“Zero Dark”: Does Torture Work? Wrong Question!
by Vincent Warren
The premier in New York and Los Angeles this week of the movie Zero Dark Thirty, about the hunt for and killing of Osama bin Laden, has touched off a national debate about the appropriateness of torture. Alarmingly, the conversation has revolved around when to torture, rather than whether to torture.
The film’s opening 45 minutes feature U.S. intelligence officers torturing a prisoner at a CIA black site, until he gives up the clue that births an ultimately-successful hunt for bin Laden. For some the message is simple: “No waterboarding, no Bin Laden.” Zero Dark Thirty, laments Adam Serwer in Mother Jones, “may do what Karl Rove could not have done with all the money in the world: embed in the popular imagination the efficacy, even the necessity, of torture.” Meanwhile, others insist that #ZD30, as the film was quickly hashtagged, “leave[s] audiences to decide for themselves whether torture was necessary to stop al Qaeda.”
Why, exactly, are we deciding whether torture was “necessary” to capture bin Laden?
The underlying assumption in this debate, both by those outraged at what they see as the film’s glorification of torture, as well as by those who insist the depiction is “largely dispassionate,” is that the moral question of whether we should torture can somehow be answered by the empirical question of whether torture works. Not only has this “ends justify the means” rationale yielded myriad atrocities, but, by debating the utility of torture, even its opponents are implicated in the conclusion that if torture does work, it is justified. There is good reason why torture is illegal, in all circumstances, under both international law and the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: torture is simply, and always, wrong. And when we concede that torture may be justified in some times and places, we weaken legal prohibitions against it in all times and places.
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