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| Redaction oriented promotion for the film "The [Redacted] Report" |
. . .The back of the special section furnished a quote from Variety: “ . . by the time it’s over the movie feels like something this country needs [i.e. to know?] now more than ever.”
A few days later the New York Times Arts section slathered on more enticement for the scandal-revealing film by running an article officially telling readers that something had been left out of the film, see: The Report’ and the Untold Story of a Senate-C.I.A. Clash Hollywood Left Untold- `The Report,” about a 9/11 torture inquiry, omits a crucial episode. By Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane, Published Nov. 15, 2019, Updated Nov. 16, 2019, or if you want the Times internet headline for the same story, The Adam Driver film dramatizes a contentious investigation into post-9/11 torture. But it leaves out a tense episode that could have buried the results altogether.
That Times story on the first page of its Arts section tells us that the “crucial episode” omitted about the “9/11 torture inquiry” that “could have buried the results” of the “contentious investigation” altogether was that the report was the subject of “a pressure campaign to keep the report under wraps” that included James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, citing a classified assessment and telling members of the Senate Intelligence Committee that release of the report “could lead to riots, attacks on American embassies and the killing of American hostages overseas.”
The big reveal, the hook based upon which the two Times headlines for the article were written, is that there were efforts to suppress that report, however, the whole movie is organized around tension involving efforts to suppress the report and its information. . . And, despite what the two Times article authors claim, there is something very similar to their cited “episode” included in the film. . . But having read the Times article (the internet version of the Times article includes the “teaser” trailer promoting it), you might be lured into thinking that, when you see the film, that you’ll know everything about what was left out . .
Is that so? Not quite! That’s why I am writing this article.
First, I don’t want to spoil things for anyone: See the film. It has great performances, including by Adam Driver as the report’s chief investigator and Annette Bening as Senator Diane Feinstein, along with superb performances of many supporting actors like Jon Hamm. The film also deals with very important issues. You can feel good about the fact that they are issues that frequently don’t get the attention they should. Indeed, they are issues that there are continual efforts to bury, just as the film is about attempts to bury the titular report of the title.
See the film, but see the film bearing in mind some of the points we’ll make in this article.
The film is docudrama. Docudrama’s have a great advantage communicating in that they can synthesize complex stories for the public that could otherwise be exceedingly difficult to understand. As human beings, our minds organize around narratives, stories that can be told around a campfire. But when docudramas put their composite or narratively simplified characters up on the screen we lose sight of reality. When blanks get filled in for the sake of moving the story along, we are likely to forget to ask questions about how those blanks could otherwise have been filled in or ought to have been.
In the case of the film “The Report,” although it asks questions about how 9/11 suspects who were tortured were “questioned,” it doesn’t ask all the questions that are there to be asked despite the feeling that the film gives that it covers everything. The film doesn’t ask questions about how a number of blanks that it fills in should have been filled in.
Before we get to those blanks and the questions that weren’t asked, let's look at a list of the many facts and issues the film does address. The list makes the film appear almost seditious in the amount of criticism it is willing to direct at our government’s intelligence agencies. Much of what is set forth on the list below is discernible by watching the trailer, but not all of it:
• 9/11 scared people, made people scared it would happen again, so they would accept the crossing of boundaries that people wouldn’t accept before, many of them. CHECK!That’s a long list. And the New York Times article provided assurance that the producers provided “an annotated script” documenting the facts incorporated into the film. (The Times article noted some only very minor liberties with the facts that it says were taken.) So what did a film that accurately includes all this leave out? What questions did the film fail to ask, filling in its docudrama blanks in such a way that could go unnoticed?
• People in the intelligence community actually foresaw that 9/11 was coming, but, somehow, those available insights were ignored allowing 9/11 to happen. Decisions were specifically made not to investigate beforehand matters about the 9/11 events that would soon thereafter take place. CHECK!
• Immediately following 9/11, huge amounts of increased funding flowed as a result thereof into the military-industrial-surveillance complex, with a virtual blank check going to the intelligence agencies included in that flow. For instance, just a small for instance, the unqualified private contractors who concocted methods of torture were paid over $80 million. CHECK!
• 9/11 suspects were tortured by the U.S. government. CHECK!
• Torture is reprehensible and morally wrong (or at least most watching the film would concur). CHECK!
• Torture by the United States government is illegal. CHECK!
• When the United States government engages in such illegal torture, it creates a greater likelihood that members of our own military will be subject to similar treatment, while our country simultaneously loses the ability and grounds to prevent and object to it. CHECK!
• Those who are properly trained in our government know quite well that there are reliable, productive interrogation techniques that much more competently get information that don’t involve torture. CHECK!
• Coercion, including using torture, does not work to get information. CHECK!
• Coercion, including using torture, yields false and undependable information. CHECK!
• The CIA that conducted such torture had a long, long, decades long knowledge that torture does not work to get information. CHECK!
• Torture sometimes kills suspects putting whatever information they potentially had out of reach. CHECK!
• The government’s switch over from interrogation techniques capable of yielding valuable information to torture techniques that wouldn’t work made it seem almost as if the government didn’t actually want real information. CHECK!
• That if the government actually knew torture didn’t work (as apparently it did), it was even more illegal. CHECK!
• The CIA was making its plans (in November of 2001) to torture people before it had identified suspects from which it wanted any information.
• Coercion, including using torture against suspects means that it becomes almost impossible to thereafter legally prosecute those suspects; thus it immunizes them from legal consequences. CHECK! (That raises questions about what is actually intended with respect to the actual disposition of such individuals. CHECK!)
• The United States tortured people who had no connection in any way to attacks on the United States, and people whose potential for providing information was deceptively exaggerated– That included exaggerating to say that Abu Zubaydah with whom the torture program was initiated, had connections to top al-Qaeda leadership. CHECK! The film notes that, of at least 119 people identified as having been tortured, more than one quarter of them should never even have been detained. CHECK!
• Torturing people creates hostility towards the Unites States generating new enemies. CHECK!
• The Unites States Government lied to the public issuing statements that were false saying that its torture programs has been successful in obtaining information that prevented attacks. That included Dick Cheney falsely claiming on television that torture led to the capture of Osama bin Laden backed up by false statements of former CIA director Michael Hayden and former Attorney General Mukasey. CHECK!
• That Public Relations people advising the CIA wanted (e.g. the misinformation in the film “Zero Dark Thirty” that the CIA helped make) President Obama’s popular bin Laden raid connected to information obtained by torture even before and when there was never any ability to manufacture such links.
• The United States Government, for about as long as it could, attempted to cover up just about all of the above, including the titular “Report” of the film about all of this. That suppression could include character assassination of the messenger. It included lying within the government and suppression of internal dissent within the intelligence agencies. CHECK!
• The CIA reportedly destroyed, so as to make them unavailable, tapes of its torture sessions (The destruction is what launches “The Report”’s investigation), so that we cannot now know and witness for ourselves the kinds of statements the CIA interrogators attempted to coerce the people it tortured into making and, further, we cannot see the responses the tortured individuals provided. The tape destruction was something that Gina Haspel (now CIA Director) was directly responsible for. CHECK!
• There are serious questions about the CIA spying on the congressional oversight investigations of CIA activities. That included unauthorized searches of the investigators’ computers. CHECK!
• That those in the government responsible for such actions were promoted, not punished or held to account and that includes Gina Haspel, one of those at the CIA most responsible, who was promoted to become the head of the CIA under Trump. The film’s end cards say “No CIA officers have been charged in connection with the actions outlined in the report. Many were promoted. One became Director of the CIA.” CHECK!
According to the Times, the film’s “heroes and villains are sketched in black and white.” Maybe, but are the “villains” supposedly sketched as “black,” sketched in the right shades of black? Are those shades as black as they should be? Because we don’t know a lot of things for sure, we can only speculate about how black those shades should be. That’s hard to do in a docudrama format, but it is a question that deserves asking.
