The plot behind the plot of Zero Dark Thirty just gets better and better.
From the moment it premiered in 2012, the film by Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal about the hunt for Osama bin Laden has been criticized as pro-torture propaganda. According to its many detractors, the film embraced the discredited notion that torture by CIA interrogators made Al Qaeda members talk about the whereabouts of their leader. It subsequently was revealed that Bigelow and Boal had received an unusual amount of access to CIA officials who had a keen interest in peddling the virtues of waterboarding, and this spawned a cottage industry of investigations and articles.
Vice News has added to the spicy pile with a 5,000-word article by Jason Leopold and Ky Henderson that draws on more than 100 pages of internal CIA documents released through the Freedom of Information Act. According to the documents, at least 10 CIA officers met Bigelow and Boal at the agency’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia, as well as at hotels and restaurants in Washington D.C. and Los Angeles. In addition, the CIA director at the time, Leon Panetta, met Bigelow at a dinner in Washington and, soon after that, shared a table with her and Boal at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner. It also turns out that Boal read his script over the phone to CIA public affairs officials on four separate days in the fall of 2011.
But the biggest takeaway from these documents is that even as the CIA turned Bigelow and Boal into its willing propagandists, the filmmakers were turning the CIA into star-gazing dupes; the seduction went both ways. Bigelow and Boal emerge in these documents as excellent co-opters of the nation’s toughest spies — and it didn’t take much for them to do that.
Bigelow and Boal visited CIA headquarters (an officer recalled having to cover up classified material on one occasion), but the meetings soon moved off campus to “avoid jealousy” about who was getting “face time” with the famous duo, according to the CIA documents obtained by Vice. For instance, one CIA officer met Boal at his suite in the luxury Jefferson Hotel in Washington D.C. and dined with him at the hotel as well as at a nearby restaurant, Citronelle, where a slab of ribeye cost $39. Not long afterwards, Bigelow met that same officer in her accommodations at the Ritz-Carlton in Georgetown.
The seduction was bi-coastal. A CIA officer met Boal in Hollywood for a meal and then drove to a beach house in Malibu to talk with Bigelow. Boal gave the officer a bottle of Tequila and boasted it was worth “several hundred dollars” (although when someone at the CIA checked, the highest listed price was $169.99). The officer who had met Boal at the Jefferson Hotel also had dinner with him and Bigelow at the members-only Soho House in L.A. and later told investigators she had “developed a friendship” with the filmmakers. It had not been terribly expensive for Bigelow and Boal to develop these friendships, however — Bigelow had given the officer a set of what the director described as “black Tahitian pearl earrings” that, it turned out, were painted black and were so cheap they weren’t worth the cost of an appraisal.
The documents show that auditors at the CIA referred the matter to the Department of Justice for possible criminal action against Boal and Bigelow for bribing public officials. Prosecutors took no action. To date, Zero Dark Thirty has earned more than $130 million in worldwide ticket sales.
Read also:
The CIA and the Myths of the Bin Laden Raid
Don’t Trust Zero Dark Thirty
Zero Dark Thirty and Why It’s So Important to Rebut Claims That Torture Works
Zero Dark Thirty: CIA hagiography, pernicious propaganda
Photo caption: Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal, by Rajnish Katyal/Hindustan Times via Getty Images.
The movie was full of flaws; among the many; Kathryn shows the people of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa speaking Urdu-language nearby the compound (where OBL was supposed to be hiding), as a matter of fact, the regional language of that area is Pashto (Urdu though national language of Pakistan, is not a native language of the majority of people – each four provinces have their regional languages ‘Sindhi, Punjabi, Pashto, Balochi, Hindko, Siraiki etc).
How easy it was to dazzle and earn the trust of these officials–in exactly the same way they would be recruited by a foreign intelligence agency. What kind of people are being employed there?
Shouldn’t the nation’s best and highest-ranking spies be a little harder to recruit than this? Especially, given how much training they’ve surely had counter-espionage and in using these same kinds of tactics to recruit people from other agencies and walks of life.
I would hope that they’d be a little better equipped to handle this kind of starry-eyed nonsense.
Hollywood perfected propaganda and manipulation before the CIA even existed in its current form. And it was the media, of course, which contributed a great deal towards making people willing to sacrifice things they took for granted in order to help supply the troops of WW2.
But the current crop of spies, it seems, grew up on Hollywood ideas of what spies are in an environment saturated by mass media and (now) social media. I find that a troubling trend and the need to fictionalise events even more troubling.
Never liked LA or DC. Politics and theatre are feeling more and more like the same industry.
“American Sniper” left me with a similar feeling, albeit of a different brand. A lot of Americans get their “history lessons” from Netflix. Is it any wonder they get their aspirations and ideals there too?
CIA, private tool of the Bush family amongst others.
CIA has never answered to the US government, and it still doesn’t
The purpose of the CIA is to discover new countries for the US to invade. So how were they seduced by Hollywood into making torture porn? It may have been the fake earrings, but more likely it was the simple human desire to see oneself on the silver screen. The CIA had been planning this for a long time. It paid members of the American Psycho Association enormous sums to devise new, more photogenic, methods of torture. It then pitched these to Hollywood and signed on B&B.
So while I initially blamed Boal & Bigelow for corrupting the CIA, I’m now more ambivalent. Perhaps it’s a cultural thing, and the individual players are merely acting out scripts they don’t themselves understand. Also ZDT, while popular, was not enormously popular. Americans, on the whole, prefer to watch things being blown up, rather than scenes of torture. I think the CIA understands this, as they seem to have placed torture on the backburner for now. Currently their main role is finding targets in Yemen for Saudi Arabia to blow up. Boal & Bigelow are no doubt over there with a film crew right now.
re “black Tahitian pearl earrings”
Poor Peter Maass thinks the female CIA agent referred the “black Tahitian pearl earrings” gift (that, it turned out, were painted black and were so cheap they weren’t worth the cost of an appraisal) to the DoJ for ‘bribery’! Hahaha Peter … hell hath no fury like a CIA woman scorned!
