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| Matt@elevenphotographs from Upsplash |
If you have seen Vice,
then the newest docudrama coming to the small screen via Amazon entitled The Torture Report is the perfect
bookend to the sorry saga of the United States’ Enhanced Torture Methods.
Cheney and Rumsfeld never set foot into the dark, disturbing
chambers where water boarding and beatings occurred post 9.11 but they were
instrumental in keeping that program alive and brutally kicking any and all
suspects. They never appear in the film, but their suffocating presence kept
all in line at the CIA.
FBI agent Daniel Jones, played by Adam Driver, performs an
exhaustive investigation into the CIA's use of torture on suspected terrorists.
He is heroic, stubborn and willing to speak truth to power. His truth is
simple: the CIA investigated the effectiveness of Enhanced Torture Methods
(devised by a couple of rapscallions cloaked as ‘professors’) and had to find
that they were effective at getting
information out of unwilling prisoners. But it was a Catch 22. If the
program did not get ‘legitimate Intel’ then it would be illegal; so the CIA had
to lie and say it was legit to be legal…even though after exhaustive research
by Jones, it was all fabricated.
However, he is not alone in his quest to reveal the truth to
the American people in his report, which the CIA redacted to the point of
farcical; without the courage of Senator Diane Feinstein (Annette Bening) and
her staff along with the support of the late Senator John McCain, nothing would
have been revealed.
Reviews of a gritty, nauseating film like this one can be
somewhat iffy. People want a Hollywood, feel good template. They get a
something far more worthwhile. Peter Travers of Rolling Stone explains, ”Scott Burns
[writer and producer} believes that the granular details of cerebral inquiry
into issues of morality are more than enough to hold our rapt attention. He's
right.”
But here is the catch. Who wants to see it? Who cares about
people of Muslim decent, especially after 9.11? All we wanted was to never let
the US be attacked again and so ‘by any means necessary’ the ‘dark’ methods of
our own CIA broke every code of decency and the Geneva Convention to get Intel
that they later had to admit was either lies or information that was already
gleaned via the FBI’s normal methods of interrogation.
Thus, the graphic water boarding scenes and naked brutality
make the viewer turn away in disgust. The utter stupidity of the torture
becomes so counter-productive that as McCain emphasizes will be used on our own
soldiers. Senator Feinstein is the most indignant and dogged in her pursuit to
make sure that Daniel Jones and his two colleagues make sure that the
atrocities will never again be perpetuated on any person help prisoner.
It is hard to watch, but as Al Gore once said of another
existential crisis: “It is an Inconvenient Truth.”
Postscript: The film barely made an appearance in movie theaters.
If you did not have Amazon, or never heard any buzz about a film about torture
(understandable), then you will never see this powerful work. So a film that
fought to make it to the light of day…is still trying to find that moment of
sunshine in which so much is transparent. Ironic, isn’t it?
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