The Pulse: An interrogator left out of film

Zero Dark Thirty is impressively spellbinding, even though everyone knows the ending. But the on-screen drama hasn't stymied the offscreen controversy surrounding the movie about the killing of Osama bin Laden.

It's funny that the initial criticism came, sight unseen, from the right. Critics of President Obama feared the movie would be a valentine to him in the midst of the campaign. Instead, its release was delayed until next weekend (with a limited release before the new year), and it depicts Obama only in a snippet of a 60 Minutes interview, saying America doesn't torture.

The opening half-hour of Zero Dark Thirty suggests otherwise, leaving the distinct impression that bin Laden was found due to harsh interrogation methods - hence the latest criticism of the film, from the opposite end of the political spectrum.

The movie asserts that it's "based on firsthand accounts of actual events," but Sens. Dianne Feinstein, Carl Levin, and John McCain have called it "grossly inaccurate and misleading." Acting CIA Director Michael J. Morell echoed that sentiment, saying it "creates the strong impression that the enhanced interrogation techniques that were part of our former detention and interrogation program were the key to finding bin Laden. That impression is false."

Director Kathryn Bigelow maintains that omitting torture would have been a whitewash. The film's first half-hour depicts the interrogation of a detainee called Ammar. Whether he's tortured depends on one's definition. He's clearly abused: strung up by ropes, forced to wear a dog collar, put in a small box, beaten, stripped naked in front of a female CIA analyst. After he's tricked through sleep deprivation into thinking he has given up information, he provides the nickname of bin Laden's courier.

Though the filmmakers say Ammar is a composite, he seems based on Mohammed al-Qahtani, a Guantanamo detainee who was harshly interrogated. Qahtani identified bin Laden's courier in 2002 and 2003. It took until 2007 for the CIA to learn the courier's real name, three more years to find and trail him to Abbottabad and bin Laden.

I asked Peter Bergen, the CNN national-security analyst and author of Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for bin Laden From 9/11 to Abbottabad, whether the movie mirrored the facts. Not only did Bergen once interview bin Laden, but he also was the only Western journalist given access to the Abbottabad complex before it was razed. Moreover, he saw the film before the final edit and encouraged screenwriter Mark Boal to tone down the interrogation scene, which he believed was "overwrought."

"They weren't beaten into a pulp, as was sort of the implication of some of the scenes that were in there," Bergen said of the detainees. "So, you know, they toned it down, but the scenes are still going to linger with filmgoers."

Bergen has written that Qahtani "was interrogated for 48 days at Guantanamo more or less continuously, kept awake for much of that time by loud music being blasted ... doused with water and subjected to cold temperatures, kept naked, and forced to perform tricks as if he were a dog. However, he wasn't waterboarded or beaten."

Bergen noted, however, that another al-Qaeda member, Hassan Ghul, "who was also subjected to coercive interrogation techniques in a CIA secret prison," named the courier. And he noted that harsh interrogation yielded "disinformation" from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and another detainee.

"It's a great movie. The question is, is it great history?" he said. "The viewer of the film might walk away with the erroneous view that coercive interrogation techniques led to Osama bin Laden, something that the Senate intelligence committee has publicly said is not the case."

I'm sorry that one of the most remarkable parts of the Qahtani story wasn't included in the film. A month before 9/11, Qahtani was denied permission to enter the United States at Orlando International Airport by an astute immigration agent named Jose Melendez-Perez. Melendez-Perez told the 9/11 Commission that Qahtani had given him a cold stare and "just gave me the creeps."

Qahtani, a Saudi national, returned to the Middle East and was apprehended in December 2001 fighting with bin Laden at Tora Bora. The 9/11 Commission later determined that he was to have been the 20th hijacker.

Too bad Zero Dark Thirty didn't begin with Melendez-Perez's interrogation of Qahtani, treating viewers to a remarkable reminder of the power of one person using conventional techniques. If Qahtani had been allowed entry, he would have been aboard United Flight 93, where his added muscle might have kept resisting passengers at bay for the 20 additional minutes the flight needed to reach its target, the U.S. Capitol. And if Qahtani had died on Flight 93, we wouldn't have learned the name of bin Laden's courier from him, whether by torture or not.

Jose Melendez-Perez. He's a little like Jimmy Stewart's character in a movie many of us just watched for the umpteenth time, Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life. Remember, George Bailey saved his brother Harry from drowning as a boy. And as a result, Harry was there to save the men on a transport boat during World War II.

Such individuals can make a big difference in real life, too.