Adam Driver and the Obama-Era Torture Report
An inglorious moment in the arugula and avocado-toast era gave Trump the power to take American civil liberties right now.
If you’re someone who feels like the world is collapsing, you might struggle to care about injustices of the American national security state from the last couple decades. “Who cares about Bush’s illegal wars, Trump is going to war against the American people!” I understand.
But your sense that tyranny is at the door and your refusal of the sins of the recent past are inseparable.
Do you remember the US Senate’s report on the CIA’s torture program, released in December 2014? I write about this stuff for a living and I had forgotten it even existed. Until, that is, I rewatched The Report, a 2019 film starring Adam Driver that dramatized the investigation of the torture program and the insider fight to publicize its findings (the movie is streaming free on Amazon).
The Senate produced a 6,700-page report, including 38,000 footnotes, documenting the US torture of “detainees” during the George W. Bush presidency…but only 525 pages of it were ever publicly released. To this day, the full torture report remains classified because of Obama-era ghouls like John Brennan, Dennis McDonough, and Gina Haspel. Bush’s people committed the atrocities, and Obama’s people washed them clean.
The film viscerally reminds us that the Global War on Terror was—and remains—an omnibus package of war crimes that the US has still never reckoned with. And that’s why so many of us are experiencing the boot today.
The torture that the US committed during the Global War on Terror stands out as the most flagrant violation of the liberal credo that justifies the existence of the American state. For that reason, many good liberals thought the torture report was worth writing, and worth trying to make public. But, as the film depicts, not only did the Obama administration censor the torture report for entirely political reasons; it treated the partial release of the report as a vindication of the larger War on Terror.
Obama, it may be remembered, massively expanded drone strikes, including targeting US citizens; it prosecuted journalists and whistleblowers at an unprecedented rate; and it legitimated the barbarism of the War on Terror as legal and “smart”—that hollow adjective that became a crass honorific during the Obama years.
This is the unfolding historical process that leads us to the depravities of our present. Think of examples of Trump’s imperial overreach—El Salvadoran prisons for ICE deportees, the mass surveillance of peace protestors, the violations of due process, the court-sanctioned return of racial profiling, the drone strikes on cartel drug mules, the illegal bombings of Iran. The techniques of MAGA tyranny were perfected by Obama-era technocrats. All of it—all of it—went on during the Obama years, only with different targets and a narrower remit than today.
It gets much worse.
The unconfronted legacy of the War on Terror haunts us right now in another way that will hit all of us close to home if it hasn’t already. Trump has today issued a sweeping presidential memorandum that classifies “political violence” as “terrorism,” and redirects the full power of the national security state against any person or civil society organization the administration deems part of “Antifa,” a hallucinatory straw man that allows the Trump administration to prosecute MAGA’s political enemies. The memorandum itself does not just label Antifa a terrorist organization; it asserts that terrorism arises from:
anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.
With the exception of the overthrowing-government bit, this describes securitizes the beliefs of everyone who isn’t a MAGA Republican—the overwhelming majority of Americans. I don’t know whether it’s most apt to call this a kind of tyranny, fascism, counter-revolution, or one-sided civil war, but it’s bad shit. And it’s bad shit that would lack potency but for the Obama administration’s expansion of the Global War on Terror.
Since 9/11, “terrorism” has taken on special meaning in both American culture and in the US national security state. The media depicts anything labeled terror as inherently evil. For the US security state, terror is the ultimate rhetoric asserting the state’s monopoly on violence, inflating the threat that individuals pose to the system so as to justify extraordinary measures.
Extraordinary measures. That’s what it’s all about. The Global War on Terror was the name we gave to an era of endless extraordinary measures—illegal invasions of foreign countries, racial profiling of US citizens, mass surveillance of all Americans, the proliferation of weapons to autocratic regimes, the practice of extraordinary rendition (state-sanctioned kidnapping), the creation of black sites for interrogation, and of course the torture of detainees held indefinitely and without due process.
Every bit of that infamy is hounding us now, not just the torture.
As someone who served during the Obama administration, this all makes me want to do drugs. I remember years spent inside the system not thinking for one minute about the torture program; believing that drone strikes were the least-bad foreign policy option for dealing with “terrorists”; accepting that American occupation of Afghanistan was necessary to go after terrorists in neighboring Pakistan.
I don’t remember even hearing about the Senate torture report when it came out in 2014, and I remember watching The Report in 2019—when my political consciousness was just awakening—and feeling very mixed up. One part of me was aghast at the cynical, dark-hearted conduct of key figures in the Obama administration. Another part of me felt a partial restoration of faith, like the fact that someone on the inside fought the good fight and got a partial, incremental victory (by getting some of the torture report released) was proof that the system was redeemed.
Yet where does any of that leave us? Without repudiating the War on Terror, holding poor judgment accountable, and rescinding both the funding and the authorities that produced its extraordinary measures, we were always going end up with the state’s techniques of progress being redirected at progress itself. That’s precisely what’s happening now.
God help us.
Listen to our conversation about The Report, with The Guardian’s Adrian Horton, on The Bang-Bang Podcast:
