The [Redacted] Report, With Adam Driver and Annette Bening: A Film That Presents Itself As Questioning The Questioning of 9/11 Suspects. . . Is, Indeed, About What’s Left Out And Questions Not Asked

Redaction oriented promotion for the film "The [Redacted] Report"

The promotion of the film, “The Report,” originally titled “The Redacted Report” (note the emphasized deletion) has been interesting in the way that it stresses what has been left out, the redactions.  In a clever bit of advertising promotion for this Amazon Prime feature (Vice Studios is also a producer) editions of the New York Times arrived in November with a wrap-around special section, looking like a newspaper section, titled “Truth Matters.” It was rendered almost entirely unreadable because the majority of the text appearing there was blacked out with redactions.  All you could supposedly make out on that section’s front page that it was something about the “White House, . . the Constitution,  . . .violations, . . etc.” 

. . .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!
    •    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!

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?

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.

Postscript For Our National Notice “How Trustworthy Is Robert Mueller?” Series: A NY Post Article “Robert Mueller Helped Saudi Arabia Cover Up Its Role in 9/11 Attacks” Evokes Consideration Of The Strange FBI/Saudi Khobar Towers Bombing Investigation

Appearing above in the end: former FBI Director Louis Freeh, Saudi Prince Bandar ("Bush"), and Robert Mueller- Read about the peculiar investigations that connect them

This article started out as, and is essentially, the postscript I wrote for the last article in a three-part series of articles all addressing a very serious question: How trustworthy is Robert Mueller and his Russiagate report?  The three articles provide an in depth profile and history of Mr. Mueller and his career (including his frequent collaborations and overlaps with William Barr) very different from what you think you might know from reading Mr. Mueller’s Wikipedia page.  See:

It’s Now A Three-Part Series: How Trustworthy Is Robert Mueller and His Russiagate Report?

Two days after I finished that last article, The New York Post published an article I couldn't ignore or avoid referencing in the series since it was one more example of Robert Mueller impeding investigations; this time it was about Robert Mueller helping Saudi Arabia cover up its role in the 9/11 attacks.  Researching Mueller and the impediments he threw up to protect the Saudis in that investigation, led me to more research about an investigation that was apparently also impeded by the FBI protecting the Saudis, the Khobar Towers bombing investigation. . .  . Robert Mueller was involved in the unsatisfactory outcome of that investigation as well.

Here then, is the full postscript I felt compelled to write about those two investigations involving apparent manipulations by the FBI to protect the the Saudis.  It also stands up excellently as an article all on its own.

Postscript (09/08/2019):  Two days after I published this article another opinion piece story was published about Mueller in the New York Post that, although it's quite pertinent, is not incorporated in the main body of what I wrote: Robert Mueller helped Saudi Arabia cover up its role in 9/11 attacks: suit, By Paul Sperry, September 7, 2019.

The article, reporting on the lawsuit by 9/11 families against Saudi Arabia and at least one affidavit submitted as testimony from a former FBI agent submitted therein says that “former FBI investigators say” 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” that they uncovered, that “also involved foreign intelligence officers,” 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.”

That:

Mueller threw up roadblocks in the path of his own investigators working the 9/11 case, while making it easier for Saudi suspects to escape questioning, multiple case agents told me. Then he deep-sixed what evidence his agents did manage to uncover, according to the 9/11 lawsuit against the Saudis. 

FBI Agent Mark Wauck said, Mueller, who used to be his boss, has a long history of acting as a “servant of the deep state,” or the permanent DC ruling class, and, in the article, another former US counterintelligence official is reported to assert: “Bottom line is, Mueller did not do an investigation on people involved in the 9/11 attacks who were connected to the Saudi government, . . . . he was not interested in investigating [Saudi] terrorists who murdered Americans.”

The article includes seven bulleted paragraphs providing more details fleshing out this picture more fully.
  
Khobar Towers Apartment Complex Bombing Research Update.  In addition, the New York Post article (partly through Zero Hedge  and some articles in it by Eric Zuesse with links I researched) led me to more investigation respecting the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers apartment complex.  As noted in the body of my own article, Mueller, as deputy attorney general, directed that bombing to Comey, for prosecution in Virginia.  The investigation and ensuing prosecution continued well into the era that Mueller was heading the FBI.  It turns out to be another investigation where probably obscurant FBI involvement seems to have been extremely unhelpful in determining the truth.

The story of the FBI investigation of Khobar Towers bombing also necessarily deeply involves Mueller's boss when it happened, FBI Director Louis Freeh, and Freeh's top-level coordination with top Saudis in shaping the investigation and the official story.  Freeh was FBI Director until June 21, 2001.  Mueller took over as the next appointed FBI Director.

In 2006, the Washington Post reported the ruling of a federal judge in the case in Virginia that Iran was responsible for the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing.  The theory of the ruling was that the Iranian government “financed and directed the bombing by a militant Saudi wing” of the Islamist terrorist group Hezbollah.  The judge’s ruling ordered Iran to pay $254 million to the families of the Americans who died in the attack.  The judge, Royce C. Lamberth, said that "overwhelming" evidence had been presented and that the  “totality of the evidence at trial . . . firmly establishes” Iran’s responsibility.   The judge’s finding was based on a trial without any Iranian participation.  Iran insisted it had “no connection to the bombing.”  The ruling about the “overwhelming evidence” required reversal of “a lower magistrate judge who said evidence linking the Iranian government to the bombing was not convincing.”

And the timing of the ruling came just as the Bush administration was resisting “recommendations that it engage in diplomatic talks with Iran” with hopes to “enlist Iran's help in stabilizing Iraq and the Middle East.”   The effect of the ruling, said the Washington Post, was to throw up a hurdle for those wanting such obvious benefits of such a “rapprochement with Iran.

But Hezbollah, blamed in the ruling as having a “wing” in Sunni Saudi Arabia, is a Shia Muslim group, and the New York Times, in August of 1996, reported, quite inconsistently with the ruling, that the suspects reported to have confessed to the bombing at that time were (emphasis added) “native Saudis, who are all Sunni Muslims with no outside connections to either Iran or Iraq.”

After Lamberth's 2006 ruling, in 2007, former Defense Secretary William Perry said that the evidence that Iran was behind the bombing, i.e. the “strongly believed” theory of the FBI, was not to his own satisfaction (or at the time President Clinton’s).  Thus was avoided a fairly significant “contingency plan to attack Iran” that would have entailed striking “a number of their military facilities that would have weakened -- substantially weakened ... the Iranian navy and air force.”

