Torture at Gitmo? Blame Jordan!

There was a nasty dustup on Twitter between the Glenn Greenwald forces and sympathizers with Bashar al Assad concerning the case of Maher Arar—a Canadian citizen who was deported by the US to Syria, where he was detained for 9 months and tortured (he describes his treatment here)--and whether Syria under Assad had assisted the US in its torture/rendition projects.

Much wroth was waxed on the issue over Assad-as-a-US-accomplice vs. Assad-as-anti-imperialist.

I’m going to tiptoe past that issue to highlight some interesting information about the role of Jordan in US rendition/interrogation/torture projects.

Perhaps Arar elicits the disapproval of pro-Assad forces because he has used the publicity gained by his mistreatment to engage in anti-Assad agitation.  When Arar appeared on Democracy Now! his profile stated:

He now works as a human rights advocate in Canada. “The cooperation with the Syrian government, as well as other dictatorships in the Middle East post-9/11, gave some kind of legitimacy to those dictatorships,” says Arar. He calls on the United States and the United Nations to declare the Syrian regime illegitimate and refer the matter to the International Criminal Court.

In the interview, Arar highlighted the odious character of the Assad regime as follows:

Now, why the — and let me also say that when the American government sent me to Syria, they knew exactly what they were doing. In fact, I can vividly remember what an ex-CIA agent said around 2004 about the rendition program. He basically something said like — if I remember correctly, his is name is Robert Baer. He said, "If you want people to be well interrogated, you send them to Jordan. If you want people to be disappeared, you send them to Egypt. And if you want people to be tortured, you send them to Syria."

I recently read the heavily-redacted Guantanamo Diary of Mohamedou Ould Slahi.  It is an eloquent and fascinating document.  It also demonstrates the pitfalls of relying on the received wisdom & privileged narratives of ex-CIA agents whose primary experiences with torture are perhaps gleaned from chitchat in the offices eager-to-impress-and-please-and facilitate-and favorbank security bureaucrats in distant lands.

Slahi was rendered from his home in Mauritania in late 2001 by the US to Jordan for detention and interrogation and we can see with good confidence, the Jordanians do torture, just not routinely and reflexively:

Jordanians practice torture on a daily basis, but they need a reasonable suspicion to do so.  They don’t just jump on anybody and start to torture him…In the beginning the Jordanians were seen as a potential associate for doing the dirty work; the fact that Jordanians widely use torture as a means to facilitate interrogation seemed to impress the American authorities.  But there was a problem: the Jordanians don’t take anybody and torture him; they must have reason to practice heavy physical torture…I learned later from the Jordanian detainee in GTMO who spent fifty days in the same prison…that they do have…painful methods of torture, like hanging detainees from their hands and feet and beating them for hours, and depriving them from sleep for days until they lose their minds.

“In Jordan they don’t torture unless they have evidence…The torture starts around midnight and finishes around dawn.  Everybody takes part, the prison director, the interrogators, and the guards…”

In February 2002, the director of Jordan’s Antiterrorism Department was the subject of an assassination plot…The investigation led to a suspect, but the secret police couldn’t find him…The peaceful brother was to be taken as a pawn and tortured until his brother turned himself in.  Special Forces were sent out, arerested the innocent boy in a crowded place, and beat him beyond belief…The boy was taken to the prison and tortured every day by his interrogator.  “I don’t care how long it takes, I am going to keep torturing you until your brother turns himself in,” his interrogator said.

So Jordan tortures.  But they’re selective.  (Judging from Arar’s account, the Syrians are less finicky and cut to the chase immediately, beating him brutally for two weeks to extract a bogus confession, perhaps as a matter of convenience, since they apparently quickly determined that the US dossier was without foundation.  They finally released Arar after over a year of inhumane detention.).

According to Slahi’s account, Jordan’s insufficiently gung-ho attitude irked the US and perhaps contributed to the idea that the US had to develop and manage its own in-house torture apparatus rather than rely on the Jordanians:

“September 11 didn’t happen in Jordan; we don’t expect other countries to pry Intels off detainees as we do,” [redacted] said once.  The Americans obviously were not satisfied with the results achieved by their “torture allies.”

