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Vice President Dick Cheney
In Zero-Dark-Thirty, as in real life, the torture-hounds at CIA never come to their senses. The Vice President, Dick Cheney, had come out to CIA headquarters repeatedly to make sure that his suggestions were carried out. And so it happened.
It is only in 2010, after President Obama has shut down the torture system, that the Hunt For bin Laden project got fresh members and finally made substantial progress at tracking down the principal courier known as “Abu Ahmed” and then Usama bin Laden.
The hunt for UBL had been crippled by Vice President Richard Cheney’s interference from the start. Zero-Dark-Thirty does not depict Cheney’s actions. Still, we know that he made certain that the team focused to using torture to pry operational intel out of captured Al Qaeda jihadists. With ZDT carrying official sanction from CIA top management there can be no doubt that the team had made little progress and then ran into a brick wall at the end of 2009.
– Al Qaeda communicated using aliases, not family names. These aliases prevented direct identifications. The team failed at finding “the Disappeared.”
Same time, they were targeted personally for counterattacks from Al Qaeda. Seven were killed by a suicide-bomber at Camp Chapman on December 30th, 2009.
Without ZDT we would face substantial barriers to understand what happened:
– How would we get a CIA-approved/vetted/cross-checked history that depicts the CIA torture ?
– What were the impacts of torture on the other components of the hunt for UBL ??? Why would CIA document any part of it?
The both of these questions are solved in spades by Zero-Dark-Thirty.
Let us be clear: the acting in ZDT conveys the full extent to which the Hunt For UBL crew believed in torture.
Despite their attitudes, facts are stubborn things.
Katherine Bigelow’s direction and, particularly, Mark Boal’s screenplay depict how getting the team away from torture in 2009 led directly to recovering the identity of UBL’s prime courier in 2010.
I say “recover,” not “discover.”
Moroccan anti-terrorism papers with the family identity of UBL’s courier “Abu Ahmed” had been left in a banker’s box unread since 2002/2003.
Consider this off-camera to ZDT (like Cheney): CIA’s torture-hounds got so lost with their sadistic duties that no one carried out Standard Procedures for data entry and computer support. They never asked for help. Nothing was put on computer.
Can’t ask for much when you’ve got blood stains on your apron.
If Obama hadn’t shut down torture in 2009, CIA might never have reopened that Moroccan gold mine. Odds on, UBL would still be directing Al Qaeda to attack American targets. Seal Team 6 would not have returned on May 2, 2011, with a ton of hard drives, papers, notes, and rolodex from UBL’s office.
ZDT not only depicts history. ZDT is history.
Dick Cheney’s principal advisers were the other members of the NeoCon group recruited by Condi Rice, called “The Vulcans” after an iron statue in her home town Birmingham, Alabama. We call them NeoCons. They insisted on following procedures developed in the IP conflict on the I side.
Torture became the focus of the CIA’s Al Qaeda and Hunt For UBL program. People were recruited and assigned the top jobs based on their usefulness for extracting and applying information from torture.
The team was selected with a binary filter: support torture and you’re in; refuse to accept it with enthusiasm and you’re out.
The script from ZDT gives us a clear look at CIA’s torture-boys. ZDT shows each nugget of information that they extracted. They go years doing this and they get nowhere. Really nowhere either for getting UBL or for knocking out Al Qaeda. Killing an Al Qaeda “# 3″ is useless where CIA’s torture antics recruit another 10,000 kids for them.
They tear flesh from bone from 2002 right through 2009. They repeat their methods, push their obsession with torture, adopt stubbornness. Also, based on ZDT as the CIA retelling of events, they maintain a flat/unwilling ignorance of modern spy tools.
They obstruct by inflicting their own project boundaries on the CIA system — necessitated by torture. They hide away critical information resources. They make it all but impossible to apply research tools. This is the legacy of torture:
CHENEY’S FOLLY
1. 9/11 happens and foreign intel services make excellent copies of their paper files on Al Qaeda. They dump these many banker’s boxes of paper on CIA.
2. Apparently, from other sources, during 2002, there was a read-through of this material. The read-through looked for ties to the 19 suicide hijackers, to bin Laden, and to the same-pattern Air France 8969 attempt at suicide-hijacking in 1994. The hunt for bin Laden was not yet a separate agency project with assigned personnel.
