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  • The True Story Behind the Movie <i>The Report</i>

The True Story Behind the Movie The Report

“Find out exactly what they have and read every word of it.” So says California Senator Dianne Feinstein, played by Annette Bening , to staffer Daniel J. Jones in Amazon’s upcoming political drama The Report. Sen. Feinstein sets Jones, played by Adam Driver , on an investigation of the Central Intelligence Agency’s detention and “enhanced interrogation” — or torture — of suspected terrorists during the administration of President George W. Bush, ultimately a seven-year project that would nearly take over his life.

Written and directed by filmmaker Scott Z. Burns, The Report chronicles Jones’ real investigation on behalf of the Senate Intelligence Committee into the Bush-era CIA as well as the Senate’s subsequent struggle with the Obama administration to release what Jones uncovered .

Working for Sen. Feinstein, then the Chair of the Committee, Jones and his team reviewed around 6.3 million pages of internal CIA documents and wrote a roughly 6,700-page report on their findings — often referred to as the “torture report” — which remains classified to this day.

In 2014, the Senate voted to release a more than 500-page executive summary , which served as a basis for the film’s script. Some dialogue is even pulled from the summary itself.

The film lays out in graphic detail what Jones discovered: that the U.S. government’s detention and interrogation program was inefficient, needlessly brutal and intentionally hidden from policymakers and the American people.

The Report also depicts how President Barack Obama’s administration — specifically John O. Brennan’s CIA — worked to undermine the Committee’s efforts to make their findings public. Jon Hamm plays President Obama’s Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, who the film suggests repeatedly sided with the CIA after the 2011 killing of Osama bin Laden improved the President’s chances for reelection.

Burns tells TIME he consulted the work of investigative journalists like Jane Mayer and James Risen, the autobiographies of CIA officials, interviews with military and law enforcement experts on interrogation, and interviews with the senators on the Intelligence Committee. But the primary source for the film was the declassified executive summary itself.

“I made a choice not to say at the beginning of this movie, ‘Based on a true story’. What I chose to say is that, ‘This movie is based on this report,’” Burns explains. “Before we can identify [whether] a story is true or not, we have to identify what the facts of the story are.”

Burns stresses that the report is about facts. “This is the CIA’s own accounting of their program, and it’s an amazing puzzle that Dan [Jones] was able to put together out of 6.2 million documents. And so one would think if there was a narrative that said this program worked, it would’ve been found somewhere in those 6.2 million documents.”

Here’s a brief overview of the real events behind The Report .

What did the “Torture Report” find?

Jones and his team found that between 2002 and 2008, at least 119 detainees were held by the CIA in covert locations around the world, known as “black sites.” The CIA admitted at least 26 of the detainees were “wrongfully” held.

According to the Committee’s executive summary, “interrogations of CIA detainees were brutal and far worse than the CIA represented to policymakers and others.”

Thirty-nine of the detainees were tortured. The techniques included “walling” (slamming a person against a wall), slaps, nudity, stress positions and sleep deprivation. Some were made to stay awake for as long as a week, and others were told their families were in danger or they were going to be killed. At least five detainees were subjected to unnecessary “rectal rehydration,” and at least three were waterboarded, which simulates the experience of drowning. The report found the interrogations caused “psychological and behavioral issues, including hallucinations, paranoia, insomnia, and attempts at self-harm.”

At least one detainee — Gul Rahman — died, possibly because of hypothermia.

Crucially, Jones’ team also found that the interrogations weren’t effective. Seven detainees provided no intelligence at all, and many detainees made up information, creating faulty intelligence. “Other detainees provided significant accurate intelligence prior to, or without having been subjected to these techniques,” the summary continues. Furthermore, Jones’ team found that the CIA exaggerated the effectiveness of the program and misled the White House, Congress and the American public.

The executive summary concludes that the program was mismanaged. What’s more, it was developed by two psychologists — James Elmer Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, played by Douglas Hodge and T. Ryder Smith in the film — who had no experience as interrogators and lacked specialized knowledge of both al-Qaeda and counterterrorism.

Burns says he was first drawn to this topic after reading Katherine Eban’s 2007 Vanity Fair article “ Rorschach and Awe ”, which examines how Mitchell and Jessen developed the interrogation program. Burns’ parents are both psychologists, and he says he was interested in “the idea that a field of science that had largely existed to explain human behavior and heal people could somehow be used by this.”

The Report features prolonged scenes of Mitchell and Jessen’s interrogations of suspected terrorists, and includes some composite characters, such as Maura Tierney’s CIA official, because names in the executive summary were redacted.

How did the Torture Report come together?

The tapes investigation ( 2007-2009).

The investigation into the CIA’s interrogation program began in 2007, when the New York Times reported that the CIA had destroyed tapes of interrogations in 2005. Two years before Feinstein became Jones’ boss, West Virginia Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller was the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and he asked Jones to review the CIA documents to determine what was on the tapes.

Before working for Sen. Rockefeller, Jones had been an FBI analyst in the International Terrorism Operations Section. He and former CIA lawyer Alissa Starzak — who doesn’t appear by name in the film — dove into the CIA’s records for two years and delivered a report to the Committee in 2009 on their findings.

“Basically the members [of the Committee] found out that they had been lied to by the CIA,” the real Daniel Jones tells TIME. “That the techniques were far more brutal than they had ever described. That the whole claims of effectiveness related to the [origins of the program] were simply not true. And that there were all these other management failures.”

The larger investigation into the CIA interrogation and detention program ( 2009-2012)

In March 2009, in response to Jones’ report, the Committee voted 14-to-1 to launch a larger investigation into the CIA’s detention and interrogation program. Sen. Feinstein had become the Chairman of the Committee at this point, and asked Jones to stay on to head up the investigation. He was initially told it would take about a year to complete.

Around the same time, Attorney General Eric Holder announced he was broadening a criminal investigation into the CIA, and as a result, the CIA said that no one within the agency was allowed to speak to Jones’ team. The Republican minority on the committee then pulled their support for the investigation, arguing it couldn’t get far without interviews. Jones and his team of four core members moved ahead, poring over millions of agency documents in a windowless basement room.

Over the years, Jones and his team wrote thousands of pages about what they found. Jones recalls having to beg other staff members to read the report, asking for their help on clarity and checking for typos. “We don’t have editors. It’s just us,” he explains.

They finished that 6,700 page document in 2012.

“The summer from hell” (2013)

Sen. Feinstein sent the report for comment and review by the CIA, other intelligence agencies and the White House. In June 2013, the Committee heard back that the CIA had major problems with the report and claimed it contained inaccuracies. Over the summer, Jones and his team began meeting with the CIA to work through these sections.

Jones describes the period as the “summer of hell.” “We knew what the facts were and we would basically say, you know, ‘The ocean water is blue. Here it is.’ And they would say, ‘No, we think it’s yellow.’ And I’d be like, ‘But here’s the picture, right? It’s blue,'” he explains.

Jones became so frustrated that Feinstein told him to stop meeting with the CIA. Jones remembers Feinstein instructing him to include the CIA’s objections in the footnotes of the summary, “ensuring the world knew the ridiculousness of their response,” he tells TIME.

The CIA files a criminal referral against Daniel Jones and his team (2014)

In early winter, the CIA accused the Senate of illegally accessing an internal review of its detention and interrogation program, known as the “Panetta Review,” and removing it from CIA facilities without authorization. The CIA’s own inspector general then opened a criminal referral after senators accused the CIA of improperly monitoring Jones’ team, per the Times .

In February, the CIA then filed a second criminal referral against Jones and his team, arguing that they hacked into the CIA and took the Panetta Review without permission.

In March, Sen. Feinstein gave a biting 45-minute speech on the Senate floor condemning the CIA’s actions. She confirmed that part of the Review had been copied and moved to the Senate’s office, because the CIA had destroyed the interrogation tapes and the Review had since disappeared off the Committee’s computer system.

Feinstein accused the CIA of conducting an unauthorized search of her staffer’s computer network, saying she was concerned the CIA may have violated the Constitution’s separation of powers principle. She requested an apology, and added that she viewed the criminal referral against Jones’ staff “a potential effort to intimidate.”

John Brennan strongly denied Feinstein’s accusations, saying, “nothing could be further from the truth,” per the Times .

But in July, the CIA’s inspector general found that the agency actually had “penetrated” the Senate Intelligence Committee’s computer network, and filed the criminal referral against Jones and his team was based on false information. The same day, Brennan apologized.

The Panetta Review came to the same conclusions as Jones’ investigation, but differed from the CIA’s official response . Jones tells TIME he thinks it should never have been withheld from the Committee. Jones says the Review appeared on his computer one day, either by a computer glitch or a whistleblower. He says a lot of documents slipped into the millions they were given access to, some having nothing to do with interrogation. It might have just accidentally come through.

The executive summary comes out ( Winter 2014)

The Department of Justice dismissed the charges against Jones’ team. The executive summary then moved to the White House to determine what should be declassified. It came back heavily redacted, and the senators pushed to include more details and names in the version released to the public.

Finally, after a long back-and-forth with the Obama administration, the Senate released the executive summary on Dec. 9, 2014, shortly before Democrats lost control of the Senate.

“The Senators who are involved are the ones who make things happen,” Jones says. “I was just a staffer. It really takes Senators being courageous.”

In a 2014 op-ed in the Washington Post , Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., the former director of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service whose name appears throughout the report, responded to the Committee’s findings with cutting words. “The report’s leaked conclusion , which has been reported on widely , that the interrogation program brought no intelligence value is an egregious falsehood; it’s a dishonest attempt to rewrite history. I’m bemused that the Senate could devote so many resources to studying the interrogation program and yet never once speak to any of the key people involved in it, including the guy who ran it (that would be me).”

Burns says that these conflicting narratives, between the CIA’s account of what happened and Jones’ discoveries, inform the conflict of the film. He’s interested in the question, “How do these two narratives battle it out in the real world and which one ends up getting purchased in the culture as the truth?”

What happened after the events depicted in The Report ?

The film ends in 2014, after the Senate releases Jones’ findings. But the issues it explores persist in the present day.

In 2015, the Senate passed the McCain-Feinstein Anti-Torture Amendment, which banned any further use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” on detainees.

In the spring of 2018, Gina Haspel — who, per the Times , oversaw the torture of a terrorism suspect in Thailand and was involved in the 2005 destructions of the interrogation tapes — was confirmed as the Director of the CIA

During her hearing before the Senate Haspel pledged not to restart the interrogation program.

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Annette Bening, Jon Hamm, and Adam Driver in The Report (2019)

Idealistic Senate staffer Daniel J. Jones, tasked by his boss to lead an investigation into the CIA's post 9/11 Detention and Interrogation Program, uncovers shocking secrets. Idealistic Senate staffer Daniel J. Jones, tasked by his boss to lead an investigation into the CIA's post 9/11 Detention and Interrogation Program, uncovers shocking secrets. Idealistic Senate staffer Daniel J. Jones, tasked by his boss to lead an investigation into the CIA's post 9/11 Detention and Interrogation Program, uncovers shocking secrets.

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  • Trivia Just before filming commenced, the film's original plan of a 50-day schedule was cut to a 26-day schedule, and its $18 million budget was slashed to just $8 million. Hence, as director Scott Burns stated, all the actors including the lead Adam Driver were paid next to nothing on this project.

Senator Dianne Feinstein : If it works, why do you need to do it 183 times?

  • Crazy credits When the title is first shown, it reads, "The Torture Report." Then the second word is "redacted" to reveal the new title: "The Report."
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Fact-checking 'The Report': How accurate is Adam Driver's post-9/11 CIA thriller?

the report torture

One of the most intriguing visuals in the political thriller “The Report” is Adam Driver sitting stoically between massive towers of paper – the entire Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture practices after 9/11 – heaped on either side of him.

The guy who sat in that chair in real life reports that a single detail was different. “I did not look as cool as Adam Driver . That's a very tall order,” says Daniel J. Jones, the Senate staffer and lead investigator whose arduous work is at the heart of “The Report” (now streaming on Amazon ). But “if you get out some printer paper and actually stack 7,000 pages, it looks like that.”

“The Report” revolves around Driver’s Jones, his boss Sen. Dianne Feinstein (Annette Bening) and their efforts to bring heinous and ultimately ineffective CIA counterterrorism practices to public light.

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“This is a story about accountability and about how our branches of government interact with each other,” writer/director Scott Z. Burns says. “And that is very much the story of 2019 as well. They're not unrelated.”

Looking back now, Jones calls it “a very interesting life for about seven years, for sure,” as he and Burns discuss the accuracy of key “Report” scenes:

Daniel J. Jones’ team really did work tirelessly in a cramped basement

When Feinstein tasked Jones with digging into the agency's Detention and Intelligence Program in 2007, the CIA wouldn’t let the Senate committee interview officials but made other records available. The base of operations was a compact room in the bowels of a secret Virginia facility that, in actuality, was half as spacious. “It was a basement, no windows, and it had no internet,” Jones recalls. “You couldn't take your phone there. You know when you really get into something and dive deep? It's almost better to not have any of those distractions.”

The film was as accurate as possible in depicting real torture

“The Report” has many flashbacks to the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” developed by two Air Force psychologists that were at the core of Jones’ investigation, including sleep deprivation, waterboarding, mock burials and rectal rehydration. While Burns admits to “a little bit of movie magic,” so things weren't as dangerous for the actors as they appear on screen, he did have Navy SEALs as technical advisers “to make sure they were depicting it correctly.” Burns recalls asking one actor playing a detainee to point out any discomfort: “He said, ‘I’m a Lebanese man and it's really important to me that you show the world what really happened and I want to help with that.' ”

Jones’ work caused a kerfuffle within the CIA

Everybody seemed to take a side on the report: In a restaurant scene, Jones’ breakfast is interrupted by a CIA employee who tells him, “Your (expletive) report will never see the light of day,” but in one Deep Throat-style moment, Tim Blake Nelson plays a CIA medical officer formerly assigned to a detention site who gives Jones info on the sly. “I was approached by all kinds of CIA officers, many of them offering really great details,” Jones says. “But there was also the other end: ‘Hey, this program was great. I'm sure you guys will find that, won’t you?’ We got played on both sides – it's a diverse organization.”

A heated face-off between Jones and the head of CIA did happen

Not surprisingly, the agency had a lot of opinions about Jones’ findings. In 2013, newly confirmed CIA director John Brennan (played by Ted Levine) argues in a meeting with Jones that mistakes were made and addressed, but the “unique” intelligence saved lives and led to the Osama bin Laden raid, with Driver’s character getting testy in response. “I was obviously frustrated with Brennan throughout this process,” Jones says. “He maintains he stood up and objected to the program. We went through 6.3 million pages of records – I found nothing to suggest that.”

The CIA actually filed a criminal referral against Jones

During Jones’ investigation, he discovers a secret internal review by former CIA director Leon Panetta that also found Bush-era torture methods to be largely fruitless and relocates the classified document from the secret facility to his own safe. After the review goes public during a congressional hearing and the CIA enters Jones’ workspace to investigate – a big no-no – the agency files a criminal referral against him. Jones meets with a lawyer about his situation, the charges are dropped, and like Jones back in the day, Driver plays it all pretty cool. However, “I get more freaked out watching the film and thinking about it with some distance,” Jones confesses. “You have such blinders on when you're in an investigation like that.”

