It’s a more subtle and minor point in the movie, but I found the one instance in which President Obama is featured to be revealing. It’s taken from a 60 Minutes interview after he was elected, and the line that gets captured, which stops the room of intelligence agents in their tracks, is when he says the United States does not torture people. This is ironic because it runs contrary to what we’ve already witness, so it’s saying on one level this statement by the President is a lie. But at the same time, it’s the President, who was just popularly elected, saying that what has been going on within the country’s intelligence department is wrong. That’s a player in this drama standing up and saying torture is wrong, full stop.
Naturally there are CIA folks who complain about this, how it ties their hands when trying to attain vital information, and so on. To say that such complaints could not have existed within the CIA is ridiculous. Even if only on the level that the officers had to be more creative, the way Maya and Dan were with Ammar, which requires more work. Torture is, in a sense, easier. But this moment is an acknowledgement that its moral credibility is gone and its reliability highly questionable. The filmmakers deserve credit for this subtle but strong point.
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