Summary
American Manhunt: Osama Bin Laden is a crucial and comprehensive account of the global efforts to track down and eliminate al Qaeda’s figurehead, and a little jingoism isn’t enough to dampen the mood.
Netflix’s American Manhunt: The Boston Marathon Bombing was a sobering exploration of the impact of domestic terrorism and America’s post-9/11 psyche, and I thought about it often while watching its sister series explore the global efforts to track down Osama Bin Laden.
This three-part docuseries is riveting and crucial, providing a comprehensive accounting of recent history. But it’s also undeniably slanted and jingoistic, revelling in Uncle Sam’s no-holds-barred efforts to bring al Qaeda’s leader to deserved justice. That previous season became important in my mind, because I could recall how, over a decade since the world was changed on September 11, 2001, the American people were gripped by the same fear, subject to the same kind of atrocities, and at war, in a sense, with the same enemy.
In that context, the fist-shaking fervour for aggressive foreign policy is perhaps a little more forgivable.
The first episode of American Manhunt: Osama Bin Laden is masterful. Stitching archival footage and talking head interviews into a tapestry of dread, it builds from the ominous intelligence suggesting the possibility of an imminent attack on U.S. soil to the attack itself and the immediate aftermath, direct from the mouths of the CIA officers whose job became immediately to find out who was responsible – and then to bring them to justice.
Ordinarily, this wouldn’t have been the CIA’s job. But following the attacks, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s claim that it would take six months to begin an invasion seemed inadequate to President George W. Bush, who was more swayed by the grandiose claim of CIA agent Cofer Black – one of the more eccentric talking heads – that he would have “flies walking on Bin Laden’s eyeballs” in six weeks. This background rivalry between the U.S. Department of Defense and its intelligence apparatus becomes problematic later, when Bin Laden is able to escape from the mountain region of Tora Bora because Rumsfeld withheld the troops that would have been required to capture him.
A one-sided docuseries like this requires certain things, and one of them is for us all to be on the same page about who the bad guy really is. Any right-minded individual should have no trouble seeing that Osama Bin Laden was a monster, but it’s constantly reiterated to be safe, with a laundry list of terror attacks attributed to him directly and many more floated as being committed in his honour. The implication is clear – the Western world would not be safe while this man was still on the loose.
This assurance is fundamental to the long pursuit of Bin Laden after his trail went cold in 2001, and it goes some way towards justifying why a thoughtful and Democratic President like Barack Obama would eventually authorize a raid by U.S. Navy SEALs on what was essentially a strong hunch. This wasn’t just a question of national pride, but global security. Obama was willing to risk his presidency on the fact that Bin Laden was hiding in a compound in Pakistan, against the wishes of his Vice President, Joe Biden. Liberal democracy was at stake.
If Zero Dark Thirty has long held the crown for the most riveting depiction of this raid, American Manhunt: Osama Bin Laden might nick it with a near feature-length final episode that is absolutely stellar documentary filmmaking. And it’s bracingly tense and raucously entertaining because we know the outcome and can agree on its morality; the earlier legwork establishing Bin Laden’s monstrous bona fides pays off. The master stroke of this series is reducing complex American foreign policy to cinematic simplicity, the good guys versus the baddest guy of all. That, at least, is a story we can all get behind.
