Why Capturing the Friedmans freaked me out

Like David Bernstein, I watched Capturing the Friedmans last night and have not been able to not shake the heebie-jeebies since then. The reason? (WARNING: SPOILER ALERT AHEAD) The movie is about the bizarre case of Arnold Friedman, an award-winning teacher who lived with his wife and three children in Great Neck, NY. He tutored children in piano and computers on the side. In the late eighties, Friedman was arrested for solicitation of child pornography. Nassau County police started to investigate, and eventually charged Friedman and his 19-year old sone Jesse with sodomy and sexual abuse of minors. Eerily, during this entire episode, the family videoaped a lot of their deliberations about what to do. The documentary consists mostly of those videotapes plus contemporary interviews of the principals involved in the case. After watching the movie, you come away convinced of two things:

1) Arnold Friedman is a pedophile who has sexually abused young children; 2) Arnold Friedman was, in all likelihood, innocent of the charges he faced.

For more on why I think this, read more from Debbie Nathan’s Village Voice story (she appeared in Capturing the Friedmans as a talking head) and Harvey A. Silverglate and Carl Takei’s discussion of the extras in the DVD version of the film. What’s so disturbing about the film is that watching it, I found myself desperately wanting Friedman to be guilty. However, it becomes clear that the dearth of physical evidence, combined with the questionable techniques employed in extracting information from alleged victims, raises a reasonable doubt about the Friedmans’ guilt. Maybe something untoward happened, maybe not — one has to think there’s a high likelihood that Friedman would have molested a child in the future. All that said, the prosecution’s version of events seems to stretch credulity. However, just because I want something to be true doesn’t mean it is true. Another reason I can’t get the movie out of my head is the release of the Senate report on pre-war intelligence about Iraq. Here’s a summary from the Financial Times. The report blasts the intelligence community because it “ignored evidence that did not fit their preconceived notion that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.” However, the report finds that “no evidence that intelligence analysts were subjected to overt political pressure to tailor their findings,” according to the New York Times. Conservatives are outraged that the intel community suffered from such groupthink. Liberals like Josh Marshall are outraged because their groupthink that the Bush team browbeat the intelligence analysts found no support in the report. In other words, a lot of people are disturbed because their preconceived notions of the turth did not find any empirical support. Those outraged on both sides of the aisle should rent Capturing the Friedmans, and then take a good hard look at the evidence they’ve got to back up their assumptions. UPDATE: the following paragraphs jumped out in Mike Dorning’s story on the Senae report in the Chicago Tribune:

The U.S. was handicapped in accurately assessing Iraqi weapons programs, the committee found, because intelligence agencies had not made development of Iraqi sources a top priority. Instead, spy agencies depended on UN weapons inspectors to collect information for them until the inspectors were thrown out in 1998. Consequently, after that the U.S. did not have a single human intelligence source of its own inside Iraq collecting information about its weapons programs, according to the report. The report said intelligence officials attributed the difficulty in developing sources to the lack of an official U.S government presence such as an embassy to provide cover for clandestine intelligence case officers. The panel said the spy agencies appeared to have concluded it was too risky to send in an intelligence officer without official cover.

An idle question: if the CIA thought sending an intelligence agent to Iraq without official cover was too risky, is there anywhere the CIA would be willing to take this risk? What is the cost of this risk-aversion? ANOTHER UPDATE: Matt Yglesias thinks I should know better:

This makes it sound like the political pressure theory is just something Josh cooked up sitting in his armchair at the R Street Starbucks but there are some serious issues to grapple with here. The political pressure meme is supported by original reporting in anti-war liberal magazines like The American Prospect, The Nation, and Mother Jones by Jason Vest, Bob Dreyfuss, Laura Rozen and others, while pro-war liberal magazines like The New Yorker and The New Republic have printed original reporting on this subject by Seymor Hersh, John Judis, Spencer Ackerman and others. Perhaps these people are all wrong — being misled by their sources, say — but it’s not some crazy idea they made up one morning.

I certainly wasn’t trying to give the impression that Matt got, and I agree on the extent of the reportage here. However, the point of connecting this post to Capturing the Friedmans was that — as in that movie — a massive amount of circumstantial evidence can still lead to an incorrect conclusion. It was logical to assume that, since Saddam Hussein had attempted multiple times to acquire WMD, he’d be doing so post-9/11. The exile reports merely buttressed the preconception. Among those who believe the Bush administration to be a bullying, illiberal, overly power-maximizing bunch, I can easily see this meme being the logical conclusion as well. That doesn’t guarantee that it’ true, however.