Missing Torture Report – Truth or Dupe?

Rowan Wolf, PhD
Voice of Conscience

CIA torture. Nothing to hide?

Did the CIA delete its only complete copy of the investigation into its use of torture? According to John Brennan (head of the CIA) the 6700 plus page report was accidentally deleted and the disk destroyed. However, the only CIA representative to serve time for torture, CIA torture program whistleblower John Kiriakou, says this claim is bunk.

I would recommend reading the Isikoff article in full as there are tidbits buried in there that should throw red flags for anyone who feels that the use of torture by the US is of concern and that government transparency is an important component of a functioning democracy. This is especially true when one of the presidential candidates has openly called for a green light on torture. This is not the first time, and I imagine it won’t be the last, that there is an effort to make this report go away. Even now, there are legislative efforts to do just that.

While this report is important from the perspective of clearly documenting the “enhnaced interrogation” practices to the CIA, it goes to much bigger issues; issues like the culpability of the “architects” of the program as well as those who carried it out; the culpability on the world stage of the United States in engaging in torture; and the culpability to the current President (Obama) for choosing to not just sweep it under the rug, but attempting to silence those who would come forward about the program. One thing I am confident about is that if we allow this to pass invisibly into the deep well of government secrets, we will see this play out again and again. Further, I have no confidence at all that the next president will pull this back off the shelf as an expedient tool – even it it is a tool to terrorize.

Senate report on CIA torture is one step closer to disappearing (Isikoff, Yahoo, May 16, 2016)

‘Everything…was a lie’: Former CIA analyst, John Kiriakou on the agency deleting torture report (RT, May 18, 2016)

The CIA inspector general’s office — the spy agency’s internal watchdog — has acknowledged it “mistakenly” destroyed its only copy of a mammoth Senate torture report at the same time lawyers for the Justice Department were assuring a federal judge that copies of the document were being preserved, Yahoo News has learned.

While another copy of the report exists elsewhere at the CIA, the erasure of the controversial document by the office charged with policing agency conduct has alarmed the U.S. senator who oversaw the torture investigation and reignited a behind-the-scenes battle over whether the full unabridged report should ever be released, according to multiple intelligence community sources familiar with the incident.

The deletion of the document has been portrayed by agency officials to Senate investigators as an “inadvertent” foul-up by the inspector general. In what one intelligence community source described as a series of errors straight “out of the Keystone Cops,” CIA inspector general officials deleted an uploaded computer file with the report and then accidentally destroyed a disk that also contained the document, filled with thousands of secret files about the CIA’s use of “enhanced” interrogation methods.

“It’s breathtaking that this could have happened, especially in the inspector general’s office — they’re the ones that are supposed to be providing accountability within the agency itself,” said Douglas Cox, a City University of New York School of Law professor who specializes in tracking the preservation of federal records. “It makes you wonder what was going on over there?”

The incident was privately disclosed to the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Justice Department last summer, the sources said. But the destruction of a copy of the sensitive report has never been made public. Nor was it reported to the federal judge who, at the time, was overseeing a lawsuit seeking access to the still classified document under the Freedom of Information Act, according to a review of court files in the case.

A CIA spokesman, while not publicly commenting on the circumstances of the erasure, emphasized that another unopened computer disk with the full report has been, and still is, locked in a vault at agency headquarters. “I can assure you that the CIA has retained a copy,” wrote Dean Boyd, the agency’s chief of public affairs, in an email.

The 6,700-page report, the product of years of work by the Senate Intelligence Committee, contains meticulous details, including original CIA cables and memos, on the agency’s use of waterboarding, sleep deprivation and other aggressive interrogation methods at “black site” prisons overseas. A 500-page executive summary was released in December 2014 by Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the committee’s outgoing chair. It concluded that the CIA’s interrogations were far more brutal than the agency had publicly acknowledged and produced often unreliable intelligence. The findings drew sharp dissents from Republicans on the panel and from four former CIA directors.

