On Prosecuting the Torturers

In the wake of the Senate report on torture by the CIA (and its contractors - leave it to we Americans to privatize our atrocities), there hasn't been a whole lot of ink spilled on what should be done to those who engaged in illegal behavior.   Generally that means prosecution, but should it?  There are at least a couple of arguments that it shouldn't, even if the folks are guilty as sin.

The first, and more persuasive argument, was set out by Anthony Romero, head of the ACLU* in the New York Times the day the report was released.  Although the ACLU has been in the forefront of trying to get all the details of our torture programs out in the open, he argues against prosecuting those involved (up to and including Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld).  It's not a matter of giving up - it's a more clever gambit:

with the impending release of the report from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, I have come to think that President Obama should issue pardons, after all — because it may be the only way to establish, once and for all, that torture is illegal.

* * *

Mr. Obama is not inclined to pursue prosecutions — no matter how great the outrage, at home or abroad, over the disclosures — because of the political fallout. He should therefore take ownership of this decision. He should acknowledge that the country’s most senior officials authorized conduct that violated fundamental laws, and compromised our standing in the world as well as our security. If the choice is between a tacit pardon and a formal one, a formal one is better. An explicit pardon would lay down a marker, signaling to those considering torture in the future that they could be prosecuted.

Problem is, I don't think pardons really work that way.  For one thing, I don't think one needs to formally "accept" a pardon for it to become effective, much less do so with conditions attached.  For another, I don't think accepting a pardon would concede that the conduct at issue was a crime.  

In fact, just the opposite could be true.  I might take a pardon precisely because I think my conduct wasn't criminal, in order to head off politically-motivated prosecutions in the future.  It would be no different than the West Memphis Three agreeing to enter an Alford plea to a lesser charge in order to be released from prison (and death row, for one guy), even though they maintain they're innocent.

So, while Romero gets some credit for creative thinking, I don't think handing out pardons would get him where he wants to go.

Eric Posner, on the other hand (writing over at Slate), has a much more disturbing take.  He argues that there should be no prosecutions because, well, in essence, politicians are untouchable:

But Obama’s best argument for letting matters rest is the principle against criminalizing politics. This is the idea that you don’t try to gain political advantage by prosecuting political opponents—as governments around the world do when authoritarian leaders seek to subvert democratic institutions. Of course, if a Republican senator takes bribes or murders his valet, the government should prosecute him. But those cases involve criminal activity that is unrelated to the public interest. When the president takes actions that he sincerely believes advance national security, and officials throughout the government participate for the same reason, then an effort to punish the behavior—unavoidably, a massive effort that could result in trials of hundreds of people—poses a real risk to democratic governance.

Obama’s problem is that if he can prosecute Republican officeholders for authorizing torture, then the next Republican president can prosecute Obama and his subordinates for the many questionable legal actions of the Obama administration—say, the drone strike that killed Anwar al-Awlaki and three other American citizens.

The full impact of Posner's reasoning is that no politician could ever be held accountable for a crime he or she commits, aside from something like garden-variety murder.  Crimes committed in the service of a political office can be committed with impunity, because of the danger of political justice.  I certainly agree that a series of bilateral criminal investigations done only for political motives would be bad for the country (although, honestly, how much worse?).  But that doesn't mean winning an election means immunity from wrongdoing just to avoid that fate.  Surely there's a line - doesn't sanctioning and carrying out a regime of torture that includes acts previously prosecuted as war crimes by this very country cross it?

One thing that both Romero and Posner say, and that I agree with completely, is that no prosecutions will actually happen. it's naive to think otherwise.  That doesn't mean we have to shrug and accept it or, much worse, justify it.

* Full disclosure - I am a card carrying member.

Friday Review: The Monuments Men

The story of the Monuments Men - a group of about 350 Allied soldiers who were tasked with safeguarding and liberating looted art during World War II - is fascinating and a part of the war that's frequently been overlooked.  That, thankfully, changed last year with the George Clooney flick, even though it didn't turn out to be the awards season champ it seemed designed to be.  The movie a fictionalized account of the story laid in the book by Robert Edsel.  For such an interesting story, it's a shame it doesn't get a better telling.

Edsel makes an admission right at the beginning of the book that doesn't bode well:

I have taken the liberty of creating dialogue for continuity, but in no instance does it concern matters of substance and in all cases it is based on extensive documentation.

I admire them for being up front about this, but it immediately calls into question what comes after.  More problematic, however, is that if the dialogue doesn't concern "matters of substance" then why include it at all?  In the end, the dialog doesn't add much drama or tension to the book, which is otherwise sorely lacking.  It's both an odd choice and a missed opportunity.

Perhaps one reason I'm particularly down on the dialogue is that in the Audible version, the reader tries to do most of them in accents and fails miserably.  I've rarely cringed while listening to an audiobook, but did so time after time with this one.  It was particularly jarring because early on when all the speakers were Americans, there didn't seem to be any accents at all (this changed, unfortunately).  The cliched French and German that came later, therefore, really grated on the ears.