Slahi was detained and interrogated for eight months in Jordan without being physically tortured (psychologically, of course, another matter), since the Jordanian intelligence services considered the US dossier on him was, like Arar’s in Syria, BS. 

This was not good enough for the United States, which was sure, apparently incorrectly, that Slahi was an Al Qaeda kingpin; they shipped him to Guantanamo (where he is still imprisoned today) and tortured him using the notorious regimen of sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, stress positions (and disregard for his sciatic condition and medication needs), temperature manipulation, forced water drinking, slaps, beating, psychological abuse, threats of execution and the imprisonment and abuse of his family, and the bizarre sexual humiliation gambit.  

The sex stunt involved women fondling and rubbing up against him, and talking dirty and maybe more (Slahi, a devout and puritanical Muslim, does not give all the details); the women were either NCOs in the US Army, which seems, well, incredible, or hookers maybe flown in from Miami.  Slahi’s allegations, by the way, were confirmed years ago in an ignored report by released British Gitmo detainees, who asserted that women smeared them with what was supposed to be menstrual blood and engaged in similar sexual provocations, as well as by several subsequent US government investigations.  If anybody knows if this is a unique US breakthrough in interrogation science, or if it has a precedent in the Middle East, Russia, China or elsewhere, please let me know.

Long story short, everybody tortures.  So leave Bashar Assad aloooooooooooooooooone!  Well, I wouldn’t go that far, but it seems unlikely that Syria was involved more than peripherally in the US GWOT global rendition/detention/interrogation/torture regime.  Jordan, it appears from Slahi’s account, was at the system’s heart, and indeed was the primary US asset in navigating the Arab world and in providing precedents and best practices for interrogation…and torture.

And also, I guess we can blame the Jordanians for being so stingy with their precious torture and forcing US to set up the enhanced interrogation system at Gitmo.

Maybe that’s the takeaway.

The Movie Zero Dark Thirty Wishes It Was But Isn’t Is…

…The Battle of Algiers

As the moving finger of chaos hovered over Mali and Algeria last week, I took another look at Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 masterpiece, The Battle of Algiers.

I am somewhat puzzled that this movie is not at the heart of the Zero Dark Thirty debate.

Because in many ways, perhaps intentionally, ZDT is the mirror-image doppelganger of Algiers.

Both of them effectively employ an objective documentary style to depict a brutal, successful exercise in counter-terrorism.

And both of them deal with torture.

In The Battle of Algiers, torture works!  Right away! In the very first scene!  Short-circuiting any need for liberal handwringing or right-wing defensiveness for the next two hours of the film!

The film opens with Colonel Mathieu, the supremely able, intelligent, and ruthless commander of the French counter-terror effort in Algiers against the Algerian National Liberation Front or FLN, striding in to confront a scrawny, scraggly, beaten little man surrounded by a crowd of sturdy, confident French soldiers in crisp camo (in an interesting irony, Pontecorvo revealed that the “soldiers” were cast from students from Kabilye—an Algerian district known for its light-skinned Berbers-- at the local university).

“He’s come clean,” a soldier tells the general and, sure enough, in the very next scene the troops are outside the refuge of FLN leader Ali la Pointe, setting in motion the final confrontation that will 1) serve as the framing for a movie-length flashback depicting the FLN’s struggle in Algiers against the French and 2) signal the virtual annihilation of the FLN as a significant force inside the city.

The big difference, between the two films, of course, is perspective.

In Algiers, we are immersed in the perspective of the Algerian revolutionaries.  Even in the first scene, before anyone is introduced or anything explained, we witness the misery and anguish of the distraught informant, his chest disfigured by the flame of a blowtorch, who, as he is clad in French camo to serve as Judas goat by the cheery soldiers, runs to the window and cries out in despair before knuckling under to a soldier’s matter-of-fact persuasion: “Do you really want another round?”

In Zero Dark Thirty, the emphasis is on the determination, forbearance, and the frustration of the torturers, especially Jason Clarke, as they struggle to crack the Bin Laden case.

