Torturing the Truth

RENDITION SHOULD be shown to all intelligence officers as a vital part of their training, former ASIS officer Warren Reed told me when I asked him for a professional assessment of the film. I have to admit I was surprised. Certainly John Le Carré novels have been used as textbooks for Britain’s MI6 courses: but books like The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Call from the Dead were based on real operations.

Still, on a first viewing Rendition seemed to me worthy but a little contrived. There is a terrorist bombing in an unnamed North African city. A senior CIA officer is killed. Anwar (Omar Metwally), an Egyptian with an American wife, Isabella (Reese Witherspoon), is “disappeared” by the CIA from his flight back to America. Interrogated, then hooded and manacled, he is sent to the country where the bombing took place. There Anwar is interrogated and tortured by Abasi (Yigal Naor), the secret police chief who was the real target of the bombing.

Isabella discovers from credit-card purchases of duty-free goods during the flight that Anwar, contrary to what she had been told by the airline, had been on the plane to America and must have been kidnapped. She contacts an old boyfriend (Peter Sarsgaard), now an aide to a powerful senator (Alan Arkin). He intervenes with the officer who authorised the “rendition”, played by a superbly chilling Meryl Streep, only to be told by his boss to “back off” when some tenuous evidence is just mentioned.

All very stylish with the inevitable confrontation scene between Witherspoon and Streep and some horrifying torture sequences, but did Anwar have to be quite so innocent and the government officials such repellent neo-cons? Or at least so I thought until I talked to Warren. Then I discovered that too many of the people picked up in this way were totally innocent and that director Gavin Hood and writer Kelley Sane appeared to have based the film on the Maher Arar case, where a Canadian citizen was kidnapped during a stopover in the USA, rendered to Syria where he was tortured into making a false confession, only to be cleared by the Canadian government of any involvement with terrorism. As for Meryl Streep’s character being repellent, she doesn’t come close to former Attorney-General Alberto Gonzalez when he gave evidence before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the Arar case. Her CIA officer is at least plausible; Gonzalez’s attempts to justify the indefensible seemed to be a caricature of a lying and evasive witness.

The main reason Warren Reed believes Rendition should be used to train intelligence officers is the film’s portrayal of Douglas Freeman (Jack Gyllenhaal), the CIA analyst who is forced to witness the torture. Certainly it is a fine performance, but Reed believes Hood and Sane’s treatment of the way Freeman comes to doubt both the morality and the effectiveness of Abasi’s interrogation goes to the heart of how intelligence services should function in a democracy. Torture is not just a disgusting crime, he insists, but also it rarely if ever produces good intelligence. Says Freeman:

In all the years you’ve been doing this, how often
can you say we’ve produced truly legitimate
intelligence? Once? Twice? Ten times? Give me a
pie chart; I love pie charts. Anything that outweighs
the fact that if you torture one person you create ten,
a hundred, a thousand new enemies.

Only last month Professor Philippe Sands made almost the same point to a Congressional hearing. In the 1970s Britain adopted so-called “aggressive interrogation” techniques against the IRA that were very similar to current US methods. It is now generally accepted by both Labour and Conservative that this use of torture prolonged the conflict by from ten to fifteen years, Sands told the Congress. One of Rendition’s sub-plots puts human faces on exactly this kind of situation. I don’t want to say too much about the detail because the unexpectedness of the resolution becomes virtually a moral discovery. But one of the film’s finest achievements is that Abasi, the Arab torturer, is not a monster but a tragic figure for whom we have a measure of sympathy—the old dichotomy between what a man is and what he does. In addition, while never glossing over the brutality of Muslim extremists the film also portrays how they have been created by corrupt regimes that employ all the methods of a police state to remain in power.

Rendition is a very accomplished political thriller with superb photography by Australian cinematographer Dion Beebe that for once employs low light levels with clarity and precision, especially in the horrifying torture sequences. Beebe also makes the most of the warm light of the Moroccan locations used to represent the unnamed North African country. But good as Rendition is as mainstream entertainment, I am compelled to agree with Warren Reed that it is much more than a spy movie—a morality play affirming the need for intelligence services to seek the truth, perhaps? If so it could not be more timely.

JUST HOW TIMELY is underscored by Alex Gibney’s Academy Awardwinning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side, broadcast here in October 2007 on SBS and again on May 6 this year. The film can be seen as providing the evidence for nearly all the dramatic inventions of Rendition. It begins with an account of the murder in American military custody of Dilawar, an Afghan taxi driver beaten to death by his interrogators. Gibney doesn’t attempt to re-enact any of this but he does use the autopsy photographs and, most disturbing of all, interviews with the interrogators. It is not that they are monsters, quite the reverse, they are appallingly normal. Wisely Gibney remains objective, juxtaposing their responses with the medical evidence and comments by the New York Times reporter who first broke the story.

