Zero Dark Thirty is a gripping Hollywood epic, but the Oscar-nominated film has become best known for setting off a torrent of debate about whether torturing prisoners helped in the hunt for Osama bin Laden. Its opening sequence announces that the film is “based on firsthand accounts of actual events.” There is pretty clear evidence, however, that it gets the torture question seriously wrong, as more than one journalist has laid out in detail.
Then there is the matter of exactly how the Navy SEALs killed bin Laden. Ironically, a movie famously described by its director as a “journalistic account” gets little help on this front from practitioners of the trade. In the nearly two years since the mission, several respected journalists and even members of SEAL Team 6 itself have put forth different versions of how the killing went down. Since I first documented some of these divergent stories, more have piled up. The so-called fog of war is surely a factor; even America’s most highly trained warriors are bound to have faulty memories of such a heart-pounding, high-stakes mission. But from conflicting reports about real-time footage to various rundowns of the number of shooters, bullets fired, and witnesses present, the collection of accounts makes for a Rashomon-style epic of its own.
The basic facts are clear enough: On May 2, 2011, the SEALs stormed bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, shot him dead, and departed with his corpse by helicopter. The US military soon transported the body to a naval ship, where it was given Muslim burial rites and dumped into the ocean. Thus concluded an unambiguous and essential victory in the decade-old war on terrorism.
Zero Dark Thirty and the Mysterious Killing of Osama Bin Laden
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