Here I must thank ZDT director Karen Bigelow for seconding my previous assertion that she has a fascination with torture as a transgressive test of heroism (for the torturer), not as a police tactic.  In a statement she gave to the LA Times as part of her effort to repair and advance the prospects of ZDT as best-picture Oscar bait, Ms. Bigelow stated:

I think Osama bin Laden was found due to ingenious detective work. Torture was, however, as we all know, employed in the early years of the hunt. That doesn't mean it was the key to finding Bin Laden. It means it is a part of the story we couldn't ignore. …
Bin Laden wasn't defeated by superheroes zooming down from the sky; he was defeated by ordinary Americans who fought bravely even as they sometimes crossed moral lines, who labored greatly and intently, who gave all of themselves in both victory and defeat, in life and in death, for the defense of this nation.

Unfortunately for Ms. Bigelow and ZDT, I think that most people—including most Oscar voters—reflexively sympathize with the torturee, rather than the torturer.  

And that is what gives Pontecorvo’s film a great deal of its power.  It immerses us in a world—and shows us the faces and motivations--of people who do things that can and do get them tortured.  (One can only thank the movie gods that the filmmakers did not—or could not—follow through with their original plan of parachuting Paul Newman into the script as a western journalist in order to give Western audience somebody to identify with.)

Given America’s foreign policy obsession with the Muslim world and Arab politics over the last decade, it is surprising that The Battle of Algiers doesn’t come up more often.

There was a mini-boomlet of interest in 2003, when the Pentagon announced a screening to educate officers on the dynamics of urban counterinsurgency during the difficulties in Iraq.  And there was a flurry of showings on the 50^th anniversary of Algerian independence last year.  But the film is pretty much MIA.

I guess it has something to do with the Marxist politics of Pontecorvo.

Anti-communist conservatives presumably hate TBOA for its sympathetic portrayal of anti-Western lumpen militancy.

But it certainly made modern neo-liberals uncomfortable that the Black Panthers and the Weather  Underground reportedly screened TBOA as a training film (presumably skipping over the parts where the militant organization is totally destroyed by The Man) and, perhaps, inspired efforts to consign the film to the end-of-history rubbish heap as a piece of naïve agitprop.

Therefore, I detect certain anxious efforts to disparage the film’s impact and its relevance with derisive sneering along the lines of “Well, your precious people’s revolution didn’t turn out so great in the end, now did it?”

Certainly, the Algerian revolution turned to sh*t with the usual alacrity—even during the period depicted in the film there were apparently some factional rubouts and after independence there was a great deal of unpleasant fighting between rival armed groups and a quick resort to authoritarian rule, punctuated with the suspension of the second round of democratic elections in 1991 to prevent a victory by the Islamist Party, the FIS.

However, the hope and enthusiasm depicted at the close of the movie—when, in 1962, two years after the French win the “Battle of Algiers”, the French occupation crumbled before a wave of national unrest and insurrection originating beyond the capital—was real.

And Pontecorvo does not shy away from showing the bloody dynamics of the struggle from the FLN side as well as the French side.  French torture practices are shown in a brief montage including hanging, electric shock, burning, and our old friend, waterboarding (for a devastating, in-depth look at how the torture regime in Algeria worked, and didn't work, read Dr. Darius Rejali's 2004 piece in Salon).  But the centerpiece of the film is the horrific simultaneous terror bombing of a bar, a milk bar filled with teenagers and a baby, and the downtown Air France office in Algiers by the FLN, using Arab women in European disguises to place the explosives.

The Battle of Algiers paints a convincing picture of the collapse of Western colonial rule, a process that even a no-holds-barred commitment to torture and the triumphant dynamiting of Ali la Pointe in his lair cannot forestall.

Zero Dark Thirty, on the other hand, puts us inside the national security bureaucracy instead of out on the Arab street, and depicts the devotion of all this torture, anger, and effort toward the destruction of a single man—Osama bin Laden—perhaps in the vain hope that the forces that obsess and threaten the United States will die with him. 

Pontecorvo demonstrated a perspective that was more Marxist-objective than Leninist-doctrinaire or Maoist-groupie in a film he made for Italian television, Return to Algiers, in 1992.

Fortunately, the film with English subtitles has been posted on Youtube  and you can join the five hundred or so people who have already seen it there.  It is well worth digging out the six clips (takes a bit of doing) and watching.