3. We know from other sources including his own statements that Vice President Richard Cheney took an active interest in seeing that prisoners were tortured to extract information. He liked waterboarding. He demanded details to assure that recommendations he had forwarded were being followed. By 2003, the main Hunt For UBL team is assembled and up-and-operating in Pakistan with full control of project resources. The team might as well have been hand-picked by Dick Cheney.
4. ZDT kicks off in its first frames showing a typical CIA torture session. Between using sleep deprivation and beating the crap out of people, names were extracted. Those names were nom de guerre Al Qaeda nicknames and aliases. Only rarely did they get the actual family names as you would see on a birth certificate. The family birth names were not used inside Al Qaeda. Where the CIA’s UBL project had photographs of the target individuals, they were able to piece things together from these torture-forced crumbs.
5. Same time, in 2003, the team took custody of the vast resource of anti-terrorism material that was sitting in those hundreds of banker’s boxes.
6. For 7 years they sit on it. Intel 101, routine, dog work… is not done.
– No work is done to flesh out or to correct the material where the inevitable conflicts are found.
– No work is done to correlate information on known terrorist identities as the info is developed from the dozens of foreign sources.
– Not one index is built.
– No transcription is performed.
– No translation is done. No summaries.
– No data entry to the computer database system at Langley is done. This omission proves critical.
– No work is done to build an appropriate document tracking structure or to implement linguistic drivers in useful dialects to enable “live” search-team support with linguistic-search-engine-tools.
– No request for technical assistance is entered to facilitate getting computer support for the project.
– For no reason that makes sense to me, the banker’s boxes are moved to Pakistan. This is about as far as you can get from support services.
– They never, ever do data entry. The banker’s box documents never get as far as a local system running MS Access.
7. Torture produces minimal information. The name “Abu Ahmed” — a nom de guerre — comes up repeatedly. Everyone who dealt with UBL met him at one time or another. This man, “Abu Ahmed,” is the prime courier to UBL and tracking him down is the route that leads to UBL’s fortress-house in Abottabad, Pakistan.
No stretch: we can assume that a very commonly known name would have surfaced with traditional interrogation techniques. Simple bribery and special favors for the subject’s families tend to work. FBI SA’s familiar with the early stages of interrogation — before Cheney’s Folly set in — found it relatively easy to establish useful relationships.
8. The banker’s boxes had “Abu Ahmed” in open view. Right person. Right country. Connections with his brothers. Everything you could ask for. This is made perfectly clear in the ZDT script in the 2010 scene. The banker’s boxes from Moroccan intelligence provided his full nom de guerre with extensions and his family name “Ibrahim Sayeed” and his brothers, including a brother “Habib” who had been killed in Afghanistan.
Instead of having this information on the computer in 2002 or 2003, readily available, Abu Ahmed / Ibrahim Sayeed only comes up in 2010 when an amazingly, shockingly diligent non-torture-hound researcher digs in and rereads the North African copy files.
This comes after losing 7 fucking years.
We lost 7 years. The foreign intel did not specify this man as a “courier.” But if you had put 20 people on it and looked for all the people who had face time with UBL, he makes the list inside a month. That’s without doing one interrogation.
The torture-hounds went for 7 years treating the banker’s boxes the way the Ark of the Covenant gets treated at the end of Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. ZDT makes this stunningly clear.
At the same time CIA torture-hounds gave us Abu Ghraib. A black eye with Muslims that will go down through the ages.
Problems For Reviewers
Audiences and reviewers have been bludgeoned by the time the story gets to the critical scene from 2010.
– First section of ZDT goes from one torture scene to the next. They bleed, they puke, they do through sleep deprivation. You know that some of them die.
– Second section, things turn against the CIA team. The main “Maya” character — coming out of her apartment in the morning — is attacked by an Al Qaeda team with machine guns. The head psychologist/torturer bails out. Then her best friend is one of 7 CIA people assassinated at Camp Chapman, December 30, 2009.
“Maya” goes into mourning and depression. This gets several scenes.
– Third section. Then and only then we get to a “Legally Blonde”-clone (sans chihuahua) popping up with a “Look what I found!” to present the Moroccan info on “Abu Ahmed.”
There is no set-up. A short discussion, where the audience is already slanted forward to the Abbottabad attack and seeing Seal Team 6 in simulated action.
And no way the audience is going to know what Support Services at Langley would have offered for a competently run Hunt For UBL team back in 2002/2003. You need hands-on experience using Oracle Text. (Or else read this article.)
– The fourth and fifth sections follow “Maya” back to Washington to campaign for approval and then the attack that kills Usama bin Laden.
