The sad fact is that Zero Dark Thirty could have been written by the tight circle of national security advisors who counseled President George W. Bush to create the post-9/11 policies that led to Guantanamo, the global network of borrowed “black sites” that added up to an offshore universe of injustice, and the grim torture practices – euphemistically known as “enhanced interrogation techniques” — that went with them. . . .

As its core, Bigelow’s film makes the bald-faced assertion that torture did help the United States track down the perpetrator of 9/11. . . . [T]he fact is that Bigelow has bought in, hook, line, and sinker, to the ethos of the Bush administration and its apologists. It’s as if she had followed an old government memo and decided to offer in fictional form step-by-step instructions for the creation, implementation, and selling of Bush-era torture and detention policies.

"I can easily name twenty better films released in the US in 2012. But as for the torture: I said in my column, and will repeat: the movie revels in it. In a film that’s entirely about professionalism—are you, Jessica Chastain, tough enough to do the job?—the ability to overcome a first squeamishness and participate in torture, initiate torture, identify with a torturer as your mentor, is the defining quality of a character who makes herself hard-core enough to earn the respect of Navy SEALs.

"Arguments that the film exposes torture as abhorrent are absurd. The movie juices the audience on the adrenaline generated by these physical confrontations, and offers vicariously the sense of power enjoyed by the person holding the leash.  

"Does the film go further, and present torture as the necessary tool for taking down bin Laden? Absolutely."

"I think the movie has earned its acclaim because film critics aren’t fact checkers. And when you do check the facts, you find that while the movie is putting a thumb on the scale for torture, the film doesn’t get the role it played in the Bin Laden chase condemnably wrong. I do think the movie reads as pro-torture, and as someone who opposes the practice, I wish that it didn’t. . . .  

"When Amar is led around by a dog collar and then finally, horribly stuffed into a tiny wooden box, we recoil at this treatment and feel Amar’s pain—but we also feel Maya’s sense of urgency. At the end of the interrogation scenes, I felt shaken but not morally repulsed, because the movie had successfully led me to adopt, if only temporarily, Maya’s point of view: This treatment is a legitimate way of securing information vital to U.S. interests."

"In summary, I’d simply say that those picking apart various scenes and pointing to key details in the film are not wrong in suggesting that the film’s depiction of torture helping to get bin Laden is muddled at best—but the overall impression by the end, for most viewers, probably will be: Yes, torture played a key (if not the key) role."

"It also borders on the politically and morally reprehensible. By showing these excellent results—and by silencing the cries of the innocents held at Abu Ghraib, Bagram, and other 'black sites'—it makes a case for the efficacy of torture."

"The most morally dubious, obtuse and overrated movie of 2012: Zero Dark Thirty."

"[F]or the greater movie-going public it will be hard not to walk away with the impression that this type of interrogation was a necessary evil – at the very least, an essential part of the CIA’s tool box when forced to operate in what Cheney famously dubbed 'the dark side.'"

"Yet what is so unsettling about 'Zero Dark Thirty' is not that it tells this difficult history but, rather, that it distorts it . . . . 

"In addition to excising the moral debate that raged over the interrogation program during the Bush years, the film also seems to accept almost without question that the C.I.A.'s 'enhanced interrogation techniques' played a key role in enabling the agency to identify the courier who unwittingly led them to bin Laden. But this claim has been debunked, repeatedly, by reliable sources with access to the facts. . . . 

"In addition to providing false advertising for waterboarding, 'Zero Dark Thirty' endorses torture in several other subtle ways. . . . The filmmakers subtly put their thumb on the pro-torture scale, as Emily Bazelon put it, in another scene, too. . . .[B]y the time millions of Americans have seen this movie, they will believe that, as Frank Bruni put it in a recent Times column, 'No waterboarding, no bin Laden.'"

It's difficult for one filmmaker to criticize another. That's a job best left to critics. However, in the case of Zero Dark Thirty, about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, an issue that is central to the film -- torture -- is so important that I feel I must say something. Mark Boal and Kathryn Bigelow have been irresponsible and inaccurate in the way they have treated this issue in their film. . . .  

I want to focus my concern on the way in which the film is fundamentally reckless when it comes to the subject of torture . . . . [I]t's a cop-out for Boal and Bigelow to say they shouldn't be held to account for the meaning of their film because "it's just a movie," and/or because it's a "journalistic account." In the context of the final result, neither statement is credible. When it comes to torture, the film fails the truth test for both accountants and poets.

I would not normally comment on a Hollywood film, but I think it important to put Zero Dark Thirty, which deals with one of the most significant achievements in our history, into some context.  The film. . . the film takes significant artistic license, while portraying itself as being historically accurate. 

[T]he film creates the strong impression that the enhanced interrogation techniques that were part of our former detention and interrogation program were the key to finding Bin Ladin.  That impression is false.  

Regardless of what message the filmmakers intended to convey, the movie clearly implies that the CIA’s coercive interrogation techniques were effective in eliciting important information related to a courier for Osama bin Laden. We have reviewed CIA records and know that this is incorrect”. . . . 

The use of torture in the fight against terrorism did severe damage to America’s values and standing that cannot be justified or expunged. It remains a stain on our national conscience. We cannot afford to go back to these dark times, and with the release of Zero Dark Thirty, the filmmakers and your production studio are perpetuating the myth that torture is effective. 

My problem with "Zero Dark Thirty" isn't just that it validates the use of torture, and sends a clear message that the systematic violation of human rights, drone strikes, and extrajudicial assassinations are just the dirty truths that "protecting our freedom" requires. 

My problem is that its use of accurate documentary detail and artistic verisimilitude seems not merely a weak justification for its inaccurate depiction of torture's value, but a way of drawing the eye to it, a whispering and surreptitious endorsement.

The controversy about the movie involves its unambiguous cause and effect assertion that the torture of al-Qaida principals and hangers on was the key to finding Osama bin Laden – ie: torture works. . . .  

Kathryn Bigelow is a fetishist and a sadist, which, in a literary sense, certainly has a fine tradition. But without some acknowledgement that this is her lonely journey and not a shared one – not our collective reality, not a set of accepted assumptions but, for better or worse, her own particular, problematic kink – all you have is a nasty piece of pulp and propaganda.