Torture Propaganda

For all the conservatives who moan continuously about the putative liberal bias of the "mainstream media," or "Hollywood" or whatever, the continued glorification of American torturers by said media ought to be grounds for some pause. At The Guardian today Glenn Greenwald comments on yet another installment:

"The claim that waterboarding and other torture techniques were necessary in finding bin Laden was first made earlier this year by Jose Rodriguez, the CIA agent who illegally destroyed the agency's torture tapes, got protected from prosecution by the DOJ, and then profited off this behavior by writing a book. He made the same claim as "Zero Dark Thirty" regarding the role played by torture in finding bin Laden.

That caused two Senators who are steadfast loyalists of the CIA - Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein and Armed Services Committee Chair Carl Levin - to issue statements definitively debunking this assertion. Even the CIA's then-Director, Leon Panetta, made clear that those techniques played no role in finding bin Laden. An FBI agent central to the bin Laden hunt said the same.

What this film does, then, is uncritically present as fact the highly self-serving, and factually false, claims by the CIA that its torture techniques were crucial in finding bin Laden. Put another way, it propagandizes the public to favorably view clear war crimes by the US government, based on pure falsehoods.

Shouldn't that rather glaring "flaw" preclude gushing admiration for this film? Is it possible to separate the filmmakers' political propaganda and dissemination of falsehoods from their technical skills in producing a well-crafted entertainment product?"