The forever prisoner : the full and searing account of the CIA's most controversial covert program / Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy.

Cover image for The forever prisoner : the full and searing account of the CIA's most controversial covert program / Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy.

Title:

Author:

Scott-Clark, Cathy, 1965- author.

Levy, Adrian, 1965- author.

ISBN:

9780802158925

Edition:

First edition, First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition.

Physical Description:

viii, 452 pages : illustrations (chiefly color) ; 24 cm

Contents:

Mai pen rai -- I am the head motherfucker-in-charge -- Hani 1 -- Disgrace in their face -- The hell with Chris de Burgh -- Oh my god, I can be horrible -- A full-size American refrigerator, only taller -- Controlled death -- Boo boo -- Full-blown, full-tilt, bozo wild person -- Lost in space -- On-the-job training -- Allah will look into their hearts and know -- Zapping the dog for pooping on the rug -- Meow -- Strawberry Fields forever -- A torture ponzi scheme -- A great big terrarium -- Ego and hypocrisy. Nothing else matters -- They are liars, liars, liars! -- Bad guys become good guys and vice versa.

Abstract:

"Six months after 9/11, CIA and FBI agents captured Abu Zubaydah, mistakenly believed to be number three in the Al Qaeda hierarchy. Frantic to thwart a much-feared second attack, the U.S. rendered him to a black site in Thailand. There he collided with Air Force psychologist James Mitchell. Believing that Abu Zubaydah had been trained to resist interrogation, Mitchell and others were authorized to use brutal interrogation techniques that would have violated the Geneva Conventions, international rules andtreaties, and U.S. law had not government lawyers rewritten the human rights rulebook. The program metastasized over seven years, encompassing dozens of prisoners and multiple black sites. Ultimately, the U.S. Senate judged it was torture. As a result, numerous prisoners, including Abu Zubaydah, remain in Guantaanamo, never charged with any crimes because their trial would reveal the extreme brutality they endured. Based on four years of intensive reporting around the world, on multiple interviews with key protagonists on all sides who speak candidly for the first time, and on thousands of previously classified documents recently released by FOIA requests, The Forever Prisoner is a powerful chronicle of a shocking government initiative that in the end produced zero high-value intelligence, continues to influence U.S. policy to this day, and remains in the headlines twenty years after its inception. It is also a primary source for a feature-length documentary of the same title by Academy Award winner AlexGibney to debut on HBO on December 6, 2021. Held incommunicado for twenty years, Abu Zubaydah speaks for the first time in the pages of The Forever Prisoner"-- Provided by publisher.

Personal Subject:

ʻAbd al-Majīd, Zayn al-ʻĀbidīn Muḥammad Ḥusayn.

Mitchell, James E. (Psychologist)

Corporate Subject:

United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

Subject Term:

Torture -- United States.

Extraordinary rendition -- United States.

Military interrogation -- United States.

Political prisoners -- Abuse of -- United States.

Intelligence service -- Methodology.

War on Terrorism, 2001-2009.

Added Author:

Levy, Adrian, 1965-

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Library	Material Type	Item Barcode	Shelf Number	Status
Searching... Avon-Washington Township Public Library	Adult Nonfiction Book Hardback	120791002960995	364.6 SCO	Searching... Unknown

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Summary

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.

Reviews (4)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Journalists Scott-Clark and Levy (The Exile) chronicle the CIA's post-9/11 torture program in this disturbing and deeply reported history. Spotlighting Zayn-al-Abidin Abu Zubaydah, a mid-level Saudi jihadi who was falsely accused of being a top al-Qaeda leader, arrested in Pakistan in March 2002, and transferred to Guantánamo Bay in 2006, where he still remains, despite never being charged with a crime, the authors describe how CIA operatives devised a set of "enhanced interrogation techniques" that included waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and confinement in coffin-size boxes. Carried out in secret prisons around the world, these and other punishments were made permissible by a thin veneer of legality scripted by the George W. Bush administration. Using extensive interviews with interrogators, testimony from secret hearings, and classified documents made public through FOIA lawsuits, the authors chart the downward spiral of the first legally authorized torture program in American history and persuasively dispute CIA claims that enhanced interrogation was "tough but necessary." Though the excruciatingly detailed interrogations of Abu Zubaydah and other prisoners, some of whom died while being questioned, become nearly indistinguishable, this is a crucial record of how the U.S. government betrayed its ideals to wage the war on terror. (Apr.)