Pontecorvo records the rancor and frustration following the suspension of the 1991 elections.  When he tries to return to his old haunts with his film crew, he is harassed and harangued by bearded Islamists.  In the Casbah, housewives point out the general decrepitude and neglect of their homes, making Pontecorvo draw the conclusion that the revolutionaries have taken the place of the French—both as privileged insiders, and as targets for the revolutionary resentment of the insulted and injured poor of Algeria.

He reports on the fear and anger of educated women at the threat of the threat of Islamic anti-feminism; he also interviews some giggling girls who would prefer that their school institute sex segregation.  

After a lot of miserable contention, the government media informs the public that the visiting European is the filmmaker responsible for The Battle of Algiers, and Pontecorvo and his crew finally get some love from the crowds on the street in Algiers.  And he films a probing interview with Mohamed Boudiaf, the exiled FLN warhorse installed in the presidency by the military after the election fiasco, just before the old man was assassinated.

As far as Pontecorvo is concerned, you get the image of a filmmaker prepared to look reality in the face, both in 1966 and in 1992.

Kathryn Bigelow also wants to look reality in the face.  Too bad it’s the face of a torturer.

P.S. Criterion did their usual magnificent job on The Battle of Algiers, with a three-disc package of film and documentaries.  For me, not steeped in the lore of TBOA, it was a genuine shock and surprise to learn about the background of the actor who played FLN leader El-hadi Jafar.  He is interviewed on one of the disc 3 documentaries.

 P.P.S.  Screengrab from Todd Alcott's blog, which has a very interesting discussion of the cinematic merits of TBOA.

Zero Dark Thirty: Torture, Take Two

Maybe Torture Doesn’t Work But Kathryn Bigelow Seems to Like It

I saw Zero Dark Thirty last night.

Most of it, anyway.  In a bizarre incident, the theater fire alarm went off just as the Seal Team Six helicopter was about to touch down in Abbottabad.  The Arclight made the interesting decision to keep the movie running (or non-decision, to be more accurate:  in the brave new world of automated multi-screen projection, there is no grizzled projectionist in the theater booth minding the store, nor, it appears, is there a technerd with an eye on the monitors or a finger on the button in the central control room either).  A lot of people remained in their seats at first, thinking that a descending stealth helicopter makes the same beeping and flashing commotion as a Honda SUV backing out of a driveway.  No announcement was made, so the flummoxed audience ignored the emergency exits and eventually jostled its way out into the jam-packed lobby.  There, the black-shirted hipsters who serve as the Arclight staff were wandering through the crowd, seemingly as non-plussed as anyone else.  If there is a PA system for the complex, nobody flipped it on to inform and instruct the bewildered herd.  Information, or its equivalent, percolated through the scrum as a series of mumbled exchanges.  I was able to buttonhole one staffer and take care of the Angeleno’s existential concern—parking validation—and head off into the night with the promise that I could eventually obtain, not a refund, but a voucher for further viewing.  Fortunately, the whole thing was either a false alarm or an extremely minor ruckus.  If it had been a serious sh*tstorm, there would have been a lot of terminally disappointed people, if you get what I’m sayin’.

So I didn’t get to see the final confrontation.  However, by that time the tone of the movie regarding everybody’s pressing interest—torture!—had already been set.  Of course, if it turns out in the final reel that the Seal team mistakenly barged in on Dick Cheney shuffling around in his slippers and bathrobe at his secret location, and then the cast popped out of the closets for an end-credit rendition of “Always Look on the Sunny Side of Life” I am mistaken about the direction that the movie was taking.  But I don’t think so. 

Torture works, at least for Kathryn Bigelow.  I think she’s fascinated with it, and it’s really near the heart of Zero Dark Thirty.  At the same time I think that she, and her screenwriter, Mark Boal, made the cautious decision not to kill the Oscar-buzz with a queasy piece of torture porn, and instead frame the hunt for bin Laden as a neutral-toned albeit torture-sodden counter-intelligence procedural, a “just the facts, Ma’am” approach for those of you old enough to remember Jack Webb and Dragnet.

The film is grim, and grimly convincing, as a picture of the United States and the CIA spending billions of dollars to bulldoze through a world they despise to kill a man they hate.