It gets more complicated when you next theorize who may have actually been responsible for the bombing.  Perry (speaking in 2007, as noted) theorized “in retrospect” that it was “probably masterminded by Osama bin Laden.”  That was probably an easy to believe theory, easy for many to swallow after 9/11.  Perry was not the only one who so theorized, BUT. . .

In his 2007 interview Perry suggested that Saudi officials “tried to discourage” the theory that the bombing was ordered by Iran, because  the Saudi's “feared what action we would take,” i.e. the contingency plan of the U.S. attacking Iran.  Is that true?  Consideration of whether it is true has to be evaluated in terms of the general hunger the Saudis have had over the years (along with the other members of the triumvirate alliance of Israel and the United States) for militarily expressed hostilities with Iran.

In any event, it is reported that in a number of respects neither the FBI, nor Saudi Arabia were keen to see any investigation or transparency that would bring out the facts of the event, and there is much to consider about reported collaboration between the FBI and Saudi Arabia that suppressed discovery and tended conceal facts in various related investigations.  That extends to concealment of the Saudis' own supportive involvement in terrorism, plus a fair amount of what was likely misdirection in considering Iran as culpable.

Apparently, facts about the involvement of Saudi royals and government officials in supporting terrorism (and other corruption and disreputable conduct) was not intended for the eyes of normal FBI agents who could follow up on it and see where it leads.

In 2003 investigative journalist Greg Palast, reported that in 1994 Mohammed Al Khilewi, a Saudi diplomat, defected to the United States “with 14,000 pages of documents from the kingdom’s sealed file cabinets.”  Al Khilewi’s New York lawyer, Michael Wildes, told Palast that FBI agents (two F.B.I. agents and an Assistant United States Attorney) “who came to his office had been ordered not to accept evidence of Saudi criminal activity, even on U.S. soil” and would not take the documents when he said to the FBI, “Here, take the documents! Go get some bad guys with them! We’ll even pay for the photocopying!” Palast’s suggestion is that the order not to accept the documents came from the top, President Clinton.

It’s pretty much agreed that the documents included damning stuff: Investigative journalist Sy Hersh, in a similar account in a 2001 article for the New Yorker described the information as “depicting the Saudi royal family's corruption, human-rights abuses, and financial support for terrorists.”  Hersh says neither Al Khilewi or his lawyer heard anything further from federal authorities, and that Al-Khilewi, granted asylum, was living under cover.  According to a Vanity Fair article, Khilewi said the Saudi royals “responded by threatening his life” and the U.S. government “offered him little protection.”

Hersh’s New Yorker article also said that National Security Agency electronic intercepts of conversations between members of the Saudi Arabian royal family demonstrated to analysts that in “1996 Saudi money was supporting Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda and other extremist groups in Afghanistan, Lebanon, Yemen, and Central Asia, and throughout the Persian Gulf region.”

The controlling interactions between the FBI and the Saudis, in shaping the narratives and allowing facts to surface were handled at the top.  Much of it through Louis Freeh and Prince Bandar (the Saudi Ambassador), who as we'll get on to, had important relationships.  Hersh said in his article that a government expert on Saudi affairs told him that Prince Bandar  "dealt exclusively with the men at the top, and never met with desk officers and the like. "Only a tiny handful of people inside the government are familiar with U.S.-Saudi relations," he explained. "And that is purposeful.""

What couldn't be revealed included the following: According to Hersh's account, American intelligence said the Saudis refused “to help the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. run `traces’—that is, name checks and other background information—on the nineteen men,” most of them from Saudi Arabia, identified as having taken part in the 9/11 attacks.

One of the most pitiful, and at the same time illustrative sagas respecting the Khobar bombing investigation and how the FBI and Saudi's collaborated to shape the narrative they apparently wanted is the story of  Hani al-Sayegh. Much of his story was told in an article by Gareth Porter.

In 1997 Canada arrested Hani al-Sayegh, a 28-year old Saudi, because the Saudis accused him of taking part in the Khobar Towers attack.  To avoid “deportation to Saudi Arabia, where he was believed to face the death penalty” al-Sayegh agreed to a plea bargain: Transferred, instead, to United States he would admit to having proposed “an attack on U.S. personnel, for which he would have to serve up to 10 years in prison.”

However, al-Sayegh was “steadfastly” denying “any knowledge of the Khobar Towers bombing.”  And in fact, he never admitted being involved in taking part of any attack of any kind on U.S. personnel that actually took place.  He admitted only to surveiling sites for the Iranians for possible retaliatory attacks if Iran was attacked.  That notwithstanding, it's reported by Gareth Porter that U.S. officials “supporting the Saudi version of the Khobar story” leaked to the Washington Post a false story* that was published supported with quotes from U.S. and Saudi officials saying that Iran was the "organising force" behind the Khobar bombing, even though, what “al-Sayegh actually told FBI agents in a series of interviews in Ottawa and Washington, however, contradicted the leaked story, according to sources familiar with those interviews.”

(* The article is reported by Gareth Porter is supposed to be dated April 14, 1997, but no such article now seems now to be available on the Washington Post site.  The closest such article appears to be a March 28, 1997 article.  However, ghost text from the article appears to show up on an archive page from The Guardian.  The Wayback Page for the Washington Post, does show that there was, indeed, such an article on that date- see images below- that it was one of the "top stories" in "International News" that day.  The Wayback page has a link for the actual story, but for some reason, clicking it- as opposed to the other stories that can be found that way- brings up an entirely wrong story, which is instead about Zaire.  The internet giveth, and the internet taketh away.)  

Wayback Machine

Top Story in International News!-

Above, information about a disappeared Washington Post article concerning how Clinton may have to go to war? "Iranian Aide Linked To Saudi Bombing Suspect

U.S. and Saudi intelligence authorities have linked a senior Iranian government official to a group of Shiite Muslims suspected of bombing an American military compound in Saudi Arabia last year. If Iran is proven to have been involved, the Clinton administration could be pressured towards military or economic retaliation."

Ultimately, in 1999, the U.S. deported al-Sayegh to Saudi Arabia where the FBI assumed (“widely”) that he would be beheaded on his return, because Hani al-Sayegh continued to deny “either that he was involved or the Iranians had anything to do with Khobar.”  In other words, al-Sayegh could have saved his life by providing to the U.S. authorities the false admission the U.S. and Saudis apparently wanted badly.

