Search Results

This chapter elaborates the book’s argument about morality and ethics by discussing documentaries and fictional dramas about torture and the ‘War on Terror’, including Zero Dark Thirty (2012), Taxi to the Dark Side (2007), and Standard Operating Procedure (2008). It argues that Zero Dark Thirty adheres to a moral script about 9/11 and its aftermath, justifying the self-appointed forces of good going over to ‘the dark side’. By constructing such a moral universe, the film helps to normalise torture and other illicit practices, making them acceptable. Taxi to the Dark Side creates another kind of moral universe, inspiring pity for the dark side’s victims and outrage towards the policy’s architects. However, Standard Operating Procedure, though criticised for its lack of moral perspective, stands out as the most ‘ethical’ of these films, as it engages us at multiple, sensory levels and explores how moral norms are reconstructed in the ‘atrocity-producing situation’.

This chapter examines a group of documentaries that deal with the Abu Ghraib photographs. These documentaries include Standard Opening Procedure (2008), Taxi to the Dark Side (2007), and The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib (2007). The subject of these documentaries is not the desiring subject or the bizarre nature of what the photographs from Abu Ghraib reveal about human subjectivity. Instead, the documentaries work to expose the inhumanity of torture. The films also reject the Bush administration's claim that the U.S. military did not directly order those specific acts of torture at Abu Ghraib. They also prove both the ineffectual nature of torture, and George W. Bush's involvement in the decrees to torture. The films, however, avoid the question of the justifications of torture, which leads these otherwise excellent documentaries to miss the real issue at stake in torture.

This chapter analyzes the 1965 feature film The Battle of Algiers, which dramatized an episode in the Algerian War during which torture was systematically used in the dismantling of an urban guerilla network operating out of the Casbah, the old city. More specifically, it explores the uncertainties and silences surrounding the filmic treatment of torture, as well as its garbled or ambiguous meanings as conveyed in The Battle of Algiers and the documentaries Standard Operating Procedure and Taxi to the Dark Side. It argues that The Battle of Algiers failed to capture the centrality of torture in the French counterinsurgency effort in Algeria, while Standard Operating Procedure minimizes the effects of torture on the Abu Ghraib detainees and does not represent the victims’ suffering or experience. Taxi to the Dark Side discloses the extent of America’s torture program, elucidates the decisions that made torture a key element in the country’s counterinsurgency program in Iraq and Afghanistan, and gives the torture victims a voice.