Alex Gibney's 2007 Oscar-winning documentary, Taxi To the Dark Side, first revealed how the FBI, CIA, and the military, with the knowledge of elected officials and security agents of the state, while also deceiving leaders, kidnapped and tortured innocent people in military prisons and black sites.
Justified by legal forgeries appropriately called "the Torture Memos," the torture ring run by the FBI, CIA, and other government intelligence officials is just one in a long line of human rights violations by US foreign service apparatuses. These memos "rationalized the unthinkable," as David Cole, the National Legal Director for the American Civil Liberties Union, wrote in a book by the same name.
Gibney's most recent film, The Forever Prisoner, according to this interview in Vanity Fair, examines "the moral lines crossed in the name of national security." For example, Strawberry Fields was a classified CIA unit where "the worst of the worst" terrorists were kept, a phrase so overused it ceases to have meaning and refers to anyone and everyone at any time, and is just one of the secrets revealed by unredacted documents Gibney gained access. Why Strawberry Fields?
"The Forever Prisoner is an unflinching look at how America's torture policy began with CIA captive Abu Zubaydah — the first high-value detainee subjected to the CIA's program of Enhanced Interrogation Techniques (EITs), later identified as torture by those outside the agency. Having never been charged with a crime or allowed to challenge his detention, Zubaydah remains imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay in Kafkaesque limbo, in direct contravention of America's own ideals of justice and due process."
Using the shocking declassified documents and interviews with CIA agents, interrogators, and investigators, "the film uncovers the incompetent and deceptive practices that the U.S. government followed in order to expedite and legalize EITs in the aftermath of 9/11. As a result, torture as a government policy was authorized by the United States for the first time in history."
Click here for the trailer. The Forever Prisoner is available for streaming on HBO.
