The Report – Defensive Functioning and CIA Rage

 The Report, Movie, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Torture

 

This Saturday, we watched The Report, an Adam Driver film that dropped last year and has been on our list to see, but has never made it to the top our list, I think because of the necessary violence – and the complicity of psychology as a field in this morally heinous chapter in US history – it has not seemed enticing to watch. 

Earlier, on Saturday afternoon, we wanted to get out from under the Covid cloud of isolation, and chose to go on a drive into the country to a local sculpture park.  It was a lovely drive, and This American Life came on the radio.  It was a rebroadcast of a 1998 piece about the Trail of Tears.  I was struck by one of the story teller’s statements – “In a Democracy, the people are responsible for the actions of the government.”

Steeled by this sentiment, we watch the film.  It is violent.  And what we did to people, for no apparent value – the way that we violated the Geneva Convention based on the say-so of two yutz psychologists, as they are presented in this movie, is appalling.  The truth of the matter, especially psychology’s complicity in these actions, is worse than the narrative lets us know.  I have documented aspects of that here, here and here. 

Psychology’s sins are not the focus of this film – it has bigger fish to fry.  What the CIA did to our constitution, what thugs did to people we were trying to extract information from, and how those who were under fire from powerful foes but managed to stay within the lines and to bring something to the light of day is what this film wants us to focus on, and I think those are good foci.  That said, I would also add that a subtle but important aspect is that a driving force behind some forms of evil is the refusal of people to acknowledge that what they are doing simply isn’t working and yet they seem powerless to change that.

In the narrative of this film, the CIA felt they had failed the country by allowing the events of 9/11/2001 to occur. The film then presents evidence that the CIA could, in fact have known, that an attack was coming if they had listened to other agencies.  The CIA, which can think it is a step above law enforcement agencies, rejected intel from the FBI that might have prevented 9/11.  Further complicating this is that FBI agents were gathering intelligence from individuals who ended up being tortured by building relationships with them – the only reliable means of interrogation.  “Enhanced” interrogation (torture) has no evidence to support its use – the CIA gathered none in the process of waterboarding, beating, humiliating, and, in at least one case, killing people who were detained in Guantanamo Bay.  And they disparaged the relationship building that the FBI espoused and that has empirical evidence to support its effectiveness as a means to gather information from hostile combatants.

Wait a minute, you say, isn’t torture illegal?  Yes, is the short answer.  The long answer is that when a mental health practitioner is present to make sure that the person is not harmed, “enhanced interrogation” procedures can be used.  The AMA told the Department of Defense they would not condone torture, as did the Nursing and Social Work associations.  It was only Psychology's APA – and it must be remembered that American Psychologists (and I am one) are dependent on the Department of Defense for training more than 50% of us – and for huge amounts of money for research  - it was we who said “Yes.  Yes, we will ‘oversee’ your torturing of foreigners [wink, wink].”  When I say we, the President of the American Psychological Association as well as past Presidents and the ethics board all signed on.  And we altered our ethics code so that the yutz psychologists, paid 80 million dollars not to watch and protect, but to administer “enhanced interrogation” procedures, could go ahead and do that and remain in good standing.  And our administrative staff denied, stonewalled and gaslit concerned psychologists who thought this might be happening and tried to get to the bottom of what eventually came to light in order to stop or, in lieu of that, to hold ourselves responsible.

OK, that last paragraph was not in the movie (except for the 80 million dollars).  I just had to get it off my chest.  Back to the film…

Adam Driver plays Senator Diane Feinstein’s staffer Daniel Jones – a Harvard grad interested in politics who wants to effect change behind the scenes.  He is well prepared for the job he is assigned – he is directed by Obama’s future Chief of Staff to get some experience with the intelligence community before applying to work as a staffer, and when he joins Feinstein’s staff, she is head of the Senate Intelligence Committee that oversees the functioning of the CIA.  Daniel and five other senate staffers are tasked with reviewing the emails and reports that were generated by the CIA relevant to the “enhanced interrogations” which the CIA credited with preventing many subsequent terrorist actions.

 

Daniel Jones was the lead author of the 6,700 page eponymous report about the activity.  Watching him work 18 hour days for 5 years to build this report, while one after another other staffer leaves the project, is actually more entertaining (if you want to call it that) than you might imagine.  The discovery of the brutality of the interrogation tactics is accompanied by graphic depictions of them – and they are horrific.  And they yield no useful intelligence.  The CIA is painting the picture that this is a necessary part of their intelligence, but Driver is able to build the narrative of what actually has happened by painstakingly tracing email interactions so that he knows that the CIA is lying about its sources. 

 

Jones finally finds the smoking gun – the CIA’s own report that shows that torture is ineffective and has produced no evidence.  The film begins and then returns to the moment when Jones steals the document showing that the CIA knew that it was harboring an ineffective but brutal and illegal torture system out of the CIA building but went right on torturing anyway.  Jones illegally has this document in his possession, and the (other) most harrowing part of the film is watching him figure out how to maneuver between revealing this document and the rest of the Report he has written to the media, which would be illegal; pressuring Feinstein to take the report public; being harassed and sued by the CIA; having Obama, who wanted to be a post partisan president, release the report but black everything under the guise of dangerously exposing state secrets; to the final release of the document in a somewhat anti-climactic because long overdue and thus disappointing final moment of the Senate standing up to the Executive branch (will we ever see that again?  Certainly not with the current administration) and reading the report into the Senate record for all to see.

