Opinion
Published on May 9, 2013
Op-ed by Jack Cloonan.
We already knew that the CIA gave unusual access to the creative team behind the movie “Zero Dark Thirty.” Now we know at least some of what the agency got in return. A memo obtained earlier this week by Gawker shows that the screenwriter, Mark Boal, altered two scenes at the CIA’s request.
In the end, though, this revelation doesn’t tell us much, if anything, about the film’s accuracy, or lack thereof. “Zero Dark Thirty” is and always was fiction, a product of its creators’ artistic and political choices. One of their choices was to depict torture as effective, disturbing but necessary, and something that American heroes do.
Cloonan spent 25 years at the FBI, where he was a special agent for the FBI’s Osama bin Laden unit from 1996 to 2002.
