The Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture (Movie Tie-In Edition)

Executive Summary of the Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency's Detention and Interrogation Program

By: Senate Select Committee on Intelligence

Narrated by: full cast

The Senate Intelligence Committee Summary Report on Torture is a public document belonging to the American people, arising from the Senate investigation into the CIA’s Interrogation and Detention Program. The summary report is more commonly known by its shorthand: The Torture Report. The Senate Intelligence Committee made public this document, with redactions, on December 9, 2009. The events surrounding its investigation, writing, and publication are now the subject of Scott Z. Burns’ film The Report, an Amazon Original (in theaters on 11/15 and on Amazon Prime 11/29 from Amazon Studios). Here, you can hear the report in its entirety, with selected footnotes - omitting those sections that are yet to be declassified - as read by members of the cast of the film. Also included is a special introduction by Daniel J. Jones, the lead investigator of the Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture.

The introduction to this audiobook is written and read by the lead investigator, Daniel J. Jones. The body of this audiobook is read by the cast members of the movie The Report including Annette Bening, Jon Hamm, Sarah Goldberg, Michael C. Hall, Douglas Hodge, Fajer Al-Kaisi, Ted Levine, Jennifer Morrison, Tim Blake Nelson, Linda Powell, Scott Shepherd, T. Ryder Smith, Corey Stoll, Maura Tierney, and Joanne Tucker.

Public Domain (P)2019 Amazon Studios

Please, please, please pay attention

The audio version is a help in working through a comprehensive report, that sometimes reiterates material to allow each section to summarize conclusions.

I decided to work through this prior to watching the Prime movie. I wanted a sense of what is recitation when I look at that adaptation of the information. It's valuable to go to source. I encourage everyone to know more about the circumstances undertaken that are the subject of this report. There are crimes and no one in our government has been held responsible. The reason under the stress of 9/11 resulted in poor decision and practice. We carried out actions that failed to accomplish the desired outcomes. We need to recognize what happened and be better. We need to live up to our treaties and founding documents.

How do you sell a hearing report?

First off, everyone in America has their side on issues important or unimportant to them. So it’s hard to draw people into a narrative such as a report from a committee. I’m not saying the narrative is fluff or propaganda of a sort but it’s difficult to follow a plot when it’s just a long stream of information with no real conclusive hook to bring to reader down from a cloud of utter confusion.

Interesting and very dry but that's to be expected

I'm glad I listened to it. It is an executive summary, so it can get really dry. A lot of the information is also repeated, since it is set up to have relevant information by section, and information can be relevant to multiple sections. It was really helpful for there to be different voice actors, as it helped break up the monotony. I also really appreciated that each time the recording went to a note, they inserted a page turning sound and had the note reader be different from the section reader. My main critique was the pronunciation of the various names. Most actors did not pronounce them as they would be pronounced in Arabic, and the pronunciation was varied based on who was saying the names. This sometimes made me have to think through if they were talking about the same person.

CIA BAD- SENATE GOOD...

I couldn't help feeling sorry for MOST of the CIA people who had to carry out orders from HQ, in spite of their belief that the subject had no information to give. it goes to show how depraved all sides can become

Redacted

This is is very dry, very repetitive material, however the cast did a great job of bringing it to life. I don’t know how the film went, but I can imagine them all having to study their parts of the report in order to ensure smooth delivery. Even then, the sheer amount of material that’s REDACTED sometimes made them stumble. Nothing like having to say REDACTED nearly every other word in a sentence to throw you off. Still hats off to the filmmaker and cast for tackling difficult material.