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.

Very accurate description of CIAs disorganization

My phone was cyberattacks while listening, I had about 12 hours remaining. The CIA uses various tactics mentioned in this, today, but fail to be caught thanks to the internet, Google, and the people that they puppet. A majority of good people working don't even know whom they're actually taking orders from and/or whom they're torturing.

The Truth Behind CIA Interrogations

This audiobook gave a lot of detail of how the CIA conducted its interrogations of terrorists. These terrorists went through a living hell because of the bold attack on the US during 911.
Some people may think the methods were too brutal and violent and violated international protocol; it must be remembered that when the enemy interrogates our people, it is without mercy, and they kill without remorse.
I think of what Senator John McCain went through when I read what the CIA did to these foreign individuals.
Perhaps a weak link in the CIA's operation was they had officers and contractors who were inexperienced or not well-trained and who resorted to violence to make up for their lack of skill.
It was an eye-opener. I will withhold my judgement.

Straightforward

I appreciate the straightforward telling. I haven’t watched the series yet, but I intend to now.

Yes, Mr. Tenet, we believe you were torturers

With rumors continuing to float around about the torture of prisoners by the CIA, the Senate Intelligence Committee did an exhaustive study and produced a 6,700-page (including 38,000 footnotes) classified report, approved on December 13, 2012. On December 9, 2014, it released a redacted executive summary of the full report. Audible recorded it and I downloaded it some time ago and finally got around to listening to it. 

I had known that there were abuses but chalked it up to the furor over the blatant attack on innocent civilians at the time and the desire to make sure that there were no further attacks. We all felt the outrage and at least some sort of desire for vengeance. At the same time, I think many of us felt uncomfortable with the idea of torture, not only on moral grounds, but with the feeling that most people, when tortured, would be more likely to tell their captor what they think he wants to hear than what is necessarily the truth. 

Reading this report, I was struck with the feeling that the whole project had gone inherently wrong from the beginning. Even if there were good motives in the beginning, the only thing that kept the project going was pure cruelty–whether from a desire for vengeance, from an innate hatred, or from an unwillingness to admit that they were wrong. It was shocking, frustrating, embarrassing, and sad. The report catalogs a litany of lies, misrepresentations, coverups, and obfuscations. The CIA kept claiming that they were getting information that couldn’t have been gotten elsewhere or in any other way and yet, their own records showed that all of the significant data came from other sources without torture and most of it had already been received when they got it from one of their tortured subjects. It was their own records. They knew that they weren’t getting anything significant that they didn’t already have. They knew there was no evidence that torture was producing anything of value. They knew that some of their prisoners were innocent and a mistake to have been taken and yet they continued to hold them for years. 

This is a report of a Congressional Committee. It’s not light reading and not easy reading. Many names, dates, locations, etc., have been replaced by the word “redacted.” It is certainly not interesting reading. There is a lot of repetition. If it weren’t for the seriousness of the subject and the absolute depravity that it depicts, it would have been hard to get through it. And yet, it was riveting. The repetition just drilled home the hopelessness of the “mission” to get information through torture. We signed the Geneva Convention for good reason and that was not just because of high moral values, as important as that may be. It was also because we wanted to be able to hold others to the same standard and hope that our own soldiers would be treated with the same respect. To break that, even with an enemy who themselves flaunted all sense of decency and morality, is to weaken our own position among the rest of the world and endanger our own military men. Many have been tortured in the past, but we’ve been able to demand accountability based on our respect for the standards in our treatment of enemy combatants. A very telling statement was a quote from former CIA Director,  George Tenet, “If the general public were to find out about this program, many would believe we are torturers.”  Yes, Mr. Tenet, if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then most of us would probably say, “Yes, that must be a duck.” Now that we have found out about this program, there are a lot of us who believe that a branch of our government were torturers, that they knew that we would think so, and that they tried to cover it up while still continuing what they were doing. Shame. 

Riveting material; excellent voice performances

Mandatory reading for anyone interested in national security, human rights, or social justice. The actors reading the material, particularly Jon Hamm, make this a really compelling listen.

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.