Filmmakers made sure the real John McCain got the last words

Feinstein has Jones’ back throughout the entire film, though just as important a champion in real life was Sen. John McCain, who doesn’t appear until the end of “The Report.” “He was always there to offer advice, to push through walls that came up,” Jones recalls. McCain’s eloquent speech in December 2014 commending the Senate’s CIA report was one of the things that made Burns want to make his movie. Instead of getting an actor to play the late senator, Burns thought it’d be more powerful to use a clip of McCain’s actual speech because "he had been such an incredible spokesperson for this issue."

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What new film ‘the report’ says about the cia and post-9/11 torture tactics.

Jeffrey Brown

Jeffrey Brown Jeffrey Brown

  • Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/what-new-film-the-report-says-about-the-cia-and-post-9-11-torture-tactics

Five years ago, a report was released on the torture tactics used against suspects of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Now, that investigation is the subject of a new film, “The Report.” Jeffrey Brown speaks with director Scott Z. Burns about why he thought the controversial topic could be made into a movie.

Read the Full Transcript

Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors.

Judy Woodruff:

Five years ago, the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released a report on the torture tactics the CIA used on terror suspects after the 9/11 attacks.

That investigation is now the subject of a new film, "The Report."

Jeffrey Brown has a look. It's part of our ongoing arts and culture series, Canvas.

Why did the CIA torture people, lie about it, and then hide it from history?

Jeffrey Brown:

The story is straight from the headlines.

Better intelligence could have been obtained by more humane methods.

Their report, released by Democrats, contends the tactics failed to produce useful information.

Gwen Ifill:

A sweeping Senate report leveled damning charges against the Central Intelligence Agency.

"The Report" portrays the real-life six-year effort by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence to uncover the CIA's use of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques used on terrorism suspects following the 9/11 attacks.

Those were implemented at the suggestion of two U.S. Air Force psychologists. The torture proved ineffective, but remained in practice at CIA black sites around the world.

Daniel Jones was lead investigator on Senator Dianne Feinstein's Intelligence Committee staff. Actor Adam Driver, known for recent roles in "BlacKkKlansman" and the "Star Wars" sequel trilogy, portrays Jones.

Adam Driver:

After 9/11, everyone was scared, scared it might happen again. It was my second day of grad school. The next day, I changed all my classes to national security.

Jones is the primary author of the report on torture.

Daniel Jones:

Well, there are 20 findings and conclusions in the overall report, which can boil down into three key findings, overall findings.

One is that the techniques the CIA used, which most refer to as torture, resulted in false answers and didn't result in unique information.

Maura Tierney:

Why are so many of these guys still lying to us after you work on them? Where's this special sauce? You have to make this work. It's only legal if it works.

Two is, the techniques were far more brutal than the CIA had described to Congress, to the president, to the Department of Justice.

We improve his treatment for a week or two, give him some hope. And then we go back at him hard and create a sense of helplessness.

And three is, the program was grossly mismanaged. The CIA didn't hold officers accountable for wrongdoing. They didn't set up appropriate guidelines.

Over and over again, we saw some significant management failures.

Scott Z. Burns wrote and directed the film. Best known for his screenplay "The Bourne Ultimatum," Burns also produced the Academy Award-winning documentary "An Inconvenient Truth."

Why did you think this might be a movie?

Scott Z. Burns:

You know, for me, it started out that both my parents are psychologists, and I grew up with some awareness of that profession as a thing that exists to help people.

And so when I read that people had figured out a way to weaponize psychology, I found that appalling.

We fundamentally disagree with the assertion that the program was poorly managed and executed, and that unqualified officers imposed brutal conditions, used unapproved techniques, and were rarely held accountable.

I also felt that my country had tortured people, and that that was antithetical to everything I had thought. And I know that may sound naive, because the CIA had done that at other points in history.

Jones and his team set up a secure room within a CIA facility to go through the evidence.

Paper has a way of getting people in trouble at our place.

At our place, paper is how we keep track of laws.

Investigators would face multiple hurdles put in the way by the CIA and other officials, including threat of legal action against Jones.

Corey Stoll:

They can go after the next best thing, you.

The film's narrative follows Jones as he puts the puzzle pieces together.

When Scott first described to me his idea, which was this — almost this dark comedy of errors, in some ways, that was the only thing that made sense to me.

I think it's the struggle of somebody to get — to get the truth out.

And I think what happened with Dan I think is kind of a tracer bullet through our political system right now, that there are these systems and institutions that exists to provide oversight and accountability, and yet it took really Herculean effort on Dan's part and the other people, the senators on the committee, to get this story out.

According to the film, the CIA and the Obama administration actively tried to keep the findings from being made public amid other national priorities.

Actor Jon Hamm portrays Denis McDonough, President Obama's chief of staff. Annette Bening is Senator Dianne Feinstein.

When this administration took office, we faced the very real possibility of economic collapse. Do we spend our political capital on going around trying to find people to blame, or do we solve the problem?

Annette Bening:

Maybe the way to solve the problem is to hold people accountable. Do you ever wonder why history repeats itself?

Well, I think maybe it's because we don't always listen the first time.

Director Burn says he felt it was important to depict acts of torture.

You had to make some decisions about what you were going to show us, right, especially when it came down to those interrogation torture scenes.

How did you decide?

Well, it was probably the part of the film that I worked and agonized the most over through the edit and through writing, through every aspect.

I mean, there were early drafts where I wondered if we could tell the story without showing anything.

They water-boarded him 183 times, and then concluded KSM may never be forthcoming or honest. Everything they got from him was either a lie or something they already had.

Well, OK. So my first question is, if it works, why do you need to do it 183 times?

Maybe, when the report comes out, people will finally see that.

The reason why Abu Ghraib was such a sea change in this whole story is, people saw these things.

And, obviously, someone who works in a visual art form, pictures do paint thousands of words. And I felt, unless I show the audience enough of what really happened, they wouldn't truly understand the trespasses against the law and against human dignity.

But when I shot it, I tried to make it more about the torturers than the torture, because a lot of these people did do criminal acts. And it wasn't to elicit sympathy for al-Qaida.

In the end, after the years-long drama, Daniel Jones says the system worked.

We did get a report out. It's 525 pages. It has redactions, but we did get the report out. The report was released. And I think that's really to the testament of what the senators did of that committee.

They really were committed to this and committed to getting it out in public.

Do you feel that you told a positive story or a warning story? What is it?

Well, as a filmmaker, I don't feel like I get to decide what the audience should feel at the end.

I know how I feel, which is I am — I'm greatly buoyed by the fact that this country did put that report out. And Steven Soderbergh, who's a producer on this, has always said, I don't — I don't know that there's another country, other than maybe Canada or the U.K., that would — that would have even allowed this kind of investigation.

"The Report" is now streaming on Amazon Prime video.

For the "PBS NewsHour," I'm Jeffrey Brown at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Another movie to put on your list for this holiday season.

Listen to this Segment

the report torture

Watch the Full Episode

In his more than 30-year career with the NewsHour, Brown has served as co-anchor, studio moderator, and field reporter on a wide range of national and international issues, with work taking him around the country and to many parts of the globe. As arts correspondent he has profiled many of the world's leading writers, musicians, actors and other artists. Among his signature works at the NewsHour: a multi-year series, “Culture at Risk,” about threatened cultural heritage in the United States and abroad; the creation of the NewsHour’s online “Art Beat”; and hosting the monthly book club, “Now Read This,” a collaboration with The New York Times.

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Movie Reviews

'the report': a 7,000-page government study, brought to vivid, horrifying life.

Mark Jenkins

the report torture

In The Report , Adam Driver plays staffer following the CIA's paper trail of post-9/11 detention and interrogation tactics. Atsushi Nishijima/Amazon hide caption

In The Report , Adam Driver plays staffer following the CIA's paper trail of post-9/11 detention and interrogation tactics.

A didactic movie on an unpleasant subject, The Report is essentially a one-man show that dramatizes a nearly 7,000-page government study. If that doesn't sound too promising, writer-director Scott Z. Burns' second feature turns out be as urgent and engrossing as it is educational. Relevant, too, since we live in a moment when "Read the Transcript" is a T-shirt motto.

The movie's opening credits offer a three-word title, but the central one is quickly redacted. That word is "torture," which, after 9/11, was issued a new bureaucratic euphemism: "enhanced interrogation techniques."

The people who coined that term are gone when the movie opens. Young Daniel J. Jones (Adam Driver), so earnest that he logged three years with Teach for America in Baltimore, is looking for a job. He doesn't get one from Denis McDonough (Jon Hamm), who will reappear later. But there's an opening at the office of California Sen. Dianne Feinstein (Annette Bening), who's about to oversee an investigation into just what happened at U.S.-run prisons and "black sites" during the Bush-Cheney years.

Soon Jones and two cohorts are spending their days (and much of their nights) in a grim underground chamber in a CIA building. They spend years digging through more than 6 million pages of documents, as the room comes to resemble a detective's office in a murder-investigation thriller. Except that the mug shots on the wall aren't of suspects. They're of more than 100 victims of American brutality.

Burns, who has scripted three films for director Steven Soderbergh, nimbly distills key information into realistic dialogue. Jones discusses what he has learned with his boss, his fellow investigators and (cautiously) a reporter (Matthew Rhys). Further facts are revealed when Jones visits a lawyer after he's accused, groundlessly, of misconduct.

Conflicting Tales Of A School Shooting In 'The Library'

Conflicting Tales Of A School Shooting In 'The Library'

Warning: 'Side Effects' May Include Eye-Rolling

Warning: 'Side Effects' May Include Eye-Rolling

The investigation is supplemented by yellow-tinged flashbacks that introduce the CIA contractors (Douglas Hodge and T. Ryder Smith) who told the agency what it apparently wanted to hear: that sleep deprivation, nonstop heavy-metal music, stress positions, "rectal rehydration," waterboarding and other abuses would elicit useful information.

"You know this is against the law?" asks an alarmed FBI agent.

After the fact, everybody seems to know it was, which is why no one in authority wants Jones' report to go public. CIA Director John Brennan (Ted Levine) intends to stop the release. So does McDonough, who now represents "post-partisan" President Barack Obama. Crucial assistance finally arrives in the form of a real-world cameo.

The Report has been compared to the brilliant Spotlight , and the two films are similar in some ways. But where Spotlight was an ensemble piece, The Report is propelled mostly by Driver's performance as an intense yet amiable loner. While Bening is persuasive as Feinstein, without literally imitating her, most of the other characters are ghosts summoned from sheets of paper. Jones engages them fiercely, without ever actually meeting them.

Burns incorporates illuminating or amusing asides, including a glancing blow at Zero Dark Thirty , which bought into the myth of torture's effectiveness. And, as one disillusioned nonlawyer tells the self-styled interrogation gurus, "It's only legal if it works."

The Report has a few clunky moments, and it occasionally introduces complications that are dispatched before they have time to resonate. That's not surprising, since Burns is condensing the events of nearly 15 years into under two hours.

Those events, by the way, have not concluded definitively. Only an executive summary of the torture report was published. The Report ends with the filmmakers' request that the entire document be released.

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Calm deliberation … Adam Driver as Daniel J Jones in The Report.

The Report review – Adam Driver's battle to expose CIA torture

Driver stars as the real-life researcher who struggled to publish his study of ‘extreme interrogation techniques’ in this cool, dry look at the facts

S cott Z Burns is the writer-producer who in collaboration with Steven Soderbergh has helped create a number of quirky films on conspiracist-paranoid themes, most recently the scattershot satire The Laundromat . Now he makes his feature directing debut with a more sober, downbeat and valuable docudrama about US Senate researcher Daniel J Jones and his decade-long battle to publish the gigantic report he’d written on the CIA’s post-9/11 use of “extreme interrogation techniques” (such as waterboarding), a report impeded at every step by the agency and the White House itself.

The film does a good job at showing how the right succeeded in framing the debate in terms of wussy-liberals-are-squeamish-but-torture-gets-answers. The point of Jones’s report is that torture did not get answers. This is not a Watergate-type tale of journalist-heroism; the person risking jail and meeting shadowy informants in underground carparks is Jones himself, played by Adam Driver with a cool, calm deliberation, although sometimes Driver is a little too impassive. People will occasionally say to him: “You look tired …” Does he?

Annette Bening plays Senator Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate’s select committee on intelligence (and Jones’s boss); Jon Hamm plays Denis McDonough, the Obama chief of staff who is deeply uneasy about the report, being employed by a drone-enthusiast administration keen to work with the CIA; and Douglas Hodge plays the US air force psychologist James Mitchell, credited with inventing the Torture 2.0 techniques for the CIA – a rackety figure who is this story’s G Gordon Liddy.

In its way, The Report is a return to the “war on terror” movies from a decade ago, such as Lions for Lambs , The Kingdom and Rendition . (It was this third film that interestingly quoted Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice: torture victims “speak upon the rack / Where men enforced do speak anything.”) Jones is shown dismissing the TV drama 24 , in which Jack Bauer gets quick answers out of people by torturing them – and who knows how influential that TV show was in terms of public policy? – and frowningly watching a trailer for the most famous war-on-terror movie of all: Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty , about the mission to kill Osama bin Laden, a film that notoriously appeared to endorse the CIA’s official line that torture gets results, if only indirectly. The Report is a cool, dry look at the facts.

The Report is released in Australia on 14 November and in the UK and the US on 15 November.

  • Adam Driver
  • Annette Bening
  • Drama films
  • US politics

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Film Review: ‘The Report’

Adam Driver stars in a darkly gripping political drama, about the CIA's use of torture after 9/11, that's authentic enough to give you that '70s feeling.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

Chief Film Critic

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Adam Driver appears in The Report by Scott Z. Burns, an official selection of the Premieres program at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by Atsushi Nishijima.All photos are copyrighted and may be used by press only for the purpose of news or editorial coverage of Sundance Institute programs. Photos must be accompanied by a credit to the photographer and/or 'Courtesy of Sundance Institute.' Unauthorized use, alteration, reproduction or sale of logos and/or photos is strictly prohibited.

Let’s talk, for a moment, about the political thrillers of the 1970s — not just the reality and urgency that coursed through them, but the history-written-with-lightning feeling they gave you. In a galvanizing work of art like “All the President’s Men,” or even a topically charged entertainment like “Three Days of the Condor,” it was the hunt for truth, the moment-to-moment investigative fervor of it, that was always so addictive and engrossing. In those movies, morality and drama became one.

“ The Report ,” written and directed by Scott Z. Burns, is a true-life drama about relatively recent events in Washington, D.C., that carries that same rapt, tense, electric, slice-to-the-bone-of-what’s-happening sensation. It’s the sort of movie that Hollywood once made and now, for the most part, comes up with only rarely; maybe now we have to go to Sundance to see it. But even here, “The Report” is a bit of an anomaly: a large-scale saga of corruption, justice, and overwhelming relevance that’s at once gripping and eye-opening, even if you’re the sort of news junkie who thinks they already know the story.

As the title comes on screen, it says “The Torture Report,” and then the word “torture” gets blocked out, as if it were being redacted. The movie goes on to tell the true story of Daniel J. Jones ( Adam Driver ), a staff member of the U.S. Select Committee on Intelligence who in 2009, while working for Sen. Dianne Feinstein ( Annette Bening ), gets charged with heading up a Senate investigative report into the CIA’s use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” during the aftermath of 9/11. The impetus for creating the report is the revelation that the Agency has destroyed hundreds of hours of tapes of those same interrogations. What, exactly, went on in them? Jones spent five years and combed through 6.3 million pages of documents to get the answer.