An earlier Washington Post opinion piece observed respecting the lack of potential for justice and truth finding if al-Sayegh was deported:

deporting him to Saudi Arabia might indeed subject him to torture and eventually execution, without ever establishing the truth of his involvement. In fact, serious questions have been raised about the entire Saudi investigation in the Khobar Tower incident. It has been six months since Saudi officials disclosed the arrest of dozens of Saudi Hezbollah supporters for involvement in the barracks bombing. However, the investigation has suffered from lack of support, even within government circles and among those opposed to Hezbollah and other militant groups. Senior Saudi officials privately complain that they are being kept in the dark, the Consultative Council is not involved and no public debate on the bombing has been permitted in the media or elsewhere outside the official line.

Notwithstanding leaks about their guilt, the suspects have not been formally charged. None has been permitted to consult lawyers, although many if not all will face the death penalty when they are formally charged.

Never charged with the crime for lack of evidence, the FBI still listed Hani al-Sayegh was still listed as one of the charged in the indictment in June of 2001.  Gareth Porter astutely observed that the announcement of the indictment, June 21, 2001, was on Freeh’s last day as FBI director.

Even for those who might have once considered al-Sayegh guilty according to the story that was being pushed by the FBI and Saudis, the reasons for sending him back to Saudi Arabia are tough to fathom.  A commentary in Time magazine by Tony Karon when it was happening began: "Run that one by again: The United States doesn't want to try a man suspected of a bomb attack that killed Americans — and they're sending him home?!" 

After the U.S. sent al-Sayegh to his fate with the Saudi's, the Washington Post ran an October 29, 2000 article that was very complimentary about FBI Director Louis Freeh's "global police agency . . . anti-terrorism mission."  The article looked like it had been sourced by Freeh.  It reported that al-Sayegh was given to the Saudis because "Freeh made a secret deal with Saudi Prince Naif, brother of King Fahd."*  "Secret deal?": Not so secret any longer!   . . . To complicate things, there is more than one version of this October 29 article, what is perhaps the original (not now available at the Washington Post Site, "FBI's Uneasy Role: Work in Lands with Brutal Police," currently available from the Orlando Sentinel, "FBI's Uneasy Role: Work in Lands with Brutal Police" with the (bylined "Washington Post") and another "New Global Role Puts FBI in Unsavory Company" (a later edition?- bylined "David A. Vise").  We will work principally with the first, syndicated article, probably the more widely seen one. 

(* Investigative journalist Greg Palast, reported that the law firm- Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld- the law firm of Vernon Jordan, President Clinton’s friend and political adviser, was involved but, so far, I find no trace of a trail to follow up on that.)

The October 29, 2000 article was clever in its `have your cake and eat it too' reporting, perhaps a little too clever.  It cited "Freeh's oft-stated message about the FBI's need to respect 'human dignity' and the tenets of democracy while fighting crime," but this pre-9/11 article managed to argue that returning al-Sayegh for expected torture was probably a good thing.  It explained contextually that al-Sayegh was going "where human-rights groups say torture is routinely used."  (So "human-rights groups say," I guess not the Washington Post itself.)  The article even managed to put an assessment that torture could be good in the mouth of a Human Rights Watch researcher (Clarisa Bencomo*): "the information that may come out of this is more useful or worthwhile to them than the possibility of this guy being tortured or executed."  Of course that's totally contrary to the fact that it is well understood that the information generated by torturing people tends to be false and highly unreliable; it is far too often what the torturer wants to hear, rather than the truth. 

(* Interestingly, Ms. Bencomo had earlier, rather contradictorily, provided her observation in the Washington Post about Mr. al-Sayegh: “The United States . . . did not have sufficient evidence to try him in U.S. courts”and “the last time Saudi Arabia had bombing suspects in custody, it executed them without a trial. . . . No one knows if he is guilty or innocent. Without a fair trial we will never know.” Contradicting the later WaPo article quoting her, she says: “Both U.S. and international law prohibit returning persons to a country where there are substantial grounds for believing they would be in danger of being tortured.”  The import of the WaPo article is that Freeh and the FBI clearly knew of the likelihood of torture, but Ms. Bencomo seems to have been informed by somebody that, at least pretextually that wasn’t the case: “The United States says it received assurances that Mr. Sayegh wouldn't be tortured.” Then she worries that al-Sayegh hasn’t seen a lawyer and might have been.)

The article was interesting in what it suggested the reader might, or might not imagine.  It said that Freeh's pact with the King's brother "permitted FBI agents to watch Hani Al-Sayegh's interrogation through a one-way mirror and submit questions to his Saudi inquisitors, officials familiar with the arrangement said."   But, while setting it up for supposition, the article did not clearly say that FBI agents had actually watched or asked questions as the pact may have permitted.  While it might challenge the squeamish to imagine FBI agents watching torture through a "one-way mirror," the article said "FBI officials say they have seen no indication Al-Sayegh has been tortured"  . . . That's without actually giving the slightest indication of what the reader should be expected to believe the FBI did see or watch, if anything.

The second version of the article says, "A friend of Al-Sayegh says that he has been tortured in prison, an allegation that Saudi officials deny."   The second version of the article, which is longer and may appear more neutral and fully considered without actually being so,  also says, "Saudi officials have denied requests from Amnesty International to visit Al-Sayegh in prison." The second version of the article also has a lot more puffery about just how wonderful Freeh is as a man, and as an FBI agent ("down-to-earth," "high-energy," "likes to go jogging" with the new guys, "a frenetic globe-trotter," "on the cutting edge of technology").  It also credits Freeh with birthing  Strategic Information and Operations Center (SIOC), and depicts SIOC cheerfully as James Bondian.  There is, of course, much to controvert the flattering portrayal of Freeh: See the May 3, 2001, press release of Judicial Watch speaking of Freeh’s “legacy of corruption” while itemizing instances- Judicial Watch Rejoices at Resignation of FBI Director Louis Freeh.

Something else that disappeared from the internet (via the Wayback machine):  Judicial Watch Rejoices at Resignation of FBI Director Louis Freeh

Rather than include any warning about the consistent unreliability of torture, the Washington Post article said that "Freeh and others argue that the FBI's approach is necessary to save American lives," and that a man who was "the FBI's top agent in Saudi Arabia" said that the FBI was "able to thwart at least a couple of major incidents" with such [torture obtained?] information from the Saudi government.  Stirring is a certain amount of extra blood lust, the second longer version of the article "the FBI is pressing for even greater access" to the results of the sometimes lethal and arbitrary Yemeni interrogations "criticized" by the State Department.  In that longer version, an expert who seemingly implies there could somehow be a reasonably high quotient of "good information" obtained this way says, "They do not ask, 'How did you question them?' They will just ask, 'Is it good information?'"