That’s the deal. We get the evidence and we get next to no help doping it out.
Oracle
ZDT was produced by Megan Ellison. Financed out of pocket. Given every dollar of money that could be translated to value on the screen. Never hurried. Never pressured.
Her Dad, Larry Ellison, is the founder and CEO of Oracle Corporation. Maker of Oracle Text, among other things. The richest man in California. The single worst manager in the history of IT at suffering goddamned fools.
ZDT gives the torture-hounds at CIA everything they wanted. Every frame. Every example of waterboarding and beatings, every depiction of torture as it squeezes out slivers of information.
As they go year after year getting their crumbs.
And then something more. In 2010 we get to see what competent no-thought-of-torture dog work accomplished. And that is what gets to “Abu Ahmed”/ Ibrahim Sayeed.
Not the Dick Cheney bullshit about copying Israeli torture chambers. Not limiting yourself to the surface of Al Qaeda — the nicknames and nom de guerre chatter — but taking the time to dig through professional intelligence reports.
(No mention is made of modern support tools. That is for Oracle database people using O-Text and for DKOS readers.)
ZDT is not only about history. ZDT is history.
Until Megan Ellison brought us ZDT we had no unclassified verification that Cheney’s Folly had sabotaged the hunt for UBL. Now, it is there for everyone to see. Now, the Morocco analyst in 2010 is depicted in CIA-approved story telling as she walks up with her discovery — not messaging 2002 or 2003 computer image files — having to hand carry the original Moroccan documents to the “Maia” character after doing an individual 2010 search through those tens of thousands of pages in the banker’s boxes.
Seven CIA people were assassinated at Camp Chapman on December 30, 2009. It’s not a stretch to suppose that the Morocco analyst who found the courier “Abu Ahmed” in 2010 was a replacement for one of them.
How can CIA complain about ZDT ??? It is their product.
This new analyst in 2010 didn’t give a shit about torture, which President Obama had shut down. So she was able to do her job competently, even though it took her months to do what would have taken her 5 minutes and 15 seconds if she had had computer support. (Add 5 minutes to type in a SQL query with a CONTAINS clause to specify “Abu Ahmed” in English or in Arabic to the 15 seconds for actually running the query.)
A simple SQL query to an Oracle data and text warehouse with a CONTAINS argument would resemble this code:
SELECT
–document-tracking-system-key
–fact-table-identifiers
FROM
–hunt-for-UBL-text-warehouse
WHERE CONTAINS
(text,Abu-Ahmed-in-Arabic,1) >0 — أبو أحمد
ORDER BY
–score
Set up a document tracking system, do the set-up DBA work, get the data entry done to post the text from the banker’s box documents, scan in first-rate images of the pages, build CONTEXT indexes, implement index_set, then make sure that O-Text works as intended. From there this is a simple enough problem for Oracle users.
Living with Cheney’s Folly, torture, nothing happened.
God bless you, Megan. You too, Larry. You have given America some of the best evidence imaginable for keeping the torture-hounds well away from the intel business. They dearly suck at it.
ZDT demonstrates their helplessness until torture was removed.
We still have a democracy here, implying collective responsibility, so the torture-hounds have made our country look like monsters. That part is not going to change. Abu Ghraib and the hidden CIA torture prisons are in our history for ever. ZDT is a giant step in the right direction.
Photo by Gage Skidmore under Creative Commons License
38 Comments
Reviews on ZDT uniformly fail to understand the structure of what happens.
I am amazed at going through dozens of them and finding nothing even close to what should matter.
Maybe you have to know something on the technical side, going in to this movie. The reviewers are smart people and they all miss the critical scene and what the film is about with respect to torture.
Torture cost the team 7 years. That is as plain as daylight at a cloudless noon.
In other words, it was basic police work that solved the case — the sort of thing that happens when you treat the case not as an excuse to shoot or torture anything that moves, but as something requiring police work.
Remember how President Clinton made the key decision to treat the first attack on the WTC as a crime and not a casus belli? Because he treated it as a crime, police work was used to deal with it — and the perps were brought to justice in less than two years without anybody’s country being invaded, much less destroyed.
“It is only in 2010, after President Obama has shut down the torture system” you said at the start of the article.
While it is true that President Obama said that he shut down the Torture system, it is not true that he ever did it.
Remember Arab Spring in early 2011? Egypt and many other countries revolted when Wikileaks revealed that President Obama was still sending his victims to be Tortured by Suleiman in Egypt.