How do you make an exciting movie out of this? Burns, a veteran screenwriter (“The Bourne Ultimatum”) and producer (“An Inconvenient Truth”), has never directed a major feature before, and he doesn’t try to gussy up the events by spoon-feeding us a lot of melodramatic cereal. “The Report” is as steeped in information and wonkish detail as a deep-dive work of journalism. It lets the facts, and our apprehension of what they mean, tell the story. That’s a tricky thing to bring off, but Burns, by trusting the audience, has created a darkly authentic political thriller that does exactly what a movie like this one should do. It leaves you chastened and inspired.

Driver, in jackets and ties and a squared-off haircut that give him the look of a bureaucratic D.C. lifer, plays Jones as a man consumed, at the expense of everything else, by his mission: to learn what the CIA did and why. He and his small staff are given a basement office that’s like a fluorescent concrete tomb with obsidian computer screens. As he looks at what happened to each of the key Middle Eastern figures who was captured and detained after 9/11 (there were, in the end, a total of 119), the film flashes back to extended sequences that show us how the enhanced interrogation techniques program evolved and what it really looked like.

We’ve seen bits of this in movies before, such as “Zero Dark Thirty,” which implied that shutting someone up in a box rendered him more cooperative. Burns sticks closer to the real record: that when prisoners were subjected to practices that edged over the line of what the Geneva Convention allows, they didn’t give up vital information — they fell into states of agonized delirium and said nothing, or spouted nonsense, or revealed old contacts. In “The Report,” we see the prisoners squirreled away at black sites, in unnamed countries, in dungeons with tunnels, getting slammed against walls or “short-shackled” to the floor, with death metal blasting, or being waterboarded, a process that was said to be uncomfortable yet “safe” — but, in fact, was not without its hazards.

The man heading up the interrogations, Dr. Jim Mitchell (Douglas Hodge), is a psychologist with a private contracting company who is given a budget of $80 million to grind the truth out of the prisoners. Yet he has never conducted an interrogation before (yes, this all really happened), and he operates under the basic intuitive sadistic assumption that ruled these practices: the more pain, the more gain. When Mitchell and his associate waterboard somebody and ask, “Where’s the next attack?,”  it’s as if they seriously believe that there truly is one in the works, and that the prisoner knows it, and that he’s going to give it up.

But as Jones scrutinizes one case after another, he’s confronted not just by the horror of what went on, but by the staggering ineffectiveness of it. None of the prisoners reveals anything. Ever. Yet that’s not how the CIA spins it. In truth, the things that were learned during that time — like the revelation of who Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the architect of the 9/11 attacks, was, or the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden — all came from connecting dots of information that the CIA already had in its possession. The enhanced interrogation techniques trashed international law  and gave the U.S. nothing. And, of course, became the ultimate recruiting tool for radical Islam.

You may say, “Sure, I knew all this already.” But it’s not as if Watergate was news the first time (or the 10th) you ever watched “All the President’s Men.” “The Report” burrows into the palace intrigue of how the realities of American torture were covered up, and of what was going on in the minds of the people who were doing this stuff. President Bush, as the film makes explicit, was kept out of the loop; it was Vice President Dick Cheney who gave the approval. And what “The Report” shows us is that the torture, even though it wasn’t working, gratified something in the psyche of the men (and, on occasion, the women) who operated the American security machine. Whether or not it worked, it was on some level payback, a primitive signifier of war.

Adam Driver, who is such a fine actor, keeps finding new things to surprise us with, changing up his persona in ways that feel entirely organic. In “The Report,” he speaks in rapid fire, with concentrated purpose and intensity, and he’s tasked with the challenge of delivering great big heady chunks of dialogue that are there to lure us into the action on an expository level — i.e., he keeps telling the audience what’s going on. Yet the fiercely contained force of Driver’s performance is that he makes this ongoing factual download a vital part of the character. Washington is the ultimate town that runs on information, and for Jones, the complicated question of what the CIA did, and knew, becomes an issue of obsession. He’s explaining it to us and to himself.

About halfway through the movie, he gets ready to deliver his report (which ran, in its original form, to nearly 7,000 pages), and that’s when he runs up against the roadblock that was always lurking: the CIA plans to kill it. Even after President Obama is elected and uses the T-word (“torture”) in his first few days of office, he wants to get the issue behind him. But Jones, though he’s at the nexus of U.S. government power, realizes that he’s been appointed, in effect, to be a whistleblower. He’s like a one-man Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and he pushes back against any attempt to bury the report. He ends up with a target on his back.

Staging recent history, and making it convincing, isn’t easy. But Scott Z. Burns brings it all off with supreme confidence. He leaps from Senate hearings to back-room meetings with the threatening new head of the CIA, John Brennan (Ted Levine), to Jones’s Deep Throat-like encounters with a CIA medical officer (Tim Blake Nelson) and the New York Times national security reporter. Jones is also forced to take a meeting with a high-priced lawyer (Corey Stoll) when it looks like he may face criminal charges for leaking a classified document: the CIA’s own report on enhanced interrogation techniques, overseen by Leon Panetta, which came to the same conclusion that Jones’ report did. The CIA knew torture wasn’t working, but couldn’t admit it because it would damage the Agency’s credibility.

The average political drama would look at a reality like that and tut-tut its disapproval. But part of the seductive intelligence of “The Report” is that Burns, as a filmmaker, wants to understand as much as he wants to wave a moral flag. His film isn’t a liberal-left harangue. It unfolds in the world of realpolitik, where a man like Daniel Jones operates out of a purity that the country needs but, at the same time, can’t always afford. (There’s a dryly funny phone call between Sen. Feinstein and President Obama, in which Obama’s curt refusal to make heads roll is basically his way of paying the CIA back for killing Osama bin Laden, and therefore aiding his re-election.)

Nowhere is the balance of idealism and practicality, valor and hard-headedness, more exquisitely embodied than in Annette Bening’s superb performance as Dianne Feinstein. From her beauty-shop hair to her iron-lady gaze to her voice of delicate will, Bening is note-perfect. But she also makes Feinstein a ticklish study in how power works, at its best, in Washington — as a game of survival that filters the right thing to do through the art of the possible. “The Report” is a galvanizing movie that, if handled correctly, many people will want to see, because by the time it’s over the movie feels like something this country needs now more than ever: a reckoning.

Reviewed at Sundance Film Festival (Premieres), January 26, 2019. Running time: 118 MIN.

  • Production: A VICE Media production. Producers: Steven Soderbergh, Jennifer Fox, Scott Z. Burns, Kerry Orent, Michael Sugar, Danny Gabai, Eddy Moretti. Executive producers: Nancy Dubuc, Shane Smith, Natalie Farrey, Lila Yacoub, Michael DiVerdi, Vincent Landay, TJ Rinomato.
  • Crew: Director, screenplay: Scott Z. Burns. Camera (color, widescreen): Eigil Bryld. Editor: Greg O’Bryant. Music: David Wingo, Matthew Rhys.
  • With: Adam Driver, Annette Bening, Jon Hamm, Ted Levine, Maura Tierney, Michael C. Hall.

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A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Depicts courage and persistence/perseverance in tr

Daniel Jones is something of a role model in that

Scenes of prisoners being tortured. Torture techni

Naked male prisoners shown. Naked bottoms.

Uses of "f--k," "s--t," "bulls--t," "a--hole," "as

Social drinking in bar.

Parents need to know that The Report is a fact-based drama about the efforts to investigate the CIA's use of torture to question suspects after 9/11. A few sequences demonstrate the kinds of torture used, including waterboarding, mock burials, and hands being chained to the floor. There are also scenes of…

Positive Messages

Depicts courage and persistence/perseverance in trying to do the right thing, even when many others are convinced that it's not.

Positive Role Models

Daniel Jones is something of a role model in that he never gives up fighting for something he believes is right, but he's also shown giving up most of the rest of his life to do it. (He has no life outside of work.)

Violence & Scariness

Scenes of prisoners being tortured. Torture techniques demonstrated (including waterboarding, mock burials, rectal rehydration, etc.). Kicking prisoners. Hands bolted to floor. Shouting.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Uses of "f--k," "s--t," "bulls--t," "a--hole," "ass."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that The Report is a fact-based drama about the efforts to investigate the CIA's use of torture to question suspects after 9/11. A few sequences demonstrate the kinds of torture used, including waterboarding, mock burials, and hands being chained to the floor. There are also scenes of shouting, kicking, etc. Male prisoners are shown naked, including bare bottoms. Language is fairly strong, with uses of "f--k," "s--t," "bulls--t," and more. Adults drink socially. The film starts off a bit dry, and it's never very dynamic, but it manages to work up enough outrage and suspense to make it worth a look for mature viewers. Adam Driver and Annette Bening co-star. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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  • Parents say (3)
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Based on 3 parent reviews

This film does not diverge much from the original story...harrowing.

What's the story.

In THE REPORT, staffer Daniel J. Jones ( Adam Driver ), working under Senator Dianne Feinstein ( Annette Bening ), is assigned to head an investigation into the CIA's use of "enhanced interrogation techniques" on terrorist suspects following September 11, 2001. After years of relentless study, Jones confirms that these techniques were nothing short of brutal torture -- and that they resulted in no useful information whatsoever. He also finds that the CIA was deliberately misrepresenting data. Jones compiles a massive report, but when it comes time to publish it, he finds that the CIA isn't particularly eager to have the information out in the open.

Is It Any Good?

Essentially a movie about people in suits sitting in offices, staring at computers, and talking to each other, this fact-based drama somehow eventually gathers up enough tension to click. Written and directed by Scott Z. Burns, who previously wrote The Informant! , Contagion , and Side Effects , The Report opens tentatively, with a flash-forward to show that Jones may be in serious trouble, before heading back to its natural beginning, a rather static series of scenes in which everything is introduced -- including Jones' depressing, windowless office -- and the rules are laid down.

But at some point during the movie's two hours, it starts to crackle. Perhaps it's because of the many shockingly awful events we hear about in the news or because of righteous anger over the blatant wrongdoing. Perhaps it's the thrill of seeing Jones getting a much-needed breakthrough: a secret, Deep Throat-style meeting with a man ( Tim Blake Nelson ), sick with guilt and terrified, who worked for the program as a "doctor." Or perhaps it's Driver's performance, which is obsessive and creates a forward momentum. Certainly Bening's performance as Senator Feinstein is a skillful treat. In the end, The Report is worth seeing for anyone who's interested in true political stories.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about The Report 's depiction of violence and torture. How did these scenes affect you? How do they compare to fantasy/action violence?

How do characters justify the use of torture here? Do their arguments make sense? Are there other times in history when people have talked themselves into believing that something wrong is actually good?

How accurate do you think the movie is compared to what actually happened? Why might filmmakers choose to change the facts in a film based on actual events?

Is Daniel J. Jones a role model for the work that he did? What are his flaws? What did he give up to perform this work?

Movie Details

  • In theaters : November 15, 2019
  • On DVD or streaming : November 28, 2019
  • Cast : Adam Driver , Annette Bening , Jon Hamm
  • Director : Scott Z. Burns
  • Inclusion Information : Female actors
  • Studio : Amazon Studios
  • Genre : Drama
  • Character Strengths : Perseverance
  • Run time : 119 minutes
  • MPAA rating : R
  • MPAA explanation : some scenes of inhumane treatment and torture, and language
  • Last updated : February 27, 2022

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The Real Story Behind Amazon's The Report Starring Adam Driver as Daniel J. Jones

The new film dives into the Senate Intelligence Committee's investigation of the CIA's Enhanced Interrogation Techniques.

White-collar worker, Chin, Businessperson, Suit, Gesture, Conversation,

In one of the first marks on our apocalyptic Bingo Card of the 21st Century, after 9/11 the CIA began secret use of Enhanced Interrogation Techniques to torture detainees held under suspicion of connection to Al Qaeda. Violent details of these techniques were mostly unknown to the majority of the American public and members of U.S. government until word got out that the CIA was destroying tapes of the interrogations, which raised some eyebrows. Enough so, at least, for the Senate to approve two related investigations regarding the interrogations of some of the 119 men detained. The Report , now available to stream on Amazon, outlines the details of the Senate Intelligence Committee investigations. Starring Adam Driver as Daniel J. Jones, the Senate staffer who led the investigations, Scott Z. Burn’s new political drama delves into the details gleaned by Jones and his team from over 6 million pages of CIA correspondence and documents, and what it means for the U.S. today.

In the film, increasingly haunted by what he learns, a sleep-deprived Adam Driver leans over a computer, slams coffee after coffee, yells at senators, draws frantic diagrams on a whiteboard, and considers leaking documents as he transfers them from safe to briefcase and back again. Adding to the growing sense of dread Driver’s character relays to viewers, familiar names haunt the dialogue of the film and Jones’ report. First comes Denis McDonough, then Dianne Feinstein, Sheldon Whitehouse, George W. Bush, Barack Obama—and it’s easy to realize The Report isn’t a historical artifact so much as a frank look in the mirror at very real government officials and the very real events that made up the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program and now-outlawed use of Enhanced Interrogation Techniques. While the actual full-length report is still classified, here’s everything the film outlined.

Who is Daniel J. Jones?

"The Report" Washington DC Premiere

Why was the interrogation report project started?

In November 2005 , four years after President Bush authorized use of torture during interrogations linked in 9/11, multiple tapes showing these interrogations were destroyed by the CIA. Michael Hayden, then director of the CIA, told his employees the tapes were destroyed to protect the identities of undercover agents and also claimed the tapes had no intelligence value. Suspicions arose around the motivation to destroy the tapes, and the Senate voted 14-1 to investigate. After that investigation, the Senate voted again in favor of a further investigation into the Detention and Interrogation Program, using over 6 million pages of documents and correspondence provided by the CIA. While filming The Report only took 26 days, watching the slow, steady plod of Daniel J. Jones and his few coworkers investigate the CIA’s torture program is, at first, like watching a dripping faucet fill an olympic pool. The commission of the report was only one in a series of events that took place over more than a decade.

What is EIT?

The main focus of the film is Jones’ five years spent compiling the Senate report on CIA use of EIT, or Enhanced Interrogation Techniques. This was a system of twelve procedures used by the CIA at least between 2002 and 2003. EIT’s twelve steps were: the attention grasp, walling, facial hold, facial slap, cramped confinement, wall standing, stress positions, sleep deprivation, waterboarding, use of diapers, use of insects, and mock burials. The goal of gaining psychological control of detainees was valued over ethics, and eventually led to the death of Gul Rahman by hypothermia and the reported waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times. All claims that EIT led to gainful information have been debunked by the Senate Intelligence Committee and an internal CIA investigation. However, as late as April 2012, government officials falsely claimed EIT directly led to the capture of Osama Bin Laden.

Report On CIA Interrogations To Be Released By Senate Intelligence Chair Sen. Dianne Feinstein

Who were “the contractors”?

The twelve-pronged EIT program was designed by two psychologists contracted by the CIA, and in the film, they used a PowerPoint presentation to get the job. John “Bruce” Jessen and James Mitchell previously worked at the Air Force regarding capture evasion and interrogation resistance, they had no first-hand interrogation experience and their previous studies were not related to Al Qaeda, 9/11, or language studies. Jessen and Mitchell conducted evaluations on their own EIT program, suggesting a serious conflict of interest. Eventually, both the Senate investigation and the CIA internal report conceded that rapport-building is the only effective interrogation technique, after paying Jessen and Mitchell more than 80 million taxpayer’s dollars to do the opposite.

Did the CIA really hack Senate computers?

One of the most memorable details from The Report is Jones’ insistence on access to a printer, and how many safes were in his office. He later told a lawyer that this was because documents kept mysteriously disappearing from the CIA server. In March 2014, then-CIA Director John Brennan denied the claims , calling them “beyond the scope of reason.” However, a few months later the CIA Inspector General’s report backed up claims that the CIA repeatedly hacked Senate computers in an effort to stop the release of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report.

