Zero Dark Thirty - Nothing

My brain is still reeling from Zero Dark 30. Here are some highlights:

At least a half hour of torture porn that somehow managed to be boring and repetitive, followed by rapid-fire spitting of Arabic names I had likely read before, but could not place (nor did any of them get explained much).

The propagandistic propping up of the old saw that torture got any useful information, let alone being the key unlocking the hiding place of Osama.

A pasty mushroom-woman neurotic central character who took down the world's most wanted with a series of tics, spasms, and outbursts of hissy fits interrupting her otherwise cold, clammy, affectless demeanor.

A fairly good video game version (complete with dirty-screen overlay) of the actual raid in Pakistan. Worth the ticket? No, but I cared much more about the Navy Seal team than I did about the careerist, torture-loving wanks at the CIA the film massaged so lovingly.

So, we have, overall, a stew of nastiness that the critics love. I walked away muttering, "I'll never trust the critics again." Which only confirmed what I was muttering when I left The Master. More than that, this movie had dialog your average 15-year-old could have written. The Master at least felt like a 17-year-old wrote it.

I rate it: Zero, zilch, nada.

More: Senators write angry letters about the movie's central point, and the CIA's playing footsie with the picture people. 

Zero Dark Thirty - The Central Lie?

The story gets curiouser and curiouser. Senators Feinsten, McCain, and Levin have been writing letters hotly disputing the movie's central premise: that the CIA tortured the name of the courier out of a detainee, who they followed to Bin Laden's compound in Pakistan.

They want to know what the CIA told the Zero Dark Thirty people, who they are also asking to set the record straight. In communication to both they throw in these interesting bullet points about the torture program:

• The CIA did not first learn about the existence of the UBL courier from CIA detainees subjected to coercive interrogation techniques. Nor did the CIA discover the courier's identity from CIA detainees subjected to coercive techniques. No CIA detainee reported on the courier’s full name or specific whereabouts, and no detainee identified the compound in which UBL was hidden. Instead, the CIA learned of the existence of the courier, his true name, and location through means unrelated to the CIA detention and interrogation program. 

• Information to support the UBL operation was obtained from a wide variety of intelligence sources and methods. CIA officers and their colleagues throughout the Intelligence Community sifted through massive amounts of information, identified possible leads, tracked them down, and made considered judgments based on all of the available intelligence. 

• The CIA detainee who provided the most accurate information about the courier provided the information prior to being subjected to coercive interrogation techniques.

Gee, it looks like someone gave them some kind of information about the courier (after the identity was known?), but then they tortured the guy anyway. Nice.

The letters also point to a bit of coyness on the part of the CIA, and tries to pin the agency down on the details. Stay tuned.

Again, Zero Dark Thirty's central point is that torture works, torture is glorious, torture is what we should do. Take that away and the movie's story falls apart.

See my thrilling review of this dreadful movie.

Murdock Paper Tried to Listen to 9/11 Victims' Phone Recordings

Or maybe The News of the World did pull it off by other means. It did just as bad in the home country. One article in the UK Mirror tabloid, not terribly well confirmed, yet.

From the story:

A source said: “This investigator is used by a lot of journalists in America and he recently told me that he was asked to hack into the 9/11 victims’ private phone data. He said that the journalists asked him to access records showing the calls that had been made to and from the mobile phones belonging to the victims and their ­relatives.

“His presumption was that they wanted the information so they could hack into the ­relevant voicemails, just like it has been shown they have done in the UK. The PI said he had to turn the job down. He knew how insensitive such research would be, and how bad it would look.

There's a lot of talk about the Murdock empire crumbling, but it's this and the other instances of deep creepiness that are setting people's teeth on edge.

Murdock has spilled a lot of ink and unleashed a storm of photons lecturing me on what's right and moral (anything ultraconservative), what not to do (there's a long list), and what I'm supposed to believe to be patriotic. (Ahem, Congressional citizenship, anyone?)

It may be tempting to enjoy watching him fall on his face, but the gritty, dirty, low reality of this scandal should be taken on its own merits. It's all seedy and disgusting.