 

One way of trying to understand this sequence of events is that the CIA was engaged in what psychoanalysts call the repetition compulsion.  To get to this reading, we have to imagine them as traumatized by what they had done to others (this argument would be similar to the Catholic Social Teaching that we should be concerned about the well-being of the college administrators who are “having” to order schools to reopen knowing that this will cause deaths) and, as a result of the consequent “moral trauma” they have to keep doing what they are doing in order to absolve themselves of guilt – as if by continuing to do it they would justify it as a “normal” action.  This is a problematic reading – not just because it is applying the repetition compulsion to the perpetrators of violence rather than to those who have survived it, but also because it requires us to imagine guilt on the part of the CIA.  Even imagining unconscious guilt is pretty tough to do the way that this movie is structured (which is not to rule out the possibility of this having happened in the actual situation being depicted – it is important to note that I am offering an interpretation of the portrayal of the actions of these people, not of the actual people and their actions, though there is assumed to be a reasonable parallel).

 

A parochial read would be “in for a penny, in for a dollar.”  The idea would be that once the CIA had committed to the program, they would continue because of inertia.  Sort of like when the US continued to escalate the war in Vietnam because of the costs they had already taken on in getting to the point where they were.  I think there is some merit to this position and I don’t doubt that some in the chain of command signed off because of something like this, but I think the movie is pointing at something far more sinister.

 

The film ends with the usual accounting of where our heroes and anti-heroes have ended up.  As is often the case in a film that exposes governmental or white collar corruption, the bad guys have never paid their debt to society.  In fact, many of the perpetrators have been promoted within the CIA and Trump is in open awe of individuals who tortured.  I think, if memory serves, he has referred to them as “badasses”.  (If you know that he used a different term, please let me know that in the comments below and I will edit this post).

 

Unlike so many of my other posts, this is not a post about what a bad guy Trump is.  Nor is it about the “basket of deplorables” who voted for him or have served under him.  Despite the fact that I think that Trump would institute torture in a heartbeat if he could figure out how to do it (some of the loopholes have been closed in the wake of this scandal, and I think the APA learned its lesson – we did fire our institutional perpetrators…), that is not how I am thinking of this.

 

I think that the CIA acts to channel our collective rage – one of the basic motivational systems posited by Panskepp that neuroscientists like Solms are bringing to psychoanalysts’ attention.  This motivational system is intended to destroy frustrating objects in the world.  At the beginning of WWII, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, our rage was unleashed with terrible consequences.  We experienced aggression from another.

 

Since that war, our position as the unquestioned power on the world stage has not, until quite recently, been truly in question.  Yes, the cold war was a difficult period.  Yes we were concerned that nuclear proliferation and the spread of communism was an attempt to steal our riches and redistribute them to other nations.  More recently, though, we have experienced ourselves as the dominant world power, while simultaneously feeling that may be slipping – China is rapidly gaining or surpassing us on many measures of wealth and influence.  When we are focused on how wonderful we are while also wondering if we are, in fact, quite all that we are cracked up to be, we are in a position of being narcissistically vulnerable.  So, from that perspective, it makes sense that we elect a leader like Trump who has a narcissistic character structure.  He is mirroring the current national psyche.  The CIA has always been there to protect us from external threats.  When we are functioning narcissistically, it can be very difficult to distinguish between real and perceived threats.

 

Obviously, Al-Qaida was and is a real threat.  But a part of that threat was narcissistic.  For the CIA, it was that they missed the warning signs.  For the country, it is that “backwards”, ill equipped fundamentalists can expose our vulnerabilities.   They can use our most sophisticated technology against us by simply wielding box cutters.  And part of having narcissistically vulnerable aspects exposed is that this is a direct route to unleashing our rage. 

 

In this context, the rage is doubled because not only has Al-Qaida exposed our national vulnerability, the Senate has the temerity to expose the CIA’s.  The CIA directs its rage at the Senate – in the form of lawsuits towards the Senate staffer, but perhaps more importantly through the violation of the Senate’s oversight abilities – they break into the Senate’s secure room and steal files from the Senate aids.

 

The hero in our story, Daniel Jones, responds by sticking to his guns.  He makes good use of advice and figures out how to get very powerful bullies to back off by making them play by his rules rather than playing by theirs.  He asserts the ideal that our friends on This American Live espoused – the individuals making the cross country trek to follow the trail of tears that led their forbearers to Oklahoma -  that we the people – and these Cherokee descendants included themselves in this – are responsible for the actions of our Democracy.

 

No matter how this coming election is determined, we have a lot of work to do to have our Democracy reflect not just who we are, which I think it will always – and often for the worse – do, but to work towards expressing who we imagine ourselves are capable of becoming.  And much of that work will actually mirror what Trump promised.  We do need to dismantle aspects of our government – aspects where various isms are institutionalized – and we need to quit pretending that those are not ours – but to realize that they are ours, and to rework them, so that they can work for the good of the many, not the few. 

 

Fortunately there are people like Daniel Jones and the cadre of other staffers not depicted in the film who worked with him and can help us work on these seemingly intractable problems.  Perhaps we are in the process of waking up to these problems and we can constructively work on addressing some of our vulnerabilities rather than simply using them to open the door to rage.

 

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