‘The Forever Prisoner’ Reveals When America ‘Forever’ Lost Its Moral Standing in the World
Does Alex Gibney sleep? In the past two years alone, the tireless documentarian has directed four feature-length films (The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, Citizen K, Crazy, Not Insane and Totally Under Control), two two-part, four-hour cable docuseries (Agents of Chaos and The Crime of the Century), and one episode of a non-fiction series (The Innocence Files)—not to mention produced a handful of other likeminded efforts. On top of that enormous slate, he now delivers The Forever Prisoner, an inquiry into the tale of Abu Zubaydah, a Saudi Arabian who’s been detained by the U.S. since March 2002 (and imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay since 2003), making him one of the longest-serving captives in the War on Terror. More notable still, during his initial imprisonment, Zubaydah was subjected to repeated bouts of newly-devised “enhanced interrogation techniques” (EIT)—i.e. “torture”—which to Gibney marks him a symbol of America’s betrayal of its bedrock values.
Despite that thesis, however, it’s difficult to get a good read on precisely the point being made by The Forever Prisoner (Dec. 6, HBO), since most of its core contentions are common knowledge and/or generally accepted as fact, and its primary position—that Zubaydah’s indefinite detainment is a fundamental and disgraceful wrong—turns out to be merely a footnote to its larger portrait. As usual, Gibney constructs his film with propulsive efficiency, providing succinct contextual background regarding the War on Terror, and a collection of talking-head commentators, textual evidence, and archival footage (as well as narration from himself) to forward his claims. What’s absent in his latest, however, is a compelling bombshell, or a more fully fleshed-out argument, to invest viewers in this trip back to the ugly early days of our post-9/11 history.
From the outset, Gibney declares Zubaydah’s detention by the CIA “the origin story of America’s failure of intelligence, and our retreat from the ideals we claim to be fighting for.” Zubaydah was caught in Pakistan in March 2002 and immediately spirited away to one of the U.S.’s original black sites, which in this instance was little more than a house in the rural jungles of Thailand. There, he was treated for multiple gunshot wounds he’d suffered during the skirmish that led to his capture. Afterwards, he wound up on the receiving end of interrogation procedures created, on the orders of the CIA, by James Mitchell, a military psychologist who had previously developed and run the government’s SERE school (for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape), which trained soldiers to endure extreme coercion tactics. According to Gibney’s doc, SERE was a response to America’s scarring Korean War experiences, during which time torture, and fears of enemy “brainwashing,” were so great that they invaded the national consciousness, such as via films like The Manchurian Candidate.