New Film ‘The Report’ Details CIA Torture Practices Following September 11
Adam Driver stars as Daniel Jones in The Report, a new Scott Z. Burns film about Jones’ attempt to uncover the CIA’s use of torture following 9/11.
The Report is a new film depicting the CIA’s use of systematic torture on terrorist suspects following the Sept. 11 attacks and the heroic attempt to expose these inhumane practices. It covers more than a decade’s worth of real-life political intrigue, drawing from former U.S. Senate investigator Daniel Jones’s 6,700-page report—the largest investigation in U.S. Senate history.
Written and directed by Scott Z. Burns (writer for The Laundromat, The Bourne Ultimatum) and produced by Steven Soderbergh (Traffic, Erin Brockovich) the new film stars Adam Driver (Star Wars: The Last Jedi ) as Daniel Jones, who was an aide to US Senator Dianne Feinstein, played by Annette Bening.
Jones is tasked with documenting what actually occurred as part of the allegedly enhanced interrogation techniques employed to fight terrorism after the 9/11 attacks. With little help and thwarted by other government branches, Jones’ small team sift through 6 million pages of documents for over seven years. Adding to their frustration, officials at the CIA and in the Obama administration show little desire for exposing the truth and are often seeking to obscure it for their own protection.
In actuality, the duo that had sold themselves to the CIA as experts on interrogation and breaking the wills of detainees—to “induce learned helplessness”—would include practices such as waterboarding, sleep deprivation and other methods that proved ineffective. This was despite the experts’ insistence that they were based on science, and their argument that the subjects’ continued lying meant the tactics were actually effective.
Jones’ report would eventually be released in December 2014, exposing the faulty practices and principles of the CIA, and how it ultimately affected the United States’ standing in the world. Subsequently, Jones partook in reforms such as the National Defense Authorization Act, which would prevent the future use of coercive interrogation techniques or indefinite, secret detention in the future.
Jones is now 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.” He is currently a Fellow at Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy.
The Report opens Nov. 15 in select theaters and will be available on Amazon Prime Video two weeks later on November 29.