When they finally do get useful information out of Ammar, it’s more complicated. What’s indisputable is that it happens over hummus and tabouli, not while a bucket of water is being held over his face. They devise this rather clever plan of bluffing Ammar, convincing him that he’s been suffering from short-term memory loss and merely forgets giving them information that prevented an attack, which is a complete lie. Of course, this isn’t torture. It’s strategy. And it works; he gives them the name of three men, last of which is Abu Ahmed, Bin Laden’s courier. He does this with a mouthful of food they’ve provided him. Granted, Dan makes one mention of sending Ammar back to his cell to be tortured further, but he’s already been coaxed into giving information at this point.
This is also a very tiny detail relative to the entire manhunt. Yes, it gets the ball rolling, but the fact that this Ammar fellow is the one who sets things in motion is almost arbitrary. We learn later that they’ve had Abu Ahmed in their files since the beginning of the war in Afghanistan and he was simply overlooked. So if people had done their jobs well in the first place, torture would not have been necessary at all. Since torture was carried out on Ammar, it makes his later testimony, which comes not specifically as a result of torture but does come after he’s been tortured, complicated. If they were able to eventually trick him into giving them the information they needed, was torture necessary at all? If they had tried these methods in the first place, instead of torture, would they have been more effective as well as more morally justifiable? The truth is that we don’t know, and will never know because the United States decided to go the torture route. This is a point of truth the movie demonstrates beautifully and it deserves credit for this, not to be treated as if it condones torture or proclaims its effectiveness. It does neither.
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