Senators Take Zero Dark Thirty Gripes to Sony CEO

Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow's film about the Osama bin Laden raid, was already quite controversial, and it just got more so. Three senators sent a letter to the chairman and CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment yesterday accusing the fictionalized film of being "grossly inaccurate and misleading in its suggestion that torture resulted in information that led to the location" of bin Laden. The bipartisan critique came from Dianne Feinstein, Carl Levin, and John McCain, the New York Times reports, calling it an "unusual" move.

Feinstein heads the Senate Intelligence Committee, which just completed a massive study of the CIA's detention and interrogation program. Though the report is quite critical of the program, Feinstein says that it showed waterboarding and other torture techniques did not play much of a role in finding bin Laden. Thus, the senators say in their letter, the film is "factually inaccurate." They want Sony Pictures to "consider correcting the impression," but didn't specify how. (More Zero Dark Thirty stories.)