The lesson of ‘Zero Dark Thirty’

(AP)

The Osama bin Laden manhunt thriller “Zero Dark Thirty,” which comes out Wednesday, has already received several Best Picture awards from film critics’ groups, including the one in New York. But that’s no reason not to see it.

Director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal’s follow-up to their Oscar winner “The Hurt Locker” is far superior to the earlier film — a gripping work but also a painstakingly detailed one that is more intellectually and morally serious about the War on Terror than any other Hollywood film yet made.

It lays out how a female CIA agent, named “Maya” and played by Jessica Chastain, pieced together information from a variety of sources, including al Qaeda prisoners who had been waterboarded, to learn of the existence of the bin Laden courier who ultimately led to his boss’s death.

“Zero Dark Thirty” is so drenched in procedural detail that its message may appear ambiguous at first glance, and the hacks are already calling it a “Rorschach test” that will confirm whatever view of torture you held going into the theater.

It isn’t. Not if you’re paying attention.

After seeing it, I can report that it is a clear vindication for the Bush administration’s view of the War on Terror. Moreover, “ZD30” subtly presents President Obama and by extension the entire Democratic establishment and its supporters in the media as hindering the effort to find bin Laden by politicizing harsh interrogation techniques and striking a pose against them that was naive at best.

Since the film is based on unpublished interviews with primary sources, it is unusually difficult to fact-check. But as information about the reality behind the story emerges, so far “ZD30” is standing up factually and is consistent with relevant statements by former CIA Director Leon Panetta and lawmakers with access to classified information about the raid.

The left is alarmed. Glenn Greenwald, without even having seen the film, wrote a piece headlined, “Zero Dark Thirty: New Torture-Glorifying Film Wins Raves,” then finished up by comparing Bigelow to (of course) Hitler’s favorite director Leni Riefenstahl.

Does “ZD30” glorify torture? No, because no one is tortured in it. The worst procedure shown is waterboarding, and while this is an extremely unpleasant process (it’s not even easy to watch a movie simulation of it), it isn’t torture.

Any reasonable definition of torture must exclude procedures that sane people would undergo on a lark. Journalists such as Kaj Larsen and Christopher Hitchens have volunteered to be waterboarded in exchange for nothing more than a cocktail-party anecdote and some copy. (Indeed, Larsen paid $800 for the privilege.) A mixed-martial-arts trainer named Ed Clay volunteered to be waterboarded because he was upset about the general tenor of discussion during a Republican presidential debate and wanted to prove something or other.

Method actors are being waterboarded. Not only did “ZD30” star Jason Clarke volunteer to undergo the procedure for the role — though his character is the guy administering punishment, not taking it — even Denzel Washington says he consented to the procedure while preparing to make the silly thriller “Safe House.” It’s getting so you can’t attend a dinner party in Washington, New York or Beverly Hills without meeting someone who agreed to be waterboarded.

Would any of these people have agreed to undergo having their fingernails ripped out one by one? Would any have said, “I need a topic for my next column/something to talk about for my profile in Entertainment Weekly. Will someone please sever my little toe with a rusty butcher knife?”

The turning point of “ZD30” comes when a terrorist whose name once appeared on a wire transfer to one of the 9/11 attackers reveals to Maya and fellow spook Dan (Clarke) some of the other terrorists he has worked with. He gives up this information freely, over a casual lunch. So, harsh interrogation is unnecessary, right?

Wrong. In the opening scene of the film, the same prisoner is shown undergoing treatment the left keeps erroneously calling “torture.” The prisoner is sexually humiliated. He is kept awake for long periods of time (up to 96 hours) and strung in manacles. He is stuffed in a small box, he is led around on a dog leash and he is waterboarded.

Only after all of this has happened do we get to the lunch scene. When asked who he worked with, the al Qaeda financier answers, “Some guys.” Dan says that isn’t good enough and threatens to take him back to the interrogation room for more harsh treatment. Only now does the terrorist crack: He gives up three names, one of which, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, is new to Maya. Further, the terrorist reveals that Abu Ahmed was carrying a message from bin Laden.

Abu Ahmed turned out to be the alias of Ibrahim Said, the man who when followed led the CIA to the Abbottabad, Pakistan compound where the agency correctly surmised bin Laden was living.

To maintain, as left-wing writers are already doing, that an expense-account lunch, maybe with a nice Cotes du Rhone, is the way to get information from a hardened terrorist is an argument for the superior quality of the good cop/good cop method.

The soft treatment only works because of the nasty stuff. The guy eating lunch wants to stay at the table, badly, and knows what the alternative is.