Beyond that, part of the problem with the book is that the Monuments Men tend to blend together until it's hard to remember who's who.  They have very similar backgrounds and face the same kind of obstacles so that none of them really stand out.  In fact, the biggest help I had in keeping them separate in my head was to picture their counterparts in the movie (fictional characters based on actual people).

In fact, the two most memorable people in the book (aside from Hitler, Eisenhower, etc.) are ones that don't quite fit the "Monuments Men" label.  One was Rose Valland, a French woman who spent the war in the midst of Nazi Paris keeping track of plundered art, then became the key figure in tracking it down and recapturing it.  She, obviously, was not a man (nor American, which is the primary focus of the book and film).

The other is Harry Ettlinger, who was a man, but unlike the more sophisticated, educated, and high class art types who became Monuments Men, was just a private who wound up doing his part.  It's his back story that makes that part compelling.  Ettlinger was a Jew, born in Karlshrue and forced to flee before the war.  He was, we are told, the last person to have a bat mitzvah in that city's synagogue before it was destroyed.  That he returned to Germany an American GI, helping right the cultural wrong perpetrated by the Nazis (including a fulfilling personal mission) is the best part of the book.

The other problem is that, once things get going, the activities of the Monuments Men are pretty redundant.  During the initial periods after Allied landings in Italy and France, they are tasked with keeping valuable buildings and works from being carelessly destroyed.  Important, no doubt, but not that thrilling once we're past the initial instance.  Things pick up a bit once they're on the trial of looted art, but those trails mostly lead to a series of mines in Germany and Austria where the Germans stashed the loot.  The mere fact that untold treasures are stuffed down mines, much less the challenges of getting them out, are interesting but, again, become a bit redundant.

In the middle of this section comes an interesting, if not altogether relevant, diversion.  The most impressive of the salt-mine stashes was found in the Austrian town of Altaussee.  The Nazi governor of the area planned to blow the whole mine up, destroying all the looted artwork rather than let it fall into Allied hands (all based on an order from Hitler that may, or may not, have been rescinded and/or modified).  A group of locals managed to trick him into delaying the plan long enough for the Allies to arrive.  It's a neat story and, from Edsel's telling, one that's been untold in its true depth, for years.  However, it doesn't really have much to do with the Monuments Men, as they arrived after the drama was done.

But most of that is nitpicking.  What Edsel has done is to celebrate not just a group of people who did important (and often overlooked) work.  He notes just how unusual this focus on preserving and repatriating art was and what a worthy endeavor it was.  Armies just didn't do such things.

Nor do they much anymore.  Edsel wonders why we haven't had similar operations (at least in terms of scope) in future wars.  Sadly, I think it's pretty easy to figure out.  Edsel frequently refers to the Monuments Men's goal as no less than the salvation, not just of particular cultural artifacts, but of "our" culture in general.  He even goes so far as to call the Altaussee plot one of the great turning points of civilization.  So why, then, were there no Monuments Men units in Iraq or Vietnam or Korea?

Simple - those places aren't part of "our" culture.  The Nazis, after all, were still Europeans and thus part of a long heritage that extended to the United States.  Not so much some others. It's not for nothing that the Monuments Men effort was confined to Europe, with no mention of the Pacific theater.  Nor should it be lost that the genesis of the group that became the Monuments Men was concerns about protecting American art in case of invasion.  We care most about ourselves and those who remind us of ourselves (Bender was onto something), whether that is how it should be or not.

Edsel himself has an interesting story (according to Wikipedia).  He grew up in Texas and made his money in (what else) oil and gas drilling.  He sold out to Union Pacific in the 1990s and moved to Europe.  It was there he first became interested in the subject of the Nazis and art during the war.  He's done yeoman work to bring this issue to national attention and clearly cares deeply about it.  None of the criticisms of his writing should minimize that.

The Details
------------------------
The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History
by Robert M. Edsel, with Bret Witter
Published 2009

On Criticism of Islam

So, a few weeks ago, Bill Maher said this:

That stirred up a bit of shit, but the real deal came the next week, when Maher brought up the topic again, this time with Sam Harris and Ben Affleck in the free fire zone:

I like Bill, but I think he's on the wrong side of thing here.  Or, if he isn't, he's not being sufficiently specific in his criticism to convince me.

For one thing, he never actually names the "liberals" he's calling out or provides examples of the kinds of things to which he objects.  Without that, it's hard to tell whether he's right or wrong.  Reading between the lines, he might be talking about people who argue either that (1) it's important to distinguish radical Muslims from those more moderate and liberal ones and who stress the need to not paint an entire religion with a broad brush or (2) religion isn't really the root cause, or is one of many contributing causes, to the violence in Iraq and elsewhere.

I'm leaning toward the first, because Bill is fond of making broad sweeping comments, in this and all other areas.  Also, it's bolstered by something Harris said during the second segment:

There are hundreds of millions of Muslims who are nominal Muslims, who don't take the faith seriously, who don't want to kill apostates, who are horrified by ISIS.

This is an argument I see pop up with some regularity in the atheist blogosphere that really makes no sense.  I've hinted before that, as an atheist, I really don't have a say in who gets to claim the label of Muslim, Christian, Hindu or whatever.  It's enough to note that radically different people with apparently irreconcilable positions both claim the title and leave them to sort it out.  Thus, it comes off as awfully arrogant to claim that the non-lethal members of a religion are so in name only and really don't take their "faith seriously."

It's also stupefyingly bad politics.  Although there are some atheists who are intent on turning other people into atheists, most of us (I hope) are more interested in ensuring that the government stays a secular institution and that no religions dictates get enshrined into law.  In that quest we can count on a large number of Christians, Jews, and other religious folks who value church/state separation, for whatever reason.  It's beyond counterproductive to tell them they aren't "really" religious because they've signed on to a moderate form of a particular faith that lets them live in peace with their neighbors.  After all, that should be the goal.

Leading the push back against Bill and Sam (or coming to Affleck's rescue, if you like) is author Reza Aslan.  In a New York Times piece he makes an interesting point:

What both the believers and the critics often miss is that religion is often far more a matter of identity than it is a matter of beliefs and practices. The phrase 'I am a Muslim,' 'I am a Christian,' 'I am a Jew' and the like is, often, not so much a description of what a person believes or what rituals he or she follows, as a simple statement of identity, of how the speaker views her or his place in the world.

As a form of identity, religion is inextricable from all the other factors that make up a person’s self-understanding, like culture, ethnicity, nationality, gender and sexual orientation. What a member of a suburban megachurch in Texas calls Christianity may be radically different from what an impoverished coffee picker in the hills of Guatemala calls Christianity. The cultural practices of a Saudi Muslim, when it comes to the role of women in society, are largely irrelevant to a Muslim in a more secular society like Turkey or Indonesia. The differences between Tibetan Buddhists living in exile in India and militant Buddhist monks persecuting the Muslim minority known as the Rohingya, in neighboring Myanmar, has everything to do with the political cultures of those countries and almost nothing to do with Buddhism itself.

Azlan also argues that "scripture is meaningless without interpretation," which I think is his way of saying that no text, regardless of how explicit it appears, stands on its own.  Everything has to be interpreted, which says as much about the person doing the interpreting as it does the text itself.  Don't believe me?  Read courts taking opposite positions on the same statutory or Constitutional language - it happens all the time.

Which is not to say that Islam itself is off limits from criticism, nor are those who act in its name when they do horrific things.  Fareed Zakaria sums up the situation pretty well:

Islam has a problem today. The places that have trouble accommodating themselves to the modern world are disproportionately Muslim.

In 2013, of the top 10 groups that perpetrated terrorist attacks, seven were Muslim. Of the top 10 countries where terrorist attacks took place, seven were Muslim-majority. The Pew Research Center rates countries on the level of restrictions that governments impose on the free exercise of religion. Of the 24 most restrictive countries, 19 are Muslim-majority. Of the 21 countries that have laws against apostasy, all have Muslim majorities.

And that was before ISIS wrote proudly in its Enlglish language magazine (there is such a thing!) of its enslavement of Yazidis in Iraq.  Yet Zakaria still concludes that Bill and Sam are guilty of being too broad when talking about Islam.

If Bill's problem with liberals and Islam is the second one I laid out above - that they might tend to look deeper than just a "religion=bad" analysis, he's on even shakier ground.  It's easy to point to religious conflicts through history, ones where one faith battled another.  But it's hard to find ones that are really, deep down, about religion itself.

To use a non-Islam example, think of The Troubles that racked Ireland for so many decades.  On the surface, it was a sectarian struggle, between Catholics and Protestants.  Dig deeper, however, and it turns out that those were convenient labels for groups that were actually split between Irish republicans and British royalists.  They weren't fighting over the finer points of the Reformation or Transubstantiation, they were fighting about political control of Ireland.  As Azlan wrote, being "Catholic" or "Protestant" in the context of that struggle was more about a form of identity, not theological rigor.

Hell, even Richard Dawkins is softening a little bit as to whether ISIS and the like are really about religion or not.  If the Grand Poo-Bah Supreme Potentate of Atheism (tm) has come to that conclusion, surely Bill can't complain!

There's nothing wrong with criticism, either of a person or an idea.  However, broad criticism of entire groups of people does very little good in the end.  It doesn't help you understand the nuances of a situation or the deeper currents that may be driving it.  It doesn't help draw those to your cause who may think you're an arrogant dipwad for telling them what they believe.  It might feel good to blow off a little steam and feel superior for a while, but that doesn't get you very far.

Seeing The Great War

We're on the verge of a sad centennial. Late next month will mark the 100th anniversary of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian empire. That sparked a conflagration that stretched around the globe, killed millions, and earned the hopeful (but false) title of the War to End All Wars.

