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Amazon’s “The Report”: Tough to Stomach, but Heroic in the End
If you have seen Vice, then the newest docudrama coming to the small screen via Amazon entitled The ‘Torture’ Report is the perfect bookend to the sorry saga of the United States’ Enhanced Torture Methods.
Cheney and Rumsfeld never set foot into the dark, disturbing chambers where water boarding and beatings occurred post 9.11, but they were instrumental in keeping that program alive and brutally kicking any and all suspects. They never appear in the film, but their suffocating presence kept all in line at the CIA.
FBI agent Daniel Jones, played by Adam Driver, performs an exhaustive investigation into the CIA’s use of torture on suspected terrorists. He is heroic, stubborn and willing to speak truth to power. His truth is simple: the CIA investigated the effectiveness of Enhanced Torture Methods (devised by a couple of rapscallions cloaked as ‘professors’) and had to find that they were effective at getting information out of unwilling prisoners. But it was a Catch 22. If the program did not get ‘legitimate Intel’ then it would be illegal; so the CIA had to lie and say it was legit to be legal…even though after exhaustive research by Jones, it was all fabricated.
However, he is not alone in his quest to reveal the truth to the American people in his report, which the CIA redacted to the…
