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Equally propulsive as a narrative, The Forever Prisoner goes way beyond Jane Mayer’s powerful and revelatory 2008 bestseller, The Dark Side, which initially revealed the torture program. Mayer had no access to the protagonists themselves nor to thousands of recently released FOIA documents, so her riveting account was necessarily limited in its scope.
The torture program remains an existential threat to the reputation of the CIA, which is why they have done everything possible to prevent the story Scott-Clark and Levy tell from leaking out.
The authors’ investigation was a primary source for the feature length documentary also titled The Forever Prisoner, directed by award-winning Alex Gibney, to be released on December 6, 2021. It will get wide coverage, setting up the book, which has much more depth and dimension, for major media. Described by Esquire as “the most important documentarian of our time,” Gibney has directed, among many others, Taxi to the Dark Side, which won the 2007 Academy Award for Documentary Feature, and most recently The Crime of the Century, chronicling the opioid epidemic.
The Forever Prisoner will appeal to anyone who has read the bestselling titles The Forever War by Dexter Filkins, Ghost Wars by Steve Coll, and Manhunt by Peter Bergen.
In 2014, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence determined the CIA was guilty of torture, murder, and deception, and that these transgressions had produced no high-value intelligence. The Forever Prisoner chronicles many details behind these charges that the Senate committee was unaware of in 2014.
Many believe the torture program began and ended in the 2004 scandal at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Rather, as the authors show, this was an inevitable outgrowth of the program James Mitchell devised, which metastasized when the military appropriated it. The program then ran for four more years after Abu Ghraib.
We will have blurbs from bestselling journalist / authors Lawrence Wright and Peter Bergen, from Alex Gibney himself, and from a range of high-profile writers and public figures the authors know.
The 2015 success of Guantanamo Diary, by Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a former Guantanamo detainee, and of the 2021 film on which it is based, The Mauritanian, underscores the strong appetite for understanding the darkest corners of the “war on terror” and how America reached a point where torture was deemed acceptable.

Editor: George Gibson