The article even included an assurance that such involvement of U.S. FBI law enforcement officers with torture ("police tactics, including torture and a lack of due process, that would be barred in the United States") through such "unsavory company" was essentially legal: "U.S. law does not prohibit the bureau from developing close ties with foreign governments whose practices, laws and ethics differ dramatically from those in the United States." 

This pre-9/11 Washington Post article, venturing all this post-9/11 rhetoric ends, not only by saying that despite "the moral issues posed," FBI officials say this is what they need to fight terrorism effectively, it goes on to say it's needed to address the "complex challenge of pursuing an international terrorist such as Osama bin Laden."  "Osama bin Laden"?  The second longer version of the article saw even further into the future, explaining, "bin Laden is the head of an anti-Western radical Islamic movement that experts say would survive even if he were killed or captured."

Will these torture interrogation yield at least a few confessions?  The longer version of the Washington Post article communicates that al-Sayegh departed for Canada as "as Saudi authorities began rounding up hundreds of members of the Shiite minority," with "200 people being incarcerated and tortured for the same attack."  . .  If you remember, in "Casablanca," "Round up the usual suspects," was code for `we are going to pass over the actual perpetrator.'   In the Unites States, when we seek such a semblance that our police and peace officers aren't letting crimes go unsolved we tend to round up hapless black and brown people.


Let's back up to remember also that in 1996, the New York Times was reporting that Saudi officials said that they had evidence linking some of the detainees to the four men who were condemned and beheaded the previous November in connection with the bombing in Riyadh (five Americans and two Indians were killed).  So again, with their beheading, that information and ability to test the evidence was lost.  In the same article the Times was saying that it was "reported, and then denied by the Saudis, that six Saudi Muslim fundamentalists, all former Afghan-trained fighters, had confessed to carrying out the June [Khobar] bombing"; that it was "confirmed that dozens of Saudi men are indeed being detained and questioned intensively," but "'As far as I know, Prince Nayef is keeping the Americans away from all the details at this point,'' he said. ''But we are sure the young men have indeed confessed to the bombing, - that Saudi authorities ''are still refusing to let United States investigators see the suspects.''

After Louis Freeh left the FBI one of the questionable things he went on to do was represent Saudi Prince Bandar ("Bandar Bush"), the Saudi Ambassador in connection with the British-based BAE/ a.k.a. British Aerospace arms trafficking and bribery investigation that U.S. prosecutors at the Justice Department Justice Department are said to have initiated in May of 2008.  Whenever he might have been hired, Freeh was out in the open representing his client Bandar's interests in a March 19, 2009 interview aired April 7, 2009, as part of a Frontline film “Black Money”  (transcript available online). 

The Frontline film was about what was presented as the “shadowy” world of bribery; the “concealed, camouflaged, a whole world of conduct that rarely sees the light of day” where  “You get pots of black money that nobody sees, nobody has to account for, . . . you can do anything you like with.”  That included Bandar's participation in such shadowy transaction, in one specific case to the tune of $2 billion.

The Frontline film seemed to assure that a crackdown on that world was then being initiated.  Freeh's freakish representation of Bandar in the film was there to be observed by alert viewers as what was perhaps a conflict of interest.  Frontline provided a supplemental web page extending its exchanges with Freeh about Bandar, which has comments posted by the public reacting to it that are worth reading.  The interview was a few years after the suspect 2006 court ruling on the Khobar Towers bombing backing the ultimately suspect FBI/Saudi theory that blamed Iran, but comments hearkened back to earlier events.  For instance, two of them read in part:

Comment: . . When . . .   your internal counter terrorism chief [goes] to work for the country where most of the hijackers came from, what can you say.

Comment: . . The first time I ever heard of FBI director Freeh was when I watched Frontline's "The Man Who Knew".* In that program he seemed to be the one who was instrumental in getting rid of FBI agent John O’Neill. John O’Neill was the counter-terrorism expert who had been tracking Al Qaeda for six years.

(* Aired October 3, 2002- Transcript online.)

Frontline's supplemental web page has an interesting "FOOTNOTE 5: Exoneration?"  (Note Frontline's question mark.) The footnote basically deals with the fact that Prince Bandar, though his wife, was implicated in funding a number of the men named as 9/11 hijackers.  Demanding some mulling over, it reads:

Freeh says that when the FBI investigated Riggs Bank accounts under the control of Prince Bandar, "...they exonerated our client, Prince Bandar and his family with respect to any money laundering or any terrorist financing, because you remember that was really the focus as to whether two individuals who were Saudis who had connections with two of the [9/11] hijackers were using any monies from those [Riggs Bank] accounts to finance it."

"It was very unusual. In the public statements what they said is they found there was no activity, in the accounts that showed any wrongdoing by my client or members of his family. It's an extraordinary conclusion to make. But the government found no money laundering and no evidence of any terrorist financing and absolved my client and his family, which is a very extraordinary result."

FRONTLINE inquired to the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice about the "public statements" that "exonerated" Prince Bandar. The FBI responded saying it was unable to locate anything that matched what the former Director was referring to. Inquiries with the Department of Justice were met with instructions to contact the FBI. When asked to provide a copy of a statement or a private letter that may have been sent to him or his client, Mr. Freeh did not respond.

The 9/11 Commission found "no evidence that Saudi Princess Haifa al Faisal [wife of Prince Bandar] provided any funds to the [9/11] conspiracy, either directly or indirectly," but made no further reference to the Riggs Bank accounts or to accusations of money laundering.

Is it a "conflict of interest" for Freeh to represent Prince Bandar, an obvious "revolving door" problem?  Some might view it differently, those who instead see a "consonance of interest" between what the FBI wants and what the Saudis want, a common interest in the story the FBI and the Saudis both want to tell.

Gareth Porter saw Freeh’s subsequent legal defense work for Prince Bandar, appearing in the British case about the arms trafficking bribery, as connected to what was, in metaphorical terms, Freeh’s role, while FBI director, as Bandar and the Saudis’ defense lawyer, particularly in the Khobar bombing case.  (See: Exclusive-Part 5: Freeh Became "Defence Lawyer" for Saudis on Khobar) Defense from what?  That question posits that the Saudis need to be defended against the perceptions or conclusions respecting their own culpability as they supported terrorism, including their own acts that very likely were, in ways, truly responsible for the Khobar bombing.

Nevertheless, the goals of Freeh's FBI may have themselves been served: Porter notes that Freeh testified before a joint hearing of the House and Senate Select Intelligence Committees that Prince Bandar bin Sultan was "critical in achieving the FBI’s investigative objectives in the Khobar case."

