How Accurate is the Movie "Zero Dark Thirty?"

I saw "Zero Dark Thirty" Wednesday night with Visalia Times-Delta Entertainment Editor James Ward.  You can see his review of the film here.  He asked me along to look into the movie's historical accuracy.  When investigating a movie like “Zero Dark Thirty,” which depicts secret operations like the hunt for Osama bin Laden and the mission that killed him, there are unavoidable problems from the historian’s point of view.  There are some sources, but not a great many, and not from many different perspectives.  The official records remain classified.  Also, personal and political controversies still swirl around some facets of the events, especially including the means by which information may have been gathered to piece together the master terrorist’s whereabouts.

The film moves like a story within a documentary.  Director Kathryn Bigelow measures time for the viewer by making references to world events, especially to some of the al-Qaeda terrorist operations that took place between the horrific attacks of September 11, 2001 and the killing of bin Laden on May 1, 2011.  These are all historically accurate in the dates and in the characterizations of what took place.  In the movie these include the al-Khobar massacre of 22 victims on May 29, 2004, the London bus and subway bombings that killed 52 on July 7, 2005, the truck bombing of the Islamabad, Pakistan Marriott Hotel that killed 54 on September 20, 2008, the suicide bombing that took eight CIA personnel at Camp Chapman in Afghanistan on December 30, 2009, and the attempted car bombing of Times Square, New York on May 1, 2010.       

The culminating raid on bin Laden’s compound in Abbotabad, Pakistan, is rendered with exacting detail and remarkable faithfulness to the accounts we have.  “Zero Dark Thirty” portrays the raid in real time, taking precisely eighteen minutes from helicopter touchdown to the shots that felled the al-Qaeda chief.  The sequence correctly shows the SEALS and their actions in bringing down first bin-Laden’s principal courier Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, Kuwaiti’s brother Abrar, Abrar’s wife Bushra, one of Bin Laden's sons, Khalid, and finally Osama bin Laden himself, in addition to wounding one of bin Laden’s wives, Amal al-Fatah. 

There are a few inaccuracies in the raid depiction.  In the real raid, after killing bin Laden the SEALS had twenty minutes to gather intelligence.  The movie gave them four.  The SEALS brought a Belgian Malamois dog named Cairo along to sniff for explosives; he was portrayed as a German shepherd in the film.  A fluent Pashto-speaking operative was part of the mission in case they needed to speak to the local Pakistanis.  The movie shows many locals approaching the compound during the raid, and the operative having to threaten to have the SEALS shoot them if they did not leave.  In reality, he wore a Pakistani Army cap, only a few neighbors came by to see what was going on, and he easily got them to leave by telling them a security operation was underway and to go home and turn off their lights.          

Certainly the most controversial part of “Zero Dark Thirty” is its depiction of the use of torture to get information from detainees at secret CIA sites, and the importance of that torture in obtaining the crucial information that enabled the movie’s agent Maya, played by Jessica Chastain, to locate bin Laden’s courier and have him tailed to his master’s hideout.  Most sources that have come out so far take issue with that view, though not all. 

Former CIA chief supervisor of interrogations Jose Rodriguez says, “No one was bloodied or beaten in the enhanced interrogation program which I supervised from 2002 to 2007,” and that “written authorization from Washington” was needed even to give a prisoner a slap across the face.  He says they did use sleep deprivation or “in rare cases, waterboarding,” which was discontinued in 2003.  Republican Senator John McCain and Democratic Senators Dianne Feinstein and Carl Levin, along with Leon Panetta, CIA Director from February 2009 to June 2011, strongly maintain that no information useful to the bin Laden operation was obtained by the enhanced techniques, including the identity of the courier. 

In opposition to that, former Bush Administration Attorney General Michael Mukasey has claimed that the waterboarding of al-Kaeda’s number three leader, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, (captured in 2003) provided information “that led to bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan.”  He says this even though it wasn't found until seven years later.

The historian has to take special care to reserve judgment in the case of sources who may be trying to justify controversial political positions in their recounting of events.  Though the preponderance of those who have spoken so far tends to discredit the torture depictions of the film, the definitive verdict may have to await the declassification of the relevant documents.  That, of course, might not be for several years.  

Obama Masters Foreign Policy

The recent successful end of the rebellion in Libya marks another milestone in President Barack Obama's conduct of foreign policy.  This latest in a remarkable string of successes is all the more striking given the president's lack of international or defense credentials when he ran for office.  It says a lot about his basic outlook, validating a measured and principled approach to the world in contrast to the wasteful, unprincipled and ultimately counterproductive methodology of his predecessor in office. While Obama has certainly shown no aversion to the use of force when he considers it necessary, he has consistently shown an astute capacity to tailor the scale of the action to the need at hand.

