Shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, US Vice-President Dick Cheney declared the need for the USA and its allies to work ‘the dark side’, ushering in an era of globalised torture, rendition and assassinations. This chapter deals with documentaries and fictional dramas that have delved into ‘the dark side’ of the post-9/11 intelligence world – including Zero Dark Thirty (2012), Taxi to the Dark Side (2007) and Standard Operating Procedure (2008). Each of these three films offers a distinctive perspective on torture and the ‘War on Terror’, but I argue that Standard Operating Procedure, criticised by some for its lack of moral viewpoint, is actually the most ethical of these films.

The Hollywood blockbuster about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, Zero Dark Thirty, has also attracted critical controversy, in its case for its apparent endorsement of torture. In the wake of 9/11, debates emerged about the effectiveness of torture in gathering intelligence to prevent future attacks. The capture and killing of bin Laden in May 2011 revived those debates, with Cheney (2011), among others, claiming that the policy of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ that he instigated led to obtaining the name of bin Laden's courier, which in turn enabled the CIA to track down the Al-Qaeda leader. In its narrative Zero adheres to the view that torture played a crucial part in locating bin Laden – a view, however, that has been disputed in real life, although the film claims to be ‘based on first hand accounts of actual events’. Its screenwriter, Mark Boal, has defended the film on the grounds that it is ‘a movie not a documentary’, a gesture criticised by Alex Gibney, director of Taxi:

Debates about documentary have tended to revolve around questions of ‘truthfulness’, questions from which, Gibney suggests, fictionalised ‘movies’ purporting to be based on historical events are not exempt.