The film had its world premiere at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival on January 26, 2019. It was released in theaters in the United States by Amazon Studios on November 15, 2019, two weeks before it began streaming on Amazon Prime on November 29. Critical reviews of the film were generally positive.
As Jones begins his work, the narrative shifts back to the September 11 attacks of 2001, with CIA employees at the Counterterrorist Center (CTC), including Bernadette and Gretchen, anxiously watching live videos of the attacks. At CIA headquarters a few days later, DCIGeorge Tenet reports on his meeting at Camp David with President George W. Bush and CTC director Cofer Black. John Rizzo, the CIA's legal counsel, reports that the president has given the CIA powers to "capture and detain suspected terrorists." The next year, intelligence psychologists Bruce Jessen and James Elmer Mitchell are contracted to instruct the CIA in EITs.
Although he loses half of his team after the Department of Justice (DOJ) begins its own investigation of the CIA and the CIA decides to only allow its personnel to speak to the DOJ, Jones continues his investigation with his remaining staff: April and Julian. Jones meets with FBI agent Ali Soufan and learns more about the CIA's interrogation program, particularly regarding Abu Zubaydah. The interrogation of Abu Zubaydah is shown, contrasting the FBI's use of rapport-building with the CIA's use of EITs. Bernadette observes the sessions, and she defends the use of the new techniques. Soufan says he gathered crucial intelligence from Zubaydah before the CIA took over the interrogations,[6][7][8] though the CIA disagrees on what techniques are most effective and what results came from what approach.[9]
At a briefing with Senator Feinstein in her office, Jones describes evidence from the CIA's own records that prove the agency knew Zubaydah was not a high-ranking member of Al-Qaeda, as they falsely reported to the DOJ. After the CIA told the Bush administration that Zubaydah was a key player, they received authorization in the August 2002 CIA "Torture Memos" drafted by Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo to use EITs on him, making Zubaydah the first detainee to be tortured.[10]
Raymond Nathan, a physician assistant with the Office of Medical Services who works at a CIA black site, secretly meets with Jones, saying he and other medical professionals had complained that the EITs were torture, but the only response they received was a cable from Director Jose Rodriguez telling them to stop putting their objections in writing. Nathan witnessed the waterboarding of Zubaydah, who lost consciousness and almost drowned during the procedure.
April and Jones uncover the story of Gul Rahman, who died from hypothermia in 2002 after CIA interrogators threw water on him and left him chained to the ground overnight in a 36°F (2°C) cell. Jones meets with Senator Feinstein and her staffer Marcy Morris to inform them about the CIA inspector general's report of the incident. Jones also deduces that national security advisorCondoleezza Rice had been told to not inform the president about the Torture Memos, which President Bush only learned about in April 2006.
Among the files provided to him by the CIA, Jones finds the Panetta Review, a harshly critical internal CIA review of the EIT program that was prepared in 2009 but never shared.[Notes 1] While watching TV at a bar after work, April, Julian, and Jones become discouraged as they watch a pundit on the news claim that EITs had yielded good intelligence and prevented terrorist attacks. Jones stays up all night to disprove the claims, and the CIA's own records show that crucial information it is claiming to have obtained by subjecting Khalid Sheikh Mohammad (aka "KSM") to torture was obtained by other means.
Seen in flashback, Mitchell and Jessen waterboard KSM in March 2003. Mitchell complains that, when waterboarded, Muhammad makes up lies to make it stop. Bernadette, who has been observing from another room, questions the contractors about the effectiveness of their techniques, but the torture continues.
The DOJ concludes its investigation of the CIA, and files no charges. April accepts another job offer and leaves Jones's team.
In April 2004, the Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse scandal hits the news, which is particularly embarrassing, as President Bush had recently denounced the use of torture in an address to the United Nations.[11]Jack Goldsmith, the DOJ Office of Legal Counsel's new head, repudiates and withdraws the Torture Memos. Tenet, Rodriguez, Rizzo, Thomas Eastman, Bernadette, Mitchell, and Jessen meet to discuss how to respond. Mitchell gives an impassioned speech in defense of his methods, and Rodriguez has the program re-certified.
Jones and Julian finish the 6,200-page report, and it is approved by the Senate Intelligence Committee, chaired by Senator Feinstein, on December 13, 2012, and sent to the CIA for final comments. Two months later, John Brennan is sworn in as the new director of the CIA. Brennan tells Jones and Senator Feinstein that he disagrees with many parts of the report and will not allow it to be published without modification, so Jones has a series of meetings with CIA representatives, who raise several objections to key findings in the report, such as that no unique intel was obtained by using EITs, or the fact that Mitchell and Jessen were unqualified to be offering advice on interrogation techniques, but were nevertheless paid $81 million of taxpayer money for their efforts. Senator Feinstein listens to Jones's defense of his report after these meetings and eventually tells him to stop going to them.