The In Focus feature of The Atlantic's blog - which should be a regular stop, it's really well done - is digging into the photographic history of World War I. It's begun a 10-part series covering the war, with a new part posting every Sunday.

This past Sunday was the second installment, which focused on the earlier years of the war on the Western Front. The images drive home the utter destruction of the first truly modern war:

That's what was left of a small town in France that changed hands countless times over four years (via the National Library of Scotland).   Go check out the rest and ponder what we, as a species, did to each other for four long years

As a postscript, here's a wonderful IQ song about a soldier who survived the war and returned decades later.  Powerful stuff.

We Asked For This

The reaction to last week’s revelations (courtesy of Glenn Greenwald) at the Guardian) of sweeping data gathering by the National Security Agency, the predominant reaction from the public has been one of outrage.* Even folks who otherwise fall on the “security” side of the security/civil liberties line stopped and asked if things had gotten a bit out of hand. But even the outrage is justifiable (and I think it is), should anybody really have been surprised by this?

Fourth Amendment expert and former NACDL President John Wesley Hall explains how, as distasteful as the NSA’s plans might be, they probably aren’t unconstitutional under current law:

All this data collection is perfectly legal under pre-Patriot Act law and compounded by it. In 1976, the Supreme Court held in Miller v. United States that it did not violate the Fourth Amendment for the government to gather information from bank records of a depositor under investigation. In 1979, the Court held in Smith v. Maryland that it did not violate the Fourth Amendment for the government to put a pen register on a telephone to record only the numbers being dialed because the telephone call wasn’t recorded. That was, after all, all technology allowed at the time. Think of the NSA as one huge pen register.

As for the Patriot Act, Hall notes that it:

became law without any critical thought, and it made it carte blanche for government to gather information about us. Couple this with the information technology available over the last decade and the ability to store Brontobytes of data, and that we see now was inevitable. I’m not the slightest bit surprised. Nobody keeping up is surprised.

Even beyond that, the primary bulwark keeping the government from searching people (and their stuff) willy nilly, the Fourth Amendment, has been slowly hacked away for decades. Well before 9/11 and the War on Terror, we as a society had largely ceded the protections against unreasonable search and seizure in the War on (Some People’s) Drugs. The quantum of evidence needed to search or seize someone has gradually gone down, while the only effective tool to punish breaches – the exclusionary rule – is on its death bed. In the grand tradition of “when they came for the [INSERT GROUP HERE] I did nothing,” society was largely OK with all this, as it only impacted “those people.” Who gives a shit about goddamn drugies, anyway?

Ironically it’s the drug angle that writer/producer David Simon (of The Wire, Treme, etc. fame) uses to explain why we shouldn’t really be all that freaked out about this (via):

Allow for a comparable example, dating to the early 1980s in a place called Baltimore, Maryland.

There, city detectives once began to suspect that major traffickers were using a combination of public pay phones and digital pagers to communicate their business. And they took their suspicions to a judge and obtained court orders — not to monitor any particular suspect, but to instead cull the dialed numbers from the thousands and thousands of calls made to and from certain city pay phones.

Think about it. There is certainly a public expectation of privacy when you pick up a pay phone on the streets of Baltimore, is there not? And certainly, the detectives knew that many, many Baltimoreans were using those pay phones for legitimate telephonic communication. Yet, a city judge had no problem allowing them to place dialed-number recorders on as many pay phones as they felt the need to monitor, knowing that every single number dialed to or from those phones would be captured. So authorized, detectives gleaned the numbers of digital pagers and they began monitoring the incoming digitized numbers on those pagers — even though they had yet to learn to whom those pagers belonged. The judges were okay with that, too, and signed another order allowing the suspect pagers to be “cloned” by detectives, even though in some cases the suspect in possession of the pager was not yet positively identified.

All of that — even in the less fevered, pre-Patriot Act days of yore — was entirely legal.

Simon stresses that, like the NSA program exposed in the Verizon order, they weren’t listening to calls, just getting the “metadata” (if the term was around back then). That information, he points out, is already generated without the NSA’s request and, increasingly, is going to be stored for some kind of future use by the private companies that produce it. To not utilize it for something as serious as trying to thwart terrorist attacks (or develop more traditional particularized individual suspicion) is silly.

I think Simon’s right that the only thing about the NSA program that’s different from his Reagan-era memory of Charm City is the scope of the information gathering, but, unlike him, that still bothers me. It’s possible to, at the same time, not be particularly surprised by something and yet still outraged. Furthermore, Simon appears to take Obama at his word when he says nobody’s listening to our phone calls.** There’s just no reason to believe that. As this piece at Slate points out, there’s a history of surveillance operations straying far afield from the legitimate, limited goals.

While the NSA’s programs are outrageous in and of themselves, what’s more outrageous is that they may be perfectly legal. They’re clearly authorized by statute and have been blessed by Congresspersons in the know. And, of course, they have the approval of a pair of presidential administrations from theoretically opposite parties. Furthermore, I don’t have any confidence that they violate the Fourth Amendment in its current emaciated form.

No, the real outrage is that we’ve let it come to this. For too many years we’ve traded liberty for security, from crime or from terrorism, on a bipartisan basis. If things have really gone too far for too many people, maybe we can start to roll things back. But I won’t hold my breath.

* Or maybe not. Via Orin Kerr at Volokh, a Washington Post poll found that only 41% of respondents think the NSA’s phone program is “unacceptable,” compared to 56% who find it “acceptable.” There appears to be the inevitable partisan gloss as well. We are so fucked.

** To be fair, in the comments he expresses more concern about the PSRIM internet surveillance program, which does appear to reach content, not just technical metadata.

Friday Review: Zero Dark Thirty

Let’s begin with the thought that no representation of a historical event can really accurately capture that event. Even first-hand news accounts based on interviews from people who just witnessed the event often get things wrong, either the minor details or broader strokes. Which is only to say that any movie, even a documentary, isn’t able to present “the truth,” but rather only one variant of it, a variant that’s molded for reasons of art and, sometimes, politics or propaganda.

When Zero Dark Thirty came out last year I wrote about the controversy swirling around of whether it justified torture as the means by which the United States learned the location of Osama bin Laden, ultimately leading to him being killed by Navy SEALs. On the one hand, it was an apologia for torture that shows an efficacy that isn’t borne out by the historical record. On the other, it’s a movie that, perhaps, is taking aim at broader themes. As I concluded:

Which is just to say, you really need to see the movie before you decide its morally horrific. Is there some reason to think that critics, who have actually seen it, just check their moral compasses at the door? Or is the film perhaps more nuanced and subtle than Bruni, et. al., are giving it credit for? Who knows? I suppose we common folk will need to wait until January to find out.

In the end, it’s best to judge for yourself.

So now that I’ve finally seen Zero Dark Thirty, I suppose it’s time to do some judging. Putting to one side Kathryn Biggelow’s ill-advised remark that the film is “journalistic,” I think most of the furor about the film was ill founded.

First and foremost, does the movie come out and say torture was effective in getting crucial info on bin Laden and thus allowing us to track him down? Sort of yes, sort of no. The real problem is that, for dramatic/streamlining purposes, the dozens of people questioned and, in some cases, tortured for information during the search are pretty much reduced to one guy, Ammar. We see him brutalized in multiple ways, during which he either provides no information or incorrect information (in one scene he feebly recites every day of the week as potential answers to try and avoid being crammed into a tight wooden box). Later, after an attack in Saudi Arabia, he’s treated to lunch and a little kindness (in addition to false information about the attack) and only then does he provide some relevant information.

Is Ammar’s story one of torture working in the end? After all, during their little lunch the chief interrogator tells Ammar that he can hurt him again, if he doesn’t cooperate. The threat of more brutality hangs over the conversation like a circling bird of prey. Or, alternately, is Ammar’s story one that shows how torture doesn’t work, since he only gives up important information after the torture stops? Honestly, it’s both.

If Ammar was a real person, a single identifiable individual, I’d say it shows that torture had been effective. The brutality he experienced is a bell that cannot be unrung. After all, the whole reason the bad cop/good cop dance works isn’t because the suspect wants to please the good cop, it’s because he wants to avoid further pissing off the bad cop. Once tortured, any further questioning while the threat (explicit or otherwise) remains is tainted, at least within the short time frame presented in the film.

But Ammar isn’t a real person. He’s a character in a fictionalized account of a real event, one that serves as a stand in for numerous detainees, if not damned near all of them. Dramatically, the distinction between what produces no information (torture) and what produces valuable information (kindness, or at least humane treatment) is stark and dramatically effective.

So, is it a movie that argues for the triumph of torture or not? Did Dick Cheney really love it? Ultimately, I think it works as a sort of Rorschach test for the viewer. There’s enough there for viewers looking for a pro-torture message in the film to find it, such as later repeated references to new limits on torture making the hunt for bin Laden more difficult. But there’s also enough there to read it as a statement on the ultimate futility of torture as a useful information gathering tool. There is never, to be fair, a full-throated moral objection to torture, however. It’s a purely utilitarian argument.

Personally, I see the film as a meta commentary on the United States reaction to 9/11 and our behavior during the War on Terror. In addition to being a stand-in for the person (or persons) who led the hunt for bin Laden, the main character Maya strikes me as a stand-in for the American people as well. She is spurred to action by 9/11, is uncomfortable with some of what that means, but ultimately she’s not willing to completely repudiate it. Her laser-like focus on bin Laden is contrasted with the world moving on around her, raising questions about the need to expend resources on the hunt. And, finally, when all is said and done, what has Maya really accomplished? She heads home, alone, in the back of an empty C-130 transport plane, to an uncertain future. The air of melancholy at the end of the film seems to me to be a giant question mark – like someone’s asking “was all of this worth it?”

