Intelligence has to be smart more than greedy or painful

Rating: 10/10 (18 July 2013)

With time the film has become a lot less pungent and pregnant than it was when it came out. It is nothing but a fiction documentary on an essential event of the beginning of the 21st century. There was September 11, 2001 before and now there is May 2, 2011. The ten years during which terrorism seemed to be dominating the world and the USA to be running after an uncatchable ghost, will remain the ten years during which the West ran after its own tail like a deranged dog.
And Osama Ben laden was a ghost. He had managed to be ever present everywhere and to be untraceable at all in any way imaginable. No telephone link. No Internet connection; No going out of his fortress at all. A fortress well hidden right in the middle of an urban area in Pakistan, 585 feet or so from the main Pakistani military academy, their West Point. To be unseen hide in a crowd. To be invisible hide in a fortress that stands out on its surrounding neighborhood and protect it in the most standard way so that everyone may think it is the residence of a drug lord. And it would have worked if there had not been one girl who was crazy enough to believe what her reason and deduction told her with certainty though she had no material proof of the presence of her target.
She was a subductive mind who built a conviction from a pile of circumstantial and partial facts and subductive she had to be to subdue all the males around her in the secret service, CIA, armed forces and other agencies of the type, subdue indeed, if not abduct their rational mind for a trip onto the other side of visible reality, the invisible side of reality. To believe is at times enough.
But the film was a very scandalous film when it came out because of the torture used to get some information. The case was abducted out of reasonable behavior and intelligence. First the only TV skimpy appearance of Obama was when he declared he would put an end to torture. All the torture took place in the film before that declaration. That's an ellipse, my dear film viewers, meaning that Obama put a stop to torture. Then the film even shows how a "tip" was in fact a trap that led a loaded car into a military base in Afghanistan and it exploded killing many, including some CIA agents who were so happy to have invited someone in the base who was going to tell them where Ben Laden was and all that with the torture of greed, for 25 million dollars. Idiotic. Money is a very good bait for suicide bombers.
So torture did not give them a lot. And money did not give them a lot. It is only crossing and crisscrossing intelligence from many sources that led to a track, a trail, a path to the man they were looking for. Nothing replaces intelligence, and I should say a vast diversity of intelligence. Nothing is better than human intelligence, I mean intellectual work, to build a conviction from a mass of data that seems to have no logic at all. No machine could reach that conviction because a machine would work on probabilities, and let me say subduction, the truth emerging from the deeper layers of the accumulated data, is irrational, illogical, absurd in many ways. That's how Homo Sapiens invented God. Today we use it in science all the time.
As for the unethical side of torture, it is a very bad argument. Of course it is unethical but Guantanamo will only close when the last prisoner there dies provided they don't bring any anymore. Guantanamo nevertheless worked and works very well because of the reputation it has, the myth about it and the legend about the methods used there. Of course it is unethical but with terrorists fear is the best incentive to try anything to defy that fear, to defy reason and prudence and to get caught.
Torture is ineffective as for the intelligence it brings out but it is unluckily effective in the fear it creates in some people on the wrong side of the divide of humaneness because then they get reckless, sloppy, careless and even talkative. In fact real torture is not necessary. Just a public reputation about it is enough to reach its target. And yet real torture in inhuman and unethical.
But once again the manhunt of the first decade of the 21st century was constructed on real intelligence obtained through intelligent collecting and not fake intelligence obtained through torture. Was torture actually used or not? Who knows really. We can trust the perversion of some intelligence gatherers for them to turn themselves into torture-masters. But these are probably the little ones on the chain, particularly if we are speaking of physical torture. And it takes a woman to know that a woman witness to a torturing session is a lot more effective on the man who is being tortured than the torture itself because the presence of a woman becomes psychological torture that is untenable for real Islamic people from the Arab or Middle-East world. To be stripped naked in front of a woman is the worst psychological and moral torture you can invent in that situation.
Christians on the other hand are used to the quasi-naked Christ tortured to death on his cross and Jesus did not wince at the presence of his own mother and Mary Magdalena at the foot of the cross, and a third Mary, at least in the conscience of Christians who even believe Jesus presented John as being her son now, directly from the cross.
This film has to be seen and known as a fiction documentary on an important event of our time.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU