Bigelow's film establishes the pro-government style of Bush/Cheney-era policies on the War on Terror, which promote Dan's torture of terrorist suspects as effective in finding Bin Laden. Beatings, sexual humiliation, and other forms of torture define the militaristic style of information extraction, which Zero Dark Thirty promotes as effective and ethical in the political culture of the 2000s and 2010s. In contrast to this pro-government view, Zwick presents the film as a cautionary tale on martial law and the growing militarism of torture techniques, deemed unacceptable in the late 1990s. This anti-government viewpoint illustrates General Devereaux's arrest as a war criminal arrested by Agent Hubbard. However, both of these films project the war on terrorism in American politics as overtly militaristic in large-scale military operations and procedures for capturing individuals in small terrorist cells. These are the similar and different aspects of pro-government and anti-government representations of the War on Terror that were examined in Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty (2012) and Edward's The Siege (1998)