Burns’ “The Report” told of how whistleblowers started to realize the scope of torture in the War on Terror, and how much it did not work; Paul Schrader’s recent “The Card Counter” based its brooding nature on the psychological effects post-9/11 torture would have on the soldiers who enacted it.
Enter Alex Gibney’s vigilant and infuriating “The Forever Prisoner,” which interviews real-life figures seen in those narratives—Daniel Jones, the FBI agent portrayed by Adam Driver in “The Report,” and someone who wore a black mask and did government-sanctioned torturing, as in “The Card Counter.” Gibney’s film proves to be a vital text in understanding the on-the-ground terror from the post-9/11 hunt for information and revenge, and the American barbarism that defines it.
Zubaydah is considered the first high-value detainee subjected to the CIA’s Enhanced Interrogation Techniques provide a grounded idea of who he was, and was not—he was not the number three target of Al-Qaeda in the hunt for Osama Bin Laden, as the public narrative went.
It was always surprising to me how much calculation there was to each act of torture, how much discussion there was in Washington about making what was happening in a black site in Thailand “legal,” or seem legal enough.
The film has the prolific documentarian thriving on his razor-sharp focus, along with his passion for digging for information and sharing his findings and his words are displayed with the cryptic nature of a quiet, white room, the images of being waterboarded or crammed into a small coffin indicating the immense traumatic activity.
The extremes uncovered in this film become revealing of what we accept as necessary, in what we as a nation rationalize as justice even without procedure.