Torture porn

Rating: 1/10 (30 December 2012)

This is largely a work of fiction, as are all movies that pretend to recount history. They may contain a few facts, but they invent more and leave out most, giving at best a distorted, partial view, and at worst outright propaganda.
However, this one is much worse than usual. It begins with an extended and entirely gratuitous sequence of torture scenes, and then pretends that torture produced actionable intelligence against Osama bin Laden. In real life torture is useful only for extracting false confessions and whatever "information" the torturers have settled on in advance.
To make matters worse, the creators of the movie pretend that they are not defending torture, but simply presenting what happened for the viewer to evaluate. This is in the spirit of the Fox News propaganda slogan, "We report, you decide".
There are multiple versions of the hunt for Osama bin Laden. It is proposed that someone, possibly Barack Obama, possibly CIA torturers, possibly those who actually got the information, heroically defended the nation from the ultimate bad guys, or else someone, possibly Barack Obama, possibly CIA torturers, possibly CIA operatives posing as immunization workers in Pakistan to look for bin Laden, shredded the Constitution and the standing of the US around the world in assassinating Osama bin Laden, with little effect on actual Al Qaeda operations, and increased danger to US soldiers and to civilians everywhere. Or Obama did it all for political gain, because he hates America. None of these versions has much to do with the facts of the case. Certainly this movie is more part of the problem than part of the solution.
For example, CIA torture is one of Al Qaeda's strongest recruiting tools, and the CIA's fake immunization program in Pakistan has resulted in the murders of nine actual immunization workers in the tribal regions of Pakistan, and will result in hundreds of deaths of children and crippling of many more by polio. As I said, movies are necessarily fictional by omission, and this one is more fictional than most.