The marketers for "Zero Dark Thirty" ran a full-page reprint of Roger Cohen's column on the film as an advertisement. I found myself agreeing with Cohen about Bigelow and the screenwriter Mark Boal (who also worked with Kathryn Bigelow on "The Hurt Locker" for which she won Best Director in 2009.)

Why ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ Works by Roger Cohen

...George W. Bush has been rightly mocked for once commenting on Bin Laden that, “I just don’t spend that much time on him.” But the truth is not that many people did. Bin Laden had vanished, perhaps he was already dead. Anyway he was best not dwelled upon. Years went by, 9/11 receded. Bigelow lasers in on those for whom finding the mastermind behind the killing of almost 3,000 Americans was an undying obsession. 

Or rather she and her scriptwriter Mark Boal, a former journalist, focus on a single C.I.A. analyst, “Maya,” played by Jessica Chastain. (The film has much to say about female single-mindedness and good sense as contrasted with male huffiness and volatility.)
... 

Maya's single-mindedness and competence reminds me of Clare Daines's Carrie Mathison on "Homeland" and Keri Russell's Elizabeth Jennings on "The Americans."

Watching torture — the C.I.A. should abandon its ghastly euphemism — is profoundly unsettling. But Bigelow and Boal have done an important service in setting before a wide U.S. and global audience images of a traumatized America’s dark side. This happened: the waterboarding, the sleep deprivation, the sexual humiliation, the cruelty. Not exactly as depicted, but yes it did, in places that, as if in a totalitarian world, existed on no map. 

And I think the movie’s portrayal of torture is truthful: It helped at times but at others did not. It provided clues that might have been gleaned by other means. And the ultimate success in finding Bin Laden occurred after President Obama had banned the methods “Zero Dark Thirty” portrays so powerfully....

[I'd question if torture ever helped at times. Even if it did it's morally wrong and will backfire and ultimately "not help."*]

The charge of inaccuracy is a poor thing measured against the potency of truth. “Zero Dark Thirty” is a truthful artistic creation, one reason it has provoked debate. Boal told The New York Times he did not want “to play fast and loose with history” — a statement held against him by several of the movie’s critics, most eloquently Steve Coll in The New York Review of Books. My sense, however, is that Boal has honored those words.**

There were few more minute observers of fact than George Orwell. As Timothy Garton Ash has written, if Orwell had a God it was Kipling’s “God of Things as They are.” Yet, as Garton Ash says of Orwell: “One of his most powerful early essays describes witnessing a hanging in Burma. But he later told three separate people that this was ‘only a story.’ So did he ever witness a hanging? He annotates a copy of “Down and Out in Paris and London” for a girlfriend: this really happened, this happened almost like this, but “this incident is invented.”’ 

Truth is art’s highest calling. For it the facts must sometimes be adjusted. “Zero Dark Thirty” meets the demands of truth.

Cohen is a Brit in America and Ash is British. The late, great Christopher Hitchens admired Orwell and was a friend of Ash. Cohen was obviously influenced by him and tends to share his viewpoints. I wonder what Hitchens would have made of Boal's script. Most likely, he would have dismissed Maya's argument that the ISI wasn't supporting bin Laden because al Qaeda tried to kill Musharraf. Technically no, but elements of the ISI were/are treasonous and part of the problem. The ISI was supporting him in that they didn't turn him over to the Americans when they knew where he was. Of course the ISI and Pakistan were helpful to the U.S. in other ways so it's a complicated picture.

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*I liked Robb Stark's response to the Roose "is loose!" Bolton within the brutal context of war in Westeros on the topic of flaying. First he says that his father (and moral authority) outlawed flaying in the North. "We're not in the North," replied Bolton. Robb then says something along the lines of "they have my sisters and I won't give them an excuse to abuse them."
** From Coll's review:

The result of such secrecy is that what is often described as America’s “debate” about the use of torture on al-Qaeda suspects largely consists of assertions, without evidence, by public officials with security clearances who have access to the classified record and who have expressed diametrically opposed opinions about what the record proves. Senator Dianne Feinstein, for example, has said that waterboarding and other harsh techniques were “not central” in developing the clues that led to Osama bin Laden’s hideout. Yet Michael Hayden, the final CIA director of the Bush administration, wrote last year that information gleaned from detainees who were “subjected to some form of enhanced interrogation” proved “crucial” to the search. The most thorough, independent account published on the bin Laden hunt to date—Manhunt, by the journalist Peter Bergen1 —mainly supports Feinstein’s view, but the CIA and other officials Bergen interviewed also asserted that some al-Qaeda detainees who were tortured provided relevant pieces of evidence.
...
In virtually every instance in the film where Maya extracts important clues from prisoners, then, torture is a factor. Arguably, the film’s degree of emphasis on torture’s significance goes beyond what even the most die-hard defenders of the CIA interrogation regime, such as Rodriguez, have argued. Rodriguez’s position in his memoir is that “enhanced interrogation” was indispensible to the search for bin Laden—not that it was the predominant means of gathering important clues.

The mere fact that the record is classified causes me to believe that Feinstein is not telling the truth. Rodriguez isn't as die-hard a defender as Michael Hayden and others. Rodriguez, Feinstein and Coll may all be covering the CIA's ass (and America's self image and image to the world). There's an exploration of this theme in the movie.