The Forever Prisoner

April 18, 2022
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.

Starred review from March 1, 2022

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

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 15, 2022
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 Guant�namo, 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.

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