Having said all that, is the movie any good? It’s not bad, but there isn’t much greatness in it. Most of the film is a slow, slogging procedural that’s only of interest because of the inciting crime and the target of the manhunt. There’s no real character development, things just move from point A to point B, efficiently and competently, but not very compellingly. The exception to the rule is the depiction of the raid on bin Laden’s compound. Rather than pump it up artificially to be the kind of loud, bright, fast action sequence we’re used to on the big screen, Bigelow lets it play out in real time. It’s a slow, methodical execution of a meticulously assembled plan. It’s all the more chilling for the cold efficiency of the SEALs in doing their thing.

Good art, at some level, is about confronting the audience with something they don’t want to see or think about. On that level, Zero Dark Thirty succeeds in spades. Whatever your ultimate takeaway from the film, it’ll make you think about what’s in it, think about it, and make you reconsider your own thoughts. That’s not a bad result, all things considered.

The Details
------------------------
Zero Dark Thirty
Released 2012
Written by Mark Boal
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow
Starring Jessica Chastain, Jason Clarke, Kyle Chandler, et. al.

Win the War By Deciding to Stop It

The climactic scene in War Games involves not the explosion of thousands of nuclear warheads, but a few games of tic-tac-toe. Followed, of course, by the playing out of several thousand possible scenarios for a nuclear war. In the end, after learning the futility of both pursuits, the supercomputer who brought the world to the brink of annihilation concludes that “sometimes the only winning move is not to play.” The corollary is that sometimes the game is so far lost that the only winning move is to stop playing it.

When it comes to the War on (Some People’s) Drugs, the Portuguese have learned that lesson. Sadly, here in the United States, we’re still plodding ahead, thinking the game can be won. Two stories that popped up while I was away really threw that difference into sharp relief.

The first was this story, from Wired, about how United States Marines are stepping up operations in Guatemala. They’re part of Operation Martillo, which goes well beyond the usual training and technical assistance US forces have provided to overseas drug warriors in the past:

The Marines’ share of the operation involves chasing drug traffickers with UH-1N Huey helicopters. The Marine contingent has four of the choppers, and the Marines are carrying weapons. ‘It’s not every day that you have 200-some Marines going to a country in Central and South America aside from conducting training exercises,’ Staff Sgt. Earnest Barnes, the public affairs chief for Marine Corps Forces South, tells Danger Room. Prior to the Marines’ deployment, there were only a ‘handful’ of Marines in the country, Barnes says.

The Marines are only authorized to fire in self defense (leaving the Guatemalans to proactively shoot the bad guys), but that doesn’t mean things always work out right:

On the night of May 11, Honduran troops along with Drug Enforcement Administration agents allegedly killed two civilians — possibly four according to local accounts — including a pregnant woman. According to a report released this month by the Center for Economic Policy and Research, Honduran troops and U.S. agents seized a boat on a river containing cocaine near the town of Ahuas, when another boat — containing civilians — rammed into the first boat in the darkness. DEA agents and Honduran troops circling in a helicopter then fired on the second boat. The U.S. has denied that any of its agents took part.

The DEA isn’t a military organization, but what the Ahuas shootings represented was a military approach to the drug war gone bad. A case of mistaken identity, sure, as the mayor of Ahuas said following the shootings. But it also reflects a danger of stopping drugs at the point of a gun.

The second paragraph there really nails it. The more like a real war you make something, the more often anybody who’s not on your team looks like the enemy. Which is not to say that the target of Operation Martillo, one of Central America’s violent cartels, are good guys who should be left alone. But it does suggest that there are better ways to deal with the problem than sending in the Marines.

Which brings us to Portugal. Ten years ago, the Portuguese decriminalized drugs and began treating addicts as a medical, rather than legal (and moral) problem. The results are in and it appears to be a roaring success (via):

’There is no doubt that the phenomenon of addiction is in decline in Portugal,’ said Joao Goulao, President of the Institute of Drugs and Drugs Addiction, a press conference to mark the 10th anniversary of the law.

The number of addicts considered ‘problematic’ -- those who repeatedly use ‘hard’ drugs and intravenous users -- had fallen by half since the early 1990s, when the figure was estimated at around 100,000 people, Goulao said.

Drug use in Portugal is generally lower than the rest of Europe. The change in the criminal law wasn’t the only factor, of course, but it’s a necessary precondition for dealing with the problem as a medical and social one, rather than a criminal one:

A law that became active on July 1, 2001 did not legalise drug use, but forced users caught with banned substances to appear in front of special addiction panels rather than in a criminal court.

* * *

Since then, government panels have recommended a response based largely on whether the individual is an occasional drug user or an addict.

Of the nearly 40,000 people currently being treated, ‘the vast majority of problematic users are today supported by a system that does not treat them as delinquents but as sick people,’ Goulao said.

As you can see, decriminalization isn’t the same thing and legalization. But it’s certainly a step in the right direction. Imagine a public policy that would lower the number of people actually addicted to drugs that would, at the same time, rescue the Fourth Amendment from its nearly fatal wounds at the altar of the Drug War. I hate the term “win/win,” but that comes pretty close, don’t you think.

