The Forever Prisoner: A Documentary Review

My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. Documentarian Alex Gibney once again expertly exposes the origins of the U.S. torture program, although he doesn’t adequately shame the ruling elites responsible for the moral and ethical atrocity of torture.

 Watching the new HBO documentary, The Forever Prisoner, by Academy Award winning filmmaker Alex Gibney now available on HBO Max, is an at times infuriating experience.

 The film isn’t infuriating because it’s a flawed but damning reminder of America’s hypocrisy and brutality as it examines the birth of the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program and the death of the delusion of American ideals. No, it’s infuriating because you know no one of any consequence will be held accountable for the gruesome crime being exposed in heinous detail before you.

‘The Forever Prisoner’ of the title is Abu Zubaydah, the alleged terrorist mastermind captured in Pakistan in 2002 who was savagely tortured by the CIA for months and now resides in an endless legal limbo in Guantanamo Bay.

 Zubaydah’s torture, which included isolation, sleep deprivation, freezing, beatings, stress positions, and 83 water boarding sessions, is shown to have been the blueprint for CIA and U.S. military torture programs from Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan to Abu Ghraib in Iraq to Guantanamo Bay in the War on Terror.

Zubaydah was no innocent, but he also wasn’t the al Qaeda heavy hitter that the CIA claimed him to be. That said, he was a useful asset, as FBI agent Ali Soufan was able to extract vital information from him during the early, pre-torture days of his interrogation.

As Soufan explains, it was non-torture interrogation techniques that got Zubaydah to identify Khalid Sheikh Muhammed as an al Qaeda leader and mastermind of 9/11.

But when word got back to CIA director George Tenet that it was FBI agents getting info from Zubaydah and not the CIA, the ever-territorial Tenet went ballistic.

So, FBI agent Soufan was out and after a 47-day isolation period where Zubaydah saw and spoke to no one – a clear indication that the ticking time bomb scenario so often used to justify torture was invalid, the insidious clown show that was the CIA took over and the torture program kicked off.

The CIA man who developed the torture regime used on Zubaydah which became the playbook for America’s torture program, James Mitchell, is featured in The Forever Prisoner and vociferously but poorly defends himself and his work.

As the film shows, the CIA were so desperate to create an “enhanced interrogation” system they chose the eager Mitchell with virtually no vetting and despite the fact that he had no experience in actual interrogation.

Mitchell and his partner Dr. Bruce Jensen’s only remotely relevant experience was in working with the SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Extraction) program which teaches U.S. military personnel how to avoid being captured and how to resist torture techniques.

The CIA reverse engineering SERE to create an interrogation program creates obvious legal and operational contradictions as the SERE program clearly states that torture techniques only extract false confessions and empty propaganda victories.

Not surprisingly, Mitchell and Jensen’s immoral and unethical torture program was also ineffective, as it failed miserably to garner any useful intelligence, but despite their abysmal failure they were paid by the CIA an astonishing $81 million as torture teachers.

The man who led the CIA torture program and signed those checks was Director of the CIA Counterterrorism Center, Jose Rodriguez, and he knew the evil and illegality he was perpetrating, as evidenced by his telling his subordinates, “Do not put your legal concerns in writing. Not helpful.”

Rodriguez and his Chief of Staff, Gina Haspel, were also the ones who illegally destroyed the videotapes of the Zubaydah torture sessions, against the advice of legal counsel.

Haspel and Rodriguez never faced any legal recourse for their part in the torture program or for destroying evidence. In fact, Haspel later became Director of the CIA and then Director of National Intelligence, while Rodriguez became wealthy as a consultant with an impressive car collection.

Deep State darlings like General Michael Hayden and John Brennan avoided consequences as well, as they’re now warmly welcomed on CNN and MSNBC and even get fellated by Bill Maher for being “heroes”.

Of course, George W. Bush was never held to account for his torture program, and liberals now adore him because he once gave a candy to Michelle Obama.

