Zero Dark Thirty

...Not really sure what you're trying to say here, Tam. If you want to bring the Second World War into it, our intelligence frankly ran rings around the Germans without resorting to torture, whereas German intelligence was hideously incompetent in most regards to the extent that the Abwehr may as well have been on our side. AFAIK, there's not much evidence that suggests that the Germans managed to get much useful intel from torturing Allied spies.

I think the case is not so much that torture never works, but that it is so patchy in terms of effectiveness that it isn't worth the moral cost.

Oh, you never heard of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Englandspiel then? Cause I have. Several whole networks rounded up. The agents tortured, gave up their colleagues. And the SOE was so fucking incompetent they didn't stop playing the England Game until the Abwher agent, Major Hermann Giskes sent a Clear Text message (according to that wiki page):

"to the SOE on 1 April 1944 complaining about the lack of recent business given that he had been servicing them for so long. Giskes' message also "promised a warm welcome to any further agents SOE wished to insert into Holland".[2]"

No sign of incompetence there except on the part of the SOE who flushed 54 lives down the toilet.

And that's ignoring the many networks of French and Belgian resistants they hoovered up.

edited 23rd Jan '13 4:30:30 PM by TamH70

One could argue it's a lot easier to out British intelligence officers (or CIA officers) with ranks, personal data, and families than it is to pinpoint some zealot in a cave with no security clearance.

I do wonder, though, if all this talk of torture is missing the forest for the trees. The left worries about torture becoming official policy, when it pretty has been for a while. But there's plain torture and then there's Globocop rendition of anyone the CIA doesn't like, life sentences without trial, etc.

When you boil the whole war down to, "Torture, yay or nay", it makes the proponents look like John Wayne and the rest of us look like Vichy French. It's a bigger issue than 'whose life if worth more, an American or a terrorist's?'

edited 23rd Jan '13 6:00:14 PM by johnnyfog

Nope, I hadn't. Thanks for bringing it to my attention. Still, on a strategic scale, the Allies were much more successful than the Germans in the wider intelligence war - and had SOE actually been even remotely on the ball in that instance, they should have twigged that the messages they were receiving were German in origin instantly. The torture itself was ineffective because the messages being sent back from the Netherlands lacked the security checks, which may as well have screamed "THE GESTAPO HAS MY NOSE IN A BOLT CUTTER D:".

edited 24th Jan '13 2:15:52 AM by pagad

To be fair, the Abwher was pretty much actively working for us.

Not all of it, and mostly at the higher levels. Canaris? Sure. He was an SIS asset from basically the get-go. The Abwehr, and indeed the rest of the German intel apparatus' biggest blindspot was the breaking of the Enigma and Fish series secure teleprinters and associated cyphers. They thought it couldn't be done to them.

Which was actually rather ironic as they had smashed our own cryptography pre war, and kept on doing it throughout the war. (of which there would be a lot more coverage in the media if a/ it hadn't been overshadowed by the publicity and legends surrounding the breaking of the Enigma codes, etc, and b/ if it wasn't so bloody embarrassing.)

There were a lot of Hermann Giskes in the Abwehr. Folks dedicated to their job. Saying they were all in our pocket, or at least saying the ones that never landed in Britain (who pretty much ALL where), would make the amount of agents we actually lost on operations even more tragic.

I don't think anyone is saying they were all in our pocket, but frankly they didn't need to be. Individual successes in the field don't mean much in the context of the wider war when the head of your division is in the enemy's pocket, as Canaris was. I'll note that the main period of German intelligence coups occurred before the Nazis alienated Canaris and he started actively working against them.

Anyway, we're kind of drifting off topic...

edited 25th Jan '13 3:50:32 AM by pagad

I went to see this the other day.

It was way too long, and the plot felt disjointed and indecisive (for example, there's a scene in which two characters are in a building which gets suicide-bombed, and after that the film jumps years). The characters were largely uninteresting, too. On that basis, I can't really bring myself to recommend it. Buuuut...

...the sequence in which SEAL Team Six actually takes down bin Laden is utterly enthralling. It's a superb bit of film-making, and it's almost worth going to see the film purely by itself. Unfortunately, the film is just far too long, and feels like it should have already ended by that point.

Needs better editing then?

Oh, yes, it definitely could have done with a fair bit longer on the cutting-room floor. The decision to switch the story from the failed hunt for bin Laden in the Tora Bora mountains to his actual demise in Abbottabad is painfully obvious. It's two movies worth of material crammed into 154 minutes.

edited 29th Jan '13 5:23:28 AM by pagad

Saw this a few days ago and loved it. It does feel like it goes on too long but that works to it's advantage, helps highlight the frustration in not being able to find anything, and when it is found not being able to act. The torture, whilst horrible and of little use, wasn't presented with any bias or opinion. It simply shows what happened and lets the viewer come to their own conclusions. My only complaint is that the 'Main' SEAL was played by Chris Pratt, and I couldn't help but feel they were sending in Bert Macklin to take down UBL.