Some argued it would save the U.S. after 9/11. Instead, the CIA's
enhanced interrogation program came to be defined as American torture.
The Forever Prisoner, a primary source for the recent HBO Max film
directed by Academy Award winner Alex Gibney, exposes the full story
behind the most divisive CIA operation in living memory.
Six months after 9/11, the CIA captured Abu Zubaydah and announced he
was number three in Al Qaeda. Frantic to thwart a much-feared second
wave of attacks, the U.S. rendered him to a secret black site in
Thailand, where he collided with retired Air Force psychologist James
Mitchell. Arguing that Abu Zubaydah had been trained to resist
interrogation and was withholding vital clues, the CIA authorized
Mitchell and others to use brutal "enhanced interrogation techniques"
that would have violated U.S. and international laws had not government
lawyers rewritten the rulebook.
In The Forever Prisoner, Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy recount
dramatic scenes inside multiple black sites around the world through the
eyes of those who were there, trace the twisted legal justifications,
and chart how enhanced interrogation, a key "weapon" in the global "War
on Terror," metastasized over seven years, encompassing dozens of
detainees in multiple locations, some of whom died. Ultimately that war
has cost 8 trillion dollars and 900,000 lives, and displaced 38 million
people--while the U.S. Senate judged enhanced interrogation was torture
and had produced zero high-value intelligence. Yet numerous men,
including Abu Zubaydah, remain imprisoned in Guantanamo, never charged
with any crimes, in contravention of America's ideals of justice and due
process, because their trials would reveal the extreme brutality they
experienced.
Based on four years of intensive reporting, on interviews with key
protagonists who speak candidly for the first time, and on thousands of
previously classified documents, The Forever Prisoner is a powerful
chronicle of a shocking experiment that remains in the headlines twenty
years after its inception, even as U.S. government officials continue to
thwart efforts to expose war crimes.
Silenced by a CIA pledge to keep him imprisoned and incommunicado
forever, Abu Zubaydah speaks loudly through these minutes, prompting the
question as to whether he and others remain detained not because of what
they did to us but because of what we did to them.