Where does it leave the U.S. today?

The use of EIT not only didn’t gather any unique intelligence, but actually hindered the U.S.’ goal to prosecute architects of the 9/11 attacks. EIT impeded legal course of action and undermined the U.S.’ international standing. In The Report , an objection to EIT is raised on the grounds that it violates the Geneva Convention, and if used, American prisoners of war will never be able to reasonably claim a right to humane treatment after their country’s own violations. While it’s unknown whether or not a CIA agent ever raised that concern, as media outlets reported on the destruction of interrogation tapes, the American public as well as Senate members demanded information. Consequently, President Obama admitted the U.S.’ use of torture. However, he also said he understood why it happened. No CIA agent has been prosecuted for war crimes. Gina Haspel , who was chief of a black site in Thailand that waterboarded detainees, is now Director of the CIA. The question The Report really raises is how a government run by biased and political people holds itself accountable . Unfortunately, the answer as of now is that it doesn’t.

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What’s Fact and What’s Fiction in The Report

Did the cia really hack into the senate’s private files did abu zubaydah really prefer pepsi we break down the new adam driver movie..

Late in the new movie The Report , Adam Driver’s Daniel Jones—the Senate investigator digging into the CIA’s torture program—rejects a suggestion that he leak his findings, saying, “If it’s going to come out, it’s going to come out the right way.” That same scrupulous spirit appears to have animated nearly every aspect of the film’s production. Ethan Tobman, the drama’s production designer, told Architectural Digest that he had an ambassador personally sketch the Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility , or SCIF, where Jones is shown reporting his findings. Tobman’s set design team also had the black-and-white marble in the Hart Senate Office Building’s hearing room digitized for duplication on the film’s Queens, New York, soundstage. Writer-director Scott Z. Burns also pulled some lines verbatim from C-SPAN videos, declassified reports, and contemporaneous news accounts—research that he conducted in consultation with the actual Daniel Jones.

But is the movie’s depiction of the government’s internal workings as accurate as its portrayal of its interior design? We break it all down below.

The Torturing

There’s no need to belabor this, but the film is accurate in its assertion that the agency detained 119 individuals, roughly one-fourth of whom did not even merit capture according to the CIA’s own internal standards . “ Suspected Islamic extremist ” Gul Rahman did, in fact, die of hypothermia at a CIA black site code-named Cobalt, and psychologist Bruce Jessen had been involved in the pitiless interrogation that lead to his death. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, really was waterboarded at least 183 times, and the Senate committee did conclude from internal CIA documents that these methods were “not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation from detainees.”

As part of their strategy for inducing sleep deprivation, disorientation, and other conditions conducive to “learned helplessness,” the interrogators really did subject some prisoners to ceaseless replays of Marilyn Manson songs , and while there is no public record of the agency using “Yankee Doodle Dandy” as deployed in the film, patriotic music including Neil Diamond’s “America” was a recurring theme in their agonizing “mental breakdown playlists,” alongside Bruce Springsteen’s perpetually misunderstood protest song “ Born in the USA .” There aren’t any published accounts suggesting that Slayer’s “Angel of Death” was ever used, as it was in the film, although metal was used with enough regularity to make the idea plausible.

One more admirable detail about the CIA did manage to make its way into the film: The agency’s Office of Medical Services really did stick its neck out on numerous occasions to express criticism of the “enhanced interrogation” program. Tim Blake Nelson’s character, Raymond Nathan, although fictionalized, does accurately convey the role that the office’s physician’s assistants played in the torture program: These low-level staffers were employed more as pliant participants than actual physicians , though they would occasionally balk and report their objections.

The movie’s depiction of the origins of the program is also fairly accurate. Burns had initially secured the rights to a 2007 Vanity Fair article by Katherine Eban with the hopes of writing a black comedy about its subjects: the “enhanced interrogation” program’s shockingly incompetent masterminds, retired Air Force psychologists James Elmer Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. Mitchell and Jessen’s disturbing pitch to take the military’s torture endurance training program Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape, or SERE, and flip it into a brutal interrogation protocol did in fact come with a lucrative $81 million payout. And the pair did travel the globe managing this program, officially dubbed Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation, or RDI, despite their laughable dearth of interrogation experience.

While the film accurately conveys the Senate report’s findings that the CIA believed it had not fully briefed then-President George W. Bush on the extent of the torture program until about four years in, April 8, 2006, any precise timeline of Bush’s knowledge has been muddled by contradictory statements made in Bush’s own memoir, Decision Points , as well as in the recollections of other agency and executive branch officials. Dick Cheney knew years earlier, of course. The vice president was informed during a July 29, 2003, CIA briefing along with national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, Attorney General John Ashcroft, and others.

The Torturers

No less significant than faithfully recounting RDI’s grim details, The Report takes great pains to accurately convey all of the inane language used by the program’s architects to justify their human rights violations.

John Yoo, the Bush White House’s deputy assistant attorney general in the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel, is depicted delivering a terrifying little exegesis reviewing all of the inhumane activities that his parsing of torture’s legal definition would allow. Played by Pun Bandhu, he considers gouging out a detainee’s eyes , dousing them in acid , nearly anything, so long as it doesn’t betray intentional “malice or sadism” or lead to “death, organ failure, or serious impairment of body functions.” The speech is cribbed nearly word for word from Yoo’s own infamous 81-page “torture memo,” submitted to the Department of Defense in 2003.

In another jarring moment, the then-head of the CIA’s Clandestine Service, Jose Rodriguez, justifies enacting Mitchell and Jessen’s pitch for inverting SERE with the proclamation that everyone involved needs to put on “their big boy pants”—a real phrase that the real Rodriguez would actually utter out loud to 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl a decade later in precisely the same context.

The most notable elision is that of Rodriguez’s long-serving real-world chief of staff, Gina Haspel, who is now Trump’s CIA director. In almost every worthwhile detail, Haspel, who is name-checked only once in the film, is replaced by a composite character named Bernadette (Maura Tierney), who, like Haspel, was present at the CIA black site in Thailand where al-Qaida suspect Abu Zubaydah was nearly tortured to death. And according to Human Rights Watch, Haspel, along with Rodriguez, ordered the destruction of the CIA’s interrogation videos .

Were liberties taken in the portrayal of these officials? Yes, but where exactly is hard to say. Unless it came up in Scott Burns’ personal screenwriting inquiries, it does not appear to be true that either Mitchell or Jessen saved the rag used to waterboard Khalid Sheikh Mohammed or toyed with auctioning it off on eBay, as they do in the movie. Similarly, while the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center facilities were evacuated based on a terror threat in the aftermath of 9/11, it’s not clear if Rodriguez and Haspel were there to endure that panic. There’s also no reported evidence that Haspel put pressure on agents to justify the torture program with the statement that “it’s only legal if this works.”

The People Investigating the Torturing

Compression is inevitable when dramatizing stories like this, and you can rest assured that the Senate’s actual 6,700-page report was written and compiled by more than three Senate staffers in a windowless room, after their three Republican counterparts stopped showing up to the satellite CIA facility in northern Virginia where the research was conducted. At least 19 other staffers are mentioned and thanked by name in Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s introduction to the report . Although Daniel Jones led the project and wrote “ thousands of its pages ,” per Feinstein, he was not the sole author of the entire document.

Nevertheless, a lot of the investigation’s key dramatic moments as seen in The Report are real and are more or less faithfully conveyed. The researchers were given a partitioned server, dubbed RDINet , expressly installed for the Senate team’s secure review of CIA documents, and that server was indeed hacked by the CIA after Jones shared details of the agency’s damning internal investigation into the torture program, known as the Panetta Review, with Colorado Sen. Mark Udall. And during the confirmation hearings for CIA attorney Caroline Krass, Udall did indeed, with Jones sitting behind him , out the existence of the Panetta Review in an attempt to keep the Senate’s torture report from being suppressed. Similarly, Jones did risk his career by storing a paper copy of the Panetta Review in a secure safe in the Senate offices out of concern over the CIA’s access to RDINet. Amid all of this, many of the qualms expressed by President Barack Obama’s CIA director, John Brennan, including statements he makes in the film at a March 11, 2014, Council on Foreign Relations event , were taken word for word from his public statements.

Some of the plot’s smaller, character-building details are also grounded in reality. Jones really  did interview for a position with Obama’s future chief of staff Denis McDonough —and that initial meeting did reverberate in their sparring over the highly politicized fate of the Senate torture report during the 2014 midterm elections. However, although she has very likely uttered the words strong and pills many times in her life and in many contexts, Dianne Feinstein does not appear to have used the phrase “I hope you took your strong pills today” to such dramatic effect as Annette Bening does in the film.

The Tortured

Let the record show that detainee Abu Zubaydah loved an ice-cold Pepsi. When you see FBI counterterrorism investigators fetch an infirm Zubaydah the choice of a new generation , know that this personal preference has been widely documented: Jessen testified to it in a Jan. 20, 2017, sworn and videotaped deposition conducted by the U.S. Department of Justice; it’s mentioned in at least five separate entries in an official U.S. government translation of Zubaydah’s diaries (“He knew, as everybody over here knows, how much I love ‘Pepsi Cola.’ And how much I used to indulge in drinking it”); it crops up all over .

No terrorists, suspected terrorists, or hapless foreigners caught in the dragnet seem to have been invented for the convenience of The Report ’s narrative structure. Estimates from Human Rights Watch suggest that somewhere near 100 detainees died as a result of U.S. interrogation methods in Iraq and Afghanistan during the Bush years, including those related to the CIA’s program. Some things don’t need to be exaggerated.

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2019, Drama/Mystery & thriller, 1h 58m

What to know

Critics Consensus

The Report draws on a dark chapter in American history to offer a sober, gripping account of one public servant's crusade for accountability. Read critic reviews

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The report videos, the report   photos.

FBI agent Daniel Jones performs an exhaustive investigation into the CIA's use of torture on suspected terrorists.

Rating: R (Language|Torture|Scenes of Inhumane Treatment)

Genre: Drama, Mystery & thriller

Original Language: English

Director: Scott Z. Burns

Producer: Steven Soderbergh , Jennifer Fox , Scott Z. Burns , Danny Gabai , Eddy Moretti , Kerry Orent , Michael Sugar

Writer: Scott Z. Burns

Release Date (Theaters): Nov 15, 2019  limited

Release Date (Streaming): Nov 22, 2019

Runtime: 1h 58m

Distributor: Amazon Studios

Production Co: CNN, Vice Media, Harbor Picture Company, Anonymous Content

Aspect Ratio: Scope (2.35:1)

Cast & Crew

Adam Driver

Daniel Jones

Annette Bening

Senator Dianne Feinstein

Denis McDonough

John Brennan

Maura Tierney

Michael C. Hall

Thomas Eastman

Jennifer Morrison

Caroline Krass

Tim Blake Nelson

Raymond Nathan

Sarah Goldberg

Douglas Hodge

James Mitchell

Fajer Al-Kaisi

Scott Z. Burns

Screenwriter

Steven Soderbergh

Jennifer Fox

Danny Gabai

Eddy Moretti

Kerry Orent

Michael Sugar

Michael Di Verdi

Executive Producer

Vincent Landay

Tj Rinomato

Lila Yacoub

Eigil Bryld

Cinematographer

Greg O'Bryant

Film Editing

David Wingo

Original Music

Ethan Tobman

Production Design

Art Director

Rich Devine

Set Decoration

Susan Lyall

Costume Design

News & Interviews for The Report

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The Indie Fresh List: Adam Driver, Sterling K. Brown, and Two Pop Culture Documentaries Lead the Way

Critic Reviews for The Report

Audience reviews for the report.

Political junkies, especially liberals, should get their fix from The Report, although a president Obama staffer and CIA appointee get exposed for their misconduct, in this re-telling of how Daniel Jones exposed the United States torture techniques the the Bush era. The movie details the many efforts to thwart Jones efforts during and after his exhaustive investigation. Adam Driver almost makes this a one man show. He portrays Jones as a determined and single focused investigator with no political agenda. Slowly, Driver begins to deliver several diatribes about CIA crimes that come off a bit too politically motivated by the filmmaker. Nonetheless, a solid entry into my list of movies government movies to watch.

the report torture

Mostly boring, that said there is something interesting in the movie's inert drama. Some of the worst things America has ever done where implemented by dispassionate mid level bureaucrats so it makes sense to go after them in the same way.

I always seem to be fascinated by true stories that make it into a feature film, that were otherwise hidden until then, but I also wonder how true it really is, given the fact that these stories were kept a secret. That aside, regardless of the source material, I always go into movies like The Report with an open mind and try not to nitpick facts that probably aren't completely true. Put together in the same vein as movies like The Social Network or Molly's Game, the pacing of this movie is off the charts. While it's absolutely an imperfect movie in retrospect, this is a solid watch and here's why.  After the horrific day known as 9/11 had passed, Daniel Jones (Adam Driver) was recruited to helm an investigation into the CIA's secretive ways of interrogating individuals. Some of the findings were disgusting and thus sparked the need to get this story in the public eye. While I don't believe all stories like this need attention, I believe this one warranted a film adaptation. The material at hand and the nicely paced editing by Greg O'Bryant were the standout elements here because the wasn't always interesting enough to hold my attention. The Report is a film that spews tons and tons of information on its audience. There are scenes where I found myself completely invested and others where I was slightly bored. Not to say the movie as a whole is boring, but I didn't think there were enough surprises to really make this movie hit home. From the editing to the quippy dialogue, it just felt like a movie that had the potential to be a great film like The Social Network, but it just didn't go the extra mile. Still, this is a solid film with some great performances.  Adam Driver seems to get better and better as the years go on and The Report is no exception to that. This performance shows his immense maturity as an actor and I truly do see a future where he wins an Academy Award one day. It also didn't hurt that he has a lot of great dialogue to work from, written by Scott Z. Burns. From The Bourne Ultimatum to Contagion, I have really liked his work thus far (excluding The Laundromat). This movie was a nice mixture of a lot of good, that just didn't quite become great in many areas. In the end, The Report could've been a movie that received a lot of awards consideration, but I think the novels written about these behind-the-scenes events will probably be more informative. This movie feels more like a briefing, rather than an in-depth exploration. The movie has been made and I wouldn't touch it, but I think it could've worked much better as a television series. I can't exactly rave about the movie as a whole, but it's worth watching for the story alone.

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The report true story: what amazon's cia torture movie leaves out.

While it is based on the Senate's attempts to expose the CIA's torture tactics post-9/11, The Report jumps around the story. Here's what it missed.

Scott Z. Burns'  The Report   tells the true story of investigator Daniel J. Jones' obsessive tracking of the CIA-sanctioned program that led to the torturing of over 100 "potential" terrorists – but how much did the Amazon original movie leave out? The Steven Soderbergh-produced film stars Adam Driver as Jones, who leads a cast that also includes Annette Bening as Senator Dianne Feinstein and Jon Hamm as Denis McDonough, the White House Chief of Staff under the Obama Administration.

Morally duped and frankly embarrassed by the weight of the country's most disastrous terrorist attack, the Central Intelligence Agency authorized the use of EITs – "enhanced interrogation techniques" – to pry any sort of information out of dozens of detainees. The extent to what "enhanced" meant was truly horrendous: waterboarding, sleep deprivation, freezing conditions, and tight-space confinement, among others. And the result, as detailed in Jones' 6,700+ word torture report, showed not only that these practices were bred by malicious intent, but that they were incredibly ineffective as well. The film reenacts Jones' painstaking, five-to-seven-year process of data collection and analysis. Despite the ferocious legal battle that emerged between the CIA and the head of the Senate's investigation committee, Senator Feinstein, Jones' report was finally released to the public on December 9, 2014; the senator called the program "a stain on our values and on our history."