But the full three-volume report, which formed the basis for the executive summary, has never been released. In light of a U.S. Court of Appeals ruling last week that the document is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act, there are new questions about whether it will ever be made public, or even be preserved.

After receiving inquiries from Yahoo News, Feinstein, now the vice chair of the committee, wrote CIA Director John Brennan last Friday night asking him to “immediately” provide a new copy of the full report to the inspector general’s office.

“Your prompt response will allay my concern that this was more than an ‘accident,’” Feinstein wrote, adding that the full report includes “extensive information directly related to the IG’s ongoing oversight of the CIA.” (CIA spokesman Boyd declined to comment.)

The incident is the latest twist in the ongoing battle over the report, and comes in the midst of a charged political debate over torture. Likely Republican Party nominee Donald Trump has vowed to resume such methods — “and a lot more” — in the war against the Islamic State. “I love it, I love it,” Trump recently said, describing his views on waterboarding. “The only thing is, we should make it much tougher than waterboarding.” )

Ironically in light of the inspector general’s actions, the intelligence committee’s investigation was triggered by the CIA’s admission in 2007 that it had destroyed another key piece of evidence — hours of videotapes of the waterboarding of two “high value” detainees, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri.

According to a brief by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which is seeking release of the full report under the Freedom of Information Act, the document “describes widespread and horrific human rights abuses by the CIA” and details the agency’s “evasions and misrepresentations” to Congress, the courts and the public.

To ensure the document was circulated widely within the government, and to preserve it for future declassification, Feinstein, in her closing days as chair, instructed that computer disks containing the full report be sent to the CIA and its inspector general, as well as the other U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies. Aides said Feinstein specifically included a separate copy for the CIA inspector general because she wanted the office to undertake a full review. Her goal, as she wrote at the time, was to ensure “that the system of detention and interrogation described in this report is never repeated.”

But her successor, Republican Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina, quickly asked for all of the disks to be returned, even threatening at one point to send a committee security officer to retrieve them. He contended the volumes are congressional records that were never intended for executive branch, much less public, distribution.

The administration, while not complying with Burr’s demand to return the disks, has essentially sided with him against releasing them to the public. Early last year, Justice lawyers instructed federal agencies to keep their copies of the document under lock and key, unopened, lest the courts treat them as government records subject to the Freedom of Information Act. Weeks later, in an effort to head off a motion for “emergency relief” by the ACLU, a Justice Department lawyer told U.S. Judge James Boasberg that no copies of the report would be returned to Congress or destroyed; the government “can assure the Court that it will preserve the status quo” until the Freedom of Information Act lawsuit was resolved, wrote Vesper Mei, a senior counsel in the Justice Department’s civil division, in a February 2015 filing.

But last August, a chagrined Christopher R. Sharpley, the CIA’s acting inspector general, alerted the Senate intelligence panel that his office’s copy of the report had vanished. According to sources familiar with Sharpley’s account, he explained it this way: When it received its disk, the inspector general’s office uploaded the contents onto its internal classified computer system and destroyed the disk in what Sharpley described as “the normal course of business.” Meanwhile someone in the IG office interpreted the Justice Department’s instructions not to open the file to mean it should be deleted from the server — so that both the original and the copy were gone.

At some point, it is not clear when, after being informed by CIA general counsel Caroline Krass that the Justice Department wanted all copies of the document preserved, officials in the inspector general’s office undertook a search to find its copy of the report. They discovered, “S***, we don’t have one,” said one of the sources briefed on Sharpley’s account.

Sharpley was apologetic about the destruction and promised to ask CIA director Brennan for another copy. But as of last week, he seems not to have received it; after Yahoo News began asking about the matter, he called intelligence committee staffers to ask if he could get a new copy from them.

Sharpley also told Senate committee aides he had reported the destruction of the disk to the CIA’s general counsel’s office, and Krass passed that information along to the Justice Department. But there is no record in court filings that department lawyers ever informed the judge overseeing the case that the inspector general’s office had destroyed its copy of the report.

