‘Saturday Night Live’ Mockingly Slams CIA Torture Report

There are very few issues that Saturday Night Live won’t confront head-on, including the current CIA torture report released by the Senate Intelligence Committee last Tuesday.

The sketch uses the Charlie Rose Show, with Charlie Rose being played by Taran Killam, as a device to interview the two psychologists, played by Bobby Moynihan and Kyle Mooney, who are behind the torture techniques listed in the Senate’s report. The two were paid $80 million to devise actual torture techniques for the intelligence agency.

Killam, as Charlie Rose, begins the skit by saying that the torture report reads like a menu from The Cheesecake Factory.

“[It’s] 660 sickening pages, yet I couldn’t put it down,” he says.

When asked how the two psychologists felt about the torture report, they replied, “It was teamwork, you have to remember, there is no ‘I’ in torture.”

On Saturday Night Live, though, the pair are responsible not just for the torture techniques used by the CIA, but basically for everything bad, including the customer service at Time Warner Cable and the fact that the TSA requires passengers to remove their laptops from their bags when boarding a plane. In the skit, though, the two insist to “Charlie Rose” that torture isn’t their “main thing,” and not the only thing they want to be remembered for, with Moynihan saying, “After all, there’s more than one way to skin a cat.”

“And we know the exact number,” says Mooney in response. “It’s 19.”

The Senate Intelligence Committee report on the CIA program describes a period in 2003 when officials at the CIA were searching hard for “reaffirmation” that the current White House, under the Bush administration, supported the “enhanced interrogation” techniques used on al Qaeda suspects being detained by the United States. The report revealed that there were at least two “mock executions,” as well as “nudity, dietary manipulation, exposure to cold temperatures, cold showers and rough takedowns,” according to CNN.

The CIA also threatened the families of the detainees. Detainees were also subject to extreme sleep deprivation — for up to 102 hours at a time — shackled in a standing position, and doused with near-freezing water in order to keep them awake. And at least five detainees were subjected to medically unnecessary rectal feedings, whereby CIA agents would simply puree the food on the detainee’s lunch tray and rectally infuse it.

The report is shocking, and although former Vice President Dick Cheney defends the actions of the CIA, saying that the extreme methods employed produced results crucial to national security, the findings of the actual torture report say the opposite.

But leave it to Saturday Night Live to take what may be the most disturbing news of the entire week and turn it into a skit. Of course, this skit actually had the benefit of being aired. SNL recently pulled a skit about Ferguson, Missouri, from its line-up last minute. You can see that clip here.

Watch the full CIA torture report skit from Saturday Night Live below and tell us — is this just another example of SNL pushing the boundaries when it comes to black comedy, or is the skit in poor taste?

[Image via Slate.com]