Alex Gibney thought he was done with torture. His 2007 film Taxi to the Dark Side, about an Afghan prisoner who was interrogated to death by his American captors, won an Oscar for best documentary, and the writer-director moved on to make fascinating features about Hunter S. Thompson, New York governor Eliot Spitzer, Lance Armstrong, and the Church of Scientology, among other subjects. But Gibney had lingering questions about the role of the CIA in the treatment of suspected terrorists in the years after the September 11 attacks. So he, along with journalist Raymond Bonner, sued for access to classified documents. 

When the agency surprisingly caved, a trove of damning new—and news-making—material became public, including a 2002 al-Qaida plot to attack Israel. Those documents figure prominently in Gibney’s latest riveting documentary, The Forever Prisoner, which debuts December 6 on HBO. But the story’s most vivid, and most infuriating, details are about the moral lines crossed in the name of national security. Gibney spoke to Vanity Fair about the discoveries chronicled in his new film—including details about the case of Abu Zubaydah, a Saudi-born Palestinian who has been held in Guantanamo Bay since 2006.

Vanity Fair: Besides directing and cowriting Forever Prisoner, you are the film’s narrator. And early on you say that this is a story about “a failure of intelligence.” How so?

Alex Gibney: In the most essential way, it was stupid—the way our government went about interrogating possible terrorists. People in the CIA will say actionable intelligence was obtained using enhanced interrogation techniques. It wasn’t. That’s bullshit. But it was also a failure in the sense that our intelligence agencies, and even we as Americans, became far too comfortable with listening only to what we wanted to hear rather than what the truth was. And in the case of Abu Zubaydah, nothing could have been worse. 

As your movie describes, Zubaydah was captured in March 2002 and has been held ever since—never charged, let alone put on trial—because he was supposedly a terrorist mastermind.

The CIA was convinced he was somebody they imagined him to be. But there’s no evidence for that. It’s just what they wanted to hear. And that, of course, is the essence of torture: You get what you want to hear, not what the truth is. It’s a very, very dangerous path to go down.

Certainly, and literally, for Zubaydah, who was the first “high-value detainee” subjected to tactics including waterboarding, which in one instance left him unresponsive and needing to be revived by medical personnel. Which is bad enough all by itself. What’s truly bizarre is that the CIA insisted on unproductive torture when conventional questioning, by FBI agents Ali Soufan and Steve Gaudin, was generating useful information. 

I think the CIA was determined to make up for its terrible screw-up prior to 9/11—the agency’s failure to report to the FBI the entry of two hijackers into the United States. So now George Tenet, the CIA director at the time, is going to make sure there are no more attacks, and there’s a determination to please, and that overrides everything else—this is what the boss wants, this is what the boss is going to get.

Nearly as outrageous is the incompetence of some of the bosses. You include clips from a deposition of Jose Rodriguez, the former director of the CIA’s counterterrorism center, describing how he picked James Mitchell to run the interrogation program without any vetting.

In the months after 9/11 the CIA hadn’t really done anything to assemble an interrogation team. Zubaydah is captured and Rodriquez gets this request on, like, a Friday afternoon and says, “Hey, Jon, do we know anybody?” And Jonathan Fredman, a CIA lawyer, says, “Well, my wife knows this guy.” And because his wife knows a guy, they hire him and put him on the next plane to Thailand. That’s crazy shit.

You take pains to fact-check, and the film includes plenty of documents and video. Yet you use recreations of Zubaydah being subjected to hours of loud Red Hot Chili Peppers songs and being doused with water to keep him awake, despite being criticized for such simulations in other films. Why?

You notice I didn’t really do it when it came to the hard-core torture. But I did it early on because there was something so ridiculous and absurd about it, and it wasn’t sufficient to just use his words saying, “Men all in black with goggles entered the room.” I felt we needed to show it. And so the people who say, don’t do recreations, I say, go fuck yourself.

As viscerally effective as those recreations are, to me the most powerful material is simpler, in terms of production values: quotes and drawings from Zubaydah’s diaries, ranging from when he was a rootless young Saudi with dubious tastes in American pop music to when he’s being abused in the CIA’s black sites. The portrait that emerges gives Zubaydah a real humanity. Was that a goal?

Abu Zubaydah, to use a phrase from his lawyer Joe Margulies, is not Hollywood innocent. Look, he was a guy who was helping jihadis travel all over the world, moving them in and out of the Khaldan training camp. He was privy to terrorist plots all over the world. But he’s a human being, and as such he should never be outside the framework of the rule of law. The idea of the Geneva Conventions is once you have somebody in front of you who’s totally under your control, you’re not allowed to torture them. Why? Because that person is another human being. He is, in effect, just like you. Once you succeed in demonizing somebody, then it permits you to do anything you want to them, and you see that over and over and over again in the world’s great atrocities. So the CIA writes a psychological portrait of Abu Zubaydah to make him look like the ultimate bad guy so they can do things that they normally wouldn’t do to people. 

You interview James Mitchell, one of the experts the CIA hired to run enhanced interrogations. Do you think he comes across as sympathetic?

I think Mitchell’s perspective is properly represented, but I mean, I think it’s clear from the film I’m not sympathetic to what Mitchell did. I know how he rationalized it. He doesn’t have any regret because he saw it as fulfilling his duty. And that’s the danger.

The film begins with a CIA cable discussing how Zubaydah will probably die under questioning—but if he doesn’t, the interrogators want a promise that he will never talk to anyone in the outside world. 

Which to me is the most chilling message of all. It’s basically saying he’s not a human being as far as we’re concerned.

And so he sits in Guantanamo.

The Biden administration talks about turning over a new leaf, but it is still trying very hard to prevent Abu Zubaydah from speaking. Gitmo is just a terrible wound. It’s the place where the rule of law goes to die.

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