‘The Forever Prisoner’ by Cathy Scott Clark – In the wee hours of March 28, 2002, a joint team of F.B.I. and C.I.A. officers, accompanied by the Pakistani police, raided a house in the city of Faisalabad. The suspects inside tried to flee, and in the ensuing melee the C.I.A.’s main target, a clean-shaven Palestinian with wild corkscrew hair, was shot and badly wounded. He was known as Abu Zubaydah, and President George W. Bush soon announced his capture as one of the first big victories in the nascent War on Terror. He was said to be No. 3 in Al Qaeda, a financier and planner of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Still bleeding, he was hustled off to one of the C.I.A.’s secret so-called black sites for interrogation. Eventually, investigators would discover that Abu Zubaydah had never been a member of Al Qaeda, never fought American forces and never had advance knowledge of any Qaeda attacks. By that time, the horrific torture inflicted on him had already become the template for later C.I.A. interrogations, even though it yielded no significant intelligence. When the Senate Intelligence Committee released its damning report on the C.I.A.’s post-9/11 torture program in 2014, Abu Zubaydah’s appalling mistreatment and the lies told about him were front and center. Abu Zubaydah is often cited in the vast library of books written about the 9/11 attacks and their legacy, from self-justifying C.I.A. memoirs to angry critiques of the Bush administration. Yet he remains a mysterious figure, because — amazingly — he is still being held incommunicado, in deference to a promise made by the Bush administration to the C.I.A. in 2002. Although he has never been charged with a crime, he sits in a cell in the American prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, his body and mind permanently scarred. “The Forever Prisoner” is a comprehensive and at times excruciatingly detailed narrative about Abu Zubaydah and the people who ordered and oversaw his interrogation. The authors managed the extraordinary feat of communicating with him through a “circuitous route” that they don’t describe, presumably because it violated the rules of his confinement. They also spoke at length with the military psychologists who tried on Abu Zubaydah the C.I.A.’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” — a revolting euphemism for beatings, sleep deprivation, near-drownings and other forms of torture. CONTINUE READING
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