Ali Soufan Quoted: ‘Disturbing’ & ‘Misleading’

January 15, 2013

‘Disturbing’ & ‘Misleading’

The New York Review of Books
By: Steve Coll

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It is not unusual for filmmakers to try to inject authenticity into a movie’s first frames by flashing onscreen words such as “based on real events.” Yet the language chosen by the makers of Zero Dark Thirty to preface their film about events leading to the death of Osama bin Laden is distinctively journalistic: “Based on Firsthand Accounts of Actual Events.” As those words fade, “September 11, 2001” appears against a black screen and we hear genuine emergency calls made by victims of al-Qaeda’s attack on the World Trade Center. One caller describes flames spreading around her and says that she is “burning up”; she pleads against death and then her voice disappears. Before any actor speaks a single fictional line, then, Zero Dark Thirty makes two choices: it aligns its methods with those of journalists and historians, and it appropriates as drama what remains the most undigested trauma in American national life during…

There is no secret about this strain of dissent within the government about the CIA program. Not only FBI agents, but also some CIA officers expressed qualms about waterboarding and sleep deprivation, as has been described in detail by the former FBI agent Ali H. Soufan in his 2011 book, The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against al-Qaeda.3 Soufan recalls commiserating over the use of “enhanced techniques” with a CIA officer who tells him, “There are the Geneva Conventions on torture. It’s not worth losing myself for this.” Soufan also describes an argument he had with a CIA interrogator about whether torture can produce reliable information from hardened ideologues. When the agency interrogator declared that he would make an al-Qaeda prisoner “fully compliant,” Soufan replied, as he recalls it:

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These things won’t work on people committed to dying for their cause…. People like [him] are prepared to be tortured and severely beaten. They expect to be sodomized and to have family members raped in front of them! Do you really think stripping him naked and taking away his chair will make him cooperate?

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None of this sort of argument is available to viewers of Zero Dark Thirty. It would hardly have…

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To read the full article please click on the link below:http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/feb/07/disturbing-misleading-zero-dark-thirty/?pagination=false

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