Bigelow maintains that everything in the film is based on first-hand accounts, but the waterboarding scene, which is likely to stir up controversy, appears to have strayed from real life…

In this week’s issue, Dexter Filkins talks to Kathryn Bigelow about making her new film on the killing of Osama bin Laden, “Zero Dark Thirty”: http://nyr.kr/SEeiCy

In today’s Daily Comment, Amy Davidson asks “what’s wrong with politicizing the death of Osama bin Laden?”  She writes,

The list of questions that we have had to confront practically, not just abstractly, reads like a catechism of citizenship.  When should we go to war? What are the limits of habeas corpus? What are our priorities— financial, moral, military— as a nation?  What are the rights of citizens, and of strangers?  What do Congress, the Court, and the President each get to decide?  How much can we know about what they do?  Is torture worth it?  What are my rights?  Should we sneak into South Asian countries and assassinate our enemies in the middle of the night?  These are all matters for politics. And, again, in the past decade there haven’t been too many questions raised about them; there were again, too few.  And too often the critics were told to just be quiet and keep national security out of politics.

Click-through to read Davidson’s entire post.

The Quiet Admiral

McRaven didn’t actually kill bin Laden. The shot was fired by one of twenty-three SEALs who flew into Pakistan on the night of May 1st, stormed bin Laden’s compound, and took his body away. Their identities remain secret. And McRaven might have preferred the same. His name, however, became part of the lore of the raid after Panetta, who was the director of the C.I.A., told PBS’s Jim Lehrer that McRaven was the “real commander” of the Abbottabad mission. McRaven had long been revered inside the special-operations community, but he was hardly known outside of military circles. In fact, immediately after finishing with Panetta, Lehrer felt obliged to inform viewers that McRaven was in charge of Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC (McRaven has since received his fourth star and been promoted to commander of Special Operations Command, of which JSOC is one component.)

- Nicholas Schmidle on Admiral Bill McRaven. Last August, Schmidle wrote in detail about McRaven’s role overseeing the bin Laden mission.