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soil being masterminded by Osama bin Laden. Nonetheless, George Tenet’s CIA was convinced that Zubaydah was a top-ranking al Qaeda operative who had even more valuable intel to cough up-specifically, about an imminent attack on U.S. Guided by interviews with former FBI agents Ali Soufan and his partner Stephen Gaudin, as well as now-unredacted passages from the former’s book The Black Banners, the doc details how Soufan and Gaudin’s early, standard-protocol interrogations of Zubaydah paid dividends, culminating with them learning that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had been behind 9/11. 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. 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. There, he was treated for multiple gunshot wounds he’d suffered during the skirmish that led to his capture. 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.ĬIA Agents Reveal How Bill Clinton Stopped Them From Killing bin Laden and Preventing 9/11įrom 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. 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.
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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. “torture”-which to Gibney marks him a symbol of America’s betrayal of its bedrock values.ĭespite that thesis, however, it’s difficult to get a good read on precisely the point being made by The Forever Prisoner (Dec. More notable still, during his initial imprisonment, Zubaydah was subjected to repeated bouts of newly-devised “enhanced interrogation techniques” (EIT)-i.e. since March 2002 (and imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay since 2003), making him one of the longest-serving captives in the War on Terror. 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.
#THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE POSTER SERIES#
Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast/Photos Department of Defenseĭoes 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.