Acting CIA director Michael Morell said that Zero Dark Thirty, the Hollywood take on the US’ hunt for Osama bin Laden, exaggerates the importance of information obtained by harsh interrogations.
The movie by Academy Award-winning director Kathryn Bigelow tells the story of the decade-long search after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the US that climaxed in last year’s dramatic and deadly raid in May on the al-Qaeda leader’s hideout in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
The film shows US personnel using harsh interrogation techniques like waterboarding — a method widely seen as torture — to force captives to speak. The information obtained was crucial in piecing together the trail that eventually led to bin Laden, the movie shows.
Not so, Morell said in a message to CIA employees released to reporters on Saturday.
The movie “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,” the message read.
Morell’s message, sent on Friday, states that “multiple streams of intelligence” led CIA analysts to conclude that bin Laden was hiding in Abbottabad.
He acknowledged that “some” of the information “came from detainees subjected to enhanced techniques, but there were many other sources as well.”
The controversial techniques were banned in 2009 by US President Barack Obama.
“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,” Morell said.
Morell is widely believed to be a top candidate for the job of CIA director after the resignation of the agency’s former director, David Petreaus. Petreaus stepped down last month after admitting to an extra-marital affair with his biographer.
Morell’s message echoes a statement decrying the Zero Dark Thirty interrogation scenes signed by three US senators, including Senator John McCain, himself a prisoner of war and torture victim during the Vietnam War.
In a letter to the head of Sony Pictures, McCain and Democratic senators Diane Feinstein and Carl Levin wrote that the movie “clearly implies that the CIA’s coercive interrogation techniques were effective” in obtaining information that would lead to bin Laden.
“We have reviewed CIA records and know that this is incorrect,” the senators wrote. “We believe that you have an obligation to state that the role of torture in the hunt for [bin Laden] is not based on the facts, but rather part of the film’s fictional narrative.”
However, two CIA officials on active duty when suspects were tortured disputed those assertions.
Jose Rodriguez, who oversaw the CIA’s counterterrorism operations when “harsh interrogation” methods were in use, wrote in the Washington Post in April that the path leading to bin Laden “started in a CIA black site ... and 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.”
Former CIA director Michael Hayden wrote in the Wall Street Journal in June last year that a “crucial component” of information that eventually led to bin Laden came from three CIA prisoners, “all of whom had been subjected to some form of enhanced interrogation.”
Hayden claimed that he learned the information in 2007 when he was first briefed about pursuing bin Laden through his courier network.
However, Morell emphasized that the film “takes significant artistic license, while portraying itself as being historically accurate.”
“What I want you to know is that Zero Dark Thirty is a dramatization, not a realistic portrayal of the facts,” he said.
‘IN A DIFFERENT PLACE’: The envoy first visited Shanghai, where he attended a Chinese basketball playoff match, and is to meet top officials in Beijing tomorrow US Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday arrived in China on his second visit in a year as the US ramps up pressure on its rival over its support for Russia while also seeking to manage tensions with Beijing. The US diplomat tomorrow is to meet China’s top brass in Beijing, where he is also expected to plead for restraint as Taiwan inaugurates president-elect William Lai (賴清德), and to raise US concerns on Chinese trade practices. However, Blinken is also seeking to stabilize ties, with tensions between the world’s two largest economies easing since his previous visit in June last year. At the
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese