by Gleb Sidorkin

Attorney General Mukasey announced this week that a criminal investigation will look into the CIA’s destruction of interrogation tapes. The tapes are said to show the torture of suspected Al Qaeda members. The euphemistically-named “enhanced interrogation techniques” were ordered by the White House, and the CIA denied the existence of the tapes when the 9/11 commission specifically requested such materials. The questions being raised in Washington are ‘Why were they made?’ ‘Why were they destroyed?’ ‘Why were they kept secret?’ and, of course, ‘What’s on them?’ As in the Abu Ghraib scandal, everyone is obsessed with the images of torture, rather than the torture itself. When news reports started coming out that certain Iraqi prisons were hell-holes of humiliation, abuse, and torture, there was little interest. The story never made front page until the images leaked out, at which point they were plastered on every available media surface for weeks on end. Such is the power of images, and the weakness of imagination.

The CIA destroyed those tapes because they couldn’t allow for even the slightest risk of such images being leaked to the public. The fallout from such a leak would have dwarfed Abu Ghraib. The torture in this case was directly sanctioned by the white house and conducted by the CIA, whereas culpability for Abu Graib was deftly foisted off onto Lynndie England and fellow ‘bad seeds’. If the videos leaked, all the efforts of the Bush administration to manipulate the language of public discussion about torture would go down the drain. When you’re looking at a guy in a cell screaming for his life at the hands of a CIA agent, it doesn’t matter what kinds of euphemisms you use to describe it. Right now, public opinion is divided about the need for/effectiveness of torture tactics, but a video of an actual torture session would be the greatest thing that ever happened to the ant-torture cause. It’s surprising the CIA ever made the tapes in the first place, considering how much of a threat such evidence presents to the Bush crew’s goals.

The “War on Terror” has already produced several genres of violent internet video. There’s the execution tape, which the media production house known as Al Quaeda has mastered, but which the U.S.-backed Iraqi government also dabbled in when Saddam Hussein was hanged. Insurgents regularly release DIY video tapes of their attacks, but they seem quaint in comparison to U.S. Government’s mega-production of “Shock and Awe.” The budget of the latter was spectacular, and the news media provided good camerawork and a far-reaching distribution platform. (I gave it two thumbs up and nominated Bush/Cheney for “greatest action movie producers of the century”). The CIA interrogation video is now officially another of these genres. The mystery of what’s on the tapes makes them that much more alluring. The vast investigatory effort directed at the missing tapes is indicative of a deep desire to see those tapes– and perhaps a public screening of them wouldn’t be such a bad thing. If we as a nation are going to use torture, if we are to have a real discussion about this issue, it would be helpful to know exactly what we’re talking about. Those tapes would settle a lot debates that the Bush administration is interested in prolonging.

The “War on Terror” has been a period of increased representation of torture in film and television. On one hand there are the law enforcement shows like “24.” Jack Bauer regularly beats information out of people and uses it to save lives, usually in the context of the apocryphal “ticking time bomb” scenario. Pro-torture advocates often argue that if a terrorist knows where a bomb that’s about to explode is hidden, the need to get that information would justify any and all tactics. In reality, the ticking time bomb scenario has never happened and will probably never happen. More importantly, interrogation experts agree that torture is mostly an effective tool for getting false information. Under extreme stress, people will say whatever they think their captors want them to say, often leading to military operations working from bad intel. There have also been reports of inexperienced soldiers applying the torture tactics they see on TV to real-world situations. In an effort to encourage TV producers to depict torture in nuanced and realistic ways, the Human Rights First foundation devoted their annual Excellence in Television Award to the issue. The policy debate about torture must be accompanied by an effort to make media producers realize the real political impact of their entertainment.

The other trend in torture cinema is exemplified by Eli Roth’s Hostel films. Look for Zach Wigon’s article about the “Torture Porn” subgenre of horror in the forthcoming print issue of Tisch Film Review. As important as it is to critique the way police interrogation is represented in film and TV, perhaps the more important discussion to have is a theoretical one about our culture’s ambivalent attitude towards violence.

How can we renounce torture in our policing methods when we are so attracted to viewing it in our entertainment? The non-existent CIA tapes are an important illustration of the split between our practice of outsourcing real torture to hidden offshore prisons and our demand for reenacting torture on our screens. Putting real torture on the screens would highlight this contradiction, revealing the horrible reality that hides behind our violent fictions.