Frustrated, Jones reveals some of the contents of the Panetta Review to Senator Mark Udall of the Intelligence Committee. Senator Udall confronts Caroline Krass during a December 17, 2013, Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Krass's nomination to the position of CIA general counsel, stating that he is "more confident than ever of the accuracy of the committee's 6,300 page study." He then reveals the existence of the Panetta Review by saying that the Intelligence Committee's report is consistent with the CIA's own study of the EIT program initiated by former director Leon Panetta, while both reports conflict with the CIA's official response to the Senate report.[12] Meanwhile, Jones, who is fearful that the CIA will attempt to destroy all copies of the Panetta Review, like they destroyed the interrogation videotapes, secretly moves a copy of a portion of the review into a safe in his office in the Senate Hart Building.
The CIA, humiliated by Udall's revelation, conducts a search of Jones's workspace, violating the agreement between the Senate and the CIA. They threaten to prosecute Jones for "stealing" the Panetta Review from the CIA's computers, and Jones's lawyer, Cyrus Clifford, advises him that he does not have a legal problem, but a "sunlight"—that is, transparency—problem.[13] Jones meets with a New York Times national security reporter and suggests he look into the hacking of Senate computers by the CIA, careful to provide no specific details. When the Times article is published, Jones is called into a meeting with Morris and Senator Feinstein, who is visibly angry with him, but ultimately makes a speech supporting him and formally accusing the CIA of unlawfully searching the Senate's computers in violation of the separation of powers. Brennan and the CIA are forced to back down, and the charges against Jones are dropped.
Senator Feinstein tells Jones that she is prepared to release a shorter summary of the report, but President Barack Obama grants the CIA broad authority to redact it first. Jones points out that the CIA's proposed heavy redactions make many of the revelations detailed in the summary impossible to follow, but the agency claims that even the pseudonyms used could endanger the lives of its agents. In the face of unrelenting efforts to block the release of the summary, Jones again meets with the New York Times reporter, but ultimately decides not to leak the report to the media.[14]
The Republican Party wins control of the Senate in the November 2014 midterm elections, meaning the report will likely be buried forever when the new Congress is sworn in January 2015. Faced with this deadline, the Senate finally agrees to release the summary of the report. Senator Feinstein gives a speech summarizing the report and its implications, and then Senator John McCain, who was tortured by his captors as a prisoner of war during the Vietnam War, gives an impassioned speech in support of the report.
An epilogue, delivered through a series of intertitles, explains that Jones left his job as a Senate staffer after the summary of the report was released. It is also noted that no CIA officers were ever criminally charged in connection with the actions outlined in the report, that many were in fact promoted, and that one (an allusion to Gina Haspel) later became director of the agency.
When asked by PBS NewsHour's Jeffrey Brown about his motivation for making a film inspired by the controversial 2014 Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture, Burns replied that both of his parents are psychologists, and he found it "appalling" to learn from the report[17] that "people had figured out a way to weaponize psychology," a profession that "exists to help people."[18] Burns further said that he and producer Steven Soderbergh felt it reflected well on the United States that the government allowed the summary of the report to be published. In the same interview, Soderbergh said he did not know "that there's another country, other than maybe Canada or the UK," that "would have even allowed this kind of investigation."[18]
Some of the characters that appear in the film are composite characters, such as Bernadette, who bears some resemblance to Gina Haspel. Haspel oversaw the CIA black site in Thailand where Abu Zubaydah was tortured, and later managed to push her bosses to destroy the tapes of the torture. According to the CIA, Haspel was not, however, in charge of the site during Zubaydah's interrogation.[19]
The Report had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on January 26, 2019,[23] and Amazon Studios acquired its distribution rights shortly thereafter for $14 million.[24] In October, it appeared as a spotlight film at the Hamptons International Film Festival.[25] In the United States, the film was scheduled for a theatrical release on September 27, 2019, two weeks before its streaming release on Amazon Prime Video on October 11,[26] but those dates were changed to November 15 and November 29, respectively.[27]
Reception
Box office
Unlike with its previous titles, Amazon did not publicly disclose The Report's theatrical grosses, but IndieWire estimated that it grossed around $150,000 from 84 theaters over its opening weekend. The site wrote that "the response, so far as we can determine, are [sic] under the usual Amazon performance."[28] Playing in just 60 theaters the following weekend, the film made an estimated $75,000.[2]
Critical response
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 83% of 244 critics' reviews of the film are positive, with an average rating of 7.2/10; the site's "critics consensus" reads: "The Report draws on a dark chapter in American history to offer a sober, gripping account of one public servant's crusade for accountability."[29] On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 66 out of 100 based on reviews by 33 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.[30] Certain critics compared the film to political thrillers from the 1970s, in contrast to more recent works. For instance, Owen Gleiberman of Variety said he found The Report "at once gripping and eye-opening" in a way that made him think of All the President's Men (1976).[31]
Human Rights First awarded the 2019 Sidney Lumet Award for Integrity in Entertainment to The Report.[32] In 2020, the film won the Cinema for Peace Award for Political Film of the Year.
