"One of the issues that instructors run into is that they have a lot of younger people coming in, whose only exposure to interrogation is, up until that point, through media," a Department of Defense research scientist who specializes in interrogation training told me. "We struggle with how to un-teach these new interrogator the wrong things they have learned from such previous interrogation exposure."

When I watched Zero Dark Thirty, I thought about Tony Lagouranis, an Army interrogator who served in Iraq in 2004, who I interviewed for my book about American soldiers and torture. Back then, many interrogators told me they lacked adequate training, and fewer had field experience. They faced widespread problems identifying and capturing insurgent targets, and sorting out the detainees who were haphazardly picked up in sweeps. And their superiors place unattainable expectations on them: for instance, believing that interrogators should collect actionable intelligence from a detainee in 30-minute sessions.

In the absence of better guidance and training, and in the midst of failing intelligence operations, interrogators like Lagouranis said they drew on various sources for inspiration, including talk about what kind of coercive techniques worked elsewhere, what special ops had been doing nearby—and what they saw on their television screens. In between interrogation sessions, he and his colleagues watched movies and TV shows from their bunker office in Mosul. They later said that the kinds of pressure that was used to make their suspects talk in these Hollywood depictions was especially compelling to them, fueling beliefs that pain and duress were effective tools for questioning their prisoners.

"None of us were complete idiots—we knew it was make-believe," he said. "But still, it affects you."

That's not surprising to Barry McManus, a former CIA chief polygrapher and interrogator, who notes how and why some interrogators might turn to TV and movies in high-pressure situations.

"You're dealing with a lot of inexperienced young men and women, and all of a sudden they are put into an environment where they're tasked with getting information," McManus said. "When it doesn't go the way they think it should go, as quickly as they think it should go, with the pressure they have, they tend to revert back to things they've seen on TV or in movies—thinking that this might be the right thing to do."

In the book, Torture Team, author Philippe Sands describes how Army Lieutenant Colonel Diane Beaver, the staff judge advocate at Guantanamo, had witnessed the effect of Fox's anti-terrorism thriller 24 on the base. She believed the show contributed to an environment in which those at Guantanamo were encouraged to see themselves as being on the frontline, and to go further than they otherwise might. Interrogators even copied the methods of show's protagonist, Agent Jack Bauer, she said: "You could almost see their dicks getting hard as they got new ideas."