The episode was viewed among intelligence committee aides as another embarrassment for the inspector general’s office. Months earlier, a CIA accountability board had overruled the IG’s findings that agency officials had improperly searched computers used by Senate investigators working on the report. Sharpley has been serving as acting inspector general since his predecessor, David Buckley, resigned in January 2015. The White House has yet to nominate a successor.

A Justice Department spokesman said on Friday that, since the inspector general’s office is, by statute, a “unit” of the CIA, and the agency still had its copy, “the status quo … was preserved.” But Feinstein, in a separate letter to Attorney General Loretta Lynch last Friday, took a different view: She asked that the Justice Department “notify the federal courts” involved in the Freedom of Information Act litigation about the destruction.

At issue in the ongoing legal dispute is whether the report is subject to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The administration says no, and a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals last week agreed, ruling that it is a congressional document not subject to FOIA, under the terms of a 2009 letter by which the Senate panel had received access to CIA files. The judges did write, however, that the executive branch does have “some discretion to use the full report for internal purposes.” The ACLU said on Friday it was “considering our options for appeal”; CIA spokesman Boyd said the agency’s copy of the report would be retained “pending the final result of the litigation.” But he pointedly made no mention of what would happen to the CIA’s copy of the report after that.

In the meantime, Feinstein, joined by Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, has taken a different route, petitioning David S. Ferriero, the chief of the National Archives, to formally declare the report a “federal record” that must be preserved “in the public interest” under a law known as the Federal Records Act.

In a letter last month, the senators expressed concerns that federal agencies might destroy their copies of the report. “No part of the executive branch has ruled out destroying or sending back the full report to Congress after the conclusion of the current FOIA litigation,” they wrote in an April 13, 2016, letter. A similar point was raised by more than 30 advocacy groups who noted in a separate letter to Ferriero last month that the archivist had a duty to act whenever there was a threat that government records are at risk of “unauthorized destruction.”

Ferriero on April 29 wrote back to Feinstein that he would not rule on the question until the FOIA court case is concluded. And last week, Burr renewed his call to have all copies of the report sent back — presumably a way to ensure they are never publicly released. Citing the new Court of Appeals ruling, “Sen. Burr anticipates the return of these full reports to the Senate Intelligence Committee,” a spokeswoman said.

The CIA’s Inspector General Office reportedly “inadvertently” deleted its only copy of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Torture Report, but CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou tells RT that the American people shouldn’t believe what the agency says.

The “inadvertently” deleted copy contained 6,700 classified documents on torture techniques used on prisoners by the CIA following the 9/11 terror attacks. Only about 500 pages of the report were declassified and released by the committee chair, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-California), in December of 2014.

Former CIA analyst John Kiriakou, who served time in jail for being the first to blow the whistle on the CIA’s use of waterboarding, told RT he was not surprised that the agency is saying it had destroyed the copy.

Kiriakou was surprised, however, at the agency’s attempts to convince the committee that the erasure had been an accident.

“It is not an accident. You can’t accidentally destroy a 6,700 page document. You cannot accidentally destroy the electronic copy, especially when these documents are numbered. There are only about a dozen that exist anywhere in the world,” Kiriakou said.

“Someone would have to physically go into the safe in Office of the General Counsel, pull out this document, which comes in many parts, it is so long it can’t sit by itself, and take the time to physically destroy it. It doesn’t make any sense. It is not how the CIA works,” he added.

Feinstein wrote to CIA director John Brennan this week after Yahoo broke the story to ask him to replace the copy.

“Your prompt response will allay my concern that this was more than ‘accident.’ The CIA IG should have a copy of the full Study because the report includes extensive information directly related to the IG’s ongoing oversight of the CIA,” wrote Feinstein.

RT asked Kiriakou if he thought the agency was trying to make the report disappear.

“Everything the CIA has told us about this program from the very beginning has been a lie,” Kiriakou told RT. “The CIA said they weren’t torturing prisoners. That was a lie. The CIA said they were not sending people to third countries to undergo torture. That was a lie. The CIA said they were not sending people to secret prisons around the world. That was a lie.”

