Contributed Photo
New Haven Quakers showed up at the Criterion Cinemas Saturday — not to watch a movie, but to ask other people not to.
The New Haven Friends group, organized by Grant Wiedenfeld of East Rock, were joining a national day of picketing of showings of the film Zero Dark Thirty. The National Religious Campaign Against Torture organized the nationwide action.
They argue that the film promotes a dangerous fallacy: the waterboarding helped the United States find and kill Osama bin laden.
Leafletrers asked people to check out a 20-minute video (at left) instead.
The New Haven group distributed a critique of the film written by Karen Greenberg on the website TomDispatch. She argued in part:
“As its core, [Kathryn] Bigelow’s film makes the bald-faced assertion that torture did help the United States track down the perpetrator of 9/11. Zero Dark Thirty — for anyone who doesn’t know by now — is the story of Maya (Jessica Chastain), a young CIA agent who believes that information from a detainee named Ammar will lead to bin Laden. After weeks, maybe months of torture, he does indeed provide a key bit of information that leads to another piece of information that leads… well, you get the idea. Eventually, the name of bin Laden’s courier is revealed. From the first mention of his name, Maya dedicates herself to finding him, and he finally leads the CIA to the compound where bin Laden is hiding. Of course, you know how it all ends.
“However compelling the heroine’s determination to find bin Laden may be, the fact is that Bigelow has bought in, hook, line, and sinker, to the ethos of the Bush administration and its apologists. It’s as if she had followed an old government memo and decided to offer in fictional form step-by-step instructions for the creation, implementation, and selling of Bush-era torture and detention policies.”
Click here to read a report on the protest by the Register’s Phyllis Swebilius.