VICE News
Here’s Why You Should Still Care About the Torture Report — From The Guy Who Wrote It
2019 • E38 Nov 6, 2019 6m
It seems like a bad idea for a movie: A guy spends five years in the windowless basement room of a nondescript office building in Virginia reading through 6 million documents. He and his small team then write a 6,700-page report — with 38,000 footnotes and a table of contents that’s hundreds of pages long — based on what they learn. Only a handful of people ever bother to read the report, and it’s then basically locked away. The end. But it isn’t just any office building; it’s a CIA installation. The documents are classified CIA emails and cables. And the report seeks to uncover information about the agency’s post-9/11 “enhanced interrogation” program, a yearslong torture campaign in which more than 100 detainees were brutalized in secret blacksite prisons all over the world, and which remains a horrific stain on America’s reputation