The Forever Prisoner: Abu Zubaydah and the CIA’s “Enhanced Interrogation” Program
Channel: New America
Date: 2022-04-11

Six months after 9/11, the CIA captured Abu Zubaydah and announced he was number three in Al Qaeda. Frantic to thwart a much-feared second wave of attacks, the U.S. rendered him to a secret black site in Thailand, where he collided with retired Air Force psychologist James Mitchell. The CIA authorized Mitchell and others to use brutal “enhanced interrogation techniques.” 

In their new book, The Forever Prisoner, Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy draw on four years of intensive reporting, interviews with key protagonists who speak candidly for the first time, and on thousands of previously classified documents to provide a powerful chronicle of a shocking experiment that remains in the headlines twenty years after its inception, even as US government officials continue to thwart efforts to expose war crimes. Abu Zubaydah, and others, remain imprisoned in Guantanamo, never charged with any crimes. 
"The Forever Prisoner" prompts the question as to whether he and others remain detained not because of what they did to us but because of what the United States did to them.

To discuss the book, New America welcomes Cathy Scott-Clark, co-author of The Forever Prisoner. Scott-Clark has written multiple other acclaimed books with her co-author Adrian Levy including The Exile, Deception, The Siege, The Amber Room, and The Stone of Heaven. Writing for the Sunday Times and the Guardian, they have won the One World award for foreign reporting and in 2009 were voted One World Media’s Press Journalists of the Year, and they won the 2016 CWA Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction.

Speaker: 

Cathy Scott-Clark, @cathyscottclark
Author, The Forever Prisoner

Moderator: 

Peter Bergen, @PeterBergenCNN
Vice President, New America


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