“John Brennan [ CIA director]… said he did not have his employees spy on Senate investigators. That was a lie. My question is why should we believe anything John Brennan says when everything that he has told the American people has been a lie?” he added.

Graphic by the ACLU.

For Further Information:

The Torture Report is one of the web sites that have preserved what portions of the report have been released.

Required Reading: Prequels to the Torture Report. Marcellene Hearn. CommonDreams, 12/8/2014

Executive Summary that was released by Feinstein and the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Rowan Wolf, PhD

Is Managing Editor of The Greanville Post and Director of The Russian Desk. She is a sociologist, writer and activist with life long engagement in social justice, peace, environmental, and animal rights movements. Her research and writing includes issues of imperialism, oppression, global capitalism, peak resources, global warming, and environmental degradation. Rowan taught sociology for twenty-two years, was a member of the City of Portland’s Peak Oil Task Force, and maintains her own site Uncommon Thought Journal. She may be reached by email at rowanwolf@greanvillepost.com

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The ZDT controversy heats up: Director Kathryn Bigelow defends her indefensible Zero Dark Thirty

Bigelow: The devil often wears seductive masks.

Editor’s Note: This post offers our readers two additional views on the growing debate about Zero Dark Thirty, a film liable to win some Oscars this year. The first is by David Walsh, house critic at wsws.org, a socialist organization, and, for my money, perhaps one of the most perceptive movie evaluators in the anglophone world. As a socialist, David brings to his readers the advantage of a sophisticated class analysis, a feature that, all by itself, makes his commentary that much more insightful than the rest. The second is by Jonathan Kim, critic for ReThink Reviews and the HuffPo. Here we deal with a liberal, with all the incomprehensible and exasperating myopias of that tribe, a social tier which, while blabbing criticism always strives to keep one foot firmly planted in the system. This posture inevitably leads to confusing statements like this (pay special attention to the bolded part):

Zero Dark Thirty ignores the fact that America’s torture program inspired anti-U.S. sentiment around the world, causing many to vow revenge on the U.S. and its allies. It ignores the fact that torture scandals like Abu Ghraib caused support for the U.S. occupation in Iraq to plummet, inflaming the insurgency, prolonging the fighting, and putting U.S. troops at increased risk. It ignores the possibly irreparable damage to America’s reputation as a country that respects the rule of law. It ignores the damage torture did to America’s relationships with its allies, who became reluctant to hand over possibly valuable detainees to the U.S. for fear of being accomplices to war crimes and were furious when the U.S. detained and tortured their citizens without charge. It ignores the fact that if CIA agents such as Maya and Dan — two of Zero Dark Thirty’s “heroes” — were actual people, they deserve to be tried and convicted as war criminals under international law for their unrepentant participation in the torture of detainees.

You may wonder what I can possibly object to in the above para, which looks and smells like an impeccable call to support the nation’s highest moral standards. At the risk of sounding picayune, that’s precisely what sticks in my craw, and it happens often when dealing with the liberals’ version of America’s history. Kim does not seem to realise that it’s been a very very long time (if ever) that America truly respected the rule of law, especially in foreign affairs, as opposed to the simulacrum thereof. While the brainwashed —among which I naturally include liberals, not to mention the countless fucktards that America incubates by the millions— may think that Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and Mr Bushoma’s sneaky wars and invasions have done “irreparable damage to the (supposedly) sterling reputation of the United States,” we must offer the following correction: You can’t damage what doesn’t exist. On that basis I must conclude that what Kim is actually deploring is the fact the shocking revelations about torture and other inconvenient subjects have damaged the propaganda image the US ruling circles have carefully cultivated for more than a century. Their dismantlement should be cause for celebration, not concern.