We’ve fought the War on (Other People’s) Drugs for decades and are no closer to winning it. It’s time to change course, trying something different, and realize that the winning move, sometimes, is to stop playing the damned game.

The World Scoffs at Simple Solutions

I may be the one person on the Web who hasn’t watched the “Kony 2012” video, probably because I already knew who Jospeh Kony is and what his brutal (Christian – that gets left out a lot) militia has been up to over the decades. I’m not surprised that the video’s basic message – that Kony is a bad dude and something needs to be done with him – is resonating around the Web, given the horrible things he has done.

I’m also interested in the slowly building voices that are taking aim at the Kony 2012 project and the group that produced it, Invisible Children. A main critique is that the video distills what is a long-raging conflict with a complex history and distills it into a simple “good versus evil” narrative, complete with the heartstring plucking use of IC’s 5-year old son as a prop, which suggests a simple solution to the problem. Mark Kersten, writing in Salon, explains:

Many have said it is manipulative and patronizing. But the most problematic and potentially dangerous aspect of the film is what it doesn’t do, which is give an adequate understanding of the dilemmas and situation facing those who live in LRA-affected areas. Invisible Children’s smooth message brutally obfuscates key realities about the conflict and other real and less costly solutions, in both human life and monetary terms.

* * *

As many critics have pointed out, the crisis facing LRA-affected areas, which include northern Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Central African Republic, Sudan and South Sudan, is far more complex than the ‘KONY2012’ filmmakers portray. It is a conflict that reaches as far back as 1986, and one in which atrocities have been committed not only by the LRA but by the government of Uganda.

Or, as Alex Dewaal of the World Peace Foundation puts it:

In elevating Kony to a global celebrity, the embodiment of evil, and advocating a military solution, the campaign isn’t just simplifying, it is irresponsibly naive. ‘Big man’ style rulers – of which [Ugandan] President Yoweri Museveni [who is no saint himself] is one – prefer to dismiss their opponents as disturbed individuals, and like to short-cut civil politics by military action. The ‘let’s get the bad guy’ script is a problem, not a solution.

That’s important, given that the main action urged by IC is some kind of military intervention. But that’s been tried before, with bad results:

In 2002, following the U.S. declaration that the LRA was a terrorist organization, the Ugandan People’s Defence Force won the reluctant cooperation of Sudan and launched ‘Operation Iron Fist’ on both sides of the Uganda-Sudan border. It didn’t succeed. In 2008, after the LRA had relocated to north-eastern Congo and the adjoining areas of southern Sudan, a joint offensive by the armies of Uganda, Congo and South Sudan also failed. Another episode was a 2006 operation by special forces attached to the UN mission in Congo. Experts in jungle warfare, Guatemalan commandos were dispatched to the Garamba national park with the objective of executing the recently-unveiled ICC arrest warrant against Joseph Kony and senior commanders. The operation ended in disaster with the UN soldiers fatally shooting each other.

I’m very sympathetic to those criticisms. The world seldom breaks down into simple Manichean struggles of good guys versus bad guys. Simpleminded solutions often tend to make things worse, not better, or at least prolong the suffering. But I’m also sympathetic to IC and its desire to make Kony public enemy number one. He’s a religious nutcase who kills and enslaves people. There is no good there. That doesn’t make the situation in which he exists simple, however, nor does it point to a simple solution.

I’m less sympathetic to criticism like these (again, from Kersten’s Salon article):

While much of the criticism has taken a vitriolic character, some have tapped into larger debates about human rights activism in Africa and ‘[t]he White Man’s Burden.’ The Nigerian-American novelist and photographer Teju Cole, for example, argues that ‘[f]rom Sachs to Kristof to Invisible Children to TED, the fastest growth industry in the U.S. is the White Savior Industrial Complex.’ Writing in the Christian Science Monitor, Semha Araia, founder of the Diaspora African Women’s Network, noted that Invisible Children ‘must be willing to use their media to amplify African voices, not simply their own. This isn’t about them.’

Don’t get me wrong – I’m hip to the problems of culture imperialism. It’s just that I seem to remember decades of pleas for the West to do something in response to various crises in Africa, from Ethiopia to Rwanda to Sudan. Often the pleas are literally that – do something, anything – without any real specifics attached. So which is it – hands off and let the locals hash things out? Or swoop in and provide some assistance?

There must be a happy medium. I think Araia is perfectly right that, in the end, problems like Kony “isn’t about” the would-be saviors who come in from the outside. They’re about the locals who have lived (and died) with the problem for decades and will be there long after the spotlight shifts to a juicier atrocity. There’s a world of difference between providing valuable assistance to the locals that empowers them to find long-term solutions and just sending Steven Segal in to jump out of a C-130 and kill Kony with his bare hands while grateful locals grovel in thanks, after all.

