By Clifford D. May
Thursday, January 17, 2013
Nazir is dead. Actually, both Nazirs are dead. Earlier
this month, Mullah Nazir, a Taliban and al-Qaeda commander, was killed by an
American drone strike in South Waziristan, a tribal area of Pakistan. Also
recently killed: Abu Nazir, the fictional al-Qaeda terrorist in the suspenseful
Showtime series Homeland.
I suspect more Americans know about Abu Nazir than Mullah
Nazir. It also seems possible that more Americans are forming their
understanding of the global conflict now underway based on television dramas
and movies than on newspaper dispatches and the talking heads who quarrel over
the airwaves.
This may explain, at least in part, why senators Dianne
Feinstein, Carl Levin, and John McCain last month sent a letter to Sony
Pictures expressing their anger over Zero Dark Thirty, the feature film loosely
based on the decade-long hunt for Osama bin Laden. The senators called the
movie “grossly inaccurate and misleading” because it suggests that harsh
interrogations produced intelligence that led to the discovery of bin Laden’s
whereabouts. The senators are now investigating the CIA’s communications with
the filmmakers to determine whether “inappropriate” access was provided. Your
tax dollars at work.
Acting CIA director Michael Morell was among those who
provided access — appropriate or not — to Zero director Kathryn Bigelow and
screenwriter Michael Boal. Morell released a statement saying that harsh
interrogations were not “the key to finding bin Laden.” He acknowledged,
however, that some intelligence did come “from detainees subjected to enhanced
techniques.” Former CIA director Michael Hayden and former attorney general
Michael Mukasey have both said the same. Actually, Mukasey has gone further,
saying that 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed “broke like a dam” thanks to
waterboarding, and provided a “torrent of information”
Morrell’s main complaint with the film is that it does
not make clear that a “very large team” — not just “Maya,” the main protagonist
in the movie — was actually responsible for finding bin Laden. Last week,
Morell was passed over for the top job at the agency in favor of White House
adviser John Brennan. I don’t know whether there was any connection.
And then there is Jose A. Rodriguez, a 31-year CIA
veteran who was “intimately involved in setting up and administering the CIA’s
‘enhanced interrogation’ program.” He left the agency in 2007, “secure in the
knowledge not only that our program worked but also that it was not torture.”
His criticism of the film is that the on-screen interrogations were far more
brutal than in real life. “The enhanced interrogation program was carefully
monitored and conducted,” he wrote. “The truth is that no one was bloodied or
beaten in the enhanced interrogation program that I supervised from 2002 to
2007.”
Rodriguez commended the film makers for accurately
portraying the hunt for bin Laden “as a 10-year marathon, rather than a sprint
ordered by a new president.”
This much seems clear: Kathryn Bigelow has been denied an
Oscar nomination in Hollywood due to Washington politics and Hollywood
“political correctness,” a development lamented in a Wall Street Journal
editorial last weekend. The Journal pointedly notes that Zero is “an action
movie, not a documentary.” But that ignores the fact that, these days,
documentaries, too, often are weapons of mass indoctrination. In addition to
airing Homeland, Showtime has been broadcasting Oliver Stone’s Untold History
of the United States, a series that re-litigates the Cold War, finding Truman
more to blame than Stalin, telling audiences that Americans not only aren’t
“the good guys,” but that we are “the wrong side.”
This debate is of far more than academic interest. It is
hugely consequential at a time when Americans are trying to decide whether we
should be robustly defending America and other free nations from those who
proclaim themselves our enemies, or whether we should be attempting to address
the “legitimate grievances” of those we have supposedly wronged.
The elite broadcast media has been unwilling to give
Stone’s critics — most notably historian Ron Radosh — an opportunity to
challenge Stone’s “facts” and his broader conceit that the truth about the Cold
War for years has been hidden from Americans. Nor have members of the U.S.
Senate taken exception to Stone’s attempt to breathe new life into old Soviet
propaganda. Nor, for that matter, has serious concern been expressed on Capitol
Hill over al Jazeera’s imminent entry into 40 million American homes with
former vice president Al Gore opening the doors.
As for Homeland, I found the series generally nuanced
despite the fact that the most articulate character was Abu Nazir, who, at a
climactic moment in the story, explains to CIA agent Carrie — the series’s
heroine whom he’s taken prisoner and handcuffed to a pipe — why drone attacks
and other forms of American aggression justify the mass murder of civilians.
I doubt Mullah Nazir could have done as well — though I
suppose we’ll never know. That fact, I should acknowledge, causes me minimal
distress.
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