Second, while the debate rages, most critics like Kim continue to take at face value the notion that Pres. Obama ended all torture. This is entirely false. Torture in one form or another continues, and will go on till the rotten but extremely hypocritical imperial system is defeated globally. That will only happen when America finally becomes a real democracy instead of a plutocracy pretending to be one. Third, if the ruling cliques based in Washington are a criminal enterprise, and in my view they are, why should we lament that other countries will now fail to collaborate with it?—P. Greanville

••••••
Director Kathryn Bigelow defends her indefensible Zero Dark Thirty
wsws.org

Director Kathryn Bigelow took to the pages of the Los Angeles Times Tuesday to defend her pro-CIA film Zero Dark Thirty which has provoked opposition inside and outside the film industry. Bigelow’s column, which reveals her as a slavish admirer of the US intelligence and military apparatus, only sinks her—deservedly—deeper in the mire.

The filmmaker and her screenwriter Mark Boal, in their political blindness and misreading of the current state of American public opinion, thought they could get away with murder, as it were. They assumed that wide layers of the population would be as excited as they were by contact with torturers and assassins and would be enthused about a version of events essentially told by the latter. They were mistaken in this.

Bigelow now finds herself in the unenviable position of claiming that her film, which clearly offers a justification for torture and other war crimes, does not advocate torture. One can only conclude from her ludicrous and incoherent LA Times piece that Bigelow was unprepared for criticism and protest.

The filmmaker begins by noting that her goal had been “to make a modern, rigorous film about counter-terrorism, centered on one of the most important and classified missions in American history.” She acknowledges that she started, in other words, by accepting everything that any serious artist would have subjected to criticism and questioning.

Bigelow betrays no interest (in the LA Times or in her movie) in the history of US intervention in the Middle East and Central Asia over the course of decades, of the CIA’s relations with Osama bin Laden and other Islamist elements in Afghanistan and elsewhere from the late 1970s onward, of the first war on Iraq in 1990-91, of Washington’s support for the oppression of the Palestinians, or, for that matter, of the murky events leading up to and surrounding the 9/11 attacks. In general, Bigelow indicates a lack of concern with anything that might disrupt her tale of “counterterrorism” and its courageous warriors.

The award-winning director presents herself in the following manner: “As a lifelong pacifist, I support all protests against the use of torture, and, quite simply, inhumane treatment of any kind.” As a devotee of counterterrorism and classified military-intelligence missions, Bigelow has already indicated that she is a unique sort of “pacifist,” but there is more to come.

She then notes disingenuously, “But I do wonder if some of the sentiments alternately [?] expressed about the film might be more appropriately directed at those who instituted and ordered these U.S. policies, as opposed to a motion picture that brings the story to the screen.” As it turns out, although Bigelow apparently hasn’t noticed it, such sentiments have been directed at those who instituted and ordered these criminal US policies for more than a decade.

Bigelow eventually gets to the heart of her argument, which has been echoed by such apologists as filmmaker Michael Moore: “Those of us who work in the arts know that depiction is not endorsement. If it was, no artist would be able to paint inhumane practices, no author could write about them, and no filmmaker could delve into the thorny subjects of our time.”

Driving home the point, she asserts that “confusing depiction with endorsement is the first step toward chilling any American artist’s ability and right to shine a light on dark deeds, especially when those deeds are cloaked in layers of secrecy and government obfuscation.”

Something important is revealed here about a generation or generations of artists and semi-intellectuals nourished on post-structuralism and postmodernism, cold, empty “conceptual art” and social indifference, and made affluent as a by-product of the stock and art market booms and related economic trends of the past several decades.
No, depiction is not endorsement, as though anyone with a brain would ever suggest that it was. However, whether the representation of torture and other inhumane acts amounts to endorsement, on the one hand, or criticism and outrage, on the other, depends on the artistic treatment (context, juxtaposition of images, the artist’s attitude) in the given instance.

In the case of Zero Dark Thirty, the evidence is clear. The film begins, as the WSWS review noted, with “a dark screen and a sound track of fire fighters’ radio calls and frantic cries for help from the upper floors of the Twin Towers on 9/11 … The juxtaposition of the 9/11 soundtrack and the harrowing scenes of torture are presented as cause and effect, with one justifying the other.”

