The day after the stench of torture ruined Zero Dark Thirty’s Oscar hopes, Reuters reports that the Senate Intelligence Committee has dropped its probe of the movie.
One day after “Zero Dark Thirty” failed to win major awards at the Oscars, a congressional aide said on Monday the Senate Intelligence Committee has closed its inquiry into the filmmakers’ contacts with the Central Intelligence Agency.
The intelligence committee gathered more information from the CIA, film director Kathryn Bigelow, and screenwriter Mark Boal and will not take further action, according to the aide, who requested anonymity.
And that may be all there is to the story.
Or maybe not.
As was made clear by the correspondence between Dianne Feinstein and Mike Morell in December, what DiFi wanted was to make sure CIA was not making official claims that torture worked.
In addition to ZD30’s failures last night, something else has happened — or was scheduled to happen — since that time. The CIA was supposed to provide its response to SSCI’s Torture Report on February 15. And of course, because of the delay of Brennan’s confirmation, Morell remains the Acting Director at CIA.
While I’ve seen no reporting on what they said, I presume if they were at least open to the conclusions of the report, DiFi would have less reason to continue correcting the record on ZD30 publicly.
Who knows? Maybe she achieved two objectives with her public pressure? Sinking the chances of the movie, and pushing against any rejection of the report.