While Porter starts his Part 5 article by describing the acceptance by an FBI team (a team that Freeh sent to Saudi Arabia in 1998) of the confessions to the Khobar bombing of eight men from the Minority Shia sect whom the Saudis held, he shows how suspect those confessions were.  He details another case where “four British citizens, one Canadian and one Belgian had confessed” to three car bombings in Riyadh.  He recites in excruciating detail how the falsehoods of these Riyadh bombing confessions were systematically tortured out of these individuals to match a prewritten Saudi interrogation script.

Porter argues that with “blatant pro-Saudi bias” Freeh “effectively shut down” the probe of the Khobar bombing, pushing “a seriously flawed Saudi account of the bombing . . . tainted by the likelihood of torture.”

Louis Freeh’s seemingly intentional obtuseness in terms of appropriately discerning information about Saudi Arabia and its culpability comes up again in terms of his relationship with counterterrorism chief John O’Neill. O’Neill is referred to above as being the subject of Frontline’s “The Man Who Knew",” and O’Neill’s being pushed out of the FBI by Freeh.

O’Neill and Freeh get mentioned in a 2011 Vanity Fair article by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan.  The article was about what was included in Congress’s Joint Inquiry (and then for a long time censored and withheld from release) about the connections between Saudi Arabia and the 9/11 hijackers and how the U.S. government buried and ignored evidence with respect thereto.  The article asks many good questions although some may almost inevitably head off in the direction of false leads.

The article recounts:

On a flight home from Saudi Arabia in the late 1990s [i.e. around the time of the Khobar bombing investigation], F.B.I. director Louis Freeh told counterterrorism chief John O’Neill that he thought the Saudi officials they had met during the trip had been helpful. “You’ve got to be kidding,” retorted O’Neill, a New Jersey native who never minced his words. “They didn’t give us anything. They were just shining sunshine up your ass.”

The article goes on to say that O’Neill continued to be openly frustrated that “all the answers, all the clues that could enable us to dismantle Osama bin Laden’s organization,” remained out of reach because they “are in Saudi Arabia.”

We can't get O’Neill's own version of this story now or any of his thinking, including about the Khobar bombing, because, in one of the bizarrely peculiar aspects of the 9/11 story, O’Neill was in the towers and reported killed on 9/11.  He had just taken a job there as head of security.

But to go back to Robert Mueller; that's who we started with when we began this tour reviewing the FBI/Saudi Khobar Towers bombing investigation.  It's where we must end too: Robert Mueller took over where Louis Freeh left off to bring the matter to it unsatisfactory conclusion.

Out In Theaters Now: “Shock and Awe” A Film About Suppression of Anti-War News Journalism That Itself Seems Like It Is Being Suppressed– So You’ll Have to Hurry To See It

Two film reviews that came out last week are poles apart: One is the New York Times review of Rob Reiner’s new film “Shock and Awe,” a true story about investigative beltway reporting.  It’s about the run-up to Iraq war.  The other was the review of the same film that appears in the Village Voice.

The New York Times review of the film is disgraceful: It reviews the film dishonestly treating it as essentially a non-movie.  It short-shrifts it with a few mostly dismissive paragraphs.  Likely to be overlooked by most readers, the message was clearly: `nothing to see here, move along.'

Conversely, the review in the Village Voice was way beyond respectful. It was an engaging one that would likely encourage most readers to see the film.  Oddly, the Village Voice review, initially very easy to discover in an internet search just hours after it was posted, was soon almost impossible to find by Googling.  That is one indicator of a question that needs to be discussed: Whether the film is being suppressed.  The New York Times review, on the other hand, continues to be easy to find.

Ben Kenigsberg, who wrote the Times mini-review, probably telegraphed what he was up to when he wrote in the first paragraph that the film insults the abysmal quality of news coverage that the New York Times offered during the run up to the Iraq war.  And truly, part of the fun of the film (as the Village Voice review recognized: Rob Reiner’s “Shock and Awe” Takes on Bush’s War and the “New York Times” — and Wins) is how thoroughly the film lambasts the New York Times as an unconscionable conduit of propaganda for the powerful who doled out access in return for the publication of the false stories they want the public to swallow.  The inspiring part of the film is how diligent reporters working at the Knight Ridder newspaper chain were, without high-level access, able to see through the deceptions and get the story right.  Its main characters, journalists working for the Knight Ridder newspaper chain, are Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel, and later Joe Galloway working under their Washington bureau chief John Walcott.

In the film, that propaganda is the fake news that the George W. Bush administration manufactured and deceitfully handed out in 2003 as an excuse to go to war in Iraq.  As such, the film is ever so relevant to today, particularly from a potentially anti-war standpoint, as we presently listen to the drumbeats urging the U.S. to start up new wars around the world on multiple fronts, Korea, Iran, Syria, Russia, Yemen, Venezuela. . .  Two of those countries, not yet attacked by us, Korea, and Iran, were, alongside Iraq, included in G. W. Bush’s original 2002 rhetoric about a tripartite “Axis of Evil.”— Venezuela is the country that Trump very recently questioned whether we could invade. . .  Thus, it is perhaps not surprising if the film is being suppressed in various ways, as appears may very likely be the case.

In his New York Times review, Kenigsberg ignores those ways that the film is most likely relevant and manages to invert the way he concludes that the film “feels more timely than it might have,” by instead linking its potential relevance to a “current president” who “routinely dismisses the accuracy of reporting.”  In other words, Trump is the enemy again and if you have the notion that the New York Times publishes fake or unreliable news then that puts you in the Trump camp?

Kenigsberg concludes his review by saying of the film:

It also captures an aspect of journalism not often portrayed: the fear of being wrong when the conclusions of your reporting break from those of your competitors.

That almost sounds like a humorously offered defense of the New York Times for getting it 100% wrong in the run up to the Iraq war, as if instead of incredible sloppiness on the part of the Times, there was just a difference of opinion between competing journalists about what the news actually was with the Times and Judith Miller having the commendable courage to get it wrong.

The film is a significant addition to the expanding canon of films about real journalists reporting about real events and issues.  Some of them are documentaries and others, like this and “All The Presidents’ Men” are dramatized versions of what happened.  To include its release, National Notice has just updated a list of such films ordered according to the chronology of the real events concerned: Time To Update Our Timeline Presenting Movies About Real Journalists Covering Real Public Issues and Events (To Include “Shock and Awe” and “Risk”), Sunday, July 15, 2018.- 

One important subject of “Shock and Awe” is about the working of mainstream media and how the reporting of the Knight Ridder team of journalists which, essentially anti-war because of its rightful skepticism, was suppressed.  The on-target and in retrospect very valuable stories published by the Knight Ridder chain were not treated as news or picked up by New York Times, Washington Post and other mainstream media.   As the films puts it, those media outlets, as in the wake of 9/11, acted as “stenographers” for the Bush administration’s propaganda.  One of the things the film sadly depicts is how the Philadelphia Inquirer, one newspaper in the Knight Ridder chain, defected, refusing to publish the accurately skeptical Knight Ridder stories and replaced them with the stories by Judith Miller for which the New York Times ultimately had to apologize because of they were so abjectly false.