Zero Dark Thirty was created with the intimate collaboration of the CIA, the Defense Department and the Obama White House (including the personal intervention of John Brennan, formerly the chief of the drones assassination program and current nominee for the post of CIA director). It tells its tale from the point of view of a female CIA operative.

As was the case with The Hurt Locker (2008), where the central figures were US soldiers in Iraq, Bigelow concentrates in her latest work on how exhausting and difficult it is to be a victimizer. There is no indication that Jessica Chastain’s Maya seriously questions her work or that she would not preside over the same horrific acts in the future.

The suggestion that critics of her film are not “adult” enough to deal with the world’s unpleasantness or, as Bigelow puts it in her LA Times piece, are “ignoring or denying the role it [torture] played in US counter-terrorism policy and practices,” is another cynical effort to divert attention.

Films dealt with the most nightmarish events in history, including Nazism and the Holocaust, long before Bigelow picked up a film camera.

For instance, Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (1945) includes scenes of Gestapo torture of Italian resistance fighters and Gillo Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers (1966) depicts the torture of Algerians at the hands of the French colonialist military. A more recent work, Ken Loach’s The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006) vividly shows the British military torturing Irish republican detainees.

The important difference, of course, is that Rossellini, Pontecorvo and Loach, through their dramas, offered an indictment of the torturers and the forces that stood behind them, whereas Bigelow’s film takes the side, with whatever qualms, of the oppressors.

Other, better films on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have dealt with the brutalities of those conflicts. Gavin Hood’s Rendition (2007), commented the WSWS, “depicts unflinchingly the simulated drowning technique now known to the entire world as ‘waterboarding,’ as well as the beating and electrocution of the torture victim.” However, Hood’s film, a protest against US policy, met with a generally hostile reception from the media, which criticized the movie for its “slanted” and “one-sided” and “deck-stacking” arguments.

Philip Haas’ The Situation (2006), Nick Broomfield’s Battle for Haditha (2007) and Paul Haggis’ In the Valley of Elah (2007) were serious efforts that did not shy away from the realities of the US invasions, nor did the documentaries Gunner Palace (2004), The Prisoner or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair (2006), How to Fold a Flag (2009), all co-directed by Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein, Taxi to the Dark Side (2007), directed by Alex Gibney, and Standard Operating Procedure (2008), directed by Errol Morris. For the most part, the US media saw to it that these films, critical of American policy, were buried.

Bigelow concludes her piece in Tuesday’s LA Times by paying sycophantic tribute (a cruder expression comes to mind) to the American military and CIA. “We should never forget,” she writes, “the brave work of those professionals in the military and intelligence communities who paid the ultimate price in the effort to combat a grave threat to this nation’s safety and security.” Bin Laden, we are told, “was defeated by ordinary Americans who fought bravely even as they sometimes crossed moral lines, who labored greatly and intently, who gave all of themselves in both victory and defeat, in life and in death, for the defense of this nation.”

The “brave professionals” in the CIA and military, the “defense of the nation”! Who writes and speaks in this manner? This is the language of the extreme right. Bigelow is appealing to and aligning herself with quasi-fascistic elements.

But this is the trajectory of the social element she speaks for and to. Perhaps not entirely happy about torture and assassination, which may even disturb its sleep for an hour or two, this upper middle class layer instinctively identifies the defense of its wealth and privilege with US military operations around the globe. There is no other way to explain a work as repugnant as Zero Dark Thirty or a “defense of the indefensible” as crude and transparent as Bigelow’s.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
wsws.org site is an information arm of the Socialist Equality Party.

••••

Take Two

Jonathan Kim, Film Critic for ReThink Reviews and the Uprising Show
A Response to Kathryn Bigelow’s Latest Statement on Zero Dark Thirty and Torture

Dear Kathryn Bigelow,

I read your January 15 response in the Los Angeles Times to people like myself who have said that Zero Dark Thirty endorses torture. I would like to address it.