*A legitimate case could be made the CIA is entitled to a fair cut of the $130 large, less production costs, imo.
Not to be a pedant but I thought a “large” was a thousand, not a million?
“Perhaps it’s a cultural thing, and the individual players are merely acting out scripts they don’t themselves understand.”
You have been writing well so I will give you a pass from your momentary lapse of reason sir.
Actually I was about to quote that block and say it was spot-on. See my comment above, if you care to, Benito.
Do people here really believe bin Laden was buried at sea? That story always seemed far too convenient to me. I’m picturing that either he is either entertaining himself with a secret hareem on one of the Bush estates, or else suffering American hospitality at some deep, dark base we never heard of. (Solely for poetic flourish, I’ll say that my imagination, unaided by even the most rudimentary research, is fixated on the thought of some vast and ancient secret drydock, hidden somewhere beneath Diego Garcia, once capable of hoisting nuclear submarines entirely out of the water, but which now receives any prisoner tossed into the ocean for their submarine taxi service to scoop up. That’s absurd, but not as absurd as burying bin Laden at sea without even getting good evidence of his death…)
This is what happened according to Seymour Hersh:
“The remains, including his head, which had only a few bullet holes in it, were thrown into a body bag and, during the helicopter flight back to Jalalabad, some body parts were tossed out over the Hindu Kush mountains – or so the Seals claimed.”
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n10/seymour-m-hersh/the-killing-of-osama-bin-laden
Should anyone (especially readers of TI) even believe that OBL was behind the attacks?
We have every reason in the world not to believe anything the gov. reports; never mind burial at sea proposition, question the entire story from the outset.
Architects and Engineers for 911 truth are doing this.
This Bigelow chick is such a hideous slag that she went on John Stewart’s show and fumbled out the phrase “well, our story was based on the available journalism at the time” – which was so obviously a lie that she could barely speak the sentence without sounding like a child who just got busted.
She and her husband are also Jewish, does this have anything to do with her obviously notoriously cheap skate attempts at bribing people? A $2 necklace and tequila which costs several times less than she said it did. Amazing, at least if you’re going to bribe someone and your worth 10’s of millions at the time, at least do it properly and don’t be such an obnoxious tightass.
What a despicable woman, imagine marrying or ending up with a detestable slag like her? God help us.
Jews? Cheap bribers? Slag? You are a little, hateful, fktard, aren’t ya.
Erx might well be a ‘little, hateful, fktard’ but they are a 100% accurate ‘little, hateful, fktard’. What’s your proposition?
The funny thing is that with the whole world submitting its fate to the trustworthiness of spies, they always seem to be cheap for those who know how to ask. Even total subversion of the very top men like Ames and Hansson happened for less than the rich “ordinary” people on TV spend on their houses. Apparently that price ratio trails all the way down to the smallest of favors.
Not that this excuses treason, but Hanssen sold secrets to pay for his kids’ Catholic school.
oh..and btw Boal, you look like a fucking dolt in those sunglasses. get a grip.
as for these scum sucking hollywood capitalists who chose to write and produce a fiction of such monumental bullshit.. lest you think your accomplishments are worthy of the rewards bestowed on your endeavors ..i tend to think at the least opportune moment..you will reap a reward of equal and opposite attraction.
quote”The documents show that auditors at the CIA referred the matter to the Department of Justice for possible criminal action against Boal and Bigelow for bribing public officials. Prosecutors took no action. To date, Zero Dark Thirty has earned more than $130 million in worldwide ticket sales.”unquote
vs Edward Snowden.
file under
great moments in absurd.
I fail to see how any thinking American could possibly believe anything out of Washington, D.C., or Hollywood?
Alfreda Bikowsky Silverstein, as we now know, sat on the damning information about the soon-to-be jihadi hijackers (or cutouts, depending on one’s informed POV) and we know today, thanks to the after-action reports from the US Congress, that the CIA, FBI and DIA should very well have known what was to take place, yet took no action.
Most disturbing! Are we to believe they are all complete and incompetent idiots?
If that is the case, then immediately after 9/11 the CIA, DIA, NSA and FBI should have been closed down and purged, but that never happened.
Certainly, when CIA’s Afghan station was blown up by a suicide bomber, who was “recruited” by a bunch of completely incompentent morons (he was a hardcore jihadi, but had been arrested by the police in either Syria or Lebanon, and was offered the choice to go to jail or work for the CIA, so of course he chose to penetrate the CIA, which was ENTIRELY PREDICTABLE, for god’s sakes!), who were late blown to smithereens by the hardcore jihadi they felt confident was a trusted asset — where do they scrape these people off of?
So while it is easy to believe everyone at the CIA, DIA, NSA, and FBI are incompetent and corrupt morons, chances are really that they are just corrupt, and employ morons at the lower echelons.
My my..Dear sgt_doom..
I suggest it would behoove you to search for Col. Fletcher Prouty. Then take a vacation and contemplate what you learned.
You’re being very unfair. They are quite adept at convincing an entire industry to destroy an enemy’s career and hound him (Gary Webb) to suicide if he threatens one of their revenue sources.
Sums it up.
Jason Leopold is a FOIA wizard. The information coming out of his tenacious efforts is amazing.
Ain’t that the truth!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Thank you Jason Leopold. If it were in my power, I would nominate you for the Nobel prize for Best in FOIA requests that showed the world what unmitigated liars, thieves, torturers, and murderers are the core of the United States government…as are every government…because..they are human.