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via PrairiePundit by Merv Benson on 1/4/13
Jose Rodriguez:It is an odd experience to enter a darkened room and, for more than 21 / 2 hours, watch someone tell a story that you experienced intimately in your own life. But that is what happened recently as I sat in a movie theater near Times Square and watched "Zero Dark Thirty," the new Hollywood blockbuster about the hunt for Osama bin Laden.
When I was head of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center from 2002 to 2004 and then director of the National Clandestine Service until late 2007, the campaign against al-Qaeda was my life and obsession.
I must say, I agree with both the film critics who love "Zero Dark Thirty" as entertainment and the administration officials and prominent senators who hate the movie for the message it sends — although my reasons are entirely opposite theirs.
Indeed, as I watched the story unfold on the screen, I found myself alternating between repulsion and delight.
First, my reasons for repulsion. "Zero Dark Thirty," which will open for Washington audiences Friday, inaccurately links torture with intelligence success and mischaracterizes how America's enemies have been treated in the fight against terrorism. Many others object to the film, however, because they think that the depiction of torture by the CIA is accurate but that the movie is wrong to imply that our interrogation techniques worked.
They are wrong on both counts. I was intimately involved in setting up and administering the CIA's "enhanced interrogation" program, and I left the agency in 2007 secure in the knowledge not only that our program worked — but that it was not torture.
...
The film shows CIA officers brutalizing detainees — beating them mercilessly, suspending them from the ceiling with chains, leading them around in dog collars and, on the spur of the moment, throwing them on the floor, grabbing a large bucket and administering a vicious ad hoc waterboarding. The movie implies that such treatment went on for years.
The truth is that no one was bloodied or beaten in the enhanced interrogation program which I supervised from 2002 to 2007. Most detainees received no enhanced interrogation techniques, and the relative few who did faced harsh measures for only a few days or weeks at the start of their detention. To give a detainee a single open-fingered slap across the face, CIA officers had to receive written authorization from Washington. No one was hung from ceilings. The filmmakers stole the dog-collar scenes from the abuses committed by Army personnel at Abu Ghraib in Iraq. No such thing was ever done at CIA "black sites."
...
Most Americans probably think waterboarding was stopped by President Obama once he took office in 2009. Few know that the technique was last used in 2003, when Obama was still an unknown state senator in Illinois.
Inspired perhaps more by past movies than first-hand accounts, "Zero Dark Thirty" shows detainees being asked a question, tortured a little, asked another question and then tortured some more. That did not happen. Detainees were given the opportunity to cooperate. If they resisted and were believed to hold critical information, they might receive — with Washington's approval — some of the enhanced techniques, such as being grabbed by the collar, deprived of sleep or, in rare cases, waterboarded. (The Justice Department assured us in writing at the time that these techniques did not constitute torture.) When the detainee became compliant, the techniques stopped — forever.
...There is more.
I trust Rodriguez's description of events more than the politicians who have denigrated the efforts of the CIA interrogators. The enhanced interrogation did save lives and a form of it did provide a lead that led to bin Laden, but it was not through waterboarding, not that it would trouble me if it was used.
While he quibbles with some specifics Rodriguez thinks the movie is worth seeing as a broader representation of the work that went into finding the mass murder Osama bin Laden.
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