Bourne and the Black Sites: Torture's Gone Pop

Just read the fascinating (and terrifying) article by Jane Mayer in this week's New Yorker on CIA "black sites;" secret facilities based abroad that house housed high-value terror suspects. There's too much going on in this article to comment on each intriguing point, however I will say that the timing of the piece nicely coincides with the recent release of the The Bourne Ultimatum. It's interesting how many parallels exist between the fictional activities of the CIA depicted in the film and the agency's actual activities as indicated in Mayer's article. One particular section in the piece really drives this home:

Lacking in-house specialists on interrogation, the agency hired a group of outside contractors, who implemented a regime of techniques that one well-informed former adviser to the American intelligence community described as “a ‘Clockwork Orange’ kind of approach.” The experts were retired military psychologists, and their backgrounds were in training Special Forces soldiers how to survive torture, should they ever be captured by enemy states.

Mayer describes the CIA's interrogation techniques as stemming from both the ominously named "Phoenix Program" (it's clear that Ludlum gets his creepy project names right) instituted by the military during the Vietnam War and from outside contractors. Most surprising perhaps is the implication that the CIA's expertise in "aggressive" interrogation lapsed after the Cold War. You would think these skills are not easily un-learned. Who knew.


The Bourne series focuses on a secret CIA program that trains assassins, primarily by brain-washing them through torture. Stuff of pure fantasy right? Apparently not. In Bourne psychopath psychologist Dr. Albert Hirsch (played well by the corpulent and wheezing Albert Finney) is an outside consultant hired by the CIA to train its own to be cold and calculating killers by, well, by torturing them. Mayer mentions in her article that many of the CIA's interrogators had been trained by psychologists who actually performed many of the torturous acts on the trainees. So if we're to take Mayer's article seriously, it seems as if this nasty torture business has been routinely practiced on both the high-value terror suspects and (obviously not to the same degree) the CIA operatives as well.

Art imitating life... great stuff. Normally the conspiracy theory-laden, "the government is out to get us," spy-thriller is scoffed at (see: Enemy of the State) and the actions depicted are seen as outside the realm of possibility. Not so with Bourne; the series, and Ultimatum in particular, has truly touched a nerve by making ridiculously illegal and frightening acts such as state-sanctioned torture seem eminently plausible. Fucking brilliant.

By the way, the media blitz surrounding Bourne is so extreme that there's a six-story billboard touting the movie on Matt Damon's apartment.