Acting C.I.A. Director Criticizes ‘Zero Dark Thirty’

Acting C.I.A. Director Criticizes ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ 

 

By SCOTT SHANE

Published: December 22, 2012

The acting director of the C.I.A., Michael J. Morell, has criticized a new movie about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, saying it exaggerates the role of coercive interrogations in producing clues to the whereabouts of the leader of Al Qaeda.

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In a message sent Friday to agency employees about the film, “Zero Dark Thirty,” Mr. Morell said it “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 Laden. That impression is false.”

In fact, he said, “the truth is that multiple streams of intelligence led C.I.A. analysts to conclude that Bin Laden was hiding in Abbottabad,” the city in Pakistan where a Navy SEAL team killed him in May 2011. “Some came from detainees subjected to enhanced techniques,” Mr. Morell wrote, using the C.I.A.’s euphemism for harsh and sometimes brutal treatment that included waterboarding. “But there were many other sources as well.”

He said that “whether enhanced interrogation techniques were the only timely and effective way to obtain information from those detainees, as the film suggests, is a matter of debate that cannot and never will be definitively resolved.”

The message from Mr. Morell, who is considered a top candidate for the C.I.A. director’s job, comes days after a similar statement from three senators, including Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California and chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which will consider the confirmation of whomever President Obama selects as C.I.A. director.

While Mr. Morell’s account is close to that given last year by Leon E. Panetta when he was C.I.A. director, other agency officials who served under President George W. Bush have put greater emphasis on the usefulness of the harsh interrogation methods.

This year, Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., who oversaw the agency’s counterterrorism operations when the methods were in use, wrote in The Washington Post that the hunt for Bin Laden “stemmed from information obtained from hardened terrorists who agreed to tell us some (but not all) of what they knew after undergoing harsh but legal interrogation methods.”

And Mr. Bush’s last C.I.A. director, Michael V. Hayden, wrote last year in The Wall Street Journal that “a crucial component” of the information that led to Bin Laden “was information provided by three C.I.A. detainees, all of whom had been subjected to some form of enhanced interrogation.”

While many commentators agree with Mr. Morell’s interpretation of the interrogations in “Zero Dark Thirty,” some film critics and advocates have argued that the film takes a more ambiguous view of torture. There are suggestions in the film that the infliction of pain and fear sometimes produced unreliable information, and one brutalized detainee gives valuable information not under torture but later, during a relaxed meal, when his interrogators trick him.

Mr. Morell also faulted “Zero Dark Thirty” for putting undue emphasis on the role of a handful of C.I.A. analysts in the search for Bin Laden, saying it involved “the selfless commitment of hundreds of officers.” He said the movie “takes considerable liberties” in its sometimes unflattering portrait of C.I.A. officers, including some killed in a terrorist bombing in Afghanistan in 2009.

“We cannot allow a Hollywood film to cloud our memory of them,” Mr. Morell said. 

COPY  bal.nytimes.com