“I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it.”
— Col. Nathan Jessup
to Lt. Daniel Kaffee
“A Few Good Men” (1992)
“You,” said Jack Nicholson’s Jessup to Tom Cruise’s Kaffee, “have the luxury of not knowing what I know.” Viewers of the movie “Zero Dark Thirty” will, according to some informed persons, lose the luxury of not knowing about hard but morally defensible things done on their behalf. Other informed persons, however, say viewers will be misled because the movie intimates (actually it is ambiguous about this) a crucial role of “enhanced interrogation” in extracting information useful to tracking Osama bin Laden.
In “A Few Good Men,” Col. Jessup insists that a harsh — and proscribed — training method (“Code Red”) saves lives: “You f—in’ people … you have no idea how to defend a nation.” “Zero Dark Thirty” explores the boundaries of the permissible when defending not a nation but this nation. Viewers will know going in how the movie ends. They will not know how they will feel when seeing an American tell a detainee, “When you lie to me I hurt you,” and proceed to do so.
The movie, which is primarily about CIA operatives, probably will make at least a cameo appearance in the confirmation hearings for Barack Obama’s nominee as the next CIA director, John Brennan. His 25 years with the CIA included the years when “enhanced interrogation” was used to squeeze crucial information from suspected terrorists.