The film’s trailer shows how the film conveys that those wearing the black hats in the film were acting with the intent “to gain intel and save American lives.” Even as they are shown to be mendacious and deceiving, incapable of recognizing their own sadism, the film allows those wearing its black hats to be seen as essentially misguided and/or perhaps incompetent. The Times even manages, in its discussion of the film, to back up the idea of this incompetence of government officials by finding an `independent expert,’ Edward Peters, author of a history of torture, to say that those in charge of the nation’s torture program were incompetent to the level that they were “so ignorant of the history of torture,” that they didn’t actually know that they were, without question, torturing people. Really?: The advantage of being `inexpert’ about torture “history” when you are in charge running a torture program is that you have an excuse for failing to recognize when you are torturing people as your job?
The Times softened any possible judgment that could be leveled against the black hats in the film even further, by supplying, in its film discussion, information that 60 percent of visitors to the International Spy Museum in Washington “voted in favor of torture” (in response to a survey the museum created) if “suspected terrorists . . may know details about future attacks.” This was after the Museum Curators provided “video clips in which the [torture] program’s architects defended it and opponents of torture denounced it.”
The Times discussion ends with a note (via quotes from Senator Udall, an author of the report) that the legacy of the report’s “grim record” is that it could serve a possible “warning” if “future leaders” are tempted to use torture again. But here we have the two Times co-writers of the article, who just saw the film, inserting into their article that discusses these `warnings,’ theories about how maybe those wearing the film’s black hats were possibly not all that bad, that maybe these black hats were only `inexpert’ about torture history, and maybe these black hats were somewhat representative of the 60% of the visitors to the Spy Museum exposed to the pro-torture arguments offered by those in government running these programs who were inexpert in such history.
The real subject here is not intended to be how the New York Times recontextualized the black hats of the film into arguably normal people; the subject here is intended to be the unquestioned suppositions the film itself supplies, almost unnoticeably, concerning about how black the hats of the black hats in the film might actually have been.
The film, presupposing to know them, continually ascribes defensible, even admirable motivations to those who conducted and ran the torture program. The film has the composite character that stands in for the Gina Haspel and who delivers her supposed point of view say that she justifies what she is doing because, in the aftermath of 9/11 “we are not going to get beat again.” To her fictional credit, the Gina Haspel composite character, in later scenes, expresses exasperation when it is clear that torture is not bringing forth “the truth,” and she shows irritation with the idea that, when torturing people, you have to supply those people with the words you want them to say (your own “intel” on the subject) to get them to repeat it back.– In other words, she shows irritation that torture is only effective to put the words of your own script in their mouths.
Another stand in character for the torturers who presents the views of those favoring torture tells the investigators in an earnestly overwrought fashion that the report investigators don’t know what worked or didn’t, and that those engaged in the program who were doing these things are “trying to protect this country from people who want to destroy everything we believe in.” One of the chief torturer concocters says that after 9/11 he “wanted to do something to keep people safe.”*
(*Somewhere herein we have to note that film often has its character's use, just as in real life, the euphemism "EIT Program"_-- Enhanced Interrogation Technique Program-- for torture.)It is towards the end of the film that these presumed motivations of the torturers get emphatically vouched for one more time by Adam Driver playing the film’s trusted protagonist, the report’s chief investigator when he is squarely asked: “If the CIA knew that torture didn’t work, why did they continue to do it?”
Driver’s character, Daniel Jones responds: “After 9/11 everyone was scared, scared it might happen again, and the CIA would be blamed if it happened again. Or maybe they were ashamed: How come the most sophisticated intelligence agency on earth couldn’t keep its own people safe?”
Actually, based on the film’s earlier revelations that the CIA knew torture didn’t work decades before, why did “the most sophisticated intelligence agency on earth,” in this instance, do it in the first place, let alone “continue” to do it?
Certainly, some of the people involved in conducting and running the torture program could have had such motivations as the film supplies, but to supply all of the top people running our intelligence agencies with such motivations, means that all of the top people at “the most sophisticated intelligence agency on earth,” if not simply sadists, had to be grossly incompetent and extraordinarily misguided, uninformed about the very things about which they are supposed to be expert.– Maybe as the author of the book on the history of torture says, because they don’t know their history? How easy is this to presume, as is the film’s wont?
Even though the film emphasizes how the entire torture program never got any valuable information and although the film makes a brief reference to how over one quarter of the people tortured by the U.S. in its torture program “should never even have been detained,” it portrays a number of the key individuals being tortured mostly as if they are individuals who likely may be harboring just out of reach information that they are not giving up under torture. We hear the suggestion that some of the tortured not giving information may “never be forthcoming or honest,” as if that was the point. At another point, the torturers feeling stymied because they get no information, make out one of the men being tortured as seemingly crafty when they quote him as telling them that if they hurt him “he’d just make things up to get us to stop.” We are similarly told that “KSM [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] admitted he just told them what they wanted to hear to make it stop.” The torturers in the film figure they are faced by `super-resisters’ who just give them stuff they already have, lies to make them stop, not the truth. They decide they know about a man they are torturing only that “the truth is he’s lying.”
The film makes a big deal of the fact that those tortured just gave the CIA back information that the CIA already had. As noted, the film included mention of how the only way to get more information from the tortured was to give the tortures more “intel” already in the hands of the CIA that the torturers could then extract from the tortured. This bounce back of information supplied by and already in the hands of interrogators is an inherent problem with torturing and coerced confessions. It’s why everyone in these professions knows that coercion and coercive interrogation techniques are famous for yielding false confessions. People are sent to prison for crimes the police want them to confess to in such situations, not crimes they actually commit. (And, concomitantly, someone else is likely to go free.)
The film avoids asking whether there would be any reason, other than utter incompetence, for the CIA to engage in and persist in so many interrogations where the result was simply statements bouncing back the “intel” the CIA came to those interrogations equipped with. And even though coercion is famous for yielding false confessions, no more than exactly the story the interrogator wants recited back, the film doesn’t ask to what extent that statements bouncing back to the CIA the CIA’s own “intel” were perhaps false, verifying what might have been false information furnished by the CIA.
Unfortunately, the result of such unreliable investigative techniques is that we don’t know what we don’t know. For instance, some of what is not known and needs to be discovered is the basis of and at the core of the lawsuit by 9/11 families against Saudi Arabia for the Saudi government’s assistance of the hijackers in the lead-up to the 9/11 attacks. Saudi Arabian involvement in 9/11 is not mentioned in the film.— The film briefly mentions FBI Director Robert Mueller as one of those in government who is apparently suppressing the reporting of torture (an FBI agent explains that things went nowhere when he told the FBI about the torture- “They briefed Director Mueller and told me to get the hell out of there.”)– And the 9/11 families have introduced in their lawsuit an affidavit submitted as testimony from a former FBI agent saying Mueller, as head of the FBI, was not appropriately interested in investigating “multiple, systemic efforts by the Saudi government to assist the hijackers in the lead-up to the 9/11 attacks,” and that “the record shows” Mueller “covered up evidence pointing back to the Saudi Embassy and Riyadh — and may have even misled Congress about what he knew.”
Throughout multiple administrations, the United States continues to have a very close relationship with Saudi Arabia– That includes the entire extended time period during which“The Report” takes place.
The film certainly does not stress enough that, because torture increased the unreliability of investigations that needed to be conducted, there is much that we probably haven’t found out, and much that is difficult to presume we actually know. Nonetheless, about some things, beyond the torturers’ motives, the film presumes to know– In what is probably intended to be one of the film’s hardest hitting dramatic moments, Adam Diver’s Daniel Jones protagonist says of KSM:
What they really did was make it impossible to prosecute a mass murderer like KSM, because if what we did to him ever came out in a court of law the case is over. The guy planned 9/11, and instead of going to jail for the rest of his life the CIA turned him into a recruiting tool for a war we're still fighting.What is remarkable in a sense, is that because the film is so methodically thorough, it makes what is left out obvious if you bring to it the kind of scrutiny we are engaging in here. It's a scrutiny the film invites given the way it revels in its wonkishly analytical delights. The Guardian’s review of the film describes writer and director Scott Z Burns as having a “a fetish for competence porn (that’s watching hugely capable, incredibly smart people carry out difficult tasks with great aptitude)” which keeps the film on track as being about the thrill of dealing with the actual facts.
