Real-life model for character in Zero Dark Thirty accused of series of bungles and being an apologist for torture
In the film Zero Dark Thirty, she was the persistent, conscientious CIA officer who finally tracked Osama bin Laden to his lair.
In real life, her identity and current position were carefully hidden: until now. Following the release of the controversial US Senate report on the CIA’s use of torture and rendition, she has had her less-than-sparkling record picked over, been dubbed by the media “The Queen of Torture” and now finally been outed.
While the film’s portrayal of her as a life-long al Qaeda expert is accurate, her career is revealed to feature a series of blunders and accusations of misleading Congress.
“She dropped the ball when the CIA was given information that might very well have prevented the 9/11 attacks,” wrote Jane Mayer, author of a definitive history of the agency’s “enhanced interrogation” practices, in the New Yorker.
“She gleefully participated in torture sessions afterward; she misinterpreted intelligence in such a way that it sent the CIA on an absurd chase for al Qaeda sleeper cells in Montana. And then she falsely told congressional overseers that the torture worked.”
As with other reporters, Mayer acceded to the requests of the CIA not to name the officer, although she has been identified in other contexts.
However, in response to Mayer’s article and the investigation by the television NBC news channel which triggered it, the investigative website The Intercept decided to “out her”.
It said it was doing so over “CIA objections because of her key role in misleading Congress about the agency’s use of torture, and her active participation in the torture programme (including playing a direct part in the torture of at least one innocent detainee).”
Many of the incidents involving the 49-year-old career CIA officer have been described before.
However, because of “redactions” in official reports of CIA activities, few were aware that the operative featuring in them repeatedly was the same woman.
According to NBC, she was harshly criticised after 9/11, when it was revealed that a subordinate had discovered beforehand that two al Qaeda suspects who later joined the hijack team had entered the country, but failed to notify the FBI.
She went on to become a “key architect” of the enhanced interrogation methods used to attempt to extract information from suspects – perhaps as a form of compensation.
She personally attended the waterboarding at a so-called “black site” in Poland of Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, the al Qaeda number three who masterminded the 9/11 attacks, even though she had no reason, as an analyst, to be there.
She wrote enthusiastically that Mohammed was “going to be hatin’ life on this one”, but then accidentally fed the wrong information to his interrogators, who used it to extract a false confirmation.
The information – that there was an al Qaeda cell of African-Americans operating in the US – then led to a manhunt for black Muslims in Montana.
She also demanded the rendition of a German citizen named Khalid al-Masri, who was arrested in Macedonia and flown to Afghanistan for interrogation, though the man of the same name the CIA was hunting did not have a German passport.
He was released as a victim of mistaken identity five months later and compensated.
Despite these errors, she was promoted, and in 2007 gave evidence to Congress on the use of “enhanced interrogation” in which she insisted: “There’s no question, in my mind, that having that detainee information has saved hundreds, conservatively speaking, of American lives.”
That was the key CIA claim for the torture programme which the Senate’s latest report dismissed as “wrong”.
“She wrote the template on which future justifications for the CIA program and the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques were based,” the report concluded.
The film’s producers say that the central character of Maya was “based on a real person, but she also represents the work of a lot of other women”.
Maya’s abrasive character is also matched by that of her model, according to former colleagues who have sprung to the operative’s defence.
“She’s an extraordinarily capable analyst,” one told NBC. “She has a caustic personality, but she is frighteningly intelligent and knows more about al Qaeda than virtually anyone else at the CIA.
“She’s hard to manage but brings a lot to the table. She wasn’t afraid to make mistakes.”
She was said to be “furious” about the Senate report’s conclusions.
Another former officer, however, disagreed. “She should be put on trial and put in jail for what she has done,” the officer said.
The CIA, meanwhile, are continuing to insist that the woman not be identified because of a “climate of fear and retaliation”.
Mayer said the real purpose was to protect the CIA’s reputation.
“Without names, or even pseudonyms, it is almost impossible to piece together the puzzle, or hold anyone in the American government accountable,” she wrote.
“Evidently, that is exactly what the CIA was fighting for during its eight-month-long redaction process, behind all those closed doors.”
ha…. so much for the fallen angel!!!!!
Comments are closed.