On his third day in office, Obama fulfilled campaign promises by signing executive orders ending torture and closing secret CIA prisons.  These actions were met with relief around the world. Juxtaposed with this was his order three months later to kill Somali pirates holding American merchant sea captain Richard Phillips hostage.  The lesson seemed to be that the U.S. could and would stand firm against criminal thuggery and extortion while upholding its traditional principles--that it was not an either/or proposition as the Bush-Cheney administration had contended.  Why not both?

President Obama followed this up with the first visionary appeal by an American president to the people of the Middle East on their own soil with his landmark Cairo Speech of June 4, 2009.  In it he spoke out against the allure of violence by stating, "So long as our relationship is defined by our differences, we will empower those who sow hatred rather than peace, and who promote conflict rather than cooperation that can help all of our people achieve justice and prosperity."  And in a passage that now sounds prophetic, he continued,

"But I do have an unyielding belief that all people yearn for certain things: the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed; confidence in the rule of law and the equal administration of justice; government that is transparent and doesn't steal from the people; the freedom to live as you choose.  Those are not just American ideas, they are human rights, and that is why we will support them everywhere.  Suppressing ideas never succeeds in making them go away...and we will welcome all elected, peaceful governments--provided they govern with respect for their people."

That these words were delivered in the Egypt of the corrupt and oppressive dictator Hosni Mubarak is not inconsequential.  To what extent these appeals contributed to later events may be revealed in  historical studies to come, but it cannot be denied that the American outreach Obama initiated in his early months culminated in the October 9, 2009 announcement that the new president had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace.  In the words of the Nobel Committee, "for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy, and cooperation between peoples...Obama has as president created a new climate in international politics."

This climate was revealed in the Arab Spring of 2011, when the citizens of Tunisia and Egypt successfully agitated for freedom and democracy and ousted their authoritarian rulers.  Uprisings also took place in Libya, Syria and Bahrain.  Obama's adroit handling of the situation in Libya, focused on air support and enlisting the contributions of allies, ultimately resulted in the overthrow of the odious regime of Moammar Ghaddafi without a single American casualty at a cost of about $1.5 billion: a clear delineation from how the Bush Administration went about regime change in Iraq.  There, U.S. boots on the ground resulted in American losses of 4,481 dead and 32,195 wounded at a financial price tag of $757.8 billion in direct costs and possibly $1.9 trillion, according to the Congressional Budget Office, including indirect costs.

Speaking of the inherited wars, Obama personally made the bold decision that killed Osama bin Laden in May despite potential diplomatic fallout with Pakistan, and also recently eliminated English-language Al-Qaeda recruiter Anwar al Awlaki in Yemen.  His stepped-up use of drone attacks has decimated the terror group's leadership in Pakistan.  Meanwhile, all American forces are scheduled to be out of Iraq by the end of this year and Afghanistan by 2014. The Obama scalpel has proven to be a far more effective and economical strategy than the Bush-Cheney bludgeon.  While they excelled at braggadocio and posturing, Obama quietly shows good judgment and gets results.  The contrast could not be more refreshing nor more helpful to America's image and interests. 

The End of Osama Bin Laden

Osama Bin Laden died on May 1, 2011, shot twice by a U.S. Navy SEAL at his hideout in Abbottabad, Pakistan. This is the way we all expected his end would come, avenged by crack American special ops forces. One thing that particularly gratifies me is the timing of Bin Laden's demise, for he lived just long enough to see proof of the failure and futility of his life's work.

Like most fanatics, the al-Qaeda founder's ideology and appeal were built on intolerance and hatred. In his case, this meant intolerance of any deviation from his medieval views on religion and society and hatred of all who failed to share those views.

If the Muslim world had problems they were the result of scapegoats and bogeymen, especially Westerners in general and Americans in particular. Just how the indiscriminate murder of these imagined enemies would in any way improve the lives of Muslim people was never fully explained or even thought through. But then it never is, any more than Hitler's hatred of Jews, Stalin's paranoia of kulaks or Ottoman antipathy to Armenians made any rational sense. It was about focusing disaffection on the other, the outsider, to create unity in fear and fellowship in service to the sinister.

This spring Bin Laden must have watched in dejection as a wave of revolution spread across the Middle East. Revolution was what he was always fomenting, but these popular upheavals for freedom, rights and democracy appealed to hope, not fear. Unlike his vision, they embraced the future, not a barbaric past of whippings, beheadings and inhuman subjugation of women.

And unlike his record of carnage and destruction, these movements were actually about building
something. Marchers throughout the Muslim world were demonstrating people power in the service of uplifting the human spirit rather than chaining it, following in the footsteps of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, rejecting Bin Laden's path of chaos and blood. He lived just long enough to see his message eclipsed, his means repudiated and his ethos supplanted.

Troopers entered his bedroom and the criminal's final scene unfolded. But by then the plot had been completed. Whether he realized it or not, time had passed him by. He had already become what men like him despise most: Osama Bin Laden had become irrelevant.