Zero-Dark-Thirty: Leni Riefenstahl and a Senate inquiry
- Is Catherine Bigelow the new Leni Riefenstahl?
- Did President Obama ordered the CIA to closely cooperate with her?
- Has the acting head of CIA blown his chances to be confirmed in his post?
Zero-Dark-Thirty, a recent film by Catherine Bigelow (of the Hurt Locker fame) has opened to nearly universal acclaim. Among the enthusiasts there were few voices criticizing her portrayal of torture techniques, while praising her film-making skills at the same time, while even fewer reviewers pointed at the potentially misleading nature of the reasoning presented in the movie.
The movie makes clear that torture was instrumental in capturing Bin Laden. Which may or may not be the case but after all it's a fiction feature, not a documentary.
Well, not quite.
Today, Naomi Wolf in the Guardian accuses Bigelow of being the new Leni Riefenstahl, a documentary pioneer who is best remembered for her close association with the Nazi regime and the propaganda films she created for the Reich.
Cinema has a long history of acclaimed propaganda features ranging from Alexander Nevsky to Went the day well?. Riefenstahl stands out not only because she was glorifying an abhorrent regime but also because her features were clearly not fictionalized as for example Eisenstein's ones.
That claim also comes under scrutiny. You see, a writer in the Guardian is one thing a Senate inquiry a completely different animal. Especially a bipartisan one:
Morell the acing Head of CIA (awaiting confirmation) replied that:Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, along with Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), said Thursday that they had sent two letters to acting CIA chief Michael Morell. In the first, dated Dec. 19, they requested information about what the CIA told the filmmakers. In the second, dated Monday, they asked Morell to clarify a statement he issued on Dec. 21 about the movie and its portrayal of torture.[...]“Given the CIA's cooperation with the filmmakers … and the narrative's consistency with past public misstatements by former senior CIA officials … the filmmakers could have been misled by information they were provided by CIA,” the senators said in a statement Thursday. They requested “all information and documents provided to the filmmakers by CIA officials.”
but was foolish enough to add:What I want you to know is that ‘Zero Dark Thirty' is a dramatization, not a realistic portrayal of the facts
which of course prompted a second letter by the Senators:Some [information] came from detainees subjected to enhanced techniques, but there were many other sources as well. And, importantly, whether enhanced interrogation techniques were the only timely and effective way to obtain information from those detainees, as the film suggests, is a matter of debate that cannot and never will be definitively resolved
source for the above quotes.the senators took issue with that aspect of his statement, warning him that his letter was “potentially inconsistent” with the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's study of the CIA's detention and interrogation program and challenging him to “provide specific examples of information that was obtained in a ‘timely and effective' way from CIA detainees subjected to the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques.”
To top that Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) called for a probe into whether the Obama administration improperly granted the filmmakers extensive access to government sources.
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. Bigelow should be on capital hill for making the main character in her last film go off the reservation and contemplate the killing of innocents that clearly drove that nut job to leave his base and kill those innocent Afghans.
Originally Posted by Garbarsardar
