A year after Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow was given the green light to make her film about the search for and eventual killing of Osama bin Laden, now titled Zero Dark Thirty, the conservative watchdog organisation Judicial Watch has uncovered Pentagon and CIA records suggesting that the US Defence Department provided Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal with high-level information about the mission that uncovered the al Qaeda leader in May 2011, a UK-based magazine reported. According to Vanity Fair, one transcript, obtained by Judicial Watch through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, reveals that Bigelow and Boal were given access to a SEAL Team 6 commander who helped to plan the operation and were also permitted to tour “the Vault,” a classified CIA structure where planning for the raid took place. The Pentagon’s inspector general initiated an investigation into whether the filmmakers had been given special access to military information after Maureen Dowd alleged in an August 2011 New York Times piece that they were “getting top-level access to the most classified mission in history from an administration that has tried to throw more people in jail for leaking classified information than the Bush administration.” Entertainment Weekly points out that during a press meeting weeks after the claim, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney referred to Dowd’s allegations as “ridiculous” before adding, “We do not discuss classified information. And I would hope that as we face a continued threat from terrorism, the House Committee on Homeland Security would have more important topics to discuss than a movie.” It has been suggested that the White House granted Bigelow and Boal access to the information in the hopes that the film would help President Obama in his re-election bid in November. Any truth to that is now a moot point—the original October 2012 release date has been pushed back to December 19, 2012. Zero Dark Thirty stars Jessica Chastain, Joel Edgerton, and Mark Strong and is being filmed in Chandigarh, India.
