Three senators went to see “Zero Dark Thirty,” and they recoiled from it. The problem was torture. Senator John McCain, Dianne Feinstein, and Carl Levin—a Republican and two Democrats, respectively—have now sent a letter to Sony Pictures about their “deep disappointment,” with the movie: “We believe the film is grossly inaccurate and misleading in its suggestion that torture resulted in information that led to the location of Usama bin Laden.” They also called it “factually inaccurate,” “false,” and “perpetuating a myth that torture is effective.” According to the AP, after watching the movie McCain, who was tortured himself as a prisoner in Vietnam, felt sick.

For a sense of how wrong the movie is about torture, read Jane Mayer’s definitive post. Like the Senators, she was taken aback when the movie showed men who were being or had already been “broken” by torture giving the C.I.A. precious, if scattered, clues—for example, about the identity of bin Laden’s courier. That is not how it happened: as the Senators wrote, “We have reviewed CIA records and know that this is incorrect.” The breakthrough about the courier came “through means unrelated to the CIA detention and interrogation program”; the prisoner who came closest to giving us the information did so before he was tortured, not after. The senators asked for a correction, or, rather, a clarification: “We believe that you have an obligation to state that the role of torture in the hunt for Usama Bin Laden is not based on the facts, but rather part of the film’s fictional narrative.”

We are fans of many of your movies, and we understand the special role that movies play in our lives, but the fundamental problem is that people who see Zero Dark Thirty will believe that the events it portrays are facts… The use of torture in the fight against terrorism did severe damage to America’s values and standing that cannot be justified or expunged. It remains a stain on our national conscience. We cannot afford to go back to these dark times, and with the release of Zero Dark Thirty, the filmmakers and your production studio are perpetuating the myth that torture is effective. You have a social and moral obligation to get the facts right.

What are senators doing asking a movie company to present its film one way or the other? Is that their role? Is it there a “social and moral obligation”—or any obligation—for a filmmaker to “get the facts right”? The debate on torture, it should be noted, in no way hinges on whether it yielded any one fact—especially when there are unanswerable questions about whether the information could have been gained otherwise, the problem of false leads, and whether it is morally wrong—the senators may be making a mistake in acting like it does. And no one wants a censorship board, or only worthy movies, or ones that don’t play with history.

But that’s not what’s happening. The two problems are the claims that the filmmakers have made and the vacuum of classification that they are making them in.

The senators’ letter notes that “there has been significant media coverage of the CIA’s cooperation with the screenwriters.” It’s not bad that the filmmakers talked to the government; reporters do it all the time. What’s troubling is that the government hasn’t talked more. We are meant to understand that the filmmakers heard things we can’t, at a time when cases brought by torture victims are thrown out of court because the government has invoked the state-secrets privilege. That’s not how our political discourse should work, either. So much about our recent history as torturers has been left unexamined, with no accountability, with details of events marked secret and shoved away, and the lines between the parts we do know left open to the imagination. The next time we are asked to make a judgment about whether our country should engage in torture, we should be able to look at more than a single movie. That is the value in the senators’ statement. Feinstein and Levin have access to classified information, too, as part of a review of this history, and they cite it in their letter. The senators shouldn’t edit the movie; they can, and should, increase transparency about torture.

This is a movie, after all, that opens, as the letter notes, with the real, recorded voices of the victims of 9/11, trapped in the towers, about to die, followed by a note saying that what follows is “based on first-hand accounts of actual events.” It is as if someone opened a movie, made in consultation with the Newtown police, with a recording of the intercom at Sandy Hook Elementary School, and then showed a teacher saving some students with the handgun she had in her purse. Someone may want to make that movie. People can make whatever movies they want; Abraham Lincoln can become a vampire hunter. But those who do can not be taken aback if the response is something other than awed silence. They might make a senator and torture victim sick.

Although Mark Boal, the screenwriter, told Dexter Filkins that it is not a documentary, both he and Kathryn Bigelow have talked about how the idea of the torture scenes is to present harsh realities—to “make the point that waterboarding and other harsh tactics were part of the C.I.A. program,” as Boal told Filkins, and then make a movie that “doesn’t judge,” as Bigelow told him. And defenses of the movie are based on a point that is, in itself, soberingly sad: we Americans still haven’t admitted to ourselves that we tortured at all; but this is what it looks like. That’s not enough, for a crucial reason that Mayer identifies in describing a scene:

In reality, when the C.I.A. first subjected a detainee to incarceration in a coffin-size “confinement box,” as is shown in the movie, an F.B.I. agent present at the scene threw a fit, warned the C.I.A. contractor proposing the plan that it was illegal, counterproductive, and reprehensible. The fight went all the way to the top of the Bush Administration. Bigelow airbrushes out this showdown, as she does virtually the entire debate during the Bush years about the treatment of detainees.

Nobody, in other words, including the three senators, is asking that Bigelow and Boal to make a propaganda film, or even an after-school torture special where reservations are dutifully, artificially inserted. But as Mayer writes, “the Bush years were racked by internal strife over just that issue—again, not just among human-rights and civil-liberties lawyers, but inside the F.B.I., the military, the Justice Department, and the C.I.A. itself.” The “judging” was part of the action all along. What critics are asking is why one of the central dramas that ran through the search for bin Laden was largely omitted, and why the result was presented as a revelation.