In his heralded new book, “The One Percent Doctrine,” Ron Suskind writes that Vice President Dick Cheney forcefully stated that the war on terror empowered the Bush administration to act without the need for evidence or extensive analysis. Suskind describes the Cheney doctrine as follows: “Even if there’s just a 1 percent chance of the unimaginable coming due, act as if it is a certainty. It’s not about ‘our analysis,’ as Cheney said. It’s about ‘our response.’ … Justified or not, fact-based or not, ‘our response’ is what matters. As to ’evidence,’ the bar was set so low that the word itself almost didn’t apply.

“A small mind and unlimited ambition without scruple can destroy a country of clever men.”

I believe in years to come, “Zero Dark Thirty” will be held in reverence with other great war movies like “Das Boot,” “The Battle of Algiers,” and “Saving Private Ryan.” All of these movies, while ostensibly about a battle or campaign were actually about something deeper: the human condition whilst under the bloody sky of war. Kathryn Bigelow’s film is special because its real task is not to visually portray events bookended by September 11, 2001 and the killing of Osama bin Laden, as the trailer or synopsis would have one believe, but rather to show a series of scenes to the audience which lead it to undergo the emotions that those who lived in that time period felt.