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The tireless American investigative documentarian Alex Gibney brings us another fantastic documentary. Another gruesome and horrifying investigative docu-drama nominally deals with the fate of the first Islamist terrorist ever caught after the attack on the Twin Towers, but primarily it is a film that shows the actual results of the torture of prisoners approved in early 2002. At the very beginning of the film, Gibney introduces us to the facts. Since the beginning of the American war on terror, 8 trillion dollars have been spent, 900 thousand people have died, and another 38 million have been displaced.
What are the results of the war, which has been going on for two decades now, is clear to everyone, and it is interesting that the topic covered by this documentary has been dealt with in some films and even series in recent years. It is about the film “The Report” about a Senate investigator who realized the extent of the American doctrine of advanced interrogation techniques, which is actually a euphemism for torturing prisoners in order to extract information from them, but also about Schrader’s “The Card Counter” in which the main character is a poker player who was once one of those who carried out these tortures. As usual, Gibney researched the whole story in detail, and gathered the best possible interlocutors.
From the FBI investigator who first interrogated the arrested Abu Zubaydah and how he managed to get some useful information out of that guy using standard techniques, to the guys who actually invented those torture techniques with which everyone would probably say whatever was asked of him . And from beginning to end, this whole story seems incredible because at the time of Abu Zubaydah’s arrest, he was considered the third or fourth man of Al-Qaeda, but soon it turned out that the information available to the American services was quite wrong. It turned out that this guy caught in Pakistan in March 2002 was actually working independently of Bin Laden and his team, but he still had some information.
The name “Perpetual Prisoner” refers to him precisely because this terrorist is still imprisoned in the military base in Guantanamo without any indictment being brought against him and without being formally accused of anything. Of course, Zubaydah himself could not be an interlocutor, but what happened to him while he was imprisoned in secret locations from Thailand through Poland and Lithuania to Guantanamo, he submitted through his lawyer in drawings. And while today the whole world knows what kind of torture the terrorism suspects who were caught were subjected to, the story of how it all started is completely insane and absurd.
One of the interlocutors is the psychologist James Mitchell, who designed these interrogation techniques according to earlier techniques previously tested on American soldiers so that they could avoid giving answers in case of capture by parties that do not respect the Geneva Convention. Although it was clear from the very beginning that such a form of “examination” could not yield any results because anyone subjected to such psychophysical torture would confess everything that was asked of him, whether it was true or not, the application of these monstrous techniques began. And with this film, Gibney confirmed himself as an uncompromising documentarian, a great and provocative filmmaker who knows how to present such complex and controversial topics in a masterful, precise manner, and it seems quite shocking.