This is another of the acronyms used repeatedly during the film. A man who graduated at an American university, he is currently facing charges relating to his involvement in 9/11 that are being heard by a military tribunal. In the meantime, he was waterboarded 183 times as the CIA pressed him for information about the al-Qaida network.
KSM was captured in Pakistan in 2003 and taken to the Guantánamo Bay detention centre three years later. He is regarded as the mastermind of the 9/11 plot, and one of Bin Laden's most trusted and senior lieutenants. The CIA officers in Zero Dark Thirty keep referring to KSM – Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The initials do not stand for a Dutch airline. Despite relentless special forces operations, very few al-Qaida supporters were found in the caves, and the caves themselves were just, well, caves. Back then, there was speculation that al-Qaida had created a James Bond villain's lair, hewn from the rock. For those of us with poor memories and worse geography, Tora Bora is the complex of caves in eastern Afghanistan where it was thought Bin Laden was hiding. But it's been a long time since the invasion of Afghanistan. Tora BoraĪ decade ago, when everyone became an armchair general in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, most people had heard of the Tora Bora. Poland and Romania are known to have hosted black sites, and some campaigners say 17 ships were also used for the same purposes. President Bush was forced into an admission in 2006, but only after the media began to publish details of black sites around the world. For years their existence was rumoured, but denied. They were also handy stopover sites for suspects who were being transported, kidnapped really, under the extraordinary rendition programme coordinated by the CIA. Their use was authorised in the days after the 9/11 attacks as hubs for prisoners accused of terrorist involvement. These were secret locations where bad things tended to happen – places that US government agencies used to transport, detain, and interrogate detainees. Bin Laden was a Saudi, but his closest associates were not all fellow countrymen. The group here is probably the number of detainees in CIA custody, such as Ammar, who are being interrogated, and tortured, for information leading to the whereabouts of the man who is known to them as the "emir".
Confusingly for experts on Middle East construction firms, Saudi Group is the name of a vast building business in the kingdom, but this is a red herring.
It is not clear whether Ammar is a Saudi, or which group is being referred to. The film starts with a reference to the Saudi group, and immediately focuses on the tribulations of a prisoner, Ammar. The phrase, it seems, doesn't refer to any single point, just night-time. Some soldiers say it refers to 12.30am, but others insist this is not true. Zero Dark Thirty is military slang, used across the services, by British and American soldiers, to describe a time after darkness has fallen. It isn't a term that is unique to the special forces units that found the al-Qaida leader hiding in Pakistan. Zero Dark Thirty isn't the name of the operation to find Bin Laden, nor is it actually mentioned anywhere in the film.
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