Kirkus Review

British journalists Scott-Clark and Levy team up again to take a hard look at the CIA's program of rendition and torture after 9/11. Six months after the twin towers fell, CIA and FBI agents captured a Saudi Arabian man named Abu Zubaydah, whom they believed to be third in command of al-Qaida. Rather than place him under military custody in accordance with international law, the CIA packed him off to secret "black sites" in Thailand, Poland, and elsewhere, where he underwent what is euphemistically called "enhanced interrogation"--i.e., torture. But as Scott-Clark and Levy write, the CIA never proved that Zubaydah was a terrorist leader, to say nothing of their attribution of his silence to advanced anti-torture training instead of the possibility that he didn't know anything. As the authors observe, much of the work of torture was in the hands of people who continue their work today, most now working for private companies formed by CIA retirees with fat government contracts. Remarked one, "We had to pay our senior security guys the same as Blackwater--$250 an hour, or $2000 a day--that was common, they were in a combat zone, all jocked up." Regardless of the inability to establish Zubaydah's involvement beyond reasonable doubt, the CIA nonetheless secured authorization to imprison him "for the rest of his life, irrespective of his level of guilt," considered an "unlawful enemy combatant" forevermore, or at least until the so-called war on terror is declared over. For that reason, after enduring waterboarding and other illegal methods of interrogation, Zubaydah was sent to Guantánamo, a place whose former commander called a warehouse for "Mickey Mouse detainees" of no real value to the government. There he remains even though a 2014 Senate investigation concluded that "the case against him had been largely fabricated." Building on The Exile, the authors deliver an impressively researched investigation of government malfeasance and ineptitude. A forceful book that demands greater oversight of the nation's intelligence services and justice for the wrongly imprisoned. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Choice Review

The primary source for the 2021 documentary of the same name, this book by British investigative journalists Scott-Clark and Levy centers on Abu Zubaydah in exposing and indicting the CIA's covert "enhanced interrogation" program in the post-9/11 world. They reveal for the first time the locations and operations of the numerous secret "black sites" around the globe in Thailand, Poland, Morocco, Lithuania, Guantanamo Bay, and other places. In addition to offering scathing indictments of the program's architects, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, the authors excoriate many other CIA officials, including former CIA director Gina Haspel, as they document the lies carried out to cover up the program's atrocities. They debunk the early claims about Abu Zubaydah's supposedly high role in Al Qaeda and offer his exculpatory story. That he and other captives will never be released, the authors claim, is not about what they did to the US, but what the US did to them during incarceration. This is an angry, sensational, and extremely informative piece of journalism. Counter perspectives by those involved in the administration of the program should be consulted, but it is hard to overlook this gripping account. Summing Up: Recommended. All levels. --Joe P. Dunn, Converse University

Library Journal Review

Journalists Scott-Clark and Levy (The Exile) tackle the CIA's "enhanced interrogation" program, which gave legal cover to U.S. torture of terrorism suspects after 9/11. The authors examine the case of Abu Zubaydah, an alleged jihadi operative whom the CIA detained, tortured, and imprisoned for life--without a trial--at Guantanamo Bay. Scott-Clark and Levy gained unprecedented access to newly declassified case documents, to Abu Zubaydah himself, and to an architect of the CIA torture program, James Mitchell. A retired army psychologist, Mitchell had trained U.S. Special Forces how to resist enemy interrogation; he reasoned that using similarly harsh techniques against the United States' own detainees could reduce them to a state of "learned helplessness" in which they would reveal the terrorism plots that the CIA suspected. For this work, Mitchell's firm reaped $81 million in CIA contracts from 2002 to 2009. Scott-Clark and Levy deftly unpack the legalistic contortions of Bush Administration officials trying to justify torture, the infighting among US agencies, and the physical and mental anguish inflicted on Abu Zubaydah. Scott-Clark and Levy's focused and authoritative work was a key source for Alex Gibney's 2021 HBO documentary of the same title. VERDICT A tour de force of investigative journalism.--Michael Rodriguez

Introduction	p. 1
1 "Mai Pen Rat"	p. 18
2 "I Am the Head Motherfucker-in-Charge"	p. 36
3 "Hani 1"	p. 49
4 "Disgrace in Their Face"	p. 76
5 "The Hell with Chris de Burgh"	p. 92
6 "Oh My God, I Can Be Horrible"	p. 111
7 "A Full-Size American Refrigerator, Only Taller"	p. 131
8 "Controlled Death"	p. 149
9 "Boo Boo"	p. 166
10 "Full-Blown, Full-Tilt, Bozo Wild Person"	p. 184
11 "Lost in Space"	p. 200
12 "On-the-Job Training"	p. 215
13 "Allah Will Look into Their Hearts and Know"	p. 231
14 "Zapping the Dog for Pooping on the Rug"	p. 245
15 "Meow"	p. 258
16 "Strawberry Fields Forever"	p. 271
17 "A Torture Ponzi Scheme"	p. 286
18 "A Great Big Terrarium"	p. 302
19 "Ego and Hypocrisy. Nothing Else Matters"	p. 317
20 "They Are Liars, Liars, Liars!"	p. 331
21 "Bad Guys Become Good Guys and Vice Versa"	p. 360
Cast List	p. 367
Acknowledgments	p. 375
Notes	p. 379
Index	p. 443

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Summary

Summary

Reviews (4)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Kirkus Review

Choice Review

Library Journal Review

Table of Contents