the water cooler

Michael Kirk on Torture, “Frontline” and Rumsfeld

October 21, 2005
Mike Kirk

Last Tuesday, the much-acclaimed PBS show “Frontline” debuted a new documentary, “The Question of Torture,” which took a comprehensive look at how the rules of interrogation and prisoner treatment have shifted since September 11th, a reality made obvious in the infamous photos of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison that emerged two years ago. Michael Kirk is a longtime producer for “Frontline” who also wrote and directed the film. In order to recount this story, from Guantanamo to the prisons of Afghanistan, and then Iraq, Kirk found the most senior officials and interrogators who would describe in detail how what was permissible shifted and changed over time. It’s an impressive piece of in-depth explanatory broadcast journalism.

Gal Beckerman: What particular obstacles did you come across trying to make a documentary on a subject that is so sensitive right now? You mention that you tried to interview senior Pentagon officials and didn’t have much luck.

Michael Kirk: They are, in every way, protective, controlling, and unwilling to be particularly cooperative. We had learned a lot from the film we made last year, “Rumsfeld’s War,” which was ninety minutes long and really kind of part one of what I suspect will be a trilogy. On that film, Larry DiRita, the Secretary of Defense’s spokesman, said that they would be more than happy to give us the secretary, more than happy to give us Wolfowitz, more than happy to cooperate with the making of the documentary if only we would air it after the election.

GB: Oh, really.

MK: Yeah. And it was at that moment, if you are someone like me and you’re sitting at the Pentagon, that you look at the guy and say, “Well, now you’ve done it. Now I have to go with it.” It was one of those moments that for them to say no and insist on it, is to force us to go forward. And it sort of set the standard for what we were going to be up against.

You know, we’ve been doing this for a long time, so it is possible to get primary sources, on the record, people who have recently retired. And this is the type of topic there is an awful lot of disagreement about. Even the military, as we’ve learned, is not monolithic in its point of view. It’s just that when you get into such a sensitive area as this its walking that line between people who have a very strong opinion and want to help you, but understand that in career terms and other terms they are really risking a lot to come on camera and talk. So it’s not hard to get information and feel confident that what you’re reporting is accurate.

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It is extremely hard, in television terms, to get people who will go on for quotation. And that’s always the great challenge with a documentary. Because the needs are to be really substantive and be able to go deeper and deeper. That’s why you have to talk to someone who knows about a range of things. That’s why when we got General Keane, who was the vice chief of army during most of this, he was recently out, and so everything he had was first-hand and current for the purposes of the arc of our story. Someone like him, in addition to a lot of supporting characters, allowed you to get a real sense of the dimension and arc of the story, to, in effect, say things that you had multiple, off the record, highly placed sources saying.

GB: So the Pentagon’s lack of participation didn’t make you feel at all like you weren’t getting that side of the story?

MK: You know even though you are sure you have all the details, there are times when you really, really wish and you try very hard, we tried to get General Miller, for example, the general who ran Guantanamo and came to Iraq. And I thought we got close a couple of times. Because it’s clear that he will appear in the gun sights of congressional committees and others in the near future, and our argument to him was that if there’s one place you should go on the record and lay it all out and you’ll be treated fairly, I’d like to think it would be us. It’s an argument every journalist makes. But we could make it with some confidence, because we have the time and the inclination to tell the story in all of its dimensions. I think we got fairly close. Only in the last minute did he decide to follow his counsel’s opinion that he not talk.

As to the interrogators and others who had never spoken publicly before, that was the usual … what anyone in this business tries to do, get enough of them to talk, facing the camera, that you knew you were not getting something unique, but that they were probably speaking for many others. The same is true of anonymous interviews. Deciding to use them, you really had to have the confidence that what they were saying was backed up by people even deeper off the record. We thought long and hard about how much we would promise anonymity for people and how far we would go to protect it.

GB: Much of the investigative work on this question of torture has been done by magazine writers, The New Yorker in particular, Jane Mayer and Seymour Hersh, and of course a bit from the Washington Post and New York Times. I wonder if you have a sense of why the broadcast media has not played a bigger role in this story?

MK: There has been some efforts but I think, generally speaking, it has been left to “Frontline” in America, and increasingly in the world, to spend the time, the money and the energy. It’s a wonderful responsibility and privilege to me to have six, eight months or whatever it takes, the amount of money it takes and the staff it takes, to go forward and connect the dots. It always surprises me that broadcast journalism, in its competitive environment, can’t devote, or have told themselves they can’t devote their time and energy to a subject of such importance.

GB: But you do think it’s a question of not devoting the time and resources, rather than something about broadcast journalism, that makes it more difficult to tell this story?

MK: It’s all those things, like any real answer, it’s many things, it’s not a simple thing. It is the economics, it is the time, it is the energy. Not to mention that there are not a lot of people left in broadcast journalism who know how to make a compelling or an interesting non-commercial ninety minutes. The willingness of the executives in many news organizations to sit still for that time — this “Frontline” is not jazzy, it’s not a reality TV show, it’s serious and meticulous and methodical. I happen to think it’s eminently compelling and watchable if you’re a serious person. It’s not possible for people in many commercial enterprises to trust your audience enough to give them something like this. I happen to believe people would watch it. And that film, if it had aired on a major network, would not only have two or three times the audience, but would make everybody who worked at that network feel better about working at that network, which has a certain moral benefit.

