by Bryan Alexander, USA TODAY
Influential members of the U.S. Senate are condemning the depiction of torture in Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty.
Senate
Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.,
along with Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., are
sending a letter to the film's distributor, Sony Pictures, to complain
about the role of torture in the movie about the hunt for Osama bin
Laden.
"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," the senators write, according to The Hill newspaper's DEFCON Hill blog.
"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 letter continues.
The film about the 10-year-long hunt for bin Laden starts with a prolonged waterboarding scene.
Director Bigelow and writer Mark Boal put out a statement last week regarding the use of torture in the film. Zero Dark Thirty earned four Golden Globe nominations last week, including best film.
The
statement reads: "We depicted a variety of controversial practices and
intelligence methods that were used in the name of finding bin Laden.
The film shows that no single method was necessarily responsible for
solving the manhunt, nor can any single scene taken in isolation fairly
capture the totality of efforts the film dramatizes.
"One thing is
clear," the statement continues. "The single greatest factor in finding
the world's most dangerous man was the hard work and dedication of the
intelligence professionals who spent years working on this global
effort."