Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Director Bigelow responds on torture in 0 Dark 30

Kathryn Bigelow responds in this article to the charges that her movie promotes torture. She notes correctly that depiction of action is not the same as endorsement. But that is not the point. The point for me is that the movie attempts to portray an accurate depiction of what happened, and for the most part it succeeds and does so brilliantly under her usual directorial aplomb. But she did not portray the fact that prior to enhanced interrogation techniques including torture being employed on 'Ammar'* he was interrogated without torture. And the facts are that much more progress was made prior to the torture, and that after the later the intel got worse, not better. So why no scenes of the prior interrogation? Or of those on the scene who challenged that torture would work? That is part of the accurate depiction of what happened, is it not?

* According to Gibney this is a composite of two likely people, Hassan Ghul and Mohammed al-Qahtani. In both cases useful information was obtained prior to torture.

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