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Given that  the intrinsic and historic value of this story is beyond quantifiable,  The Report  does a fair job of presenting the facts. But again, Jones' final report contained nearly 7,000 pages of incriminating evidence against the Central Intelligence Agency, and frankly, no two-hour movie can tackle such a vast assembly of information. Here's what Amazon Studios and Scott Z. Burns' latest film got right and wrong about Daniel Jones' extensive investigation.

What The Report Gets Right About The CIA Torture Program Investigation

The Report 2019 movie poster

Though the film itself uses  non-linear storytelling , the roots of the actual events can be found in Al-Qaeda's September 11th terrorist attacks. Almost immediately thereafter, psychologists Jim Mitchell (Douglas Hedge) and Bruce Jessen (T. Ryder Smith) approach the CIA with what they consider to be a full-proof plan: a series of brutal interrogation techniques which they guarantee will provide intelligence that would never otherwise see the light of day. With $80 million of taxpayer money, Mitchell and Jessen are sent overseas to oversee the operations of their torture program.

As portrayed in the film, these horrific acts went under the radar for an extensive period of time. It wasn't until 2007, when  The New York Times  reported that the CIA had destroyed tapes of the interrogations two years earlier, that the Senate officially launched their investigation. As the elected leader of the report, Jones, a former FBI analyst in the International Terrorism Operations Section, dove into CIA records. He produced his first findings two years later in 2009, before getting the go-ahead to move forward with the investigation. As shown in the movie, Jones was told that it should only take about a year to complete.

During this time, Attorney General Eric Holder had announced that he was broadening his own criminal investigation into the CIA. Like  The Report  shows, this barred anyone within the agency from speaking to Jones or his team and it was at that point that the Republicans pulled their support. With no outside help, Jones's team completed the 6,700-page document in 2012.

Related: Remember The Titans True Story: What The Movie Gets Right & Changes

As detailed in The Report , Jones and Feinstein were then required to send their findings to the CIA for review. Over that summer, with little help from the Obama Administration, the CIA and Senate debated on what information was vital to the report, what was inaccurate, and what needed to be redacted for "various" reasons. Later that year, once the CIA seemed pinned down to a corner, the agency accused the Senate of first illegally accessing and removing its own review of the interrogation program – the "Panetta Review" that was seen in the film and had mysteriously appeared on his computer one day  – and then Jones and his team for hacking into the CIA mainframe.

Soon enough, however, Feinstein shot back with her own criminal accusations, rightfully accusing the CIA for violating the agreement between the agency and the Senate for conducting an unauthorized search of her staffer's computer network. Though John Brennan (Ted Levine), the director of the CIA at the time, claimed that "nothing could be further from the truth," the CIA's inspector general found that the agency had actually been guilty of Feinstein's accusations. And not only that, but the Panetta Review was revealed to have not only come to the same conclusions as Jones' investigations, but differed heavily from the official response provided by the CIA.

The charges were quickly dropped by the Department of Justice and though the report was then sent to the White House, it came back heavily redacted as well. After Senators Feinstein and John McCain pushed back, the 500-page executive summary of the report was released on December 9, 2014, right before the Democrats lost control of the Senate.

What The Report Gets Wrong

Adam Driver holding a censored page from a government document in a still from The Report

To be fair, for the most part,  The Report 's retelling of this historic investigation is appropriately accurate. The film itself is based on the executive summary – which is over 6,000 pages less than the actual document – so there is certainly a lot of information missing from The Report . But given that it is barred from the public, that isn't really something to discredit the film over.

Related: Netflix's The King True Story: What The Movie Gets Right & Wrong

However, there are a couple of sequences that took a creative license to the actual events. For instance, Senator Feinstein, who is portrayed as the availing public figure of the investigation, only became the Chairman of the Committee in 2009, roughly around the same time the committee launched a larger investigation and two years after Jones first began digging through the CIA's files. This also means that the senator was not the person who asked Jones to spearhead the investigation: he was actually hired by West Virginia Senator Jay Rockefeller to find out what had been on those deleted tapes.

Furthermore, the real Jones told  Esquire  that the scene in which President Obama's announcement of Osama Bin Laden's death is coupled by the CIA's appraisal of the EITs was slightly fabricated. Though it is true that the Obama White House played a lackluster role in the investigation, siding with or deferring to the CIA on pretty much every point, it's not as if the CIA was trying to propel the president's career forward.

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Key Release Dates

The Report 2019 poster

Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors.

the report torture

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"The Report” explores an alarming period in our country’s recent history: the CIA’s suspect detention and interrogation program following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Writer/director Scott Z. Burns ’ intention is clear in illuminating the complicated and covert strategies employed, but the story he’s telling isn’t a naturally cinematic one.

This is a movie about a 6,700-page report that was five arduous years in the making. And while Burns eventually relies on a flashback structure to bring these deeply disturbing moments of cruelty to life, a great deal of “The Report” consists of people sitting around Washington D.C. offices and conference room tables in suits, explaining things to each other and debating policy. Rarely do these scenes crackle. Granted, enormously talented actors are playing these real-life political figures— Annette Bening IS Dianne Feinstein!—but ultimately, the whole endeavor feels like a two-hour information dump, like C-SPAN with a starry cast.

“The Report” is also surprisingly free of tension, given the subject matter; if you’re going to experience any anxiety, it’ll probably come from a sense of worry over whether all of this is going to be on the final exam. For the most part, there’s a simmering sameness to the film’s didactic tone over its two-hour running time. But Adam Driver , being an actor of endless range and versatility, finds unexpected avenues into some pretty dry dialogue throughout this earnest and densely packed drama.

As lead investigator Daniel J. Jones of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Driver becomes increasingly agitated and indignant the deeper he digs into the facts. This is helpful, given that he’s our conduit into this jargony, wonky world. The toll of wading through a never-ending sea of documents is evident in his cadence and demeanor over the passage of time. Looking back on his work when he’s under scrutiny at the film’s start, he tells a high-priced lawyer ( Corey Stoll ) that he was able to devote every day of his life to the report for five years because he had no family or personal relationships. “I wasn’t a very good partner,” he admits in a rare moment of reflection, and it’s a line you could imagine him uttering in the devastating “ Marriage Story ,” as well. The idealism that inspired him to snap a photo of the Capitol building on his way into a 2003 job interview steadily fades; a reversal of that image at the end, as he’s walking away from the Rotunda and toward the Washington Monument a decade later, finds him looking stoic and defeated on a gloomy day.

Burns jumps around in time between Jones’ discovery of documents detailing myriad and horrific examples of torturing detainees and flashbacks that show us exactly what these so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” looked like, sounded like, felt like. The drab grays and cool blues of nondescript, secure rooms within monolithic government buildings give way to lurid oranges and garish greens inside the bowels of secret detention sites. We see naked men, hooded and chained, forced to endure the blaring strains of Marilyn Manson , deprived of sleep and, eventually, subjected to waterboarding. It’s as difficult to watch as you’d imagine. But the swaggering Air Force psychologist ( Douglas Hodge ) who devised these techniques and oversees their implementation only grows more callous throughout this horrifying process—a good ol’ boy with bad ideas.

In between, Jones incrementally reports back to Bening’s Senator Feinstein, who gave him the assignment as chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Bening bears the signature hair and glasses of the veteran California Democrat, as well as her deliberate, measured delivery, but she’s mostly stuck in one low-key gear. Jon Hamm , as senior foreign policy advisor (and eventual Chief of Staff to President Obama) Denis McDonough, emerges as a seasoned pragmatist trying to appease both the Senate and the White House. Tim Blake Nelson briefly brings a welcome sense of hushed danger as a quasi-Deep Throat figure for Jones: a physician’s assistant who witnessed many of the horrors that occurred at these secret sites. And the always-great Ted Levine gives a sly spin to his portrayal of former CIA Director John Brennan; he initially seems like the voice of reason but ultimately reveals himself to be a defiant defender of these questionable tactics.

It’s an unimpeachable cast doing solid work with weighty material. If only the film as a whole weren’t so deadly dull.

Christy Lemire

Christy Lemire

Christy Lemire is a longtime film critic who has written for RogerEbert.com since 2013. Before that, she was the film critic for The Associated Press for nearly 15 years and co-hosted the public television series "Ebert Presents At the Movies" opposite Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, with Roger Ebert serving as managing editor. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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Film credits.

The Report movie poster

The Report (2019)

Rated R for some scenes of inhumane treatment and torture, and language.

118 minutes

Adam Driver as Daniel Jones

Annette Bening as Dianne Feinstein

Jon Hamm as Denis McDonough

Ted Levine as John Brennan

Maura Tierney as Bernadette

Michael C. Hall as Thomas Eastman

Tim Blake Nelson as Raymond Nathan

Corey Stoll as Cyrus Clifford

  • Scott Z. Burns

Cinematographer

  • Eigil Bryld
  • Greg O'Bryant
  • David Wingo

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The True Story Behind the Movie The Report

“Find out exactly what they have and read every word of it.” So says California Senator Dianne Feinstein, played by Annette Bening , to staffer Daniel J. Jones in Amazon’s upcoming political drama The Report. Sen. Feinstein sets Jones, played by Adam Driver , on an investigation of the Central Intelligence Agency’s detention and “enhanced interrogation” — or torture — of suspected terrorists during the administration of President George W. Bush, ultimately a seven-year project that would nearly take over his life.

Written and directed by filmmaker Scott Z. Burns, The Report chronicles Jones’ real investigation on behalf of the Senate Intelligence Committee into the Bush-era CIA as well as the Senate’s subsequent struggle with the Obama administration to release what Jones uncovered .

Working for Sen. Feinstein, then the Chair of the Committee, Jones and his team reviewed around 6.3 million pages of internal CIA documents and wrote a roughly 6,700-page report on their findings — often referred to as the “torture report” — which remains classified to this day.

In 2014, the Senate voted to release a more than 500-page executive summary , which served as a basis for the film’s script. Some dialogue is even pulled from the summary itself.

The film lays out in graphic detail what Jones discovered: that the U.S. government’s detention and interrogation program was inefficient, needlessly brutal and intentionally hidden from policymakers and the American people.

The Report also depicts how President Barack Obama’s administration — specifically John O. Brennan’s CIA — worked to undermine the Committee’s efforts to make their findings public. Jon Hamm plays President Obama’s Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, who the film suggests repeatedly sided with the CIA after the 2011 killing of Osama bin Laden improved the President’s chances for reelection.

Burns tells TIME he consulted the work of investigative journalists like Jane Mayer and James Risen, the autobiographies of CIA officials, interviews with military and law enforcement experts on interrogation, and interviews with the senators on the Intelligence Committee. But the primary source for the film was the declassified executive summary itself.

“I made a choice not to say at the beginning of this movie, ‘Based on a true story’. What I chose to say is that, ‘This movie is based on this report,’” Burns explains. “Before we can identify [whether] a story is true or not, we have to identify what the facts of the story are.”

Burns stresses that the report is about facts. “This is the CIA’s own accounting of their program, and it’s an amazing puzzle that Dan [Jones] was able to put together out of 6.2 million documents. And so one would think if there was a narrative that said this program worked, it would’ve been found somewhere in those 6.2 million documents.”

Here’s a brief overview of the real events behind The Report .

What did the “Torture Report” find?

Jones and his team found that between 2002 and 2008, at least 119 detainees were held by the CIA in covert locations around the world, known as “black sites.” The CIA admitted at least 26 of the detainees were “wrongfully” held.

According to the Committee’s executive summary, “interrogations of CIA detainees were brutal and far worse than the CIA represented to policymakers and others.”

Thirty-nine of the detainees were tortured. The techniques included “walling” (slamming a person against a wall), slaps, nudity, stress positions and sleep deprivation. Some were made to stay awake for as long as a week, and others were told their families were in danger or they were going to be killed. At least five detainees were subjected to unnecessary “rectal rehydration,” and at least three were waterboarded, which simulates the experience of drowning. The report found the interrogations caused “psychological and behavioral issues, including hallucinations, paranoia, insomnia, and attempts at self-harm.”

At least one detainee — Gul Rahman — died, possibly because of hypothermia.

Crucially, Jones’ team also found that the interrogations weren’t effective. Seven detainees provided no intelligence at all, and many detainees made up information, creating faulty intelligence. “Other detainees provided significant accurate intelligence prior to, or without having been subjected to these techniques,” the summary continues. Furthermore, Jones’ team found that the CIA exaggerated the effectiveness of the program and misled the White House, Congress and the American public.

The executive summary concludes that the program was mismanaged. What’s more, it was developed by two psychologists — James Elmer Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, played by Douglas Hodge and T. Ryder Smith in the film — who had no experience as interrogators and lacked specialized knowledge of both al-Qaeda and counterterrorism.

Burns says he was first drawn to this topic after reading Katherine Eban’s 2007 Vanity Fair article “ Rorschach and Awe ”, which examines how Mitchell and Jessen developed the interrogation program. Burns’ parents are both psychologists, and he says he was interested in “the idea that a field of science that had largely existed to explain human behavior and heal people could somehow be used by this.”

The Report features prolonged scenes of Mitchell and Jessen’s interrogations of suspected terrorists, and includes some composite characters, such as Maura Tierney’s CIA official, because names in the executive summary were redacted.

How did the Torture Report come together?

The tapes investigation ( 2007-2009).

The investigation into the CIA’s interrogation program began in 2007, when the New York Times reported that the CIA had destroyed tapes of interrogations in 2005. Two years before Feinstein became Jones’ boss, West Virginia Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller was the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and he asked Jones to review the CIA documents to determine what was on the tapes.

Before working for Sen. Rockefeller, Jones had been an FBI analyst in the International Terrorism Operations Section. He and former CIA lawyer Alissa Starzak — who doesn’t appear by name in the film — dove into the CIA’s records for two years and delivered a report to the Committee in 2009 on their findings.

“Basically the members [of the Committee] found out that they had been lied to by the CIA,” the real Daniel Jones tells TIME. “That the techniques were far more brutal than they had ever described. That the whole claims of effectiveness related to the [origins of the program] were simply not true. And that there were all these other management failures.”

The larger investigation into the CIA interrogation and detention program ( 2009-2012)

In March 2009, in response to Jones’ report, the Committee voted 14-to-1 to launch a larger investigation into the CIA’s detention and interrogation program. Sen. Feinstein had become the Chairman of the Committee at this point, and asked Jones to stay on to head up the investigation. He was initially told it would take about a year to complete.

Around the same time, Attorney General Eric Holder announced he was broadening a criminal investigation into the CIA, and as a result, the CIA said that no one within the agency was allowed to speak to Jones’ team. The Republican minority on the committee then pulled their support for the investigation, arguing it couldn’t get far without interviews. Jones and his team of four core members moved ahead, poring over millions of agency documents in a windowless basement room.

Over the years, Jones and his team wrote thousands of pages about what they found. Jones recalls having to beg other staff members to read the report, asking for their help on clarity and checking for typos. “We don’t have editors. It’s just us,” he explains.

They finished that 6,700 page document in 2012.

“The summer from hell” (2013)

Sen. Feinstein sent the report for comment and review by the CIA, other intelligence agencies and the White House. In June 2013, the Committee heard back that the CIA had major problems with the report and claimed it contained inaccuracies. Over the summer, Jones and his team began meeting with the CIA to work through these sections.

