Does Zero Dark Thirty Promote the Use of Enhanced Interrogation Techniques?

Abstract

, 2013). It is now on over 200 top-10 lists, and Chastain's performance has been called "brilliant" (Mead, 2013) and "convincing" (French, 2013). The film is the second collaboration of Bigelow and Boal; their first was Hurt Locker, for which Bigelow was the first female director to win an Academy award, and Boal won for Best Original Screenplay. Bigelow has remained famously terse about her methods or about the fact that it is unusual for a woman to make war movies. One's attention is captured by the roles of women associated with the film: The film was also produced by a woman (Megan Ellison), distributed by a woman (Amy Pascal, the cochairman of Sony Pictures), and starred a woman, and a female director made an explicit war movie with a female lead who, despite scorn and dismissal from her male colleagues, was able to use her intelligence to find bin Laden. The failure of Zero Dark Thirty to capture the nomination for Bigelow as Best Director is attributed by some to limited support for the film because of the controversial depiction of water boarding and other torture techniques. But it is worth noting that neither Ben Affleck for Argo nor Tom Hooper for Les Misérables was nominated (The Bigelow snub, 2013). In fact, at the Washington, DC, premiere, Bigelow, Boal, and former Sen. Chris Dodd, who is now head of the Motion Picture Association of America, faced criticism that the film changed history about the role of "enhanced interrogation techniques" in capturing bin Laden. Writer Naomi Wolf called Bigelow a "Leni Riefenstahl-like propagandist of torture" (Wolf, 2013, p. 1). Documented voices in the government spoke out against torture, such as the military Judge Advocate General Corps and the Pentagon's top lawyers, who called it a violation of the Geneva Conventions and the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment and Punishment (Reifer, 2013). Former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta wrote to John McCain that "some" detainees had been subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques, and that "whether these techniques were the 'only timely and effective way' to obtain such information is a matter of debate and cannot be established definitely" (Winter, 2013, pp. 26, 29, 30). In addition, a 6,300-page report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence concluded that enhanced interrogation did not work, and John O. Brennan said that senior intelligence officials and President Obama were "misled about the enhanced interrogation program" (Soufan, 2013, p. 4). Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), head of the Senate intelligence committee, Carl Levin, and John McCain wrote a letter to Sony chairman Michael Lynton calling the film "grossly inaccurate and misleading" (LaSalle, 2013, p. E2) and asked for an investigation into the CIA for possible leaks. Feinstein wrote a letter to acting CIA director Michael Morell asking