The objective tone works against depicting Maya (Jessica Chastain) as a sympathetic character, despite the presence of standard action movie vengeance-shall-be-mine personal motivators-- they killed my (kinda) friend!  They tried to kill me!  Twice!  Instead, her zeal comes across as shrill and impersonal.

Which is probably the way things really are in the CIA.  The people who get things done within that massive and murderous bureaucracy are probably more determined, more callous, and more unpleasant than their determined, callous, and unpleasant peers.

 

When the film shows Chastain wrung out after a tough day of torturing a recalcitrant detainee, one is left to wonder if Bigelow is descending to the dishonest humanizing cliché, or whether Chastain is simply expressing the zero-affect aggravation of a mechanic unable to repair a balky transmission.

In keeping with this approach, the movie cannily throws out enough pro- and anti-torture tropes for people on both sides of the argument to seize upon.  

On the one hand, enhanced interrogation techniques are unambiguously portrayed as torture, not fraternity pranks, and the potential for extracting misleading information is referenced in a scene in which a tormented detainee is stuffed in a tiny box while randomly muttering days of the week for an impending attack.

On the other hand…

The end of the torture regime is not occasioned by any handwringing over its legality, morality, or operational efficacy.  Instead, the CIA station personnel are shown staring, with at the very best, mute resignation, at a broadcast of candidate Obama promising to discontinue torture.  Near the end of the movie there is a lot of “is UBL really in there” suspense-mongering, with probabilities of 60% and up being thrown around.  One leading national security honcho bemoans the fact that with the discontinuation of the “detainee program”, confirmation cannot be wrung out of the inmates at Guantanamo.

I don’t think Bigelow is interested in passing judgment on the efficacy of torture as a counter-intelligence policy.  But torture does exist, at or beyond the legal extremes of government spook-work, depending on who’s writing the memos, and Bigelow is drawn to exploring its implications and how a hero working heroically in counterintelligence would cope with it.  The problem, for me, anyway, is that Bigelow is interested in torture less as a moral dilemma than as a test of personal strength and determination—for the torturer.  She apparently regards torturers as potentially cool, because they are out there, on the edge, dealing with the challenge, testing the limits of law, social norms, morality, and endurance, and thereby testing themselves.

For me, Kathryn Bigelow tips her hand with her portrayal of the lead interrogator, or torturer, if you will, “Dan”, played by Jason Clarke.  He is studly, grizzled, cool, sympathetic, graceful under pressure—and transgressive, in a Nietzschean will-to-power way, as Kathryn Bigelow heroes often turn out to be.  

I don’t know any torturers, at least I don’t think I do, but color me unpersuaded concerning their heroic stature based on what I read about the careful, calculated, and legalistic cruelty practiced in the enhanced interrogation program at Guantanamo and the sadism inflicted on helpless, hapless (and sometimes innocent) detainees at places like Bagram .

The element of the torture scenes (yes, there are several, torture is not just a tone-setting appetizer at the beginning of the film) that I found least convincing was the Hemingwayesque portrayal of the core confrontation between Clarke  and detainee “Amar” (Reda Kateb).

There is a lot of macho-man “bro”ing (as in “If you lie to me, I’m going to hurt you, bro”) and a brief, absurd scene in which Clarke engages in some manly wrassling to subdue Kateb  for a session of waterboarding.

Subsequently, Clarke and Chastain are shown dining al fresco on Arab fare on a sun dappled patio with a cleaned-up and relaxed Kateb , who calmly starts handing over important intelligence goodies.  

One doesn’t get the impression that Bigelow regards the torture as the degradation of a helpless person by a figure of power (a more accurate depiction of torture would probably involve the systematic and unchivalric ego destruction at the core of the Bush era Enhanced Interrogation Techniques).

Instead, it’s a studly conjugal transaction whose noble outcome (the terrorist fought hard but the interrogator broke him; prizes for everyone!) has somehow elevated and affirmed both parties.  The feeling of homoerotic subtext is reinforced when Clarke  hands over a post-coital cigarette to Kateb , who puffs on it with a dignified but grateful reserve.

In a subsequent meeting at CIA headquarters, Clarke instinctively and immediately mans up to take the rap for the torture program if and when the legal hammer comes down.  (Real-life spoiler: it doesn’t.)

The motto of Zero Dark Thirty could well be:

Torture:  It’s not for the weak.