THE REPORT 2019
by
Scott Z. Burns
The film is styled as The Torture Report, with the word Torture struck off from the name.
Adam Driver plays Daniel Jones, a Senate staffer, who leads a Senate Intel Committee's review of six million documents related to CIA's use of EIT (Enhanced Interrogation Techniques) during investigations related to war on terror. Dan and his team manage to prepare a 6300 page long final report which manages to irk everybody. CIA is predictably angry, Obama administration which had promised post-partisan governance finds itself in a bind. Dan is blamed for hacking into CIA's computers and leaking the Panetta Review which had questioned the efficacy of EIT.
EITs comprised of waterboarding, sleep deprivation, family slights, beatings etc to psychologically break the prisoners into revealing information about impending attacks upon America. As per the Panetta Review, no actionable intel was ever gathered by EIT methods, not anything that had not been earlier extracted by other methods. Forget about the waste of public resources, EITs violated fundamental American principles.
Dan stands his ground about not hacking into CIA's systems, in fact Senator Diane Feinstein accused CIA of hacking into Senate computer systems. A checkmated CIA agrees to drop charges against Dan. An interim report is published by the SIC in 2014. The full report is published later.
Adam Driver is the soul of the film. He has given everything for this one. He just shines like a crazy diamond. Annette Bening has provided able support. Jan Hamm has a decent cameo. The Report is an out and out political film like All the President's Men. Hats off to the US for not just allowing such a report to go public but having systems and values in place that allow such studies and investigations to be conducted in the first place. A country as truthful as this one can never go wrong by much.
#EIT #CIA #SIC #ADAMDRIVER #annettebening #johnhamm #thereport #danjones
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