GB: Is that a frustration that people working for institutions like “Frontline” feel, that they wish the audience was not so small?

MK: The audience was still several million people. I always think of it this way: the audience was the combined circulation of the Sunday New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times put together. What would any reporter give to write the lead Week in Review article in all those papers! That audience will not only see it at night and have that kind of experience but on the Web, others will be able to see it.

In terms of impact and believability, my experience, in 20-plus years of making “Frontline”s, people increasingly when we approach them to do interviews believe “Frontline” in some way that they don’t believe network news. We do a certain kind of information, big, in-depth, thoughtful, and, sadly, we’re the only game in town. And I think people expect us to do it a certain way that’s different than a CNN reporter, who … would never sit down with [someone] for two hours. I do interviews that run two or three hours long. And most people, especially important people who have something they don’t want to reveal, will not sit down for that long. They’ll usually say, one tape, ten minutes. I can’t tell you the last time I shot even a two tape interview and that’s an hour right there.

GB: In the documentary, you stick closely to the refrain, voiced mostly by Sen. John McCain, that you are revealing the story of abuses by American soldiers out of concern for ourselves, for what it will mean for America. I wonder if that was a way for you to keep from seeming anti-American somehow. Is that a line that you feel you walk when you are making a documentary like this?

MK: It’s interesting that Senator McCain can use it as cover. It, and the experience he personally had, there’s probably no politician more unassailable on this issue. I think that is as it should be. But I’ve also come to believe it. It is about us. There are other films to be made and hopefully others will make them: the impact of this on the Iraqi people, films on torture and what works and doesn’t work. We weren’t doing that. We were doing the politics of this, not whether it’s effective, we are not going to do the science or the sociology of it. What we are talking about is what is the impact on Americans of the revelations that we have moved some bright white lines that we have always thought, in myth or reality, that Americans have always operated under. That was the point of the film and to that extent to which Senator McCain has articulated it in a catchphrase — it’s “not about them, it’s about us” — it’s useful.

GB: He becomes an important figure for you in the film, especially at the end, in helping to explain to the audience the perspective you’re coming from.

MK: He and Lindsey Graham. Think about the important political moment when 46 Republican senators followed McCain’s prompt [and passed a bill condemning torture]. Covering that is not about our own cover, but just about reporting something that a lot of people out in America didn’t know about.

GB: And it probably provided a good continuation of the narrative arc of this story.

MK: If you think about the journey we’ve taken as a country, narratively, just purely narratively, from 9/11 and that initial impulse of fear and revenge and anger to a moment of reflection about did we go to far, did we push the lines too far. Even if you think about the interrogation issues, it’s a perfect arc to travel, because it tells you where we now stand. And what makes it perfect is that you have conservative Republican senators articulating it. It isn’t a bunch of Democrats or anti-war people, but the very people who supported the president and lead the charge now questioning the direction of things. That’s the definition of news.

GB: In the documentary you have a lot of menacing close up still shots of [Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld. I wonder if you came to see him as the villain in this story, or was that just part of the convention of building a narrative and needing to focus in one individual character?

MK: Well, if you watch “Rumsfeld’s War,” this is made in the same style, with Rumsfeld very much the focus of the film. And one person’s “menacing,” is another person’s …

GB: Powerful.

MK: Yeah. Powerful and thoughtful and sensitive and whatever. I happen to think Secretary Rumsfeld is one of the great and tremendously interesting figures in recent American history and worthy of many Shakespearean allusions which I force myself never to make, for obvious reasons, maybe even biblical allusions. But he is a wonderful, vital character who I wish one day would give me an interview. But in lieu of that I use photos and stock footage of him, and he is always in the most important places in any one of these big stories. At that level I am happy to find photos of him and use them to convey that. My question [to myself] ends up being “Am I being over the top editorially, or am I drawing attention to his role in the narrative?”

GB: How are people responding to the film? It just came out this week, so you have just gotten fresh feedback …

MK: I’ve been doing this for thirty years and I don’t think there are major awards we haven’t won. So all of those things don’t mean anything anymore. But what does mean something, or what has finally come to mean something in a career is are you doing things that touch people, that seem to matter, that are central to the American debate and sometimes you do things that you hope are and the circus has moved on. This is one of those that are a happy coincidence of being important and salient right now and powerful and big and built by us over time and at great expense dropped on the air at a moment, apparently, when people are really interested.

So the response has been really gratifying. Not only because of the quality of the work. But also because it’s a moment where people are really interested in a civic understanding of it. And that’s what you try to do as a journalist, once you’ve transcended all the other imperatives of career and success, getting to do good work, all those things you want to do, in the end you arrive at some place where you say, gee, I really want to be doing the very best work of my life when it needs to be received by people, by a democracy, who need to make an important decision. And hopefully what you’ve learned how to do and the place you do it are appropriate to the need. And for that I’m thankful to “Frontline” and the people who pay for the television program, and the people who work on it and the people who watch it.

Gal Beckerman is a former staff writer at CJR and a writer and editor for the New York Times Book Review.