The Forever Prisoner: Q&A with Alex Gibney and Ali Soufan
By Annette Graham, DC Film Society Member
A screening of the documentary The Forever Prisoner (Alex Gibney, 2021) was held December 1 at the Navy Memorial's Burke Theater. The film's director, Alex Gibney and one of the film's subjects, Ali Soufan (also author of the book Black Banners), discussed the film and took audience questions. Jane Mayer, author and reporter for the New Yorker was the moderator. The film is about Abu Zubaydah, who was subjected to torture by the CIA. This Q&A has been edited and condensed.
Moderator: Do you think we are going to see any accountability for what happened to Abu Zubaydah or will this just get swept under the rug?
Alex Gibney: I don't know. I think that one measure of accountability would be to release the full torture report, so that even if there is no judicial accountability that there is at least some record of exactly what happened. One of things that I found so interesting in terms of doing this film was how assiduously not only did the CIA try to hide what happened using its means of classification but also the way it would consistently build a false narrative--fake news, but in a very assiduous way. The three people who are in this film from the CIA, George Tenet, Jose Rodriquez and James Mitchell, their memoirs which contain the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah were all written by the same person from the CIA--Bill Harlow, which gives you a sense how carefully the CIA has tried to manipulate the story and the narrative. I would hope that some sense of accountability is finally getting everybody to understand what a big lie has been told to all of us.
Moderator: Ali, Do you think the lesson has been learned in the CIA and the FBI?
Ali Soufan: I think in the CIA and FBI, maybe, but as a nation, no. I think we are worse than we were before. We talk a lot about misinformation and disinformation and the Russians playing us; we talk about big lies by Donald Trump. They are symptoms of a problem we created ourselves, not the Russians. How many Americans believe Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda were working together on the eve of the Iraq war? I can tell you--75% believe Saddam was behind 9/11. That was a lie, not by the Russians, by our own government. How many people believe that torture worked and saved millions of American lives? Lots of people believed it. These campaigns were done by our own government. And because of the lack of accountability and lack of transparency we are getting worse and worse. Now we can get away with murder. Now the laws are nothing but a small little spider web. If you are a small insect you get stuck in it and if you are big you can break it and you become president of the U.S. if you want. I think this is a problem we are having today. And this is because of the lack of accountability that we did not have in the last two years. We never had accountability for anything. So no, I don't think we learned a lesson. I think we are way worse than we used to be before, unfortunately. But as institutions, CIA and FBI. I hope you get from this excellent documentary that the whole thing of torture was not FBI vs CIA. There are folks from the CIA who left before I even left the site because they were appalled by what they were seeing. But you have to play the Washington game. So they make it FBI vs CIA. So who are we going to believe? There is a true story for anything; truth doesn't matter. All these things started here, way before we had Donald Trump as president. And if we don't cure it we are going to go from bad to worse.
Moderator: Who would you hold accountable? Who is most culpable?
Alex Gibney: Somebody said Cheney. I think the initiative came out of the CIA; it was blessed by the executive branch. James Mitchell was a tool but he was a tool used by an organization that was determined to go in a direction for the most banal reasons. I think the CIA felt that it had failed and helped to cause 9/11 by failing to report the existence of two of the hijackers in the U.S. And they were going to make a comeback and this was going to be their way of really showing they could do something great. But if you think about it, that moment when it is reported that Abu Zubaydah is giving up valuable information soon after he gets to Thailand, about a pending plot which was then foiled. And George Tenet was thrilled until he finds out they were FBI agents, not CIA agents. Now you would think as somebody who's the head of an American intelligence service that all that would matter is that lives would be saved. But no, what is upsetting to him is that it wasn't a CIA person who got the information. So immediately they rush to put together in a very dumb and slapdash way an interrogation program which is then run by people who are just like "Okay great, let's do something." That to me is the most despicable part of this. No thought given to it whatsoever. So if I'm really looking for someone to blame, yes of course it all starts at the top and Cheney is blessing this program. But the people who are really pushing it are Tenet, Rodriguez, a whole gaggle of lawyers, who worked very hard both in the White House and CIA to make it legal. And then at the bottom, the person who was designing these techniques which weren't techniques at all. As someone in the CIA who we showed the film said, they were dumb. Who would ever use techniques that result in the lack of cognition to try to get someone to give you valuable intelligence? It's like Murder on the Orient Express, if you are looking for one person, actually there were a number of people who plunged the knife.
Moderator: Ali, who would you find culpable?