The film was discussed in a segment of this week’s On The Media. On The Media introed its coverage of the film (at 11:46) with: “What if great investigative journalism falls in the forest and doesn’t make a noise: Fifteen years later it becomes a movie.”  Unfortunately, we could now add to that bleak epigram: “A movie that nobody sees.”. . .

. . . People are tweeting about how the film only made an absolutely paltry $41,000 its opening weekend, calculating that this must work out to about five tickets being sold per showing of the film.

This astoundingly poor showing doesn’t seem exactly like an accident.  I was eager to see the film as soon as it came out, but finding out where it was playing and how to get tickets was next to impossible when I tried.  The incomplete information Fandango offered was inaccurate.  There was only one theater in New York City where I could see the film at unless I wanted to travel to Coney Island late at night.

The apparent suppression of the film now, and thus, once again, the underlying story that is so very relevant to right now, is very meta.

The film also addresses concerns beyond mere journalism that are less vanilla and increasingly relevant to today.  I could offer a “spoiler alert” concerning what I am about to describe, but the film is so subtle in one respect that I think the way it pitches one point is likely to go over the heads of almost everyone.  “All The President’s Men” has its scene where reporters Woodward and Bernstein realize that their lives may be in danger and that they may also be the subject of surveillance.  “Shock and Awe,” has a very comparable scene that takes place between Woody Harrelson playing reporter Jonathan Landay and Milla Jovovich playing his wife.  Based on her experiences when her country of Yugoslavia disintegrated, she warns Landay that he needs to be concerned for their lives and about surveillance.  She does so when he tells her that he is working on a story about how the Bush administration is stove-piping intelligence up to a newly created senior unit at the top of the U.S. intelligence agencies for cherry-picking and manipulation purposes.

Immediately after this concern is expressed, another scene follows where the New York Times  scoops the Knight Ridder team on that same story, but does so in a way that neutralizes and defangs the point of what Knight Ridder would have reported, inoculating the intelligence agencies against any future disclosure of information the new special unit formed to skew the intelligence.  The implied question that is likely to go by too many viewers is whether the Bush administration fed the scoop to a cooperative New York Times to protect itself.  Essentially the question is whether the Times acted yet again, in yet another way, as an extension of the Bush administration’s push toward war.

The Kenigsberg review suggests that this is not a film that intelligent or informed people will want to see saying that “the writing . . . has more interest in reaching the least-informed viewers than in realism.”  In other words, saying that the film is pedestrian and didactic: But there is a lot in the film that most viewers will not know.

It is fair to say that the film, is aspirational about edifying and educating and therefore sticks fairly close to facts.  The On The Media segment noted that it therefore must deal with a story that is a bit of "a downer."  It also therefore necessarily falls short of checking the standard formulaic boxes for success as mindless entertainment or even infotainment.  There are bad guys, but no car chases or super-heroes throwing enormous objects as they fly through the air.  The bad guys also get away with their scheme in the end. It is nonetheless a good and inspiring film, very worth seeing, that could critically educate a large segment of our population.

This is not to say that the film doesn’t necessarily engage in some streamlining when it comes to the facts, something it perforce almost has to do.  The film starts by establishing the events of 9/11 as backdrop to the story that partly explains the lack of criticism of the government by the media at the time.  To emphasize how off track it was to blame Iraq for 9/11 it keeps its focus on Osama bin Laden as the 9/11 perpetrator who is, as a result, getting off the hook.  The film does not detour into the unpursued involvement of the Saudis.

Although the film’s courageous protagonists don’t get to follow the standard arc of today’s mythically-presented and godlike movie superheroes (some are actually Gods of ancient myth– and the Times in its movie reviews takes them more seriously), it sent me scurrying to research one of the great enduring myths of all time, the Greek Myth of Cassandra. In their ancient story telling, the Greeks (e.g. Sisyphus) have a penchant for exquisite frustration: Cassandra was granted the gift of accurate prophecy sequestered in the curse that whatever she predicted would not be believed.  The plight of the film’s reporting team is much the same.

The reporters in the film are able to see and accurately report that the Bush administration was lying and cherry picking intelligence, and they are able to foresee the many ways that going to war in Iraq would ultimately be exactly as extremely costly and counterproductive as it was.  They do so, not through prophecy, but by digging to come up with well-founded documentation.  Part of their strategy is to cultivate, as sources, lower level government officials rather than rely on access to top officials looking for media conduits to prostitute themselves.  (The reason that Cassandra was cursed by the god Apollo to have her prophecies never believed was that she would not go to bed with him.)

Another difference between the true story the film offers and the Cassandra story is the centrality of how the Knight Ridder reporters were not merely predicting the future, but trying to unmask liars crafting a concocted story.  But, in similar fashion, Cassandra was also predicting wars that would be disastrous to the civilizations involved, and at one point she too is dealing with and seeing through deception: When the Greeks deliver their Trojan Horse to the city of Troy, Cassanda knows it is a trick.  When she tries to destroy the horse herself, she is stopped by the people of Troy who degrade her for not appreciating the Greek gift.  The Greeks inside the horse were amazed at her perception.

Is there a lack of helpful attention and coverage that is suppressing this film?  Are reviews like the Times review intended to help bury it quickly?  Admittedly, the film makes almost all the newspapers and news magazines in the country look bad, and now it is up to those same news media outlets to publicize, praise or excoriate the film and help it find its audience.  It is not surprising that the film is getting little help from these quarters.  There are also serious questions about what does and does not get elevated in importance, or conversely what gets suppressed, by Google and Facebook algorithms.  (This article about the film may not Google well.)

If the film is being suppressed, I think that the best antidote is to build legs for it by noticing the suppression.  The film is reasonably good by any standard, and the only things that make it less than a perfect entertainment or work of art are the things that also make it a more important film in other respects.  Certainly, at the very least, anti-war sites should publicize the film and its apparent suppression.