1. Do you believe that torture is an effective way to obtain accurate information?
2. Do you believe torture was used to gain accurate information that led to finding Osama bin Laden? If so, who told you that? Did they provide any evidence?

5. Do you feel that if characters such as Maya and Dan were real people that they should be charged as war criminals for torturing detainees?

7. How do you define torture?

9. What is your response to pro-torture pundits like Sean Hannity who cite Zero Dark Thirty as evidence that information obtained through torture helped find bin Laden, and that the U.S. should be free to torture in the future for reasons of national security?

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Follow Jonathan Kim on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ReThinkReviews

PBS NewsHour: Examining torture in “Zero Dark Thirty”

FILM/ SOURCE FOR THIS ITEM: PBS NEWSHOUR
Thursday on the NewsHour: Examining Torture in ‘Zero Dark Thirty’
With appendix by Jonathan Kim’s ReThink Review: Zero Dark Thirty – Yes, It Endorses Torture

Posted by Anne Davenport , January 10, 2013

Academy Award nominations came out Thursday, and “Zero Dark Thirty” claimed five of them, including for best picture, adding to a number of other recent accolades. The movie hasn’t opened around the country yet, but chances are you’ve heard a lot about it.

Jessica Chastain, nominated for best actress, plays the role of a young, tireless CIA analyst named Maya, who is obsessed with finding Osama bin Laden. The film sweeps from the haunting days of 9/11 straight through to the successful raid on his compound in Pakistan in May 2011.

Behind the film is the team of director Kathryn Bigelow and writer Mark Boal. Their 2009 film “The Hurt Locker” won six Oscars, including for best picture, best director for Bigelow — the first woman to win that award — and best original screenplay for Boal.

“Zero Dark Thirty” is also a very difficult film to watch, and that’s where the controversy begins.

Critics argue that the film’s graphic and gritty depictions of torture — and the role it played in America’s anti-terror policy — distort the truth and imply that the CIA’s use of aggressive, “enhanced interrogation techniques,” including water boarding, produced information that lead directly to the discovery of bin Laden’s whereabouts — and his death.

There’s been considerable controversy — from both sides of the political aisle — in Congress.

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., Senate Armed Service Committee ranking member John McCain, R-Ariz., and others sent two letters recently to the acting CIA director seeking information provided to the filmmakers and have subsequently begun a review of their own.

At a screening in Washington, D.C., Tuesday night, protesters, including some aligned with Amnesty International, showed their objections, while inside the filmmakers told the PBS NewsHour they stood by their work of the last five years:

Watch Mark Boal, Kathryn Bigelow on Torture in ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

On Thursday’s NewsHour, we get two views from a pair of journalists who have written extensively about the 10-year-hunt for bin Laden:

Jane Mayer is with the New Yorker and is the author of “The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals.”

Mark Bowden wrote the book “The Finish: The Killing of Osama bin Laden.” He is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and teaches journalism at the University of Delaware.

Watch their discussion with Jeffrey Brown here or below:

Watch ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ Catches Criticism Over Torture Depictions on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

APPENDIX

Jonathan KimFilm Critic for ReThink Reviews and the Uprising Show
ReThink Review: Zero Dark Thirty – Yes, It Endorses Torture
Posted: 01/11/2013 9:31 am
I was dreading the announcement of the 2013 Oscars nominees, in large part because it felt like Kathryn Bigelow’s film about the manhunt to find Osama bin Laden, Zero Dark Thirty, was peaking at the right time and had emerged as the frontrunner in a fairly unsettled Oscar race. The source of my dread was what ZD30 says about torture (more on that below), and it both saddened and infuriated me that a film that attempts to rewrite history and validate one of the darkest sins of America’s recent history might be given the world’s highest storytelling honors.

