Pretty good film

Rating: 8/10 (13 June 2013)

This was a pretty good film. While everyone liked the raid in Abbottabad, I found the buildup, the chase, to be very entertaining. Kudos to Jessica Chastain, with whom I was unfamiliar. There is a lot of comment about the portrayal of "torture" leading to leads on bin Laden, and terrorist attacks in general. I use the scare quotes to differentiate the techniques that the CIA used from real torture, such as that practiced by, say, Arab despots, or American Indian tribes in the 18th and 19th centuries. People say that torture will not get you real information, but they do not come to it cold. They extract information that can be checked, or that they already know, in order to judge the veracity of the terrorist in question. As it happened, most of the detainees had a mindset that they must resist up to a point, but beyond that, they generally sang. As for the moral aspect, this was strictly done to gain information, and was not punitive in nature. Anyway, the film is worth seeing.