This becomes the starting point for an exploration of the Bush administration’s unofficially/officially condoned torturing of suspects, sometimes with a wink and a nod, on other occasions by using legal opinions that attempted to rewrite the Constitution. Gibney even managed to get John Yoo, the author of some truly scarifying opinions, on camera. He was both sinister and ordinary— the banality of evil perhaps.

My first reaction to some of the clips was incredulity. Did Vice-President Cheney really say a week after 9/11, “We have to work the dark side”? And was George Bush serious when he tried to get around the wording of one of the key prohibitions of the Geneva Conventions by declaring “It’s so imprecise”? Two days exploring links on YouTube revealed that Bush officials, particularly on the issue of torture, have a seemingly endless repertoire of evasion and obfuscation. In one exchange with a New York Times reporter, White House spokesman Tony Snow (formerly of Fox News) became literally incomprehensible.

To his credit Gibney has quoted all the usual suspects at their most intelligible. Indeed the whole film is an impressively lucid unravelling of the convoluted process whereby the USA nearly turned itself into a police state. Not only are the interviews first-rate but there are new visuals on Abu Ghraib. Best of all is the director’s interview with his own father, Frank Gibney, who died in 2007. Gibney Senior had been an US Navy interrogator in the Second World War and tells his son that not only was this sort of behaviour forbidden, it would not have worked anyway. If you torture a man long enough, he will tell you anything to make you stop. If you then act on this information you are going on a fool’s errand.

The film has an Australian connection. It was part-commissioned by Ned Lander and Trevor Kennedy at SBS as one of the Why Democracy? series made up of ten documentaries to be screened by twenty-five broadcasters throughout the world. Predictably Taxi to the Dark Side has run into difficulties getting to air in America. According to the online Wikipedia, in June 2007 the Discovery Channel bought the broadcast rights. In February 2008 they announced they would never broadcast Taxi to the Dark Side because it was too controversial. HBO then bought the rights and announced it would be broadcast in September 2008, whereupon the Discovery Channel announced they were going broadcast the film in 2009 when, I suspect, they hope it will be safely irrelevant.

Thanks to Kathryn Hibbert at SBS I discovered there were two versions of Taxi to the Dark Side, a theatrical release that runs for about 101 minutes that won the Oscar, and a television version of about 97 minutes. (The television cut was shown on SBS last year, and the long version was screened last month.) One sequence that is not in the television version is an extract from the Fox Studio series 24, in which Kiefer Sutherland’s US government agent tortures a suspect of Middle Eastern appearance. Gibney quotes the scene to discredit the notorious ticking-bomb justification for torture, allowing his experts to point out that historically it has never happened. But it does occur quite often in the movies, and with monotonous regularity in 24. And of course Rupert Murdoch owns Fox and was until recently a staunch supporter of George Bush. Is there some footage on the cutting-room floor where Gibney connects the dots? We will have to wait for the DVD release of a director’s cut to find out whether the film-maker is going to hold Fox responsible for the 35 per cent who support torture that show up regularly in US polls.

Still, whatever version you see, Taxi to the Dark Side is a superb documentary with every assertion supported by solid evidence. There are no spurious re-enactments. Gibney simply recreates Dilawar’s last journey then uses the taxi as a metaphor for the Bush administration’s cruelty and immorality while the appalling narrative unfolds.

Throughout just about all the events described in the film Australia was a close ally of the United States. So did we “work the dark side”? The available evidence indicates we did not. But Australia did come perilously close. Taxi to the Dark Side includes evidence indicating that some of the intelligence that persuaded the previous government to join the “Coalition of the Willing” could have been obtained by torture. During an interview with Lateline’s Tony Jones, former Attorney- General Philip Ruddock was forced to admit that he had not asked to see the Guantanamo Bay interrogation logs to find out whether an Australian citizen had been tortured. He is also reported to have said sleep deprivation was not torture. This is of course absurd. Sleep deprivation has been known to be a form of torture since the Spanish Inquisition. It was a favourite device of the infamous seventeenth-century Witch-Finder General, Matthew Hopkins. Personally Philip Ruddock is a gracious and civilised man, but this was unworthy of him. None of this even approaches the criminal behaviour by members of the Bush administration exposed by the likes of Alex Gibney. What these two thoughtful films—American self-criticism at its best—tell us is that we cannot afford to again compromise our values especially for a president as unstable as George Bush.

Neil McDonald writes: I am indebted to Warren Reed for allowing me to interview him and briefing me on the tradecraft for both films, and to Kathryn Hibbert of SBS Publicity for finding copies of both versions of Taxi to the Dark Side.