ZD30 ended up nabbing five Oscar nominations, including one for best picture — a major achievement by any measure. However, I was delighted to learn that Bigelow had not been nominated for best director. Normally, I wouldn’t take pleasure in something like that, especially since I greatly admired Bigelow’s Oscar-winning bomb-defuser film The Hurt Locker, but I was very glad that the Academy members who voted for Best Director were informed enough to realize that Bigelow was ultimately responsible for the three enormous, destructive lies ZD30 asserts: that torture is an effective way to gather information, that it was instrumental in locating Osama bin Laden, and that America should have never stopped doing it. Watch my ReThink Review of Zero Dark Thirty below (transcript following).

Transcript:

The makers of Zero Dark Thirty clearly want it to be the definitive film about the ten-year manhunt to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, claiming the film is “faithful to the facts,” “truthful,” “journalistic,” and “living history.” But if that’s their claim, how come the first 30 to 40 minutes of Zero Dark Thirty are about how torture was instrumental in locating the courier who eventually led the CIA to bin Laden, despite the fact that the acting director of the CIA and the chairmen of both the Senate Intelligence and the Senate Armed Services Committees have publicly stated the opposite? And should the film’s seeming endorsement of torture disqualify it from awards consideration?

The film stars Jessica Chastain as Maya, a hard-charging young CIA agent who has devoted her professional life to finding bin Laden. It’s Maya who believes that the path to finding bin Laden is through the courier who helps deliver his messages to Al Qaeda leaders and the media, since bin Laden would be too wary of surveillance to use phones or the internet. Maya and her colleagues attempt to locate this courier, an eight-year odyssey that involves surveillance, battles for resources, frustrating delays, life-threatening risks, and old-fashioned detective work. When the courier is finally located and leads to a suspicious compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, Maya is convinced that this must be bin Laden’s hideout.

Based on a real person, Maya is a fascinating character that Chastain handles wonderfully, both because of and in spite of the fact that we know so little about her, she isn’t the most likable person, and her single-minded dedication to her mission increasingly borders on obsession. The supporting cast — including Jennifer Ehle, Jason Clarke, James Gandolfini, Chris Pratt, and Harold Perrineau — are all good and reflect the hundreds of people and the multiple organizations involved in finding and killing bin Laden. The film’s natural lighting, verité shooting style, and attention to detail successfully builds tension while also showing the often unglamorous nature of intelligence work. And when the Navy SEAL raid to get bin Laden finally occurs, it happens in almost real-time over 40 gripping minutes in a carefully reconstructed replica of the actual Abbottabad compound.

But it’s this attention to detail that makes the torture aspect of Zero Dark Thirty so baffling, infuriating, and unforgivable. It’s been accepted for decades within the intelligence and interrogation communities that torture simply doesn’t work and mostly leads to false confessions; strained relations with allies; prisoners made belligerent, insane, or useless; and victims’ families, friends, and sympathizers turned into sworn enemies. At one point, Maya says that getting bin Laden would protect the homeland. But after Guantanamo Bay, the invasion of Iraq, and the photos from Abu Ghraib, no one needed an order from bin Laden to justify attacking Americans or our allies.

Some critics have claimed that the torture scenes in the film reflect the “moral ambiguity” of the torture debate. But since the torture in Zero Dark Thirty is shown to be so effective, with one prisoner actually saying “I have no wish to be tortured again. Ask me a question and I will answer it,” and we’re shown none of the many downsides to torture, the “moral ambiguity” amounts to “torture is ugly… but it works.” For way too many people, that’s not morally ambiguous at all, and is instead seen as the dirty but necessary work of war.

But it’s a claim as factually wrong and repulsive as saying, “Rape is horrible…but some girls are asking for it.” In reality, there is no debate and no “moral ambiguity” about torture. Not only is it illegal, immoral, and counterproductive, IT DOES NOT WORK. But Zero Dark Thirty, like the TV series 24, claims that torture does work, or at the very least, revives the myth that the jury is still out on torture, just as oil companies and republicans want you to think the science of global warming is inconclusive. Zero Dark Thirty works as a crime procedural, but its irresponsible, destructive, dishonest stance on torture absolutely ruined it for me, and I feel Zero Dark Thirty should not be on any best-of-the-year lists, nor is it deserving of Oscar consideration.