We will have to conclude with some ironies.  The false information promulgated by almost every mainstream media outlet in the United States during the George Bush administration’s bellicose run up to the war is being cited by people like Aaron Maté for reason to be skeptical about all the Russiagate charges that Russia is an enemy of the Unites States interfering with our elections, especially since special prosecutor Robert Mueller heading the FBI in February 2003 was one of those Bush administration officials giving congress misleading information about Iraq  (at 9:11 in video).  Mueller, who started in office as head of the FBI a week before 9/11, is also one of the people in our government who inexplicably did not pursue the evidence linking top Saudis to 9/11.

But, on the other hand, yesterday in my email I got a request from Rob Reiner, the director of “Shock and Awe,” asking me to sign his petition demanding that President Donald Trump:

meet with special counsel Robert Mueller and answer his questions about possible conspiracy with the Russian government to influence the 2016 presidential election and obstruction of justice to cover it up. It’s imperative that federal investigators have all the information they need to get to the truth.

Frankly, the timing of the petition email from Reiner is just too weird.  And, if I were someone like Aaron Maté, I’d say that it hardly squares with the rigorous skepticism and caution about people in government that Reiner’s new film really ought to encourage.

Notes On Reliability of Coerced Confessions, Plus How That Relates To The Woman Appointed to Head The CIA

Gina Haspel, on left coming in to Senate hearing with respect to her nomination

According to the Innocence Project, of all the people whom DNA evidence later exonerates as wrongfully convicted, more than 1 out of 4 made a false confession or incriminating statement.

That’s why the Innocence Project recommends mandatory recording of interrogations.  Recording of interrogations can reveal whether police are communicating facts, elements and information about a crime to suspects which suspects later communicate back to them as somehow proof of their involvement in the crime and the way it unfolded.  It enables suspects to repeat back to the police essentially what the police have predetermined they want to hear.  To be absolutely blunt, at that point, the interrogated suspect is essentially collaborating with the interrogators to recast falsehoods as documented fact. Suspects may be inclined to do so particularly if they feel helpless to do anything else and especially if they are under duress and being coerced.  In the United States (since at least the 1936 ruling in Brown v. Mississippi) physically brutal torture to achieve a confession is, quite sensibly, a clear denial of due process.

Recorded interrogations are more reliable and can point back to what is more likely true when coercion causes the confessions to veer from the production of truth to falsehood.  Recordings have value, including retroactively, to  seek out and establish truth.

In the great grand scheme of what justice is and should be, it is not just the determination of the guilt or innocence of the particular suspect that is in issue.  And it is not just a question of who should be charged for a crime instead given that every conviction of an innocent man probably means guilty parties remain free.–   Yes, false confessions can help the actual perpetrators of crime avoid detection.–  Recordings can also point back to improper bias, and perhaps point back, perhaps in even incriminating ways, to improper goals and agenda on the part of the interrogators.  For instance, the interrogators may want to make themselves look good (like Det. "I've done nothing wrong" Louis Scarcella) through the easy convenience of finding a quick scapegoat (as in the 1989 Central Park Jogger case); they may also be indifferent or worse to the suffering of the already marginalized and persecuted minority individuals they target for such convenient scapegoating.

Therefore recordings take on a very special importance if there is any possibility of questionable motives on the part of the interrogation team.  They also help uproot and exorcise flaws that make the failure of justice systematic.

All of the above is probably intuitively clear to the reader without my writing it.  But I am starting with the basics to come in the back door to talk about something else, a bigger topic.  It’s something that no one else seems to have talked about in the mainstream media or even most of its fringes even as we whirled through an event that otherwise got a huge amount of media attention: Our nomination of Gina Haspel to head to become the head of the Central Intelligence Agency. 

It’s our country’s latest affront and embarrassing communication to the world that we feel that we and our allies are above and immune to such laws as the Geneva Convention and Nuremberg Principles.

Gina Haspel, “Bloody Gina” as many of her detractors refer to her, was quickly confirmed by the senate to head the CIA.  She shouldn’t have been.  Although outrage over her nomination was dutifully expressed in various quarters, not much was done to effectively prevent her from assuming the office.  What was done did not discourage six Democrats from joining with Republicans to produce an approval vote of 54 to 45.  The vote would have been lopsidedly the other way had the Democrats not switched given that three Republican senators were opposing the nomination.

The expressions of why Ms. Haspel was unacceptable to head the CIA were superficial . . . as if nothing extra needed to be expressed in opposition.  They mostly amounted to the reasons a New York Times editorial opposing her confirmation expressed; that she should not be confirmed because of:

    •    “her role at the center of one of . .  a brutal interrogation regime that used torture against terrorism suspects after the Sept. 11 attacks.”

    •    Her taking the lead in advocating for and drafting instructions to order the destruction of tapes documenting torture interrogations for which she was responsible.

Furthermore, it was far from absolutely clear at the Senate hearing that Ms. Haspel would not do or let such similar things happen again, even though she gestured at checking the box of sounding like she would not do it again with a collection of statements:

    •    “I would not put C.I.A. officers at risk by asking them to undertake risky, controversial activity again.”

    •    “My moral compass is strong. I would not allow C.I.A. to undertake activity that I thought was immoral, even if it was technically legal. I would absolutely not permit it.”

    •    “what I believe, sitting here today [today?], is that I support the higher moral standard we [who?] have [now?] decided to hold ourselves to.”

Asked whether she thought the CIA program of torture interrogation was immoral, Haspel refused to say that it was immoral, which is essentially to say that her strong “moral compass” would permit it in the future.  Further her hint that she interprets the law to be even less restrictive makes it sounds like she would view it as legal as well.  Therefore, what would hold her back right now is her assessment that the practice  is “controversial” (only if it is known about), and perhaps not presently a good “risk,” (weighed against others?) plus, lastly, that she supports “the higher moral standard we have” we have now “decided to hold ourselves to”— The thing is though that Haspel will be serving under a president who says that torture “absolutely works” and publicly communicated great enthusiasm about using it.  (Haspel, incongruously argued she did not expect the enthusiastic Trump to implement such a practices again.— There was also a fair amount floated in various reports that the reason Haspel earned the sobriquet “Bloody Gina” is because people suspect that she, herself, actually liked the cruelty.)
   
When it comes to the central question of whether it is wrong or right to torture people your nation holds captive, many will stop at the simple answer that it is, always without question, morally wrong.  Others, will go another step, invoking a more “hard-nosed” standard either proving their tough practicality either to themselves or the satisfaction of others: They will conclude that since torture doesn’t work there is nothing that can make it right.

We’ve known for hundreds of years that torture doesn’t work, because, at best, the tortured, to make the torture stop, will simply tell the torturer whatever they want to hear, which may or may not have any basis in truth.  As such, when asked about this at the senate hearing, Ms. Haspel did not make a risible, goofball statement directly refuting such wisdom from the ages.  Instead, this was how the exchange in question began:

“The president has asserted that torture works,” Senator Kamala Harris, Democrat of California, said. “Do you agree with that statement?”

