Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
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, 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 US 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 pages, 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.
Synopsis
- Equally propulsive as a narrative, The Forever Prisoner goes way beyond Jane Mayer's powerful and revelatory 2008 bestseller, The Dark Side, which initially revealed the torture program. Mayer had no access to the protagonists themselves nor to thousands of recently released FOIA documents, so her riveting account was necessarily limited in its scope.
- The torture program remains an existential threat to the reputation of the CIA, which is why they have done everything possible to prevent the story Scott-Clark and Levy tell from leaking out.
- The authors' investigation was a primary source for the feature length documentary also titled The Forever Prisoner, directed by award-winning Alex Gibney, to be released on December 6, 2021. It will get wide coverage, setting up the book, which has much more depth and dimension, for major media. Described by Esquire as "the most important documentarian of our time," Gibney has directed, among many others, Taxi to the Dark Side, which won the 2007 Academy Award for Documentary Feature, and most recently The Crime of the Century, chronicling the opioid epidemic.
- The Forever Prisoner will appeal to anyone who has read the bestselling titles The Forever War by Dexter Filkins, Ghost Wars by Steve Coll, and Manhunt by Peter Bergen.
- In 2014, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence determined the CIA was guilty of torture, murder, and deception, and that these transgressions had produced no high-value intelligence. The Forever Prisoner chronicles many details behind these charges that the Senate committee was unaware of in 2014.
- Many believe the torture program began and ended in the 2004 scandal at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Rather, as the authors show, this was an inevitable outgrowth of the program James Mitchell devised, which metastasized when the military appropriated it. The program then ran for four more years after Abu Ghraib.
- We will have blurbs from bestselling journalist/authors Lawrence Wright and Peter Bergen, from Alex Gibney himself, and from a range of high-profile writers and public figures the authors know.
- The 2015 success of Guantanamo Diary, by Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a former Guantanamo detainee, and of the 2021 film on which it is based, The Mauritanian, underscores the strong appetite for understanding the darkest corners of the "war on terror" and how America reached a point where torture was deemed acceptable.
- Editor: George Gibson