because it is a documentary-like recreation of the raid. Some reviewers pointed glaring mistakes: the Pakistanis seem to be speaking Arabic instead of Urdu.

One part I had to laugh was when a mob stood outside the American Embassy in Islamabad. If you have been there, or anywhere in the diplomatic compound, you know it would never happen. It is hard to make suspenseful a story that unfolds throughout 10 years and involves meticulous collection of intelligence and a lot of false starts. Torture has been tried, and it has failed. It is Maya then who then proposes something different. Why not trick him? And it is cleverness, coated with kindness, that produces something useful.

It is too late to stop the Saudi attack, but Ammar offers them a name. More correctly, a pseudonym, what in Arabic is called a "kunya," a nom de guerre: Abu Ahmad al-Kuwait, the father of Ahmed from Kuwait. Maya doesn't know it yet—indeed, she won't find out for years—but this is the first small clue on the long trail to Abbottabad.

Zero Dark Thirty , by director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal, is an extraordinarily impressive dramatization of the year-long hunt for Osama bin Laden, one that I wrote about in far more detail in my book The Finish.

Warmly praised by many film critics The Atlantic 's Chris Orr named it the best film of and so far a box office hit it goes into wide release on January 11 , it is sure to be in the running for major recognition during the coming awards season. But it has also been attacked by some viewers as a false version of the story that effectively advocates for the use of torture.

Those viewers argue that the film, while brilliant, shows torture to have played an important role in finding bin Laden, which they say is not true. It is reminiscent of the late movie critic Pauline Kael's memorable putdown of director Sam Peckinpah as a virtuoso of "fascist" art. This no doubt comes as a shock to Bigelow, whom I have never met, but who has been described to me as the kind of gentle soul who "would stoop to lift a snail off the sidewalk.

The criticism is unfair, and its reading of both the film and the actual story seems willfully mistaken. Torture may be morally wrong, and it may not be the best way to obtain information from detainees, but it played a role in America's messy, decade-long pursuit of Osama bin Laden, and Zero Dark Thirty is right to portray that fact. A screenplay is more like a sonnet than a novel. Action on screen unfolds with visceral immediacy, but any story with sweep—this one takes place over nearly a decade—can only be told with broad impressionistic strokes.

The challenge is greater when trying to tell a true story. The interrogation scenes in the beginning color the entire tale, but they are necessary. They are part of the story.

Without them, I suspect some of the same critics now accusing it of being pro-torture would instead be calling Zero Dark Thirty a whitewash. The charge that the film is pro-torture is easy to debunk. I have already noted the dramatic failure depicted in the opening scenes with Ammar.

The futility of the approach is part of the more general organizational failure depicted in the movie's first half, culminating in a dramatization of the tragic bombing of Camp Chapman, in Khost, Afghanistan, where an al-Qaeda infiltrator wiped out an entire CIA field office. The agency is shown to be not only failing to find bin Laden and dismantle al-Qaeda, but on the losing end of the fight.

In case the point hasn't been made clearly enough, a visit from an angry CIA chief to the U. Embassy in Pakistan in the next scene underlines it:. And we are failing.

We're spending billions of dollars. People are dying. We're still no closer to defeating our enemy. The work that leads to Abbottabad in the second half of the film unfolds as dramatic detective work in the office and the field, and ends with a faithful and detailed reenactment of the raid on the Abbottabad compound. Through it all, Maya is playing a long game, in dogged pursuit of a lead, battling those in command more preoccupied with short-term goals—finding and killing al-Qaeda operational figures.

Torture is presented as part of this story, something Maya accepts. But it's also shown to be at best only marginally useful, and both politically and morally toxic. So, how true is it? No matter how remarkable their research and access, the film spills no state secrets. No movie can tell a story like this without aggressively condensing characters and events, fictionalizing dialogue, etc. Boal's script is just pages: fewer than 10, words, the length of a longish magazine article.

Within these limits the film is remarkably accurate, and certainly well within what we all understand by the Hollywood label, "based on a true story," which works as both a boast and a disclaimer. There apparently was a female CIA field officer who performed heroic service in the year hunt for bin Laden, and whose fixation on "Ahmed from Kuwait" helped steer the effort to success.

In the film she is seen butting heads with an intelligence bureaucracy that regards her fixation on Ahmed as wishful thinking.

This makes for some dramatic scenes, and gives Jessica Chastain a great many chances to brood with ethereal intensity. The real life "Maya" may have been even more lovely and tenacious, but she was just one of many officers and analysts focused on "Ahmed," in an agency that never stopped regarding him as an important lead.

Indeed, those who have accused the current administration of rolling out the red carpet for Bigelow and Boal in the hopes of hyping its role may be surprised to find that the president, whose participation was central throughout, has been almost completed edited out.

Everyone understands the rules of this game. Theater is theater, not a scrupulous presentation of fact. We ought to feel betrayed only when filmmakers depart egregiously and deliberately from the record, as Oliver Stone so often has done, substituting what he thinks might be true or perhaps would like to be true for what is known. Reality, after all, is messy and only rarely lines up neatly enough for a two-hour script.

Hollywood's "true story" aims only to color safely inside the lines of history. In this broader sense, Zero Dark Thirty is remarkably true. The hunt for bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders began with efforts that were clumsy, costly, and cruel.