Kathryn Bigelow's work of fiction, Zero Dark Thirty is masterful in putting the viewer right into the gritty action of history. It has the deceptive feel of a documentary and most of the history cited is relatively recent. However, I found myself looking back on the past ten years of news events with the vaguest knowledge of the details (and this is my subject area!). A mentor recently told me that details only last in your memory for three weeks so its no wonder that I was floundering a bit. I went searching to find an accessible timeline of the basic events in the movie but strangely found the Internet lacking. There were plenty of reviews of the movie and a few skimming summaries. If I was going to recommend this to viewers who are not only younger than I am but not versed in the history of their childhoods, I was going to have to prep them (side note - this film has an R rating for a good reason. Do not show into students who are under 17).
Pre-history of the movie but often referenced either literally or through action
1. The Battle of Tora Bora - American forces in Afghanistan began a series of attacks on the mountainous region of Tora Bora on December 12, 2001. The initial operation Jawbreaker started on December 3rd with a coalition of secret services and air support attacking the mountains. A second more aggressive attack now known as the Battle of Tora Bora (a more defined area of the mountains) lasted 5 days with a series of sweeps by American ground forces through the tunnel complexes used by Al Qaeda forces in the mountains and a sustained bombing campaign. There had been information that led the CIA to believe that Osama Bin Laden was directing world wide operations from there. When the dust settled from the battle, neither Osama Bin Laden could be located not his leadership team. Two thoughts emerged from this. He either escaped because of lax Pakistani border security or the American forces were not sufficiently resupplied with fresh teams of soldiers. Either way, Osama fled into Pakistan on about December 16th. This huge failure looms over the movie even though the action is not shown. The subtext is, "Let's not have another political SNAFU like Tora Bora." However in spite of this train of thought, analysts attempting to track down Osama have a hard time imagining him living in the middle of the busy cities of Pakistan. They still assumed that he would pick an isolated and difficult to access region.
2. Foreign Intelligence service act (FISA) 1978- the passage of this Act starts the ball rolling on expanded surveillance techniques used by CIA operators attempting to gain information about the al Qaeda network and any future attacks. This was ground breaking legislation that scaffolded the ability for the government to monitor communications overseas and domestically without a warrant. Strangely it came out of the Watergate/Nixon debacle and was signed into law by President Carter.
3. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) - the 9/11 Commission developed a detailed report on the money and logistics the 9/11 attacks. They pinpointed Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as the puppeteer in planning the attacks. A critical member of al-Qaeda by 1998, he had earned his stripes as an independent jihadist earlier. He claims to have been crucial to the concept of attacking the American economy through the attacks on the World Trade Center. He also claims to have been responsible for the idea of using planes after the first World Trade Center bombing did not live up to his hopes.
The history events in the movie/story
1. CIA black sites - These are detention facilities where members of Al-Qaeda where held before being transferred to Guantanamo Bay or to their various home countries who would assume custody of their detention. The secret prisons were in a variety of complicit European countries and other allies such as Morocco. Not only was Guantanamo a site for torture methods, it is widely reported that the same methods to extract information were used in black sites. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was caught in Pakistan in 2003 but not transferred to Guantanamo until 2006.
2. Camp Chapman bombing - this event was the freshest in my mind which made the lead up in the movie excruciating. Forwarding Operating Base Chapman is one of the most secretive locations (as far as actions) in Afghanistan is a CIA asset in the war on terror. On December 30th, 2009, Doctor Al-Balawi, aged 32 detonated a bomb inside the Camp Chapman compound. He had been working with Jordanian intelligence prior to the arranged meeting. They had pressured him into turning against his Taliban and al-Qaeda contacts. He was reportedly at the compound because he claimed to have information on Al-Zawahiri ( and had been referred to the CIA by his Jordanian handlers. Both the Taliban and al-Quada praised his actions in later statements but it seems to still be unclear about who he was working for. Five CIA agents, two Blackwater security employees, one Jordanian agent, and a security base officer died. The attack was a flagrant penetration of the comfort zone of the CIA. In addition, all agents were leading al-Qaeda intelligence gatherers. Investigations into why the security protocols for searches were relaxed and how the credibility of Doctor Al-Balawi were conducted.
3. The London Transport bombings - Several days in July provide the canvas for a series of attacks on London transportation infrastructure including the bus bombing on July 7th that is cited in the movie. Bombings in underground trains and buses killed 52 people in London. As Britain has been a notable ally in the war against al-Qaeda, they have been the target of repeated attacks.
4. Release of the 911 emergency calls - some limited release was done during the release of the 9/11 Commission's publication of their findings with the mostly complete set release in 2011. The transcripts provide a chilling backdrop for the beginning of the movie, including calls from the flights and those from the towers.
5. FISA Amendments 2008 - The CIA was at it's most questioned and critical time. Tools such as water boarding were getting discredited and taken away as intelligence gathering. However, recognizing the need to provide other more painless and perhaps more grey area tools, Congress passed some provisions to FISA (see prior history 3) to assist in the information gathering mission. This allowed for unwarranted surveillance of both citizens abroad and opened the door for expansion of technology that helped for tracking cell phone calls.
6. Shooting of Saudi Arabian Citizens - nearly impossible to track down, there seem to be several shootings and truck bombs in 2003-2004 that target both American contractors and Saudi officials along with other government foiled attacks on oil resources. My best guess is that this is the attack by gunmen on the American consulate in Jeddah where armed al-Qaeda fighters forced their way in to the consulate and killed several Saudi National Guard members and non-American consulate employees. If anyone has another guess on this, I'd love to hear it. It seems out of place in the timeline established by Zero Dark Thirty because it is used as a pressure point created by the inability to get Osama and the lack of tools once the ability to torture is taken away from CIA officers.
