It’s going to be a small protest on my part, and have utterly no effect, but at least I won’t have given my money to the new film Zero Dark Thirty.  I really wanted to see this film.  Bigelow is a terrific director, the subject matter dramatic — the hunt for Bin Laden, but the film creates the strong impression that he was found because of torture, and that is simply not true.  In hearing after hearing it was clearly established that it was painstaking research and analysis that led to his location.  By wrenching the facts in this way solely for the purpose of creating a more dramatic scene the film makers have given cover to the torturers and the torture apologists in this country.

We’re not a perfect nation.  There have been horrific incidents in our past.  The most vile of course was the stain of slavery, but there was also the Trail of Tears and the massacre of native Americans, there was the internment of Japanese Americans, Jim Crow and lynchings, the McCarthy hearings, but the besetting sin of our generation was the decision by the previous administration to ignore the Geneva conventions and embrace torture.  By this action they made all of us torturers, and it sickens me.

Now Hollywood has ignored boring fact in the interest of a dramatic lie; a lie that has consequences.  Nothing has been done to lance this festering wound.  There was no accountability for making us a nation that tortures, and this film gives cover to the people who tainted us all.

And let us not forget that the phrase “enhanced interrogation techniques” or  “Verschärfte Vernehmung” was coined by the Gestapo in a memo in 1937.  Given the origins of the phrase the idea that using those words somehow grants cover is ludicrous.  It’s torture, and I’d like to believe America is better than that.