As "The Forever Prisoner" (2021 release; 119 min.) opens, we are briefly introduced to a prisoner held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, who amazingly has never been charged with a crime and who has no right to appeal his imprisonment. We then go back in time to the horrible events of 9/11 and the dramatic fallout afterwards, as the Bush administration is desperate to show the American public it has things under control... At this point we are less than 10 min into the documentary.
Couple of comments: this is the latest documentary from esteemed and Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney (Taxi To the Dark Side, Agent of Chaos, The Armstrong Lie). Here he looks back at what happened to Abu Zubaydah, believed to be involved with or have ties to the group responsible for 9/11. He was captured in 2002, and brought in for interrogation. As it turns out the FBI and CIA had very different ideas what would make effective interrogating. The CIa prevailed, and charged ahead with its ultra controversial "enhanced interrogation" program, a/k/a its torture program. With stunning effect, Gibney lays out how the CIA misled, if not outright lied, about the program. Even worse, the program turns out to be massively ineffective if not counterproductive. I cannot easily recall a more blistering indictment and utter rebuke of the CIA, and how it has damaged not only the intelligence community in the US, but also America's standing in the world, period. Gibney has plenty of insider talking heads who narrate their story calmly and with devastating effect. Your blood will likely boil in utter disgust and disbelief as you watch the sheer ignorance and incompetence within the Bush administration in the post-9/11 era.
"The Forever Prisoner" premiered on HCO earlier this week and is now available on HBO On Demand and HBO Max (where I caught it last night). If you have any interest in what unfolded after 9/11 or simply want to get to the bottom of what the CIA's "enhanced interrogations" were all about and how they came to be, I'd readily suggest you check this out, and draw your own conclusion.
