This is an important film as it goes inside the actual behavior of what happens during these types of incarceration. Think of it more as a docudrama. The actins is good and there is a high degree of tension. It's not an easy film to watch.

As "The Forever Prisoner" (2021 release; 119 min.) opens, we are briefly introduced to a prisoner held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, who amazingly has never been charged with a crime and who has no right to appeal his imprisonment. We then go back in time to the horrible events of 9/11 and the dramatic fallout afterwards, as the Bush administration is desperate to show the American public it has things under control... At this point we are less than 10 min into the documentary.

Couple of comments: this is the latest documentary from esteemed and Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney (Taxi To the Dark Side, Agent of Chaos, The Armstrong Lie). Here he looks back at what happened to Abu Zubaydah, believed to be involved with or have ties to the group responsible for 9/11. He was captured in 2002, and brought in for interrogation. As it turns out the FBI and CIA had very different ideas what would make effective interrogating. The CIa prevailed, and charged ahead with its ultra controversial "enhanced interrogation" program, a/k/a its torture program. With stunning effect, Gibney lays out how the CIA misled, if not outright lied, about the program. Even worse, the program turns out to be massively ineffective if not counterproductive. I cannot easily recall a more blistering indictment and utter rebuke of the CIA, and how it has damaged not only the intelligence community in the US, but also America's standing in the world, period. Gibney has plenty of insider talking heads who narrate their story calmly and with devastating effect. Your blood will likely boil in utter disgust and disbelief as you watch the sheer ignorance and incompetence within the Bush administration in the post-9/11 era.

"The Forever Prisoner" premiered on HCO earlier this week and is now available on HBO On Demand and HBO Max (where I caught it last night). If you have any interest in what unfolded after 9/11 or simply want to get to the bottom of what the CIA's "enhanced interrogations" were all about and how they came to be, I'd readily suggest you check this out, and draw your own conclusion.

Not one of Alex Gibney's best documentaries. He really gets into the weeds on this one. While some of that may be necessary, given the subject matter, we're left at the end -- in essence -- with nothing much having changed. And NO ONE was ever held accountable. The bad guys -- besides Abu Zubaydah -- are several Americans, including former CIA Director George Tenet (he really is a piece of you-know-what and should be in prison himself),along with James Mitchell (a psychologist) and Jose Rodriguez (the former director of CIA's Counterterrorism Center). These men are pieces of you-know-what. They should ALL be in jail for their inhumanity, their violation of human rights, their implementation of torture techniques.

Sure, Alberto Gonzales (former Attorney General in Bush's cabinet) and John Yoo (another horrible attorney in Bush's White House) are to blame as well. Along with VP Dick Cheney, of course. But for James Mitchell and Jose Rodriguez to "carry the water" and implement the torture techniques against prisoners, when there was never any evidence that torture actually works to get prisoners to "talk"... they should be held accountable. And James Mitchell made $81 Million dollars from our Government for doing this! He laughed all the way to the bank. And at the end, he justifies it all with, "I believed I was working to save millions of American lives from the next, worse terrorist attack." Really, James?? You're a liar.

All the behind the scenes fighting between the FBI and CIA... don't know that we needed all this in this doc. There's always infighting among major agencies.

Anyway, this film could have been streamlined. And all the quick cuts of redacted cables? They're so fast you can't read a lot of them while listening to the voice over, and ultimately, what's the point? Why do we even need to see these? Is there really nothing else that can be shown onscreen? This was all a bit too much.