Black holes

Senator Feinstein and her torture report starring dogged Daniel Jones ... Huckster psychologists and crook lawyers combine to trash the Geneva Conventions and civilised standards ... The battle to avoid redactions ... No accountability ... The Senate v the CIA ... Miss Lumière reviews The Report 

Here's the real Daniel Jones - who unpicked the failure of the CIA's "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques"  

Unlike its namesake, Scott Z. Burns' The Report appears to have escaped major redaction.

It's full of damning words, slimy political realities and bone-crunching details of the (George W) Bush administration's use of torture on suspected terrorists held at various US "black sites" post 9/11.

Burns' intelligently scripted and tightly edited film encompasses the lead-up to those acts, the subsequent cover-up, the follow-up Senate committee report into them and the concerted bid to suppress it.

It's a gripping, complex and ultimately depressing account that could easily have been subtitled "How the World Really Works".  

The film begins in 2009 as clever young political wanna-be Daniel Jones (Adam Driver) finds himself employed by Senate Intelligence Committee chair, Democrat Dianne Feinstein (Annette Bening), tasked with investigating the CIA's treatment of captured terrorist suspects in the wake of the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center.

While the CIA is obstructive, Jones is obsessive. He and a small team spend almost six years in an airless basement pouring over emails, transcripts and documents.

What they uncover is both galling and extraordinary. Between 2001 and 2008, the CIA employed what they called Enhanced Interrogation Techniques (read torture) repeatedly (in one case 183 times) and with no result - i.e. it produced no relevant intelligence.

Which is not surprising - the techniques were invented by two  dodgy psychologists, James Mitchell (Douglas Hodge) and Bruce Jesson (T. Ryder Smith) with a nice line in psychobabble, but without any discernible science.

In one scene Mitchell and Jesson describe to senior CIA operatives how their "EITs" aim to create in suspects the "three Ds - debility, dependency and dread", so creating fertile ground for admissions.

In The Report, we get to see their "ideas" in action, with a series of frightening flashbacks involving water boarding and beatings by men in masks, all to a death metal soundtrack.  

Given the facts, the subsequent cover-up by the US government and its agencies was inevitable. As one CIA lawyer puts it in the film:

"It's only legal if it works."

This was the justification for torture devised by then justice department lawyer John C. Yoo, who has been rewarded for his brilliance by being appointed Professor of Law at Berkeley. 

The Report features some fine performances, most notably from Driver as the driven (apologies) moral centre of the film, Bening as the politically savvy but resolute Feinstein and veteran character actor Ted Levine as John Brennan, the creepy, ruthless CIA director most keen to see Jones' report buried.

Culprits are named, evil identified and blame sheeted squarely home to an array of protagonists - the CIA, the two psychologists, the Cheney/Bush administration, President Obama (for wanting it all to go away and with no prosecutions on his watch) and most glaringly, the political system itself.

In the end, after threats of criminal action against Jones, a timely leak to The New York Times, a hack of the Committee's computers by the CIA and a whole lot of political manoeuvring, only a 500 page executive summary of the original 7000-page report saw the light of day.

It's a credit to writer/director Burns and producer Steven Soderbergh that so much more is now available to be seen on the big screen. 

The Report is in cinemas on November 14 and on Amazon Prime Video on November 29.