LITTLE ROCK — The acting director of the CIA, Michael 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-Qaida.
In a message sent Friday to agency employees about the film, Zero Dark Thirty, 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 CIA 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,” Morell wrote, using the CIA’s euphemism for harsh and sometimes brutal treatment that included water boarding. “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 Morell, who is considered a top candidate for the CIA director’s job, comes days after a similar statement from three senators, including Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which will consider the confirmation of whomever President Barack Obama selects as CIA director.
While Morell’s account is close to that given last year by Leon Panetta when he was CIA 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 Rodriguez, who oversaw the agency’s counter terrorism 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 Bush’s last CIA director, Michael 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 CIA detainees, all of whom had been subjected to some form of enhanced interrogation.”
While many commentators agree with 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.
Morell also faulted Zero Dark Thirty as putting undue emphasis on the role of a handful of CIA 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 CIA officers, including some killed in a terrorist bombing in Afghanistan in 2009.
“We cannot allow a Hollywood film to cloud our memory of them,” Morell said.
Front Section, Pages 6 on 12/23/2012