Ali Soufan: The people in D.C. definitely, not the people who were with us at the site. A lot of them believed the same thing I believed and some of them left even before I left. The instructions and orders were coming from Washington. Now I kind of agree with what Alex said. You said Cheney. The people who gave Cheney what he wanted, that Iraq was behind 9/11 and there's WMD, the people who started the torture program, and the people who instructed their subordinates not to pass information about people I was looking for in Yemen when they were here in the U.S., which caused 9/11, are the same people. That's what you get when there's no accountability. What do you do when you don't pass information that caused the deaths of 3,000 Americans? You invade another country based on a lie. And you do torture in the U.S.? You get a freaking medal, that's what you get. When we change the culture, then we can have accountability and then we can have the nation that we all love and we fight for every day and are willing to die for. When I went to that site, I still cannot say what country the site was at, they brought Abu Zubaydah in. The first question I asked him was, "What is your name?" He said Daoud, David in Arabic. I said, "What if I call you Hani", the name his parents nicknamed him as a child. And he was shocked. I said, I have been following you for many years, since the late 90s. So I know everything about you. And you are probably one of the best when it comes to operational security. How did you mess up this time? What kind of operation did you really want to do that landed you with me? He did not believe I was an FBI agent. My partner Steve and I showed him our credentials. Abu Zubaydah said, "Anyone can print those." Then he said that thing in Palestine and he gave us a threat. Even in my book after it was unredacted thanks to Alex I could not say what the threat was. In Congress, I said he gave actionable intelligence that resulted in stopping a terrorist plot. When Alex sued for my notes, we got a lot of details about that plot, the plot that resulted in the order "death is not an option," that we had to do whatever was needed to keep him alive. And the threat that the plot became like "Look, the CIA program is working very well. Look at the plots we stopped." You can see it at the very first page of the first note in my notebook. So the guy wasn't hiding information. If you look at the stuff that they just allowed Alex to have from my handwritten notes that I wrote immediately when we were talking to him. That wasn't an interview that was a proffer. He was open to talk. He's a smart guy. But no, they wanted him to confess about stuff that was wrong. And you have a guy who doesn't understand the difference between cooperation and compliance. Cooperation is when somebody talks to you and gives you threats and plots, things that are going on. Compliance is when he tells you what you want to hear. In my job I don't want people to tell me what I want to hear. I don't want people to tell me Saddam and Al Qaeda are working together, that I'm the #3 in Al Qaeda when I knew he wasn't an Al Qaeda member. He never pledged. He wanted to early on. And they said no to him because at the time he had a brain injury and they thought he was the village idiot. But when he recovered and he's one of the best operatives in smuggling people into Afghanistan, they wanted him to join. And he's like, "No, you rejected me once, I don't care about you." So it was difficult to continue the interrogation with him. We were not supposed to see him any more. All the information and intelligence stopped. So they asked, "Where's the information, he was talking before." The people in the CIA who were against this program thought it was a win. But it wasn't, it went back again. In May I knew that we didn't have any more from Abu Zubaydah. He doesn't have any plots any more. I left in May and after that I'm not familiar with any actionable intelligence or any truth that he gave them after we left. They left him for 45 days and came here and tried to settle all the administrative stuff for their program. They knew that there's nothing left in him. He was cooperating and I think the amount of information we got from him even when he was sick was really amazing. There's a lot of things I forgot, but reading some of the situation reports that we used to write from there. Alex was kind enough after he got them from the government to share a copy with me. I was remembering some stuff, when he used to ask for me and write things because he couldn't talk and I go and sit with him and talk to him and he points at alphabets. During that time period he identified Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as as the mastermind of 9/11. He talks about how KSM went to Bin Laden with the plan of Cessna planes hitting buildings and Bin Laden said why do you want to go to war with an axe when you can go with a bulldozer? And everyone was like, "Wow the CIA program works." And you see it in my handwriting in my notes. I interviewed him from April 1 to mid-May, way before the waterboarding. I'm not familiar with anything that came out after that. When I testified in Congress about everything I'm telling you, they asked if I have proof. Everyone we talked to said the program worked and they gave me examples. And I said I don't have any proof but an FBI agent always keeps his notes. So I was sitting with one [Republican] senator and he was for the program after the hearing and invited me to his office. He asked me about Abu Zubaydah. He said that the Attorney General told me because of waterboarding we were able to identify Jose Padilla. I said Senator, he's wrong, Jose Padilla was arrested in May 2002, waterboarding didn't start until summer of 2002. He didn't believe it, so he had his staff google it and his staff came back and said May 2002. In one of the declassified memos it was said that because of enhanced techniques Abu Zubaydah provided information that stopped a dirty bomb from detonating in the DC area. He was arrested in Nov. 2003. So in the report they changed the date from 2002 to 2003. So then everything makes sense. This is not the only date that has been changed. A lot of things that are highly classified are classified not because they have sources and methods but because people want to hide what they did. So it was very difficult. This is the only time I talked publicly about the threat in Israel for example. They were planning to kill 1,000 people. They would get $100,000 from Saudi Arabia, not the government but from private funders to do 4 or 5 attacks in disco clubs in Israel. They were hoping to kill 200 in each. The only reason I can tell you that after all these years is because my notes have been declassified and this has been allowed in. They did not redact it. They redacted other silly stuff like the date of every interview. When you read these notes, hopefully HBO or Alex wll put them up publicly for people to research them and read them. Remember I left in May 2002, I cannot tell you the date of each interview, so you can put your own timeline together on this. Was he a dangerous person when he was working with Al Qaeda? Yes. Did he want to do stuff against America? Yes. But he deserves his day in court. He doesn't deserve a judge and jury to look like everyone else in Guantanamo. That's what the Constitution is all about. That's what I took an oath to defend and protect. That's why I was in that room interrogating. He deserves to be in front of a judge and jury to look into the case, to say you are guilty or not guilty. We're not China or North Korea. It was very difficult to hold a lot of the intelligence that I could not talk about until now for all these years. He is alive and this false narrative is being advocated by the highest people in our Government including presidents. To just talk about what President Obama said about the patriots. You know who I think the patriots are? The CIA people who were there and refused to be part of it, not the people who made $83 milion for dumping water on someone's face.
