‘Osama killing is grossly inaccurate and misleading in ZDT’

A group of three top American Senators have questioned the accuracy of the upcoming movie based on the the hunt and killing of Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and asked for a clarification from its distributor.

In a letter to the distributor of the film — “Zero Dark Thirty” — Sony Pictures, the Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman, Dianne Feinstein; the Senate Armed Service Committee Chairman, Carl Levin and the Senate Armed Service Committee Ranking Member, John McCain, have described the movie as “grossly inaccurate and misleading”.

They have questioned particularly graphic scenes of CIA officers in movie torturing detainees that “credits these detainees with providing critical lead information” on the courier that led to the bin Laden compound.

“Zero Dark Thirty is factually inaccurate, and we believe that you have an obligation to state that the role of torture in the hunt for Osama Bin Laden is not based on the facts, but rather part of the film’s fictional narrative,” the Senators wrote in the letter.

“We write to express our deep disappointment with the movie Zero Dark Thirty. We believe the film is grossly inaccurate and misleading in its suggestion that torture resulted in information that led to the location of Osama bin Laden,” they said.

“We understand that the film is fiction, but it opens with the words ‘based on first-hand accounts of actual events’ and there has been significant media coverage of CIA’s cooperation with the screenwriters.”

“As you know, the film graphically depicts CIA officers repeatedly torturing detainees and then credits these detainees with providing critical lead information on the courier that led to the Osama Bin Laden,” the letter said.

“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,” it said.

The Senate Intelligence Committee’s recently-adopted Study of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation program, Committee staff reviewed more than six million pages of records from the Intelligence Community, the letter noted.

Based on that review, the CIA did not first learn about the existence of the Laden’s courier from CIA detainees subjected to coercive interrogation techniques.