Tough Assignment
Daniel J. Jones (Adam Driver) is a young staffer assigned by boss Senator Dianne Feinstein (an outstanding Annette Bening) to lead an investigation into the CIA’s EIT program (Enhanced Interrogation Techniques) that was designed and implemented post-9/11.“The Report” is about Jones’s journey of exposing a conspiracy by top government officials to manipulate the law, destroy evidence, and hide from and deny to the American public the truth of the CIA’s brutality.
It’s not information that many in the government, naturally, would care to have come to light. As one character tells Jones, “They asked you to build a boat, but they had no intention of sailing it.” From waterboarding to sleep deprivation, confined spaces, stress positions, deafening nonstop death-metal music, and so on, “The Report” depicts the PTSD-inducing trauma, injury, and ultimately, the death of prisoners that the United States was responsible for.
Given that we were looking for answers regarding our 2,977 people murdered on 9/11, probably even the most pacifistic of Americans, subconsciously, deep in their souls, sanctioned at least a little bit of torture. As in (to quote Jack Nicholson’s Colonel Jessup from “A Few Good Men”) “… deep down, in places you don’t talk about at parties; you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall!”
Probably most of us were feeling a little bit of —whatever it takes. I wonder if TV’s “24,” which was wildly popular and aired during that time period, with Kiefer Sutherland’s Jack Bauer running around torturing people and getting tortured, had any relation to all of the above.
What We Weren’t Aware Of
What we hadn’t counted on was for the whole “enhanced interrogation” to have been hatched by a couple of zealous, CIA-appointed pseudoscientists. It’s slightly unfortunate that in “The Report,” these fools are depicted as exactly that: a couple of bozos, who, had they actually acted and talked like that, would have immediately gotten the whole scheme called into question, under intense scrutiny.Word would have spread. Because, one more step and they’re in Rex Kwon Do from “Napoleon Dynamite” or John Ratzenberger-as-Cliff on “Cheers” territory: “What you got here is yer enhanced interrogation tactics, guaranteed to elicit full disclosure of the whereabouts of yer Osama Bin Laden” (not an actual quote).
It’s mildly funny, but the self-aggrandizing bamboozlement by these two led to people getting killed for nothing. There was no science happening, just made-up results rejiggered to fit the narratives they wished to promote. These “facts,” along with Weapons of Mass Destruction, make a good argument for this being the starting gun for America’s entry into the post-truth era. Needless to say, the whole thing makes the CIA come off rather badly.
What Goes On
The deeper Jones dives, the more his outrage mounts, to the point where he is doing nothing but eating, sleeping, and breathing the hunt for truth in an underlit, airless, basement workspace. What’s keeping him up nights is locating the black sites where torture took place. And the whitewashing, misleading, and spinning that had the American public going, “Yup—apparently waterboarding is highly uncomfortable, but they’re getting results; they’re gonna find Bin Laden!” (Not an actual quote from anybody.)Jones investigates the tortures of a long line of prisoners, chewing and munching his way methodically though a giant salad of sheer paper tonnage of CIA communications meant to wear him out, which became his 1,000-page “Torture Report.” They thought he couldn’t stomach it all. But he did.
Wore his help out too; they begged him to stop. They’d had enough of the basement and the endless redacted paper-grazing.
Performance-wise, Driver and especially Bening will get Oscar mentions. Bening for channeling Dianne Feinstein’s solemn righteousness, carefulness of speech, and her balancing of the explosive exposure of war crimes that could foment a massive political roiling.
“Should any American soldier be so base and infamous as to injure any [prisoner] ... I do most earnestly enjoin you to bring him to such severe and exemplary punishment as the enormity of the crime may require. Should it extend to death itself, it will not be disproportional to its guilt at such a time and in such a cause … for by such conduct they bring shame, disgrace, and ruin to themselves and their country.” —George Washington, charge to the Northern Expeditionary Force, Sept. 14, 1775
In the past, war was different; war had a different set of ethics. It’s probably too late to return to such quaint views. But humanity should try.Still … all those war-hero authors writing about the effectiveness of torture? If all that torture proved ineffective, maybe Ian Fleming was trying to sell more books?
