On the CIA's Evolving Thoughts About ‘Zero Dark Thirty’

Moviegoers would be well advised to remember what one of the CIA’s most ardent defenders of torture, former clandestine services head José Rodriquez, admitted last April: That agency interrogators couldn’t get Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to give up Osama Bin Laden’s courier despite days of water-boarding and sleep deprivation.

The current CIA boss, acting director Michael Morell, has been talking out of both sides of his mouth on torture’s role in finding Bin Laden, denouncing Zero Dark Thirty’s strong implication that "enhanced interrogation techniques"led directly to Bin Laden's courier and thus to the al-Qaeda chief, but also saying 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."

Three members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, including chairwoman Dianne Feinstein and John McCain, a former Navy pilot who was tortured by the North Vietnamese, are not amused. They’re now wondering exactly what Morell and other CIA officials really told filmmakers Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal, and are demanding an explanation.

Must-see: “Least Among Saints”

Name one happy movie about war veterans.

Time’s up.

From “The Best Years of Our Lives” in 1946 to the Vietnam War’s “Coming Home” and “Born on the 4th of July,”  veterans have been portrayed as troubled, bitter, dangerous and unconscionably scorned.

And often, of course, they are. Politicians love sending young men into battle, but they largely forget about them when they come home broken.

That’s much the case in "Least Among Saints," Martin Papazian’s engrossing portrayal of Anthony, a sensitive Afghanistan war vet haunted by memories of accidentally killing an Afghan family in their car at a Marine roadblock.

With a difference.