Patriotism in The Report (2019)

I finally got round to watching The Report (dir. Burns, 2019) with Adam Driver following the instigation, research, and completion of the infamous US Torture Report that took over a decade to release (well, the exec summary was released), which detailed the authorisation and use of torture by the CIA during the War on Terror and evidence that such torture was not useful or effective in obtaining actionable intelligence.

The research for this movie is meticulous. Having seen so many US films about torture (whether directly or indirectly) that often misrepresent or outright lie about the use of torture by the US military and CIA and its value, the research behind this has clearly not only gone through the exec summary report, but takes phrases directly from key intelligence elite interviews and speeches to build the dialogue. Sure, there's some artistic licence here or there, but overall it's pretty accurate with current publicly available evidence.

It's a sobering watch to see the mechanisms and abuse of power that would allow such atrocities to be legalised, the political machinations that would protect such practices even when they are opposed and the tactics they used to silence the report. It also does a good job of representing the reality of what happened, including the CIA hacking Senate computers to expose and attack the lead investigator.

But the film centres the drama on the lead investigator working under Senator Feinstein for the US Senate Intelligence Committee and in doing so portrays the story as a heroic triumph of a dogged investigator working to expose the truth against elite political forces. The poster (see below) even quotes the AV Club’s description of it as “A Portrait of American Heroism”. This leads inevitably to its patriotic conclusion. Towards the end of the film, just before the report is released to the public and revealed to the Senate, Senator McDonough (John Hamm), in attempting to supress the report, asks: “Democracy is messy. But let’s just think … how many countries there are in the world where a report like this could even get done” (my transcript, emphasis in original). To this Senator Feinstein retorts: "I would like us to be more than the country that did the report. I'd like us to be country that made it public."

Poster for The Report (2019)

And herein lies the crux of its conclusion. The revelations of torture, of legalising torture, which they knew to be torture, should leave Americans shamed. But the movie wants us to see this as a patriotic moment, something to be proud of. 'We released the report. We acknowledge we've done wrong.' Several senators in fact do say this in the film, both real (through footage of Senator John McCain’s speech) and portrayed by actors in the film. So rather than becoming a sobering expose of the lies and deception about torture and the call for justice, the film transforms that revelatory moment into sentimentalist patriotism. It glosses over the fact that no one that oversaw, developed and conducted this torture was prosecuted for war crimes, that the US taxpayers paid US$80mill to the psychologists that created the torture program, which included covering any legal costs against criminal liability. This would be compounded under Obama’s administration where the whistle blowers were the only ones prosecuted and jailed. It does a bait and switch. It swaps justice with the act of revelation, as if simply acknowledging that one is a war criminal should not only indemnify them, but indeed demonstrates their magnanimity.

The Report (2019), like the US Torture Report itself, is a study in how US propaganda works successfully even in its darkest moments. Americans can stare at their own sadistic horror and honestly and genuinely say, "Look how great America is! Aren't we great?!" without any recognition that such senses of superiority is why they believe they are entitled to torture others in the first place. The truly sad thing? I think most of us agree. The Torture Report was released in 2014. Polls from 2016 demonstrated that almost half of Americans still supported the use of torture. The following year Donald Trump won Presidency on a platform promising to bring back the torture program and “a hell of a lot worse”. Nothing was learnt, and this film reflects that. American patriotism cannot abide shame and that lack of shame leaves the door open for future atrocities.