Oscar season has been a drag for Kathryn Bigelow, director of the Osama bin Laden-hunt flick “Zero Dark Thirty.”
Ever since three US senators attacked the film as “grossly inaccurate” for depicting how tough interrogations helped uncover bin Laden’s Pakistan hideaway, the movie’s chances of snaring a Best Picture award have sunk to about 80-to-1.
So, in Bigelow’s honor, we’d like to propose a game for Oscar night tomorrow.
Here’s the challenge: Can you tell which of the following quotations is from a film director and which is from a CIA director?
Item 1: “In order to put the puzzle of intelligence together that led us to bin Laden, there were a lot of pieces . . . some of it came from some of the [interrogation] tactics that were used at the time.”
Item 2: “Many [interrogation] techniques . . . led to the compound in Abbottabad.”
Item 3: “There really is an awful lot of complex intelligence work that is shown in the movie, and for which I don’t think the movie gets sufficient credit.”
The first speaker is former CIA chief Leon Panetta, an Obama appointee. The last is Michael Hayden, CIA chief under George W. Bush. Bigelow is Speaker No. 2.
Surprised?
The point is, according to the film and top US officials, the CIA’s rough treatment of detainees played a part in finding bin Laden. The movie leaves it up to viewers to decide how important those tactics were.
This is not to say it gets the facts perfect. Detainees are seen waterboarded at whim, when in real life the technique was applied on only three top terrorists. A man is paraded half-naked in a dog collar, but that was an abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, not an interrogation tactic used by the CIA.
You won’t hear Sens. John McCain, Dianne Feinstein and Carl Levin complaining about these inaccuracies, which make the CIA look like a band of wild torturers.
But these same senators didn’t hesitate to threaten Bigelow with a congressional investigation.
Whatever the odds, we know who we’ll be rooting for tomorrow night.