For God and Country???

I abhor violence and when scenes in movies or tv depict cruelty, I shut my eyes until my husband tells me the image has passed. In that way, I am the scared teenager and the appalled adult. My cinema behavior was no different for the movie Zero Dark Thirty. Even so, the windows to my soul were wide open.

On the right and left people denounced the film for portraying torture as a necessary evil to hunt down Osama bin Laden. Maureen Dowd didn't like it for fictionalizing an event and then calling it historic. My beef is with my progressive brothers and sisters who criticized the film for promoting the notion that torture led to information to find OBL.

Of course torture gave the US government leverage to find OBL and many of his underlings. This is historic fact, but even if torture was the most efficacious way to extract information -- even it torture presented the only way to find OBL, it was wrong. Terribly wrong. Waterboarding, starving people, locking persons in boxes and chaining them up like dogs is not a scar on our national psyche but a gaping, oozing, fetid wound.

Despite the graphic violence or really because of it, Zero Dark Thirty indicted the use of torture as a means to an end. In each torture scene, my compassion was with the detainees. Even at the end, I worried for the children. My heart broke for the women. What madness leads any of us, on both sides of a conflict, to sell our souls down the river for a chance to kill our way to victory? Maya is not relieved at the end of the film. As her tears fall, the viewer wonders: was the cost worth it? Was justice done?

So what movie about historical events over the last decade would I have rather seen? One where we didn't invade Iraq or Afghanistan, we used humane means to gather information, and we put OBL on trial for crimes against humanity.