↑ The Panetta Review was a secret review of the use of torture by the CIA under the administration of George W. Bush, which was conducted by then CIA director Leon Panetta, who served under President Obama as CIA director from February 19, 2009, until June 30, 2011. According to a March 7, 2014, New York Timesarticle, the review yielded a series of memoranda that "cast a particularly harsh light" on the Bush-era interrogation program."
Related Research Articles
Abu Zubaydah is a Palestinian citizen born in Saudi Arabia currently held by the U.S. in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba. He is held under the authority of Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists (AUMF).
Waterboarding is a form of torture in which water is poured over a cloth covering the face and breathing passages of an immobilized captive, causing the person to experience the sensation of drowning. In the most common method of waterboarding, the captive's face is covered with cloth or some other thin material and immobilized on their back at an incline of 10 to 20 degrees. Torturers pour water onto the face over the breathing passages, causing an almost immediate gag reflex and creating a drowning sensation for the captive. Normally, water is poured intermittently to prevent death; however, if the water is poured uninterruptedly it will lead to death by asphyxia. Waterboarding can cause extreme pain, damage to lungs, brain damage from oxygen deprivation, other physical injuries including broken bones due to struggling against restraints, and lasting psychological damage. Adverse physical effects can last for months, and psychological effects for years. The term "water board torture" appeared in press reports as early as 1976.
Leon Edward Panetta is an American retired politician and government official who has served under several Democratic administrations as secretary of defense (2011–2013), director of the CIA (2009–2011), White House chief of staff (1994–1997), director of the Office of Management and Budget (1993–1994), as well as a U.S. representative from California (1977–1993).
Mohammed Farik Bin Amin, alias Zubair Zaid, is a Malaysian who is alleged to be a senior member of Jemaah Islamiyah and al Qaeda. He is currently in American custody in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. He is one of the 14 detainees who had previously been held for years at CIA black sites. In the ODNI biographies of those 14, Amin is described as a direct subordinate of Hambali. Farik Amin is also a cousin of well-known Malaysian terrorist Zulkifli Abdhir.
"Enhanced interrogation techniques" or "enhanced interrogation" was a program of systematic torture of detainees by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and various components of the U.S. Armed Forces at remote sites around the world—including Abu Ghraib, Bagram, Bucharest, and Guantanamo Bay—authorized by officials of the George W. Bush administration. Methods used included beating, binding in contorted stress positions, hooding, subjection to deafening noise, sleep disruption, sleep deprivation to the point of hallucination, deprivation of food, drink, and medical care for wounds, as well as waterboarding, walling, sexual humiliation, rape, sexual assault, subjection to extreme heat or extreme cold, and confinement in small coffin-like boxes. A Guantanamo inmate's drawings of some of these tortures, to which he himself was subjected, were published in The New York Times. Some of these techniques fall under the category known as "white room torture". Several detainees endured medically unnecessary "rectal rehydration", "rectal fluid resuscitation", and "rectal feeding". In addition to brutalizing detainees, there were threats to their families such as threats to harm children, and threats to sexually abuse or to cut the throat of detainees' mothers.
John Chris Kiriakou is an American author, journalist and former intelligence officer. Kiriakou is a columnist with Reader Supported News and co-host of Political Misfits on Sputnik Radio. He was jailed for exposing the interrogation techniques of the U.S. government.
The CIA interrogation videotapes destruction occurred on November 9, 2005. The videotapes were made by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) during interrogations of al-Qaeda suspects Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri in 2002 at a CIA black site prison in Thailand. Ninety tapes were made of Zubaydah and two of al-Nashiri. Twelve tapes depict interrogations using "enhanced interrogation techniques", a euphemism for torture. The tapes and their destruction became public knowledge in December 2007. A criminal investigation by a Department of Justice special prosecutor, John Durham, decided in 2010 to not file any criminal charges related to destroying the videotapes.
