9-11 Truthers Ed Asner, Martin Sheen urge Oscar voters to shun “Zero Dark Thirty”

The NYT’s Carpetbagger blog reports on a growing movement of stuffy, clueless liberal Hollywood elitists who are taking the rare – and controversial – step of urging Oscar voters to not vote for the movie Zero Dark Thirty – which roughly documented how the US eventually found and killed the 9-11 instigator and mastermind Osama bin Laden – in any of the categories for which it was nominated. Why? Because, in their view, the movie condones ‘torture’:

“I would like to condemn the movie” for making it appear that torture was effective in the hunt for Osama bin Laden, Ed Asner said in a telephone interview on Sunday morning. Mr. Asner said he and fellow actor Martin Sheen planned to join in a letter, drafted by yet another actor, David Clennon, asking fellow members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to factor in matters of conscience when casting awards votes.

“We hope that ‘Zero’ will not be honored by Academy (or Guild) members,” said a draft of the letter, which was provided by Mr. Clennon on Sunday morning.

He had already spoken publicly about the planned campaign at a Friday protest by members of the Interfaith Communities United for Justice and Peace.

His remarks prompted a sharp response from Amy Pascal, the co-chair of Sony Pictures Entertainment, which is releasing “Zero Dark Thirty.” “To punish an artist’s right of expression is abhorrent,” said Ms. Pascal in a statement. She also stressed, as has Kathryn Bigelow, who directed “Zero Dark Thirty,” and Mark Boal, who wrote it, that the film portrays torture, but does not advocate it.

Fox News has more:

Some say it is because Bigelow incorporated controversial scenes of enhanced interrogation. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) member David Clennon, an actor best known for his portrayal of Miles Drentel in the ABC series “thirtysomething,” a role he reprised on “Once and Again,” wrote an op-ed on the Truth-Out.org website announcing his intention not to vote for the film in any Academy Awards category.

“Everyone who contributes skill and energy to a motion picture – including actors – shares responsibility for the impressions the picture makes and the ideas it expresses,” he said. “There’s plenty of ‘Oscar buzz’ around ‘Zero Dark Thirty.’ Several associations of film critics have awarded it their highest honors. I have watched the film (2 hours, 37 minutes). Torture is an appalling crime under any circumstances. ‘Zero’ never acknowledges that torture is immoral and criminal.”

Clennon is apparently not alone. The actor issued a press release that said actor Martin Sheen and the former head of the Screen Actors Guild, Ed Asner, were joining his call to boycott the movie and are encouraging other Academy members to take action as well. Asner also reportedly said in Clennon’s statement that “one of the brightest female directors in the business is in danger of becoming part of the system.”

[…]

But Bigelow wasn’t the only director left out of the Oscar’s Best Director lineup. Ben Affleck too was left off the nominations list for his widely-acclaimed direction of “Argo,” which also told a based-on-true-events story of a secret CIA operation, this one to extract six American diplomats out of Iran during the 1979 hostage crisis. Despite missing out on the Oscar nod, Affleck won Best Director at both the Golden Globes and last week’s Critics Choice Awards, and both he and Bigelow are up for Director’s Guild of America (DGA) Awards.

Bigelow and Affleck’s twin Oscar snubs have prompted some to wonder whether there is a broader anti-American position at play among Academy voters, and scores of fans have taken to Twitter to weigh in on the debate.

There is no “wondering” about it. There is indeed a widespread anti-American stench amongst far leftists in Hollywood, and has been for quite some time. It’s just that shunning issues like this bring it to the forefront in a way that “low information voter” types can’t ignore.

Too bad Asner, Clennon, and Sheen have their heads too far up their willfully ignorant a**es to be able to admit that enhanced interrogation techniques did indeed lead to the eventual finding and killing of Public Enemy Number One: OBL. And it all started with the water boarding of so-called 9-11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, which also stopped the LA Library Tower plot. It’s practically a matter of record, even though anti-EIT Democrats – including a gloating President Obama – desperately tried to avoid probing questions about the issue at the time.

It is clear that Asner, Sheen, and other extremist left wing nitwits in Hollywood are against what they call the “torture” of high-value terrorist detainees (even though the water boarding procedure was only used a whopping total of three times), and are in closed-minded denial about how those tactics led to the eventual demise of OBL. But even if they could be convinced that the techniques worked, they’d still be against them on “human rights” grounds – meaning that while they stood on their idiotic high horses, the LA Library Tower plot likely would have been carried out, killing an untold number of innocents in the process, and giving them a chance to do what liberals in Hollywood and outside of it do best: Blame Bush.

Which is, startlingly enough (or perhaps not so startlingly), what they’ve done with 9-11 itself: Blame Bush. Oh, you didn’t know Sheen and Asner were part of a group of Hollywood Truthers? They sure are – to the point both of them, alongside fellow Truther and actor Woody Harrelson – are starring in an upcoming moving called “September Morn” (movie poster here) which they hope will give credence to long discredited conspiracy claims about the US government being behind 9-11:

Sheen, who starred in Apocalypse Now and television’s The West Wing, has long questioned whether Islamist hijackers single-handedly brought down the Twin Towers, killing 2,605 people.

“I did not want to believe that my government could possibly be involved in such a thing, I could not live in a country that I thought could do that – that would be the ultimate betrayal,” he told an interviewer in 2007.

Sheen grew suspicious after his son Charlie, also an actor, alerted him to apparent contradictions, such as how a structure known as “Building 7” fell.

He said: “However, there have been so many revelations that now I have my doubts, and chief among them is Building 7 – how did they rig that building so that it came down on the evening of the day?”

Asner, who has won seven Emmys, has several times urged a new investigation into 9/11. In 2010, he told an interviewer: “This country – which is the greatest, strongest country that ever existed in the world, in terms of power – supposedly had a defence that could not be penetrated all these years. But all of that was eradicated by 19 Saudi Arabians, supposedly. Some of whom didn’t even know how to fly.”

Let’s sum up: It’s a “matter of conscience” for them as “artists” to spread outright lies involving bullsh*t conspiracy theories involving 9-11 by way of a movie, but on the other hand it’s not for Kathryn Bigelow (nor Ben Affleck, for that matter) as a movie director to include references to “controversial” events that actually happened that led up to our finding and ridding the world of OBL – you know, the actual thug behind 9-11 (not the government, which was not).

The words” absolute moral bankruptcy” don’t even begin to cover these clueless, reprehensible jack asses.

Phineas Butts In: As ST mentions above, Los Angeles (where yours truly lives) was the target of a planned second wave 9/11-style attack, which could have again killed thousands — including me and people I know. The only reason it was averted was the capture and subsequent waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammad. He wasn’t talking prior to the use of “enhanced interrogation.” Asner and Sheen and all the other nitwits preening themselves over their self-proclaimed moral superiority can go to the Devil as far as I’m concerned. Question for Ed and Martin and the rest: How many of us were you willing to see die to keep your consciences lily-white? Sanctimonious jackasses.

(Related: The Truth About Torture)

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