Earlier, we’ve seen the same guy, under duress, giving random answers to a question about when the next attack is coming: “Monday! Tuesday! Friday!” The scene will excite leftists who keep saying that people under pressure are useless because they’ll say anything.

Nonsense. The point of interrogation is to obtain checkable information that can be pieced together with the rest of the puzzle, not to stake a case on what one prisoner says. When the terrorist says he doesn’t know Abu Ahmed’s real name, the spies believe him because they can sense that he’s been broken. He’s no longer in the mood to play games.

Armed with the name of Abu Ahmed, Maya questions other terrorists, many of whom confirm that he exists and routinely carries dispatches from bin Laden. In the film’s second waterboarding scene, though, al Qaeda’s third-ranking officer, Abu Faraj, denies the Ahmed story and spins a false counter-narrative.

Again, the left will argue that the scene supports their fantasy that harsh interrogation is useless. But they aren’t listening closely to the scene in which Maya reasons that the only two things Abu Faraj lies about are bin Laden himself and Abu Ahmed. To her, this means that finding the courier is tantamount to finding bin Laden. So even this seeming dry well is actually a gusher.

Such subtleties escape Obama in the only scene in which he appears. It’s a clip from an actual “60 Minutes” interview in which he says primly that America doesn’t torture, won’t torture under his watch and needs to restore its moral standing in the world.

None of the CIA agents in the room responds in words, but to me the look on Chastain’s face is disbelief at Obama’s naivety. Certainly she isn’t happy, and it’s very much to Bigelow and Boal’s credit that no one in the CIA is ever shown playing to the cheap seats by moaning, “Oh God, what are we doing? This is so wrong! Somebody go to the press with all the evil stuff we’ve been up to!” CNN national-security analyst Peter Bergen wrote, “In the film, Obama’s opposition to torture comes off as wrongheaded and prissy.”

The CIA chief in Islmabad (played by Kyle Chandler of “Friday Night Lights”) is shown screaming, “Abu Ghraib and Gitmo f – – – d us.” That isn’t exactly correct. The CIA was hampered not so much by what happened at the two prisons but by hysterical and hypocritical coverage by media outlets determined to bring down George W. Bush and promote Obama (who to this day gets a virtual free pass when he, for instance, kills an unarmed American 16-year-old, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, on a foreign battlefield, as though this is more forgivable than putting a dog leash on a known terrorist).

The upshot of the “60 Minutes” clip is that Maya and the CIA are presented with a new ticking clock. They now must work against a countdown to the faux-moral posturing of an incoming president who will be severely restricting their ability to obtain information.

Liberals are protesting that Bigelow has rewritten history to make waterboarding look like it played a bigger role than it did in Bin Laden’s killing, but her film is consistent with Panetta’s carefully parsed statement that “no detainee in CIA custody revealed the facilitator/courier’s full true name or specific whereabouts.”

Moreover, the film also shows that Abu Ahmed already had a CIA file when the detainee revealed his name, which is consistent with another Panetta statement that the courier’s alias was not initially revealed by someone in custody. The problem the film shows is that the Ahmed file had been forgotten. The harsh interrogation, in the film, brings a dead end back to life.

It’s amusing to observe liberal film critics getting discombobulated as they try to reconcile the film’s evident strengths, and its message, with their own discomfort with an America-first narrative and their belief that such stories are for cretins.

New York magazine’s lively critic David Edelstein, for instance, calls the movie “The most neutral-seeming ‘America, F–k Yeah!’ picture ever made. In its narrative arc, it is barely distinct from a boneheaded right-wing revenge picture.” Also he calls it a “borderline fascistic” and “unholy” film that “borders on the politically and morally reprehensible” — even as he endorses what it depicts and calls it the best picture of the year. He calls the opening interrogation scene “unpleasant but not unwelcome” (so is he calling himself a fascist?) and goes on to aver that, “To paraphrase Dick Cheney, you sometimes have to go to the dark side.”

Edelstein once called Cheney “so much scarier than Darth Vader,” “entrenched in evil and slime” and said, “there’s no way to account for him on a terrestrial level.” One movie changed his mind and put him on the pro side of the evil-slime debate?

Bigelow, unlike lesser filmmakers, is dogged about placing CIA practices in their proper context. Maya is twice nearly killed by terrorists, a friend is blown to bits during a meeting with a supposed al Qaeda turncoat and “ZD30” is interspersed with clips from such grim events as the 2005 terror bombing in London and the attempted 2010 Times Square bombing that the media has been content to mostly treat as a joke.

Liberal hand-wringers dismiss all this because they live in a fairy tale of their own creation in which there is always a good, just and fair way to resolve problems and nobody need lose any sleep over anything. In reality, as “ZD30” shows with devastating vividness, we are frequently presented only with bad choices and worse choices.