Ali H. Soufan is a Lebanese-American former FBI agent who was involved in a number of high-profile anti-terrorism cases both in the United States and around the world. A 2006 New Yorker article described Soufan as coming closer than anyone to preventing the September 11 attacks and implied that he would have succeeded had the CIA been willing to share information with him. He resigned from the FBI in 2005 after publicly chastising the CIA for not sharing intelligence with him which could have prevented the attacks.
James Elmer Mitchell is an American psychologist and former member of the United States Air Force. From 2002, after his retirement from the military, to 2009, his company Mitchell Jessen and Associates received $81 million on contract from the CIA to carry out the torture of detainees, referred to as "enhanced interrogation techniques" that resulted in little credible information.
Abu Zubaydah is a Saudi citizen who helped manage the Khalden training camp in Afghanistan. Captured in Pakistan on March 28, 2002, he has since been held by the United States as an enemy combatant. Beginning in August 2002, Abu Zubaydah was the first prisoner to undergo enhanced interrogation techniques. There is disagreement among government sources as to how effective these techniques were; some officials contend that Abu Zubaydah gave his most valuable information before they were used; CIA lawyer John Rizzo said he gave more material afterward.
A set of legal memoranda known as the "Torture Memos" were drafted by John Yoo as Deputy Assistant Attorney General of the United States and signed in August 2002 by Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee, head of the Office of Legal Counsel of the United States Department of Justice. They advised the Central Intelligence Agency, the United States Department of Defense, and the president on the use of enhanced interrogation techniques—mental and physical torment and coercion such as prolonged sleep deprivation, binding in stress positions, and waterboarding—and stated that such acts, widely regarded as torture, might be legally permissible under an expansive interpretation of presidential authority during the "War on Terror."
John Bruce Jessen is an American psychologist who, with James Elmer Mitchell, created the so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" that were used in the interrogation and torture of CIA detainees and outlined in the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's report on CIA torture. In that report, he was mentioned under the pseudonym "Hammond Dunbar." His company, Mitchell Jessen and Associates, earned US$81million for its work.
Zero Dark Thirty is a 2012 American political action thriller film directed and produced by Kathryn Bigelow, and written and produced by Mark Boal. The film dramatizes the nearly decade-long international manhunt for Osama bin Laden, leader of the terrorist network Al-Qaeda, after the September 11 attacks. This search leads to the discovery of his compound in Pakistan and the U.S. military raid where bin Laden was killed on May 2, 2011.
The Panetta Review was a secret internal review conducted by Leon Panetta, then the director of the United States Central Intelligence Agency, of the CIA's torture of detainees during the administration of George W. Bush. The review led to a series of memoranda that, as of March 2014, remained classified. According to The New York Times, the memoranda "cast a particularly harsh light" on the Bush-era interrogation program, and people who have read them have said parts of the memos are "particularly scorching" of techniques such as waterboarding, which the memos describe as providing little valuable intelligence.
The Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency's Detention and Interrogation Program is a report compiled by the bipartisan United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) about the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)'s Detention and Interrogation Program and its use of torture during interrogation in U.S. government communiqués on detainees in CIA custody. The report covers CIA activities before, during, and after the "War on Terror." The initial report was approved on December 13, 2012, by a vote of 9–6, with seven Democrats, one independent, and one Republican voting in favor of the report and six Republicans voting in opposition.
Daniel J. Jones is an American former United States Senate investigator who served as the senior staff lead in the investigation into the CIA's use of torture in the wake of the September 11 attacks. Jones is the founder and president of Advance Democracy, Inc. (ADI), a nonpartisan, non-profit organization that conducts public interest investigations around the world that promote "accountability, transparency, and good governance", according to its description. Jones is also the founder of The Penn Quarter Group, a research and investigative advisory headquartered in Washington, DC.
Gina Cheri Walker Haspel is an American intelligence officer who was the seventh director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from May 21, 2018, to January 20, 2021. She was the agency's deputy director from 2017 to 2018 under Mike Pompeo, and became acting director on April 26, 2018, after Pompeo became U.S. secretary of state. She was later nominated and confirmed to the role, making her the first woman to become CIA director on a permanent basis.
James Cotsana is a security consultant, and former official of the Central Intelligence Agency whose testimony has been sought over how the CIA authorized, and implemented the clandestine use of torture, in its network of secret interrogation sites, commonly known as "black sites".
Following the September 11 attacks of 2001 and subsequent War on Terror, the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) established a "Detention and Interrogation Program" that included a network of clandestine extrajudicial detention centers, officially known as "black sites", to detain, interrogate, and often torture suspected enemy combatants, usually with the acquiescence, if not direct collaboration, of the host government.
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