Zero Dark Thirty

This month will mark 11 years since the opening of Guantanamo Bay prison and four since Obama became president and proposed to close the internment camp within 12 months. This black hole of the right has seen 779 men, all Muslims, pass through. Of those, nine have died in custody. There remain 166 prisoners, of which 86 have been acquitted of all charges. The other 46 have been assigned indefinite detention without judicial procedures or charges. These and many other figures concerning the violation of human rights in the United States’ war on terror are cited over and over by the Center for Constitutional Rights, which is busy monitoring the legal limbo created by President Bush.

This American NGO, dedicated to the legal defense of detainees, is responsible for continually reminding President Obama about this and other unfulfilled promises in the area of human rights and liberties. The continuation of Guantanamo is not exclusively a presidential responsibility, because the Republican majority in Congress has intervened to stop all transfers of prisoners to American jails and has prevented them from going to court. Nor have allied countries helped, instead admitting to dropping off prisoners, let alone the home countries of the prisoners, where they could be immediately killed, tortured or jailed after repatriation to locations like Yemen, Saudi Arabia or Algeria.

The issue is whether Obama will start his second term without signs of resolving these headaches and with the threat of leaving the White House in four years with Guantanamo intact. The prison is not the only record of the political ambiguity concerning human rights coming from someone who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009. The premiere of the movie “Zero Dark Thirty” from director Kathryn Bigelow has also brought a new level of public debate on a theme that is as prickly and distressing as the use of torture by the CIA in the fight against terrorism. It has an exciting narrative concerning other controversial matters such as the selective assassination of terrorists by presidential directive, in this case the leader of al-Qaida, Osama Bin Laden, in Abbotabad on May 2, 2011.

The movie explains and synthesizes all the techniques used by the CIA and the military in the United States’ war on terror. In the foreground is torture. Later, illegal detention and the extraordinary delivery of terrorists to third world countries for extrajudicial interrogation are brought into focus. It depicts a touch of sexual abuse like that which was filmed and photographed in Abu Ghraib prison. It also depicts secret prisons like Bagram, which is grouped with Guantanamo most of the time in the movie. At its culmination, it shows the extrajudicial killing of Bin Laden.

“Zero Dark Thirty” ruins the untenable thesis that water boarding, sleep deprivation and forced positions, not to mention beatings, abuses and humiliation do not constitute torture, as the judicial teams of George W. Bush tried to show and even were defended by a good number of Republican presidential candidates. We can blame Obama for not passing bills against those who infringed the law with their authorizations and legal justifications for torture, including the use of information obtained under torture to kill terrorists like Bin Laden, as can be seen in the movie; something, which on the other hand, would be done by any responsible leader. But he has not attempted to legalize torture in the way that Bush and his neocon lawyers tried to do. Obama has been dealing with something else, with difficult if not impossible justification: Trying to give legal cover to the targeted killings of suspected terrorists, without warrant or judicial procedure, by a mere presidential directive.

Bigelow’s film has been the starting point for various debates on the borders between reality and fiction, the justification and utility of torture, and the leaking of secret information from the CIA to the media and to the writers of the movie. Its authors knew of its potential explosiveness, and for this reason they released it after the presidential election. The release coincides with the replacement of General David Petraeus at the top of the CIA by John Brennan, who until now was Obama’s counterterrorism czar and has 25 years of experience as an agent. Brennan was actually the agency’s number two when Bush worked to make torture a legal way to obtain information from detainees. Already, with Obama, he has been responsible for targeted killings through the use of unmanned drones.