And just recently it was revealed that President Obama now sends his victims to Somalia for Torture. Obama’s puppet police force in Egypt stripped and Tortured a man in broad daylight two days ago.
Because that Torture was shown on TV, the US puppet regime in Egypt apologized, but they haven’t stopped Torturing there either.
Here is a 2012 video of Obama’s Al Qaeda Mercenaries in Libya Torturing Black Africans before Murdering them:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=t3gGqfgUNJU
The US never closed its Bagram Torture Facility, although Obama claimed that it has been turned over to the Afghans: Another prisoner was Tortured to death there a few days ago.
The US Kangaroo Court will next month conduct a Show Trial of prisoners whose only offense is that someone else was Tortured into saying that the defendants did it: In fact, the Obama Administration is relying on Torture more than ever.
Yes, Torture is unreliable at gaining evidence, but far-Right ideologues like Cheney and Obama carry it out anyway.
The above video shows Black Africans being forced to eat their flag, during the Obama’s Genocide against Black Libyans, after the overthrow.
Perhaps you heard about Obama’s Al Qaeda Terrorist Mercenaries in Syria who videotaped a child Torturing a man to death for them by beheading him.
http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/339168
Wow! Rec’d.
Per NYT:
Conservatives wanted studly stuff (war, torture, shock and awe) rather than careful methodical police work. It reminds me of an 11/11/05 editorial by Molly Ivins:
this is a great piece, I hope once your info is vetted it gets front page
Thanks, Tuff. The rave reviews of torture had convinced me that I did not need to burden myself with this movie. From what I’ve read your comment is correct: “Audiences and reviewers have been bludgeoned by the time the story gets to the critical scene from 2010.” I’ve never heard anything like your post.
I’ve seen a couple of counter reviews that took the reviewer to task for glorifying torture and it’s efficacy in intel; some responding with Molly Ivins piece (thanks wigwam), or others, and there are herds of others. I had the impression that the central theme of the movie was that torture finally got OBL; to which contention I would not add my price-of-a-ticket vote of approval.
How shall I convey the essence (if not the full text) of this post via email to some people I know. I mean I know the keystrokes, but I am not in the Facebook habit, and I certainly don’t want to violate anybody’s intellectual property rights.
We look like monsters because we are monsters. We have a mass murderer who was just reelected to our highest office with the enthusiastic support of the supposedly sane and decent part of the electorate. But back to the point, how many of the “torture-hounds” has Obama prosecuted? Compare that total to how many whistleblowers he’s prosecuted. If the latter number is higher than the former, then doesn’t that kinda imply that Obama is complicit in the Bush torture regime? Also, what normanb says; it ain’t over ’til it’s over, no matter what Obama says, and putting some actual high-ranking torturers in prison would be a good way to demonstrate that it’s really over.
Furthermore, are we still behaving like ‘getting’ bin Laden was some sort of major foreign policy coup? The man was a rank amateur compared to our genocidal technocrats (e.g. Kissinger, Rumsfeld, Albright, etc.), unless only white, Western victims count. He was supposedly stalked and butchered, as opposed to being apprehended and given the sort of day in court that we liberals claim everyone deserves, and that brings the truth to light.
Liberal /fail.
Of course, the “we” part was sarcastic. Don’t call me a liberal.
To Wit: From David Swanson’s piece on Rape as Collateral Damage at FDL today.
“We must keep our priorities straight as critics soften their complaints with the pro-torture and pro-murder movie Zero Dark Thirty in part because it was made by a woman.”
Very interesting. Thanks for the details. I’ll have to take your word for it, but what you posit is quite believable.
Look, I have no idea what’s what with Cheney, but my recollection is that a different Navy SEAL Team basically had ObL in their “sights” in Oct 2001, and then suddenly W called them off. If my memory serves, they were just about to get in the choppers and go and felt that they had pretty reliable evidence for where ObL was holed up. Then: nada.
IMO, the Bush Crime Syndicate did NOT want to “capture” ObL. Let’s remember that the Bush’s and the bin Laden’s go way back as BFF. Remember, too, that the bin Laden’s were the only ones who flew out of Team USA on 9/11/01 after the Twin Towers fell. The Bush Crime Syndicate most likely had some agreement with the bin Laden’s & the Saudi’s not to pursue ObL all that seriously. It was left up to Obama, not in their “Club,” to fulfill the “obligation” to “get” ObL (if, indeed, that is what happened in Abbotabad… ).