Jones describes the period as the “summer of hell.” “We knew what the facts were and we would basically say, you know, ‘The ocean water is blue. Here it is.’ And they would say, ‘No, we think it’s yellow.’ And I’d be like, ‘But here’s the picture, right? It’s blue,'” he explains.

Jones became so frustrated that Feinstein told him to stop meeting with the CIA. Jones remembers Feinstein instructing him to include the CIA’s objections in the footnotes of the summary, “ensuring the world knew the ridiculousness of their response,” he tells TIME.

The CIA files a criminal referral against Daniel Jones and his team (2014)

In early winter, the CIA accused the Senate of illegally accessing an internal review of its detention and interrogation program, known as the “Panetta Review,” and removing it from CIA facilities without authorization. The CIA’s own inspector general then opened a criminal referral after senators accused the CIA of improperly monitoring Jones’ team, per the Times .

In February, the CIA then filed a second criminal referral against Jones and his team, arguing that they hacked into the CIA and took the Panetta Review without permission.

In March, Sen. Feinstein gave a biting 45-minute speech on the Senate floor condemning the CIA’s actions. She confirmed that part of the Review had been copied and moved to the Senate’s office, because the CIA had destroyed the interrogation tapes and the Review had since disappeared off the Committee’s computer system.

Feinstein accused the CIA of conducting an unauthorized search of her staffer’s computer network, saying she was concerned the CIA may have violated the Constitution’s separation of powers principle. She requested an apology, and added that she viewed the criminal referral against Jones’ staff “a potential effort to intimidate.”

John Brennan strongly denied Feinstein’s accusations, saying, “nothing could be further from the truth,” per the Times .

But in July, the CIA’s inspector general found that the agency actually had “penetrated” the Senate Intelligence Committee’s computer network, and filed the criminal referral against Jones and his team was based on false information. The same day, Brennan apologized.

The Panetta Review came to the same conclusions as Jones’ investigation, but differed from the CIA’s official response . Jones tells TIME he thinks it should never have been withheld from the Committee. Jones says the Review appeared on his computer one day, either by a computer glitch or a whistleblower. He says a lot of documents slipped into the millions they were given access to, some having nothing to do with interrogation. It might have just accidentally come through.

The executive summary comes out ( Winter 2014)

The Department of Justice dismissed the charges against Jones’ team. The executive summary then moved to the White House to determine what should be declassified. It came back heavily redacted, and the senators pushed to include more details and names in the version released to the public.

Finally, after a long back-and-forth with the Obama administration, the Senate released the executive summary on Dec. 9, 2014, shortly before Democrats lost control of the Senate.

“The Senators who are involved are the ones who make things happen,” Jones says. “I was just a staffer. It really takes Senators being courageous.”

In a 2014 op-ed in the Washington Post , Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., the former director of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service whose name appears throughout the report, responded to the Committee’s findings with cutting words. “The report’s leaked conclusion , which has been reported on widely , that the interrogation program brought no intelligence value is an egregious falsehood; it’s a dishonest attempt to rewrite history. I’m bemused that the Senate could devote so many resources to studying the interrogation program and yet never once speak to any of the key people involved in it, including the guy who ran it (that would be me).”

Burns says that these conflicting narratives, between the CIA’s account of what happened and Jones’ discoveries, inform the conflict of the film. He’s interested in the question, “How do these two narratives battle it out in the real world and which one ends up getting purchased in the culture as the truth?”

What happened after the events depicted in The Report ?

The film ends in 2014, after the Senate releases Jones’ findings. But the issues it explores persist in the present day.

In 2015, the Senate passed the McCain-Feinstein Anti-Torture Amendment, which banned any further use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” on detainees.

In the spring of 2018, Gina Haspel — who, per the Times , oversaw the torture of a terrorism suspect in Thailand and was involved in the 2005 destructions of the interrogation tapes — was confirmed as the Director of the CIA

During her hearing before the Senate Haspel pledged not to restart the interrogation program.

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© THE INTERCEPT

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“If It’s Gonna Come Out, It’s Gonna Come Out the Right Way”: Heroes of Torture Report Movie Are Lauded for Dodging Reporters

A choice moment in “The Report” comes when Dianne Feinstein asks Daniel J. Jones what he thinks of Edward Snowden. “I think he’s a traitor,” she says.

Standing in line for a movie screening at the Newseum this past week, I overheard a conversation — the kind I’ve come to realize is banal in Washington, D.C.

Two Capitol Hill staffers behind me were lamenting the risks of inviting their journalist friend to parties. “I couldn’t believe I had to tell him he couldn’t report on what he heard at the party,” one said. “Yeah,” replied the other, “We agreed long ago that our house was off the record.” “And then when I told him,” continued the first, “he stopped coming to my parties.”

We were waiting to see the D.C. premiere of “The Report,” the new movie written and directed by Scott Z. Burns that chronicles the struggle within the government to release the Senate Intelligence Committee’s five-year investigation into the CIA’s use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” — i.e., torture — following 9/11. The inquiry had roots in a prior investigation, beginning in 2005, into the destruction of CIA tapes showing the waterboarding of detainees. In 2009, the committee voted to initiate an expanded investigation into the CIA’s program. Five years later, the committee released a summary of the report that was heavily redacted and a tenth as long as the full report. The Obama administration and the CIA pushed to remove any details that would lead to real accountability, keeping the CIA officers involved anonymous and blacking out the names of the countries where torture had occurred.

Around 8 p.m. on Tuesday night, after over an hour of open bar and a red carpet expressly set up for Instagramming, Burns — known as the screenwriter for “The Bourne Ultimatum” and “The Informant!” — introduced the movie. He began by thanking Daniel J. Jones — the Intelligence Committee staffer detailed to the investigation into black sites, rendition, and “enhanced interrogation” — and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., chair of the Senate committee, both of whom were in the audience. When Burns addressed Feinstein, the packed house in the Newseum auditorium burst into applause. Annette Bening (who plays Feinstein in “The Report”) “sends her regards,” Burns said. “She wants you to know you’re her hero.” I watched the back of Feinstein’s head bob up and down in acknowledgement.

For many in the room that night, the movie was a celebration of the bureaucratic government work that too often doesn’t make it into the limelight. But opening in the midst of an impeachment inquiry sparked by a whistleblower, “The Report” is also a rumination on the internal calculus of government employees who want to revolt against official secrecy — as Jones did — and whether the public’s right to know is best served by revealing illegal government activity through official channels or sharing it with the press.

The movie surfaces another story about how and when congressional staffers decide to leverage journalism for their own purposes, and how whistleblowing is viewed in the culture of the capital.

“The Report” begins, like Spencer Ackerman’s 2016 rendition for The Guardian , with Jones breaking the law. Jones, played by Adam Driver, had been tasked by the Intelligence Committee with sifting through millions of documents, cables, and emails related to the CIA’s interrogation techniques in a windowless room designed to contain sensitive material. One file in particular caught his attention: an internal report prepared by the CIA for former Director Leon Panetta that seemed to corroborate the Senate’s findings. Worried about losing access to this file when it became clear that the CIA was intent on preventing the Senate from releasing anything about the torture program, Jones illegally removed it from the building. That document became a critical piece of leverage in countering the CIA’s resistance to the release of the Senate’s torture report.

The existence of the public Senate report, albeit in its limited form, is something of a bureaucratic miracle. The CIA’s own investigation into the matter, the document produced for Panetta, was deep-sixed, and President Barack Obama made an explicit decision when he came into office not to pursue the investigation. He wanted to appear, as the movie notes, “post-partisan.” Without Jones’s relentless work, we might never have known the depths to which the CIA fell in the years after 9/11.

“The Report” is a useful reminder of the inhumanity and ineffectiveness of torture and of the key fact that no one was held accountable. The graphic reenactments of torture scenes with blaring music, nudity, and physical abuse are second only to the full-throated embrace by a CIA officer of everything from imposing “learned helplessness” to waterboarding.

But the movie surfaces another story about how and when congressional staffers decide to leverage journalism for their own purposes, and how whistleblowing is viewed in the culture of the capital. It’s the same thing those Hill staffers in line were wrestling with, at a different level: A sense of both the value and the danger of the press is instilled from above. A choice moment in the film comes when Feinstein, meeting with a frustrated Jones, asks him what he thinks of Edward Snowden. Jones is silent. “I think he’s a traitor,” Feinstein says.

According to the movie, Jones, who was notoriously reticent when it came to talking to reporters, leveraged the press to his and the report’s benefit only once: when he himself became the subject of CIA intimidation. After having removed the Panetta report, he gives a reporter a cryptic clue, telling him to look into computer hacking targeting the Senate. The reporter asks for more information. “You’re the New York Times national security reporter, you should be able to figure it out.” Jones walks away, leaving the Times reporter incredulous. The crowd in the Newseum giggled.

The movie, here, elides the fact that reporter who actually broke this story was Ali Watkins — then a reporter at McClatchy who only later worked a stint as national security reporter at the New York Times (she now works on the Metro desk). “The Report” is an insider’s movie: It doesn’t name most of the characters, some because they’re CIA officers who were given pseudonyms in the summary that was released, some because they’re staffers who worked with Jones. (I overheard someone wondering out loud, before the movie began, how the composite character that included his friend would be portrayed.) Like the report itself, the story is unwieldy, and giving it a Hollywood treatment necessitates the lionizing of some and the sidelining of others.

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At another crucial moment — in December 2014, when Feinstein is in her last week as chair of the committee, as the Republicans come to power during Obama’s second term — Jones again weighs the prospect of talking to the press. A moody Jones puts his entire report into his bag and drives to meet the same reporter in a parking garage. “If the Times had your report, we would print it tomorrow,” the reporter says. Jones struggles for a moment before reaching his conclusion: “No. If it’s gonna come out, it’s gonna come out the right way.”

This approach ultimately pans out. The Democratic caucus in the Senate pressures Obama’s chief of staff, Denis McDonough (played by Jon Hamm, the perfect hotshot), to get the redacted summary of the Senate report out. The movie nails this moment as a crucial indictment of the Obama administration for wanting to move beyond what happened, rather than own up to it. But pause on Jones’s dramatized decision for a moment. He took a leap of faith; he chose to believe in the importance of the process. That time, it paid off (sort of). What if it hadn’t? Jones is something of a unicorn in having moved against the government via official channels and emerging relatively unscathed.

And what does it mean to put something out “the right way” anyway? The implication is that the report gained some kind of authoritative status because it was condoned by the Senate and the White House. The government publicly admitted that it tortured people, and promised never to do it again, even in the fog of the war. But imagine an alternate history, in which an unredacted summary had been released — a version that didn’t eviscerate the details . If that had happened, there would have been a chance at something more than symbolic justice.

The movie portrays Jones as a hero for turning away from the temptations of journalism. As a viewer who is immensely skeptical of official process, I believe that sharing evidence of government malfeasance with the press is a legitimate and often necessary check on power. But how will Americans respond to this movie when it’s released on November 15, after months of headlines about cover-ups, whistleblowers, and leaks?

For the room in D.C., “The Report” felt like a salve on a difficult time, a reassurance that the system can work as it’s set up.

The best-case scenario is that “The Report” helps viewers understand the powerful forces working against transparency. For the room in D.C., the film felt like a salve on a difficult time, a reassurance that the system can work as it’s meant to.

The depressing thing is that getting the truth out there doesn’t always result in change. On my way out, I picked up a free copy of the almost 600-page summary of the Senate’s torture report, reprinted by Melville House. On the back, one line seems to say it all: “The book that inspired the major motion picture.” Oh God, I thought, is this the fate of all that work? A new cover plastered with Driver’s face? After all, Gina Haspel, who played a key role in the destruction of the torture tapes, is now the director of the CIA, as the movie wryly notes in its end cards. Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, two of the victims of U.S. torture and the subjects of the destroyed tapes , are still being held in Guantánamo Bay. Not even the Newseum will be around that much longer.

Topic Studios, part of First Look Media, The Intercept’s parent company, helped support production of “The Report.”

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The Report is a 2019 thriller written and directed by Scott Z. Burns and produced by Steven Soderbergh .

It tells the true story of the 2012 Senate investigation into the CIA's use of torture in the wake of 9/11. Adam Driver stars as Daniel J. Jones, an idealistic staffer for California Senator Dianne Feinstein ( Annette Bening ) tasked with leading the investigation and uncovering the evidence and discover the lengths to which the government went to shield themselves from accountability.

Tropes associated with The Report include:

  • Amoral Attorney : CIA General Counsel John Yoo, who approved the use of torture and infamously determined that the President could legally order a child's testicles to be crushed "to stop a plane from crashing into a building".
  • Bittersweet Ending : Daniel avoids prosecution and is able to complete and release the report, which led to the McCain-Feinstein bill outlawing the practices described being passed and signed. However, the report is heavily redacted and not only were none of the people involved prosecuted, many were promoted .
  • Blatant Lies : The whole justification for the CIA's use of torture is shown to be built on the false identification of one prisoner as a high-ranking member of Al Quaeda.
  • Cold-Blooded Torture : Its use by the CIA is the focus of the investigation.
  • CIA Evil, FBI Good : The FBI is portrayed as being more concerned with legality and prisoner care, in contrast with the CIA who are looking for excuses to torture prisoners.
  • Deadly Euphemism : "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques" is explicitly used as a way of redefining techniques that would otherwise be called "torture".
  • Determinator : Nothing will get in the way of Daniel Jones' quest for the truth.
  • Dueling Movies : With The Laundromat , another fact-based investigative procedural written by Scott Z. Burns.
  • Government Procedural : The movie delves deep into the nitty-gritty of how Senate investigations operate.
  • Historical Domain Character : Pretty much everybody, but most notably Senators Dianne Feinstein and Sheldon Whitehouse and then-CIA director James Brennan.
  • How We Got Here : The film opens with Jones meeting up with Cyrus Clifford, a lawyer. We then get to see the events that led to Jones seeking out Clifford in the first place.
  • I Did What I Had to Do : One CIA Agent that approaches Jones claims this about the EITs, and insults him for trying to expose them.
  • Insistent Terminology : When Clifford asks Jones if he stole documents, Jones replies that he "relocated" them.
  • Jurisdiction Friction : When then-Attorney General Eric Holder opens an investigation into the CIA's use of torture, it ends the Agency's cooperation with the Senate investigation. In addition, it causes all Republican Senators and their staffers to pull out. This substantially hampers the ability of the investigation to do its work.
  • Know-Nothing Know-It-All : It's pretty clear that Jim Mitchell and Bruce Jessel have no clue what they're talking about and that their "improved" interrogation techniques are nothing of the sort. Tellingly, when Ali Soufan asks them whether they have ever participated in an interrogation of terrorists, criminals, or literally anyone , Mitchell responds that he has never attended a real interrogation, yet continues to espouse how the EITs are a godsend.
  • Married to the Job : Jones admits he became this over the five years he worked on the torture report; he had a relationship early on, but it ended because of his work. Later, one of his co-workers quits because she's afraid of the same thing happening to her.
  • Never My Fault : The CIA seems to have a terminal case of this. The film implies that the reason the CIA began to use torture was to cover up the fact that 9/11 could have been prevented by them. When it becomes clear the EITs don't work , they continue it anyway and act like it works so they don't have to admit that they screwed up, and when Jones gets too close to releasing the report, they treat him like an Obstructive Bureaucrat for daring to point out the flaws and basic inhumanity of their methods.
  • Obstructive Bureaucrat : John Brennan is portrayed as becoming this once he's confirmed as CIA director, downplaying the investigation, insisting on heavy redactions to the report, and spying on the investigators.
  • Once More, with Clarity : Early in the movie, Jones leaves the facility he works at, and it's implied that he stole (or "relocated"; see Insistent Terminology above) something from there. When we see the scene later in the movie, we see it was the report inside the CIA condemning the "enhanced interrogation techniques" they were using .
  • Only Sane Man : During the torture of Zubaydah, FBI Agent Ali Soufan is the only one to realize that Mitchell and Jessel have no clue what they are talking about and that the EITs are ineffective . After he gets kicked off, Raymond Nathan takes up the role by being the only one to be horrified by Zubaydah's treatment.
  • Reasonable Authority Figure : Senator Feinstein serves as this for Jones. Only a couple people from the intelligence community oppose torture by the CIA. She's dedicated to both stopping it and exposing the truth when Jones delivers his report to her, in spite of the CIA's protests. Most members of her committee also count to a lesser degree, along with Senator McCain (himself having endured torture as a POW in North Vietnam), though he only appears in real stock news footage.
  • Spiritual Antithesis : to Zero Dark Thirty . Both fact-based procedurals that take diametrically opposite views on torture.
  • Take That! : Zero Dark Thirty and 24 are both portrayed as media glorifying the use of torture.
  • Torture Is Ineffective : The movie makes the point that not only does torture not work, it also makes it harder to prosecute the suspects who are submitted to torture due to the illegality of the practice, along with damaging the US's global position (as someone points out, captured American personnel are at greater risk for being tortured themselves if captured when their government is known to do the same).
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Senate Torture Report - FOIA

What's at stake.

The ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit demanding that the CIA, and the Departments of Defense, Justice, and State release a 6,900-page report of a comprehensive investigation into the CIA’s post-9/11 program of detention, torture, and other abuse of detainees. The investigative report was produced by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and describes horrific human rights abuses by the CIA. It also chronicles the agency’s evasions and lies to Congress, the White House, the media, and the public. In May 2015, a federal district court dismissed the case, finding that the full torture report is a congressional record and therefore not subject to FOIA, which applies only to executive branch records. The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the district court’s judgment in May 2016. In November 2016, we filed a petition for a writ of certiorari in the Supreme Court, asking it to hold that the full report is subject to FOIA — so it may be released to the public. In April 2017, the Supreme Court declined to hear the case. The outcome was a major setback for government transparency and accountability.

The full torture report is the most comprehensive account of the torture program to date. It took more than three years to complete, and is based on the review of millions of CIA and other records.

In December 2014, the SSCI sent the full torture report to several executive branch agencies. Then-SSCI Chairman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) asked that the full report be made available within the executive branch to help make sure that the CIA’s detention and torture program never happens again.

The following month, the new Chairman of the SSCI, Senator Richard Burr (R-N.C.), wrote to President Obama with an unprecedented request: he asked that the agencies transfer their copies of the full torture report back to the Senate. Senator Burr’s request—an attempt to evade FOIA and to keep the report from the American public—was roundly condemned by members of the SSCI and other Senators. In response to an emergency motion by the ACLU in its FOIA suit, the agencies committed to retain their copies of the full report while litigation is pending.

The response to the SSCI’s public release of the torture report’s executive summary shows how important it is for the full report to be released. The summary describes how the CIA repeatedly misled Congress, the Justice Department, the White House, the media, and the public about its torture program—including misrepresentations about the “effectiveness” of torture, the brutality of the agency’s techniques, and the number of detainees in its custody. It generated global attention and spurred renewed calls for investigation and prosecution of the architects of the torture program. President Obama described the executive summary as reinforcing “my long-held view that these harsh methods were not only inconsistent with our values as a nation, they did not serve our broader counterterrorism efforts or our national security interests.” Yet executive branch agencies fought the release of the full torture report.

Following years of other litigation and advocacy by the ACLU, the government has released well over 100,000 pages of documents concerning the abuse and torture of detainees by the CIA and Department of Defense. These records are indexed and searchable through our Torture Database . The release of the full torture report is still necessary to illuminate the program’s legal and moral failings, the CIA’s evasions and misrepresentations to Congress, the White House, and the American public, and to make sure the CIA never again engages in unlawful detention and torture.

Legal Documents

  • 04/24/2017 Denial of Petition for a Writ of Certiorari

Date Filed: 04/24/2017

Court: Supreme Court (U.S.)

  • 04/03/2017 Reply Brief for Petitioner

Date Filed: 04/03/2017

  • 03/15/2017 Brief for the Respondents in Opposition

Date Filed: 03/15/2017

  • 11/10/2016 Petition for a Writ of Certiorari

Date Filed: 11/10/2016

  • 07/13/2016 Order re Petition for Rehearing

Date Filed: 07/13/2016

Court: Appeals Court (D.C. Cir.)

  • 07/13/2016 Order re Petition for Rehearing En Banc
  • 06/27/2016 ACLU Petition for Rehearing or Rehearing En Banc

Date Filed: 06/27/2016

  • 05/13/2016 Order

Date Filed: 05/13/2016

  • 05/13/2016 Opinion
  • 05/13/2016 Judgment
  • 12/30/2015 ACLU Reply Brief

Date Filed: 12/30/2015

  • 12/16/2015 Government Brief in Opposition to Appeal

Date Filed: 12/16/2015

  • 11/23/2015 Amicus Brief of Sen. John D. Rockefeller

Date Filed: 11/23/2015

  • 11/16/2015 ACLU Appeal Brief

Date Filed: 11/16/2015

  • 11/16/2015 Joint Appendix
  • 07/24/2015 Certificate as to Parties, Rulings, and Related Cases

Date Filed: 07/24/2015

  • 07/24/2015 Statement of Issues to be Raised
  • 02/14/2017 Notice of Lodging

Date Filed: 02/14/2017

Court: District Court (D.D.C.)

  • 02/14/2017 Respondents' Notice in Connection with the Court's Orders of Dec. 28, 2016 and Jan. 23, 2017
  • 06/30/2015 Notice of Appeal

Date Filed: 06/30/2015

  • 05/21/2015 District Court Order

Date Filed: 05/21/2015

  • 05/20/2015 District Court Opinion

Date Filed: 05/20/2015

  • 03/18/2015 Plaintiffs' Reply in Support of Their Cross-Motion for Partial Summary Judgment

Date Filed: 03/18/2015

  • 03/04/2015 Defendants' Reply in Further Support of Motion to Dismiss

Date Filed: 03/04/2015

  • 03/04/2015 Defendants' Reply in Further Support of Motion for Summary Judgment and Opposition to Plaintiffs' Cross-Motion
  • 02/12/2015 Plaintiffs' Corrected Memorandum in Opposition to Defendants' Motions to Dismiss and for Summary Judgment, and Plaintiffs' Cross-Motion for Partial Summary Judgment

Date Filed: 02/12/2015

  • 02/12/2015 Declaration of Ashley Gorski
  • 02/11/2015 Plaintiffs' Memorandum in Opposition to Defendants' Motions to Dismiss and for Summary Judgment, and Plaintiffs' Cross-Motion for Partial Summary Judgment

Date Filed: 02/11/2015

  • 02/09/2015 Notice of Withdrawal of Plaintiffs’ Emergency Motion for an Order Protecting This Court’s Jurisdiction

Date Filed: 02/09/2015

  • 02/06/2015 Defendants’ Response to Plaintiffs’ Emergency Motion for and Order Protecting This Court’s Jurisdiction

Date Filed: 02/06/2015

  • 01/27/2015 Plaintiffs’ Emergency Motion to Bar Defendants from Transferring Full Torture Report to Senator Burr

Date Filed: 01/27/2015

  • 01/27/2015 Exhibit 1
  • 01/27/2015 Exhibit 2
  • 01/27/2015 Exhibit 3
  • 01/27/2015 Exhibit 4
  • 01/27/2015 Exhibit 5
  • 01/21/2015 Defendants' Motion for Summary Judgment

Date Filed: 01/21/2015

  • 01/21/2015 Declaration of Martha Lutz
  • 01/21/2015 Government’s Statement of Facts
  • 01/21/2015 Defendants' Motion to Dismiss
  • 01/21/2015 Exhibit 1
  • 01/21/2015 Exhibit 2
  • 01/21/2015 Exhibit 3
  • 01/21/2015 Exhibit 4
  • 01/21/2015 Exhibit 5
  • 01/21/2015 Declaration of Neal Higgins
  • 01/21/2015 Declaration of Julia Frifield
  • 01/21/2015 Declaration of Mark Herrington
  • 01/21/2015 Declaration of Peter Kadzik
  • 10/30/2014 Defendants' Reply in Further Support of Fourth Motion for Extension of Time

Date Filed: 10/30/2014

  • 10/29/2014 Plaintiffs’ Opposition to Defendants' Fourth Motion for Extension of Time

Date Filed: 10/29/2014

  • 10/28/2014 Defendants' Fourth Motion for Extension of Time

Date Filed: 10/28/2014

  • 10/07/2014 Transcript of Court Status Conference Held on Oct. 7, 2014

Date Filed: 10/07/2014

  • 09/25/2014 Defendants' Third Motion for Extension of Time

Date Filed: 09/25/2014

  • 09/04/2014 Transcript of Court Status Conference Held on Sept. 4, 2014

Date Filed: 09/04/2014

  • 08/27/2014 Defendants' Second Motion for Extension of Time

Date Filed: 08/27/2014

  • 08/27/2014 Exhibit 1
  • 07/08/2014 Defendants’ Answer to Second Amended Complaint

Date Filed: 07/08/2014

  • 06/20/2014 CIA Status Report

Date Filed: 06/20/2014

  • 06/06/2014 Second Amended Complaint for Injunctive Relief

Date Filed: 06/06/2014

  • 05/27/2014 Joint Status Report

Date Filed: 05/27/2014

  • 05/15/2014 Defendant's Motion for Extension of Time

Date Filed: 05/15/2014

  • 03/28/2014 Defendant's Reply in Further Support of Motion to Dismiss

Date Filed: 03/28/2014

  • 03/14/2014 ACLU Opposition to Defendant's Motion to Dismiss

Date Filed: 03/14/2014

  • 02/28/2014 Defendant's Memorandum in Support of Motion to Dismiss

Date Filed: 02/28/2014

  • 02/28/2014 Declaration of Neal Higgins - Director, Office of Congressional Affairs, CIA
  • 01/27/2014 Amended Complaint for Injunctive Relief

Date Filed: 01/27/2014

  • 01/22/2014 Joint Proposed Briefing Schedule

Date Filed: 01/22/2014

  • 01/08/2014 Defendant's Answer

Date Filed: 01/08/2014

  • 11/25/2013 Complaint

Date Filed: 11/25/2013

  • 05/06/2014 FOIA Request: Updated Version of SSCI Report on Torture Program

Date Filed: 05/06/2014

Court: FOIA Requests

  • 12/19/2013 FOIA Request: Panetta Report on Torture Program

Date Filed: 12/19/2013

  • 06/28/2013 CIA's Response to FOIA Request: SSCI Report on Torture Program

Date Filed: 06/28/2013

  • 02/13/2013 FOIA Request: SSCI Report on Torture Program

Date Filed: 02/13/2013

Press Releases

ACLU Statement on Trump Administration Effort to Bury CIA Torture Report

Supreme Court Refuses to Hear ACLU Lawsuit Seeking Release of Full Senate Report on CIA Torture

News & Commentary

Who’s Afraid of the Torture Report?

Accountability for Torture

No, Senator, You Can’t Have the Torture Report Back (UPDATED)

accountability for torture featured image

Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: CIA Edition

The Torture Secrets Are Coming

the report torture

CIA Considers Releasing Its Torture Reports to ACLU

the report torture

ACLU's Vision

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Learn More About the Issues in This Case

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Harvard University Health Services Warns Students About Spike in Respiratory Illness

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Harvard Law School Program Report Finds ICE’s Use of Solitary Confinement Meets Criteria for Torture

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Researchers from Harvard Law School found that solitary confinement practices by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement met the United Nation's criteria for torture.

Researchers from Harvard Law School issued a report on Tuesday that found that solitary confinement practices by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement met the United Nation’s criteria for “torture.”

The report, released by HLS Immigration and Refugee Advocacy Program, revealed that ICE used solitary confinement at least 14,264 times from 2018 to 2023.

In a Tuesday press release from HLS, the researchers wrote that solitary placements lasted 27 days on average, exceeding “the 15-day period that constitutes torture as defined by the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture.” According to the report, 682 solitary confinement placements lasted at least 90 days while 42 lasted over one year.

In addition, researchers found an “ongoing increase in the use and duration of solitary confinement in ICE detention” since the middle of 2021, according to the press release.

The researchers emphasized the cruelty of ICE’s detention practices and concluded in the report that “ICE uses solitary confinement arbitrarily and as punishment.”

The clinic collaborated with researchers from Harvard Medical School and Physicians for Human Rights to interview 26 detainees and obtain first-hand perspectives.

“Being in solitary, that is like a whole other level of playing with your mind,” a 50-year-old man who was held in solitary confinement said to the researchers. “To bother you, to hurt you, to offend you, to make you feel like less than nothing. Even your biology changes, how you view the world changes.”

“Your mind and your body break into little pieces,” he added.

Sabrineh Ardalan, the director of the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinic, said interviewee testimony was consistent with the report’s findings.

“The descriptions that those individuals provided very much match the data that we were able to obtain, and explain how just horrific the treatment is that folks are experiencing,” Ardalan said.

Arevik Avedian, a lecturer at Harvard Law School and one of the report’s co-authors, said ICE’s use of solitary confinement disproportionately harms vulnerable populations, such as LGBTQ+ detainees and people with disabilities.

“People with vulnerabilities such as people with serious mental illnesses or transgender populations have been put in solitary confinement much longer than others,” Avedian said.

The report is the result of a six-year investigation, which included a lawsuit against the federal agency after they refused to respond to the clinic’s Freedom of Information Act requests.

The researchers found that ICE’s self-reported solitary confinement data was insufficient, often “underestimating the number of placements and the length,” according to Avedian.

“88 percent of people with serious mental illnesses were completely missing from the data that ICE provides,” she added.

The researchers emphasized the novelty of the findings and the exclusivity of the data.

“It is one of the most expansive investigations into the use of solitary confinement in U.S. immigration detention to date,” the press release reads.

In the press release, Tessa Wilson, a report co-author and senior program officer at Physicians for Human Rights, pointed to U.S. President Joe Biden’s campaign pledge to end solitary confinement.

“Our report makes it clear that there has been no meaningful progress or reform over the past decade,” Wilson said in the press release. “The White House and Congress must act now to safeguard the health and rights of those in its custody by ending this barbaric practice for good.”

“Biden has a year left at least. It would be a wonderful legacy for the administration to have from this term,” Avedian added.

Philip L. Torrey, director of the Crimmigration Clinic at HLS and co-author of the report, said their message is clear.

“​​We're calling for ICE to end the use of solitary confinement,” he said. “That’s our top line request.”

—Staff writer S. Mac Healey can be reached at [email protected] . Follow him on X @MacHealey .

—Staff writer Saketh Sundar can be reached at [email protected] . Follow him on X @saketh_sundar .

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Blindfolded Palestinian prisoners in Gaza

Stripped, blindfolded, and bound Palestinian civilians are taken prisoner and ordered into a line by Israeli occupation forces in Gaza in December 2023.

IDF Let Israeli Civilians Film Torture of Palestinian Detainees: Report

"this is beyond military occupation, apartheid, economic exploitation, and all the rest," asserted one journalist. "there is something extremely sickening happening here.".

Israel Defense Forces officers brought Israeli civilians into detention centers and allowed them to watch and film Palestinian prisoners being tortured, according to survivor testimonies published this week by the Geneva-based Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor.

