Like the Iraq war documentary No End in Sight, this movie about the U.S. military’s systematic torture of terror suspects is a triumph not of reporting but of synthesis. News publications had been investigating various aspects of the story for years, but director Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) skillfully connects the dots, from Afghanistan to Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo to the office of Donald Rumsfeld. Framing all this material is the story of Dilawar, a demonstrably innocent Afghan cabdriver who was imprisoned by U.S. forces at the Bagram detention center in December 2002 and died five days later, having been hung by his wrists for hours on end and kicked in the legs so many times they were, to quote the autopsy report, “pulpified.” Gibney leaves little doubt that torture was endorsed at the highest levels of government, though the Military Commissions Act of 2006 protects the real decision makers from prosecution.