I think the Bush Crime Syndicate & their BFF in Saudi wanted a big fat old WAR, Inc for many reasons, and that’s what they got. If ObL had been captured right away, why then: no ability to march to WAR, Inc.
The torture was just collateral damage, as they say. Quite likely it thrilled Cheney no end to watch the torture porn videos that I’m sure were sent to him regularly. Of course, I have no proof, but what do you think? Why’d we do all that torture? What for? Everyone knows, pretty much, that it doesn’t work. In *theory* Team USA is the “good guy in the white hat,” who follows the Geneva Conventions, etc. So how in the hell do these azzholes come up with all the torture?? I can only imagine it’s because someone(s) LIKED the idea of it and LOVED watching it on video.
And yes, it still goes on. We’ve always been a bully, and we’ve always tortured. It’s never NOT happened, but I have a feeling that it’s never been on such a scale before. And why the US sheeple are so willing to *accept* it as “necessary and ok” is one of those mysteries. But then again, I don’t even own a tv, so you do the math.
I’m pretty sure that, no matter how good it might be, I will not see Zero Dark Thirty. Perhaps it does depict torture as at least uselss, but I think the hype is to push the notion that somehow torture works and is ok. No thanks.
Agree, will not see it but hope another movie is made with enough clear truth that even low information citizens will see we are the enemy of the good things we say we are because the guilty go free.
Exactly. Well-said.
Why did ZDT change the facts to insinuate torture provided the information to find OBL when that was not actually the case?
Why did ZDT not present any scenes in which intelligence people decried torture, as actually happened in actual life, instead of scenes in which intelligence people lamented that they could not do their jobs without it?
From everything I’ve read about it, ZDT seems to offer a rationale for torture.
No, no and no. The sources of every bit of “information” and every “fact” in this movie have vested interests in relating them, either truly or falsely or some combination of both. There is no way to reasonably believe any of it. For example, who believes that the U.S. ever stopped torturing people? Because proven liars say so? Shorter review: Far-sighted, wise President Obama YAAAY!!! Republicans boo-hissss!!!!!
I find it ironic that the CIA broke the law to destroy video evidence of torture, only to help put it on the silver screen in an Oscar-nominated film. What’s up with that?
Seriously, fascist Democrats are so much nicer than fascist Republicans.
Except that Obama has not shut this down at all. The whole secret CIA worldwide prison sites have never been sut down, and continue to operate. He has made no effort whatsoever to shut down any of the torture sites, including Guantanamo.
Furthermore, we have just seen the one hero and whistleblower for CIA Torture prosecuted and given a Jail sentence, while all of the people who were involved in Torture have been aggressively protected by Obama.
And Obama clearly supports the concepts of Military Tribunals, the CIA blacksites, and having no proper judicial process. Not only have these policies all been enthusiatically continued, they have been more deeply institutionalized then they were under the Cheney-Bush regime, and ‘legitimized‘ in the political landscape to the point where no politician even has the temerity to question them or oppose them anymore.
The Obama Legacy is to mainstream the policies of Dick Cheney, and criminalize any whistleblowers.
Is that the “law of unintended consequences”????
I really despise that dick Cheney.
I’ve noticed that too. But more in a “which foot would you like us to cut off” kind of way.
Don’t recollect hearing of the deal in October, but there was a group consisting of two Army Special Forces A-Teams, and two CIA operatives with a couple hundred Northern Alliance fighters that almost bagged ObL in the Tora Bora in December of 2001.
There were lots of rumors, just then, to the effect that ObL had upwards of 1,000 Taliban and Al-Qaeda fighters with him in this labyrinthine cave complex and so the US/Norther Alliance folks asked for the use of a battalion of US Army Rangers. The answer was no. They begged, “Anybody, any battalion of US infantry, the 10th Mountain is right here, how about them (OWTTE).” Still no. The excuses they said they were offered by the higher-ups make no sense to me.
… X 2 … well stated
… X 2
ObamaBush continued /is continuing doing Bush/Cheney WH policy choices while cloaked by O/D zealots who allow B.H.Obama deep / wide IOKIYAAD shielding.
B.H.Obama(DLC)(MIC)(Wall ST.)(AHIP)(PP Cut/Gut SS) being elected again in 2012 with substantial O/D zealot political blocking and abetting being done? No Shame Team D hack politics.