Which, when it comes right down to it, is just another reason why simplicity really shouldn’t be the guide star for solving problems like this. History is messy. Local rivalries are complex and long standing. Viable solutions have to take all of that into account. They don’t always make for such compelling viewing or the most effective sound bites, unfortunately.

Spot the Terrorist!

The dystopian world of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil is beset by random blasts of violence, explosions laid at the feet of unnamed terrorists. It’s the terrorist threat that drives the world’s administration, one that includes a department of torture with the deliciously euphemistic label “Information Retrieval.” But the film never really shows you any actual terrorists. It’s even brought up in a discussion between the main character, Sam, and the woman of his dreams (literally):

JILL: Who is this war against, Sam?

SAM: Well, terrorists of course.

JILL: How many terrorists have you met? Actual terrorists?

SAM: Actual terrorists? Well...it's only my first day.

That line’s played for laughs, of course, but there’s an uncomfortable truth lurking there about how much of any “war on terror” is really a PR campaign by the state.

That idea flashed through my head when I read the sickening numbers compiled by the ACLU about the inmates confined at Guantanamo Bay (via). It looks like lots of people down there have never met an actual terrorist, either. Of the 779 people detained at Gitmo since 2002, a whopping 92% of them were never al Qaeda fighters. Maybe that’s because only 5% of them were actually captured by US troops in the field. The bulk of them (86%) were turned in for a bounty.

The other numbers are equally depressing (the number of men detained who the Government admits it can’t any allegations against but continue to detain anyway? 46). But that 92% says more about the “war on terror” than just about anything else could.

A War Movie Without the War

For years, I’ve seen ads for the play War Horse while I flipped through my New York Times on Sunday mornings. Never had a clue what it was about, but the imagery in the ads was striking. So I wasn’t surprised when I heard it was being made into a movie or that Stephen Spielberg was the one making it. After all, the man’s made a few war movies in his time.

Then, a few weeks ago, I saw an ad for the movie on TV, complete with excerpts from the obligatory John Williams score and a Christmas Day opening. Just based on what I saw, it involved a horse, a boy, and World War I. I turned to K and said, “a feel good Christmas-day movie about the cavalry in World War I? That’s an interesting choice.”

You see, World War I is where the cavalry went to die. Literally. The days of massed men on horseback were numbered as far back as the American Civil War, when smoothbore muskets gave way to rifled ones with greatly increased range and accuracy. By the time the First World War came around, the game was over.  Men on horseback were simply no match for machine guns. So how does one make a heartwarming movie in that milieu?

The answer for Spielberg was to ignore it. Seriously:

Despite stunning stagecraft that evokes the horror of war in general, War Horse keeps its focus narrowly on the boy-stallion relationship, saying little about the First World War itself. It sounds like the film treats the conflict in the same way. ‘I didn't pay a lot of attention to the first World War,’ Spielberg said in an interview earlier this month. ‘I didn’t know very much about it. And I also don’t consider War Horse to be a war movie. This is not one of my war movies. This is much more of a real story between the connections that sometimes animals achieve; the way animals can actually connect people together.’

To be fair to Spielberg, War Horse’s source material is a children’s book, so it’s not exactly the hard hitting meditation on the horrors of war those NYT ads suggested to me. It’s a boy-and-his-dog story (except the dog is a horse), not Full Metal Jacket. Nevertheless, it’s hard to call a move that takes place in the middle of a war zone and whose main characters are doing the fighting something other than a “war movie.”

None of which has anything to do with whether the movie is good or not, although at least one early review is not too kind. Kurt Loder called the experience of watching the film like:

being lowered into a vat of warm tears, there to remain for nearly two and a half freakin’ hours

and notes that the

movie so boldly old-fashioned that much of its true target demographic must be long dead, or nearly enough.

Ouch. Maybe I’ll pass on this one.

No No No - Just Stop, Please.

I know it's not a new thing to try and appropriate historical luminaries into arguments, but this is really beyond the pale (via).

If Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. were alive today, would he understand why the United States is at war?

Jeh C. Johnson, the Defense Department's general counsel, posed that question at today's Pentagon commemoration of King's legacy.

Johnson's answer, of course, is that MLK would be hunky dory with it, as counter intuitive as that might be (and contrary to what MLK actually said).  But if that wasn't bad enough, he tries to reason that:

if Dr. King were alive today, he would recognize that we live in a complicated world, and that our nation's military should not and cannot lay down its arms and leave the American people vulnerable to terrorist attack . . .

Note that he's saying this about a man who was perceived by many in the United States at the time as the period equivalent of a terrorist - a Communist - including by the Government! All that FBI surveillance of him wasn't so the Feds could make sure the historical record was complete, you know.

Look, we get it. We're bogged down in an unpopular and probably unwinnable war that has only been ratcheted up over the past couple of years (Nobel Peace Prizes notwithstanding). You need some PR boosts. Just do it on your own, OK? Don't rob the dead of their integrity while demonstrating that you have none of your own.