7. Drone attack protests in Islamabad - Jonathan Banks - A difficult event to find as well and some of the details including the agent's name are in doubt. What is clear is that Pakistani citizens were angry at the deaths of civilians in American drone strikes. They had filed a $500 lawsuit seeking damages against the CIA station chief, named Jonathan Banks for the deaths of between 1200 and 2000 civilians (numbers are in strong dispute). The protests evolved into an organized Islamist event to put pressure on the American government to stop drone attacks. It resulted in the withdrawal of Jonathan Banks whose name had been outed by a Pakistani journalist as a way to direct a lawsuit at the U.S. government because he could be called to trial without the protections of diplomatic immunity (he had supposedly entered the country with a civilian work visa instead of his government credentials).
8. Operation Neptune Spear - Attack on Osama Bin Laden's compound - the seminal event of the movie but one that I don't want to go into too much detail about because it is very fresh in Americans minds and has been examined recently in other writings.
9. Foiled New York City car bomb - Faisal Shazad, a U.S. citizen from Pakistan built a bomb with the intent to inflict many casualties and damage in Times Square, New York City. Two street vendors saw a smoking Nissan Pathfinder and alerted a New York City Patrol Officer. What the authorities found was a bomb that failed to detonate fully but had caught fire. Shazad was not linked to the al-Qaeda structure however had been inspired and in contact with al-Qaeda leader Anwar al-Awlaki. He had trained at a terrorist training camp in Pakistan. Shazad was sentenced to life in prison without the chance of parole. The event revealed to the public that the U.S. was still vulnerable to attacks on the homeland even though the prevailing belief had been that al-Qaeda's leadership structure had been nearly dismantled.
10. Guantanamo Bay Detainees- Not an event but crucial to the story. Guantanamo Bay had been a U.S. toehold on Cuba in the Cold War. Established as a Naval refueling center as a result of the Spanish-American War, it was portioned off by President Bush to allow for transfers from various black sites and conflict zones of the War on Terror. It was here that 779 prisoners were held from about 2002 to 2009 when President Obama ordered the facility to be dismantled and the transfer of prisoners to the U.S. mainland. While not all of the prisoners have been moved due to various budgetary restrictions and other barriers, the program is no longer a key part of the War on Terror. At the beginning of the program, it was determined by various legal advisors to the Bush presidency that due to the nature of the war on terror that the people being captured by American forces were not assigned to any legitimate government (especially not one who had signed the United Nations charter and the Geneva Convention) and so they did not fall into the protections of prisoners of war and could not be labeled as such. They became known as enemy combatants. It then evolved that the detained prisoners could be subject to extreme forms of questioning. These methods included water boarding, sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation with such tools as playing loud music for hours on end and enclosure in boxes, all of which were shown in the movie. Other techniques not shown in the movie include sexual assaults, forced feeding (as a result of prisoner hunger strikes), and drug injections. There were many attempts by prisoners to commit suicide. The Hamdan v. Rumsfeld ruling in 2006 granted prisoners very minimal protections of habeus corpus (trial procedure rights). The result of this ruling is to apply protections against torture to prisoners and to grant them trial rights that are very similar to the ones afforded to prisoners of war through the Geneva Convention. This allowed prisoners to get lawyers to defend them and potentially move to trials however the latter has been slow in coming. The ability to get lawyers is referred to in the movie. It also opened the door for prisoners to have a slight improvement in their living conditions.
Bagram Detention Facility, Afghanistan - originally built by the Soviets during their occupation of Afghanistan, Bagram is now used by the U.S. forces as a detention/prison facility. It was the site of widespread torture of detainees during the early parts of the war and horrible living conditions where prisoners were held in cages of barbed wire (seen in the movie). U.S. has been accused of still capturing and holding Afghani citizens as late as March 2012 by President Karzi. Afghanistan shares some of the responsibility for the prison but complete power over it has yet to be transferred. Prisoners have also claimed that they are still being subjected to strip searches and solitary confinement. The U.S. has denied some of these claims.
This is not a commentary on the historical accuracy of the movie. It is instead a way to more fully understand the background of the story. I admire Zero Dark Thirty as way to make a story out of history, a situation of "what-if", something that I feature quite a bit in my own writing. What if the U.S. had obtained credible information from torturous methods? Would we as a nation have been able to live with ourselves?
References
http://www.davisenterprise.com/arts/movies/zero-dark-thirty-the-ultimate-manhunt/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Tora_Bora
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/17/cia-chief-pakistan-drone-cover
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Osama_bin_Laden
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_site
http://projects.nytimes.com/guantanamo/detainees/10024-khalid-shaikh-mohammed
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-12964158
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Intelligence_Surveillance_Act
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Intelligence_Surveillance_Act_of_1978_Amendments_Act_of_2008
http://articles.cnn.com/2008-07-09/politics/fisa.explainer_1_fisa-eavesdropping-intelligence-community?_s=PM:POLITIC
http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/911/report/911Report_Ch5.htm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/uk/2005/london_explosions/default.stm
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/09/08/nyregion/911-tapes.html
http://dspace.cigilibrary.org/jspui/bitstream/123456789/5314/1/Al%20Qaedas%20Third%20Front%20Saudi%20Arabia.pdf?1
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/para/al-qaida-arabia.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Chapman_attack
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/17/cia-chief-pakistan-drone-cover
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/12/10/105104/pakistanis-protest-civilian-deaths.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/nyregion/02timessquare.html?pagewanted=all
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2010-05-03-new-york-bombing_N.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Times_Square_car_bombing_attempt
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_Bay_Naval_Base
http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/05-184.ZO.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamdan_v._Rumsfel
http://www.heritage.org/research/projects/enemy-detention/military-commissions
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagram_torture_and_prisoner_abuse
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