After I got to just about this point writing this article, I went hunting for reviews of the film. So far I have found no review that points out the questions the film does not directly ask identified here. Even an alternative press review such as the one in Counterpunch fails to pick this up. Previously published reviews generally accept what the film communicates at face value. The Rolling Stone review of the film actually reassures “Burns redacts nothing here” praising the film for its complete comprehensiveness.
Some of the most glowing reviews of the film hearken back to the film’s debut at the Sundance Film festival. Variety’s review of that time concludes, “`The Report’ is a galvanizing movie that, if handled correctly, many people will want to see. .” Sundance is where Amazon immediately picked the film up for distribution for $14 million.
I don’t see evidence that Amazon is failing to give the film the support it deserves, but many of the reviews of the film since Sundance proclaim it to be bland, dull and plodding, something I would absolutely disagree with, at least for those, like me, who have a part of their brain that lights up and activates with Andrew Sorkin type engrams and receptors when properly stimulated. The Rolling Stone review endorses that Burns is correct in believing “that the granular details of cerebral inquiry into issues of morality are more than enough to hold our rapt attention.”
Because Amazon is streaming the film at the same time that it is playing in theaters, there is no way to report, interpret or make sense of any boffo box office figures that could help attract attention for the film.
An article in the Intercept reviewing the film (“If It’s Gonna Come Out, It’s Gonna Come Out the Right Way”: Heroes of Torture Report Movie Are Lauded for Dodging Reporters) spars with one aspect of the film to make an interesting point about the film’s ambiguity concerning whether it stands up for the ethics of whistleblowing and those who resort to taking issues like these to the press. The Intercept article also snarkily notes that the film gives some credit to the work of a “New York Times national security reporter,” but that the reporter who actually broke the story was Ali Watkins, a reporter at McClatchy (who later did a “stint” at the Times). The Intercept has a page up saying that it “welcomes whistleblowers.” Unfortunately, the Intercept may not be the optimal publication to praise whistleblowing since it has provided treacherous shoals for whistleblowers seeking safe harbor there– The Internet is developing a very questionable record of "outed" whistleblowers who came to them anonymously and in confidence, i.e. Reality Leigh Winner and Terry James Albury.
What we have not so far mentioned here is that “The Report” adroitly explores the intricate multi-factored balances and interactions between the different departments and branches of government (and yes the press as fourth estate), and how this affects and involves labyrinthian constraints on getting anything done. I’ll have to leave it to others who were tracking the political players more closely to decide how fair Burns’ film is to them. (Burns says he voted for Obama twice, but the Obama administration gets roundly knocked, as it apparently deserved to be.)
Burns probably has a multilayered appreciation for the sort of politics involved in getting such a project done that is informed by his own experience. Investigation and writing of the torture report was initiated in 2007 and the film chronicles how it took seven years to surmount the impediments involved for a summary of the report to finally be released. Burn’s reportedly took five years and 20 drafts to complete his screenplay, starting his work after the release of the report. Vanity Fair reports that it wasn’t an easy film to get made. The magazine's article informs us that, towards the end, the film:
went from having a 50-day schedule to a 26-day schedule, and its $18 million budget was slashed to $8 million. Even with Driver—arguably the hottest male movie star of the moment—as the lead, Burns told press, “getting Hollywood to get behind a movie like this was difficult.”Eight million dollars to make an important film like this is a paltry sum.
Just as redaction and compromise were continually issues in getting the report out as the film depicts, so too, we might expect that redactions, the leaving of certain blanks to be filled in only by the more astute viewers, were important to getting the film made. Perhaps the most remarkable thing is that it was made while redacting as little as it did. The film is well worth seeing.
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