Torture: From Crime to Controversy to Cinema (Expanded)
The same choreography played out with the CIA’s torture program. After the September 11 attacks, the U.S. government authorized what it called “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques.” The phrase was a euphemism. In reality, it was a carefully constructed legal framework to allow torture: waterboarding, stress positions, sleep deprivation for up to 180 hours, confinement in coffin-sized boxes, beatings, and rectal feeding. At least 26 detainees were later found to have been wrongfully imprisoned, according to the CIA’s own Inspector General.[^8] Some were literally tortured to death. Gul Rahman, for instance, died of hypothermia in a secret prison in Afghanistan known as the “Salt Pit” after being stripped, shackled, and left on a cold floor.[^9]
The 2014 U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee report on torture confirmed what whistleblowers and journalists had long been saying: the program was brutal, and it didn’t work. The CIA failed to extract any meaningful intelligence through torture, despite what officials claimed. The report concluded that EITs were not only ineffective but actively misleading, producing false information that wasted time and resources.[^10] Yet even this damning report arrived more than a decade after the first acts of torture had taken place. And what was the cultural response? A series of films and narratives that recontextualized torture not as a crime, but as a dilemma.
The most infamous of these is Zero Dark Thirty (2012), directed by Kathryn Bigelow and nominated for five Academy Awards. The film strongly suggests that the use of torture was instrumental in locating Osama bin Laden. This implication-now known to be false-was widely criticized by journalists, including The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, who called it “pernicious.”[^11] What matters here is not simply that the film was wrong, but that it was effective. It reached millions. It did what the Senate report never could: it lodged a false moral association in public memory.
Then came The Report (2019). On its surface, it appears corrective. It centers on Daniel Jones, the Senate investigator who painstakingly documented the CIA’s lies and brutality. The film is procedural, exhausting by design, showing the sheer institutional resistance to truth-documents hidden, files destroyed, careers threatened. And yet, even The Report functions within the same architecture of delayed reckoning. It arrives after the torture program is over, after the perpetrators are safe, after the victims have been forgotten. The film ends not with justice, but with exposure. Exposure without consequence. The audience leaves informed, even outraged-but relieved. The work, it seems, has been done. It has not.
This is the sinister brilliance of the playbook. At first, torture is denied. Then it is debated. Then it is dramatized-first as necessity, then as scandal. And finally, it is historicized-converted into cinema, into awards, into a chapter that can be closed. The CIA officials responsible were promoted. Gina Haspel, who oversaw a black site in Thailand, became Director of the CIA in 2018. John Yoo, who wrote the legal memos justifying torture, teaches law at UC Berkeley. And the detainees? Some are still in Guantanamo. Others vanished into silence.
Bosnia: Justice Delayed, Memory Deferred
The genocide in Bosnia followed the same structure, though with a longer timeline. In July 1995, over 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were slaughtered in Srebrenica by Bosnian Serb forces. The UN had declared it a “safe zone.” Dutch UN peacekeepers were stationed there. They watched. They handed over civilians. The massacre was part of a broader ethnic cleansing campaign that left over 100,000 people dead and 2.2 million displaced between 1992 and 1995.[^12] Despite ample intelligence, photographs, and warnings from journalists and NGOs, the international community delayed intervention for years.
Eventually, justice came in the form of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). Leaders such as Ratko Mladić and Radovan Karadžić were tried and convicted. But it took decades. Mladić was arrested only in 2011-sixteen years after the massacre. By then, Bosnia was no longer in the headlines. No longer a priority.
The memory lived on in local commemorations and in survivor testimony. But in global consciousness, it faded. Only in 2020 did a film like Quo Vadis, Aida?, directed by Jasmila Žbanić, reach an international audience. The film is extraordinary-haunting, humane, and quietly enraged. It reconstructs the events of Srebrenica through the eyes of a UN translator desperately trying to save her family. It is not just about war-it is about betrayal, bureaucracy, and moral collapse. And yet, again, it arrives after the fact. It serves to close the narrative, to offer the viewer the sense that we are now reckoning with the past. But the European countries that failed Bosnia never paid a political price. The UN admitted failure, but changed little. Memory was permitted-once it was harmless.
Gaza: Amnesia in Advance (Revisited, with Film Reference Added)
Gaza is different. The atrocities are ongoing, but the machinery of forgetting is already turning.