Prisoners held at detention centers in Zikim on the northern border of the Gaza Strip and at a site in southern Israel affiliated with Naqab Prison "told Euro-Med Monitor that the Israeli soldiers had purposefully presented them before Israeli civilians, falsely claiming that they were fighters affiliated with Palestinian armed factions and that they had taken part in the October 7 attack on Israeli towns," the group said.

The former detainees said groups of 10-20 Israeli civilians were brought in and allowed to record torture sessions in which the men, stripped nearly naked, were beaten with metal batons, electrocuted, and had hot water poured over their heads. The ex-prisoners said some of the Israelis laughed while filming their torture.

"I was arrested at the checkpoint set up near the Kuwait roundabout, which separates Gaza City from the central region, as part of the Israeli random arrest campaigns. I was subjected to all types of torture and abuse for approximately 52 days," 43-year-old Omar Abu Mudallala told Euro-Med Monitor, adding that his IDF captors "brought Israeli civilians to watch our nude torture."

Abu Mudallala continued:

The Israeli army brought a number of Israeli civilians into our detention centers while beating us and telling them, "These are Hamas terrorists who killed you and raped your women on 7 October," while the Israeli civilians were filming us being beaten, abused, and tortured while making fun of us. This happened five times while I was being held. The first time was in Barkasat Zikim, where we were blindfolded. However, one of the detainees who speaks Hebrew told us that the soldiers were interacting with Israeli civilians claiming that we were armed fighters. The other four incidents took place in the Negev detention facility, where successive Israeli groups were taken inside tents to witness our abuse and record the torture methods we were subjected to without allowing us to speak or interact with them. Since we were not wearing blindfolds at the time, I saw them all four times with my own eyes.

"One of the detainees who speaks Hebrew tried to explain to the Israeli civilians that we are civilians and we had nothing to do with any military activities, but that also did not help," Abu Mudallala added. "However, he was subjected to severe psychological and physical torture. It was really shameful to bring Israeli citizens to record our torture for being allegedly involved in killing and rape incidents."

Another former prisoner, identified only as 42-year-old D.H., told Euro-Med Monitor that "Israeli civilians were brought to witness the abuse and torture that we were subjected to, which the army deliberately began when they were present."

"These Israelis sometimes brought their dogs with them to bark at us," he added. "They also took pictures of us and posted them on social media apps, particularly TikTok, with the soldiers themselves doing the same."

Euro-Med Monitor asserted that "the vast majority of those arrested from within the Gaza Strip have been subjected to arbitrary detention without being charged or brought to justice, with no legal measures taken against them."

"They are also denied a fair trial and are subjected to forced disappearance, torture, and inhumane treatment," the group added. "Israeli practices against Palestinian detainees are blatant violations of international conventions and standards, particularly the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention, which forbids an occupying authority from transferring prisoners from the occupied territory to detention facilities on its territory, as well as torturing, attacking, or otherwise degrading the human dignity of those detained."

Israeli forces, with their long history of torturing Palestinian prisoners, have been accused during the current war on Gaza of torturing civilian detainees before executing them. Photos and videos of Israeli troops abusing Palestinians—both alive and dead —have been published by perpetrators on social media. Human rights defenders point to such images and their proud display as evidence of Israeli genocide in a war in which more than 100,000 Palestinians have been killed, maimed, or gone missing.

The International Court of Justice found last month in a preliminary ruling that Israel is "plausibly" committing genocide in Gaza, while ordering Israeli forces to "take all measures" to avoid perpetrating genocidal acts.

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  • 'Deeply Sick': IDF Murder Porn Channel Compared to Horrors of Abu Ghraib ›
  • Rights Monitor Demands Probe of Israel's 'Guantánamo-Like' Prison ›
  • 30 Bound and 'Executed' Palestinians Found at Gaza School After IDF Exit ›
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Military Judge to Rule on C.I.A. Torture Program in Sept. 11 Case

Lawyers argued over the rare legal doctrine in an effort to dismiss the case at the start of pretrial hearings in the Sept. 11 case at Guantánamo Bay.

A white sign reading “Courtroom Access Here” is behind a chain-link fence and razor wire.

By Carol Rosenberg

Reporting from Guantánamo Bay, Cuba

A defense lawyer asked a military judge on Monday to dismiss the Sept. 11 conspiracy charges against a Saudi prisoner who was tortured in C.I.A. custody, describing the secret overseas prison network where the man was held as part of a “vast criminal international enterprise” that trafficked in torture.

Defense lawyers in the case have said for years that the case should be dismissed based on a rarely successful legal doctrine involving “outrageous government conduct.”

On Monday, Walter Ruiz became the first defender to present the argument to a military judge on behalf of Mustafa al-Hawsawi , who is accused of helping the Sept. 11 hijackers with money transfers and travel arrangements.

The interrogation and detention program as carried out on his client so “shocks the conscience,” he said, that Mr. Hawsawi should be dropped from the conspiracy case .

In a nearly daylong presentation, Mr. Ruiz used government documents to argue that the prisoner was sexually assaulted in his first month of detention, waterboarded by C.I.A. interrogators without permission, deprived of sleep and kept isolated in darkened dungeonlike conditions starting in 2003.

In order to build their cases against former C.I.A. prisoners, prosecutors had so-called clean teams of federal agents reinterrogate the defendants at Guantánamo Bay in 2007, without using or threatening violence.

But “no matter how many cleaners they bring into this court, they cannot clean it up,” Mr. Ruiz said. “It smells and reeks of coercion, torture, brutality and depravity.”

The C.I.A.’s black site program was established by the administration of President George W. Bush in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and was shut down by President Barack Obama. About 100 suspects were held incommunicado and uncharged in C.I.A. prisons in Afghanistan, Thailand, Poland and elsewhere, beyond the reach of U.S. courts.

To create and sustain the program, Mr. Ruiz said, the United States spent hundreds of millions of dollars paying foreign countries to let them establish C.I.A. facilities abroad, shuttled prisoners around the world and employed two psychologists to run it. He called it “a vast international criminal enterprise operating squarely outside the confines of domestic and international law.”

The lead prosecutor, Clayton G. Trivett Jr., defended the program, and revelations that the F.B.I. collaborated with the C.I.A. in the black sites, as the response of a wounded and fearful nation at war “while the towers were still smoldering.”

On Sept. 12, 2001, Mr. Trivett said, Mr. Bush concluded that the United States could “no longer afford” to continue its “simple catch, apprehend, indict and prosecute” approach to law enforcement.

Mr. Trivett said it made sense that the F.B.I. coordinated its investigation with the C.I.A., particularly because a lack of intelligence coordination was blamed for failing to prevent the Sept. 11 attacks. “It would be outrageous if it didn’t,” he said.

The timing of the argument suggests that Col. Matthew N. McCall, the fourth judge to preside in the case, will be able to decide the potentially case-turning issue before he retires later this year. The judge has a busy schedule of testimony about the C.I.A. program and the F.B.I. role in it this month and later in the year.

To make his argument in open court, Mr. Ruiz devoted hours to showing the judge — but not the public — secret documents. He accused the U.S. intelligence community of over-classifying information to hide “dirty secrets.”

One in particular, he said, “would not necessarily implode the national security of the United States. But certainly it would be embarrassing. And ugly. And shocking.”

Mr. Ruiz argued that, despite the Bush administration’s effort to “legalize torture” through Justice Department memos authorizing waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques,” the record showed that Mr. Hawsawi’s captors “exceeded, ignored and violated even those specific guidelines.”

The C.I.A., for example, has never acknowledged the waterboarding of Mr. Hawsawi. But in April 2003, his second month of custody, according to a Senate study, Mr. Hawsawi “cried out for God” while he was subjected to a waterboarding technique at a particularly brutal C.I.A. prison in Afghanistan with the code name Cobalt .

Some violations were “outright vengeance or retribution,” Mr. Ruiz said. Others were a result of a lack of training and guidance, or what Dr. James E. Mitchell, the psychologist who waterboarded prisoners for the C.I.A., testified years ago constituted “abusive drift .”

Mr. Ruiz urged the judge to reject a prosecution argument that, at trial, the government would rely on evidence gathered by the F.B.I. as part of a criminal investigation, rather than intelligence gathering by the C.I.A., which was interrogating the Sept. 11 defendants from 2002 to 2006, before their transfer to Guantánamo Bay.

Testimony for years, he said, demonstrated a “symbiotic relationship between the C.I.A. and F.B.I., with no clear line of demarcation.”

The presentation illustrated the hold that intelligence agencies have on what the public can know.

Mr. Trivett, a prosecutor, asked the judge to prohibit Mr. Ruiz from publicly showing the court a newspaper article, as well as a brief that was publicly posted on the website of the U.S. Supreme Court. Colonel McCall, the judge, agreed. “I have a duty to protect what I am told is classified information,” he said.

Mr. Hawsawi and the three other defendants were absent from court during the presentation.

Matthew Engle, representing the defendant Walid bin Attash , said there was tension at the prison over changing practices or policies that resurrected “security precautions that haven’t existed for over a decade.”

The Pentagon recently installed the 23rd commander of the two-decade-old prison operation, an Army colonel who had been in charge of a Military Police Battalion at the prison from 2018 to 2020.

Carol Rosenberg reports on the wartime prison and court at Guantánamo Bay. She has been covering the topic since the first detainees were brought to the U.S. base in 2002. More about Carol Rosenberg

White House lawyers criticized Robert Hur's report days before its release

legal

WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden’s legal team is frustrated over the findings and tone of special counsel Robert Hur's report , several letters leaked Thursday between Biden’s attorneys and top Justice Department officials show.

A key exchange of letters viewed by NBC News occurred the day before the Justice Department released Hur’s report, in which Hur explained his decision not to prosecute Biden over his handling of classified documents after he left office as vice president even while he s aid Biden’s practices “present serious risks to national security.”

The letters were first reported by The W ashington Post and Politico .

The White House and a spokesperson for Biden’s personal attorney Bob Bauer declined to comment.

In a three-page letter on Feb. 7, Bauer and White House counsel Edward Siskel objected to a final draft of Hur's report that they said “openly, obviously, and blatantly" violated Justice Department policy and practice and consensus about limitations to special counsel reports.

The Feb. 7 letter was addressed to Attorney General Merrick Garland during the White House counsel's review of the special counsel's final draft for executive privilege issues.

It argues that other presidents "have done exactly the same thing" by retaining classified information at home after they served.

“So, to criticize President Biden for a practice that his predecessors openly engaged in, a practice that the Justice Department has in the past acknowledged and declined to investigate, a practice that is not charged conduct, exemplifies the reasons why a bipartisan consensus arose to change the prior report writing function,” they wrote.

Biden’s legal team further argued that Hur's criticism of Biden "mirrors" former FBI Director James Comey's "inappropriate prosecutor criticism" in 2016 of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, whose handling of classified material similarly resulted in no charges.

"The FBI and DOJ personnel’s criticism of uncharged conduct during investigations in connection with the 2016 election was found to violate 'long-standing Department practice and protocol,'" they wrote.

The letter also objected to "denigrating statements" about Biden’s memory that were "uncalled for and unfounded."

"The Special Counsel can certainly and properly note that the President lacked memory of a specific fact or series of events," they wrote, adding that Hur's allegation about Biden's memory's failing more broadly "has no law enforcement purpose.”

The lawyers also say Hur left out "crucial context" about Biden's interview with Hur in October, as Biden grappled with "a grave international crisis," just a day after the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks on Israel.

The Justice Department responded defending Hur’s report, including its references to Biden's memory, hours before it was released.

A letter on Feb. 8, signed by the Justice Department’s top career official, Associate Deputy Attorney General Bradley Weinsheimer, stated flatly that the Justice Department did not violate any department policies and was not engaging in any improper conduct.

“The context in which this information is used in the report makes it appropriate under Department policy and the Special Counsel regulations," he wrote.

"The identified language is neither gratuitous nor unduly prejudicial because it is not offered to criticize or demean the President; rather, is it offered to explain Special Counsel Hur’s conclusions about the President’s state of mind in possessing and retaining classified information," the letter added.

The Justice Department letter further contended that the report did not include inappropriate comments about uncharged conduct, instead saying that such a disclosure is permitted if it advances “a significant law enforcement interest, including upholding the integrity of the investigation, and whether the public has a significant need to know the information.”

“For these reasons, inclusion of the identified language in the report and the report itself fall well within the Department’s standards for public release," it said. "The report addresses whether the President, as a private citizen, mishandled classified information in violation of criminal laws. This sits near the apex of the public interest. The report and its release, including the identified language, are consistent with Department policies and practice.”

The Justice Department also rejected the mention of Comey, calling the comparison “inapt.”

“Former Director Comey was not a Special Counsel, prosecutor, or Department official charged or approved to announce a declination decision,” Weinsheimer wrote.

NBC News has r eported that Hur is expected to testify March 12 before the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee, according to two sources familiar with the matter.

Several House Republican leaders have also asked Garland for a full transcript of Biden's interview with the special counsel in October, saying it will aid them in determining whether the evidence supports drafting articles of impeachment against Biden.

the report torture

Michael Kosnar is a Justice Department producer for the NBC News Washington Bureau.

the report torture

Ken Dilanian is the justice and intelligence correspondent for NBC News, based in Washington.

Zoë Richards is the evening politics reporter for NBC News.

The New Indian Express

Tamil Nadu: Tiphagne seeks full report in Balveer case, warns govt of contempt action

T IRUNELVELI: People’s Watch Executive Director and Advisor of the Joint Action Against Custodial Torture (Tamil Nadu) Henri Tiphagne said he would initiate contempt proceedings against the state government over its failure to provide the full report of the high-level probe by IAS officer P Amudha in the Ambasamudram custodial torture, involving former ASP Balveer Singh.

Addressing media persons here on Wednesday, Tiphagne said while the high court ordered the handing over of the full report of Amudha, the victims were only given an interim report which lacks annexure and statements of the victims.

“We want to know what is preventing the government from giving these reports to the victims, despite HC direction. In another case, the HC directed the government to give the victims the CCTV footage of Ambasamudram and Vikramasingapuram police stations within 15 days,” he said.

“While Amudha’s report hinted at custodial torture, the CB-CID did not include these parts in its chargesheet. While the custodial torture victims include people from the Scheduled Caste, the CB-CID intentionally added SC police officers as accused to avoid inclusion of the sections of the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act. As per Amudha’s report, there are non-SC accused in this particular case,” he added.

Tiphagne also demanded the inclusion of Dr Jaishankar, the medical officer at the Ambasamudram GH, as an accused.

Accused appear for fifth hearing

Tirunelveli: Former Ambasamudram Assistant Superintendent of Police Balveer Singh and 11 other police personnel, accused of removing the teeth of suspects and torturing them in custody at the Ambasamudram, Kallidaikurichi, and Vikramasingapuram police stations, appeared before the Judicial Magistrate I, Tirunelveli for the fifth hearing in the case on Wednesday. According to sources, of the 14 accused persons in four different cases, police inspector Rajakumari and sub-inspector Murugesan failed to appear before Magistrate D Thiriveni. The next hearing is scheduled for March 28. Former Cheranmahadevi Sub-Collector MD Shabbir Mohammed Alam and senior IAS officer P Amudha probed the allegations. Recently, their interim reports were handed over to the victims. The reports revealed that the teeth of some suspects were indeed removed at the police stations. The state government had recently revoked Singh’s suspension. ENS

Tamil Nadu: Tiphagne seeks full report in Balveer case, warns govt of contempt action

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