Moderator: I think the FBI agent who blew the whistle on it is a patriot and the journalists who told the story are patriots. I think this documentary is an important step towards accountability. it's incredibly powerful. Hats off to HBO for backing it. It's brave to do this work. Do you think Abu Zubaydah will see the light of day and tell his own story to the world at some point? Will he ever get out?
Alex Gibney: I don't know but I do think with his name raised before the Supreme Court and while I found it a little odd that the Supreme Court justices were shocked in the Claude Rains manner that somebody had been held incommunicado without access to habeas corpus at Guantanamo. His name was raised at the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court is going to have to rule on that and I suspect that it may prove too embarrassing to the U.S. government to continue to hold Abu Zubaydah there but I don't know. They've held him there for 20 years without access to his ability to question his detention or to charge him. I would hope this film and also the hard work of many other people who have been campaigning in this regard would lead to sufficient embarrassment about what is Guantanmo to occasion his release.
Moderator: Was this a hard story to tell? The subject is closely related to Taxi to the Dark Side. Why were you drawn to this?
Alex Gibney: It was a very hard subject to handle. I was drawn to it by probably the same reason you were. My dad was a Navy interrogator in WWII, which was what drew me initially to Taxi to the Dark Side. This was a much harder story to tell. We got at the beginnings of this story in Taxi because we were one of the first to glimpse the role of the CIA at the time even though we couldn't begin to imagine how deep and broad it was. I always want to know how and why the decision was made to go down this path. That's what really took me down this road and frankly it was [producer] Cathy Scott Clark who encourage me to tell this story and also a journalist Ray Bonner. But the hard part of telling the story was getting inside the heads of the people at the time to try to understand why would you do this? The CIA had apologized for these techniques in 1988 before the U.S. Congress. And there was a wealth of people inside the CIA who knew how ineffective they were, never mind immoral. So to understand that and to try put the whole thing together in a timeline that would make sense, it was very hard to do and might only have been possible recently when we were able to get Ali Soufan's book unredacted, the notes unredacted, the torture report had come out, we were able to get some of Abu Zubaydah's drawings and also his recollections of what had happened to him. A whole wealth of material. And finally also people around this story began to start talking in the background. So that gave us the ability to finally tell it in a way that would put it all together in a condensed fashion and also by focusing on one detainee Abu Zubaydah, just as we focused on one detainee in Taxi to the Dark Side--Dilawar. Something about focusing on that one individual case makes the breadth of the outrage more emotionally powerful.
Audience Question: What was your thought about the psychologist, James Mitchell, his characterization of you as a Muslim agent. Do you think he forgot your name or do you think there was more to it as the documentary implied?
Ali Soufan: The CIA never gave me any medal but I'll take that as a huge medal. If you think it's an insult--I am so honored to be Muslim. And me being Muslim and on the front lines fighting the terrorists, I was fighting for my country and for my religion. So if he's trying to insult me, figure out another way to insult me. That's just another indication he was a bad psychologist.
Audience Question: You talked about accountability from the CIA. What was the purpose and intention of Guantanamo? How is it that the CIA operates a facility within a U.S. military complex where documented torture also takes place?
Alex Gibney: The whole subject of Guantanamo is such a bizarre notion and it was undertaken with the thinking that they could create a place that was controlled by the U.S. but outside the law. And so within that context anything was possible. And yet that is also to some extent how these techniques mutated and migrated from the CIA to the military.
Moderator: The CIA had the template but the military normalized it and codified it and you see echoes of it in Abu Ghraib and all around the whole world. They were reverse engineering the program. It gave everyone the permission to do that.
Audience Question: If you had to pick your finger on one thing you were not able to get, what would be that one thing you would want to add into the film if you were able to get your hands on it?
Alex Gibney: The one part that I wish--it's two parts. And it goes to people I wanted to talk to who wouldn't talk. One is an individual who was in the CIA at the Thailand black site who was not approving of this program. I wish I could have persuaded that person to talk honestly about that experience. The other person I would have been interested in talking to was a lawyer inside the CIA who is mentioned very fleetingly in the film. I've been always been interested in the role of the lawyers in this story. How can you as a lawyer participate in legalizing a program that is the opposite of the rule of law? Those two people I would have have liked to talk to.
The Forever Prisoner was released on HBO December 6.