Just as I’ve never watched “Passion of the Christ” by Mel Gibson, I doubt I’ll ever watch Zero-Dark-Thirty by Megan Ellison. It’s not that I’m uninterested in the subject of each movie, it’s just that I’m not a violence fetishist. So, when I read the first reviews of Gibson’s movie and how the first 30 to 45 minutes were devoted to the scourging (torture) of Jesus Christ, with lots of blood and agony depicted, well, I wasn’t interested. And upon reading the reviews about Zero-Dark-Thirty, apparently the same pattern is in it, a sizable chunk of the movie devoted to torture, and torture, and more torture.
But I’m grateful to those with the stomach to watch both movies (just like I’m grateful to Media Matters to have the stomach to police Fox News). So, thank you TuffsNotEnuff. Your analysis and timeline related to Dick Cheney’s (and the neo-con’s) influence over the torture-agenda at the CIA is excellent.
Since you mentioned Megan Ellison, I found the following sentence (below) at her Wikipedia page.
> Ellison is currently developing a film based on “The Boy Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest,” an article about the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange by the departing executive editor of The New York Times, Bill Keller <
If this is true, and Bill Keller and his views/opinions is involved in a film about Julian Assange…it'll probably be even less credible and fact-based than ZDT.
You make an important point but one already made in more coherent form by Michael Moore. This post needs an editor. It is one of the worst pieces of writing to ever make the front page of FDL.
I think Moore pretty much jumped the shark defending ZDT.
Oh! And because the person ordering the torturing, and participating in the torturing, and in at least one instance, torturing someone to death is a woman–why, according to Moore, that makes this a feminist film. O happy day!
>
the film is propaganda – and ‘Megan’ is our very own Leni Riefensthal, and she, unlike Riefensthal, is a hack of a film maker.
torture does not work according to the American Military War College & violates both US and International law – and, it is morally repugnant to any sentient being – especially in this country filled to the teeth with self-described “Christians”
Obama renders, tortures and extra judicially kills both Americans and anyone else he damn well pleases daily (used to call it fascism)
is there anyone who actually believes the our lesser evil is not (ahem) evil?
what planet do you, Tuf dude, live on? time to put away the pom-pons, you are sounding a lot like a BushII apologist
Exactly.
Treating 9/11 as an excuse for permanent war is what led to Abu Ghraib. Cheney’s Folly also trashed the Hunt For UBL team, as outlined. End result: Al Qaeda established itself over a decade and has substantial recruitment momentum going forward. Helluva cost for those mistakes.
Keeping a clear head at the point where you reach the 2010 “Moroccan intel” scene will be quite the challenge. The movie also neglects to put in the new team manager, who was the “Maya” character’s new boss and the person who ordered reexamination of the banker’s boxes.
Maybe it will help that you need to answer this question along the way: why did Megan and Larry Ellison make this movie? And pay for it out of pocket? Why would they believe it would be worth a damn world of trouble to them?
You are most welcome. Considering your alias “The Oracle” and how this movie got to screen, I have to be pleased.
Which is sadly wrong by way of superficiality. Torture destroys the victims and it removes basic Police Work 101 logic from the minds of torturers — at least it does in Zero Dark Thirty.
The movie could not be clearer. It puts the conclusion in the mouth of the head of the Pakistan CIA post and in the mouth of the CIA director that they got nowhere at finding bin Laden.
It also shows exactly why Cheney’s Folly “lost” the courier’s identity for 7 years. How much more anti-torture could you be and make a movie about torture and getting UBL ?
ZDT does not do that. The 2010 scene with “Moroccan intel” shows exactly how the identity of this courier was “lost” for 7 years in the banker’s boxes.
Get over the reviews. They are written with no experience doing timelines. No experience at complex investigations.
As a guess, Leon Panetta personally learned what had happened with “losing” the banker’s boxes by way of the CIA media people reading the script. Imagine the shock. Letting this movie get made was Panetta’s only possible legal route to letting the American public know what happened — that Cheney’s Folly had let the leader of Al Q operate freely for 7 extra years.
James Gandolfini says that he played Panetta roughly in the film. So he called him afterward and apologized. Smart guy, Gandolfini. (Petraeus ??? The careerist? Why tell that one a thing?)
Also:
This puts Julian Assange front and center for the American public. One kicker is that the Craig-Mara installment of the “Dragon Tattoo” series will come out with the title “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest.”
There’s a lot more content in the second book. A likelihood of making more than the original $200-million worldwide.
So this Assange movie will get great coat tails to ride. Indeed, Assange gets tied to the Lisbeth Salander character, which is as good as it gets. So fo course we’ll see all manner of whining pseudo-PC web site postings…….