“Senator, I — I don’t believe that torture works,” Ms. Haspel said.

But then Haspel played cat and mouse with some `wink, wink, nudge, nudge,’ dog whistle type evasions suggesting that maybe torture does work . . .  and hence that torture is “moral,” for those who compliment themselves as being superior for basing their standards on hardnosed pragmatism:

GINA HASPEL: [continuing]. . .  I believe that in the CIA’s program—and I’m not attributing this to enhanced interrogation techniques—I believe, as many people, directors, who have sat in this chair before me, that valuable information was obtained from senior al-Qaeda operatives, that allowed us to defend this country and prevent another attack.

SEN. KAMALA HARRIS: Is that a yes?

GINA HASPEL: No, it’s not a yes. We got valuable information from debriefing of al-Qaeda detainees. And I don’t—I don’t think it’s knowable whether interrogation techniques played a role in that.

If you will, this hedging on Haspel’s part must be viewed as laying out nearly the only road by which Haspel can avoid conceding that torture is immoral.

A somewhat misleading headline from National Public Radio: Did this kind of inexactitude help Haspel get nominated?

The Times editorial, and others, offered one other last point of objection to confirming Haspel, which was that with her record at the CIA remaining secret and was being vetted by essentially nobody else. It was essentially being vetted by just Haspel herself serving as acting CIA Director during the process.  The editorial commented:

We are constrained in assessing Ms. Haspel because much about her record is not public. Ms. Haspel controls what of her record can be declassified, and most details released so far have been flattering. She should recuse herself and allow Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence, to make the call on declassifying more of her record.

Ignoring that the notion that so many details of Haspel’s career and qualifications are unknown and that only flattering details were selectively released, the Times editorial nevertheless offered an insanely appeasing assessment of Ms. Haspel venturing that “Gina Haspel has shown she has all the qualities to become the next director of the Central Intelligence Agency” and that she was a “shoo-in for the top job.”  That kind of double-talk is certainly shoots yourself in the foot if your goal is to write a damning indictment to stop a confirmation of a nomination.  This kind of language is also the kind of thing that makes it easy for Democrats to cross the aisle to vote to approve a torturer to head the CIA.

Now to move on to what is most important to discuss.  There are other reasons to consider why Haspel’s known actions make her a very bad choice to head the CIA and they involve the destruction of the torture tapes; this is from a standpoint we will now address that went undiscussed by nearly everybody.

The destruction of the torture tapes is probably most often simply viewed as a coverup compounding the original wrongdoing of the torturing while reconfirming with emphasis how horrible the wrongdoing must have been given these efforts to hide it.  Haspel herself and those she was working with her offered a probably the less believed explanation and excuse for destroying the tapes.  That excuse was that she sought to destroy the tapes because their release would pose a security risk (or “potential security risk”) to the officers involved or that it would put agents in the field at risk.  It’s very hard to believe that the CIA can’t keep things secret enough and its agents secure without actually destroying the tapes.  Plus, as an intelligence gathering agency, it’s surprising to think that the CIA is ever inclined to zoom any information into a black hole from which it cannot retrieved in the future if it later wants it again for its own purposes.

Our most skilled horror film makers know that the best approach to keeping their audience on the edge of their seats is to avoid showing the flick’s monster; let the audience’s imagination do the work of conjuring up what is awful and their imagination will surely come up with something far more terrifying than the monster you can actually depict by supplying more information and images.  So, on its face, it might seem that destruction of the torture tapes is thus an obvious tactical mistake for those who would like to whitewash their torture sins.  Indeed, maybe it is, but what if, through misdirection, what gets imagined is not the worst that actually happened?

What’s that possible misdirection?: It’s routinely been suggested, typically in passing asides dropping references to natural assumptions, that even if the torture interrogators were making errant, troublesome and cruel decisions that the they were part of valiant efforts to discover the truth about 9/11 in a “fraught” time so as to protect the country against future attacks.  But should that be so quickly assumed?

So far, it’s only in a low-Googling article in Consortium News that have I been able to find writing that suggests another possibility that seems obvious to me and one that responsible people considering Haspel’s nomination should have been considering:

It’s been widely assumed the tapes were destroyed because of the potentially graphic nature of the abuse, or to hide the identity of those doing the torture. But there’s another distinct possibility: That they were destroyed because of the questions they document being asked. Do the torturers ask: “Is there another terrorist attack?” Or do they compel: “Tell us that Iraq and Al-Qaeda are working together”? The video evidence to answer that question has been destroyed by order of Haspel — with barely anyone raising the possibility of that being the reason.

See: Torture is Not Only Immoral, but a Tool for War, By Sam Husseini, May 8, 2018

Mr. Husseini’s article also helpfully supplied a beginning list of questions that ought to have been asked of Ms. Haspel during her nomination.  (They weren’t asked.)

What could a review of the tapes reveal about the agenda of the torturers and Haspel?  It is far from a fantasy to believe that those involved might have been involved in the efforts to build up false facts in order to lead the United States into war with Iraq, something the Bush administration wanted almost immediately and prior to collecting any reasons.  We know that this was going on in the United State government and intelligence community on a widespread basis.  As for whether these coercive interrogators actually wanted to track down what truly happened with respect to 9/11 and who was involved, we know that were many clear trails to be investigated that pointed toward Saudi Arabian involvement in bringing about the 9/11 events.  They were apparently were not earnestly pursued by our government.  In fact, on Democracy Now this past fall there was coverage of the thinking that the coercive interrogations were conducted for the purpose of supporting a “concocted” story about 9/11.

With the torture tapes assumed to be destroyed it does unleash our imaginations to imagine the worst.  In fact, as citizens of this country looking to be properly governed as well as responsible for our own government, we probably have a duty to engage in such speculative imaginings and follow up on their implications. The worst that can be imagined isn’t the inhumanity or brutal cruelty of the torture; it is that such inhumane and brutal practices might have been pursued to tell us and the rest of the world lies, not truth. . .

If that is something that Ms. Haspel believes can be a proper and moral objective of the CIA, then maybe that is the road by which she reaches her conclusion that torture is not necessarily immoral.  (CIA goals do include misinforming the public.)  Is that what Haspel actually thinks is moral?  We are in a difficult position when trying to guess: The story is that the tapes are destroyed and nobody asked Ms. Haspel to answer this question of what she thinks.  In fact, when the senate had a chance, there was a dearth of clamor to insist that Ms. Haspel answer such hard and difficult questions.