President Obama too gets a pass for his complicity after the fact regarding the torture program, as he refused to investigate or prosecute any of these war criminals, instead only admitting that “we tortured some folks”, but then calling the torturers “real patriots”. I suppose that just as one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, one man’s war criminal is another man’s “real patriot”.

Zubaydah has never been charged for a crime but he still may very well deserve his lifetime imprisonment in Guantanamo Bay. But also deserving of that dismal fate are the Washington ghouls like Bush, Cheney, Brennan, Hayden, Haspel, and Obama who were either directly responsible, complicit or aided and abetted some of the worst war crimes of the War on Terror era.

While The Forever Prisoner viscerally recounts the crimes committed upon Abu Zubaydah, often using his own drawings as a visual guide, like the establishment media, it unfortunately doesn’t do enough to shame the murderer’s row of Washington war criminals listed above.

Like Gibney’s Oscar winning film, Taxi to the Dark Side, The Forever Prisoner dutifully and skillfully exposes the depravity unleashed by the U.S. in the wake of 9/11, but it’s ultimately a frustrating film because it fails to adequately target the brutal and barbaric elites that conjured the evil of torture and yet managed to maintain their reputations despite the blood on their hands.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley - A Review

****THIS REVIEW REVEALS SOME MINOR INFORMATION FROM THE DOCUMENTARY!! NOTHING MAJOR - BUT YOU’VE BEEN WARNED!!****

My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT/SKIP IT. This documentary is mildly entertaining but lacks insight and depth. Not awful, but not transcendent either…if the subject matter intrigues you then check it out.

The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, directed and produced by Alex Gibney, is an HBO original documentary film that examines the meteoric rise of “inventor” Elizabeth Holmes and her health technology company Theranos.

There is nothing quite as enjoyable to me as a great documentary. I can watch truly great documentaries over and over as they feel like miniature master degrees in whatever subject they dissect. Film’s like Charles Ferguson’s Inside Job, Errol Morris’ The Fog of War or just about anything by Adam Curtis are films I revisit nearly every year and never regret it.

I was excited to see Academy Award and Emmy Award winning director Alex Gibney’s new documentary The Inventor, as he definitely has a knack for choosing fascinating topics. That said, Gibney, who won his Oscar for the profound Taxi to the Dark Side (2007) and multiple Emmys for the stunning Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God, can be an uneven filmmaker who often explores intriguing topics in his movies but at times fails to adequately document his subjects to a deep enough degree to satisfy beyond a passing and surface interest.

The Inventor is one of those type of Gibney films that tackles an interesting topic but fails to do so in an in-depth enough and compelling enough way. The Inventor reminded me a little bit of his highly praised (it won 3 Emmy awards) film about Scientology, Going Clear. I liked Going Clear and found it to be engaging to a certain degree, but ultimately it fell well short of being an earth-shattering revelation. Similar to Gibney’s film on Wikileaks and Julian Assange, We Steal Secrets, a pretty shameless and embarrassing hatchet job on Assange, with The Inventor Gibney seems to be seeing his subject through a biased lens. With We Steal Secrets, Gibney’s was decidedly against Assange, but inThe Inventor he is most definitely biased in favor of Elizabeth Holmes….but more on that in a bit.

With The Inventor, Gibney once again dives into a riveting subject, but only swims in the shallow water of it and fails to give viewers much to sink their teeth into beyond the headlines. Elizabeth Holmes is a character for the ages, but Gibney barely scratch the surface of who she REALLY is in this film. On top of that Gibney never gets deep enough into the weeds of what exactly Holmes was trying to create at Theranos and how she planned to do it, to ever make viewers feel like anything more than just another mark for her con.

The film, while entertaining to a certain degree, is problematic for a variety of other reasons as well. The most glaring of which is the blind spot the filmmaker has in regards to his subject. Yes, Gibney exposes Holmes’ fraud, but he never exposes HER for being a fraud. Instead, what Gibney does is cloak Holmes in a protective blanket which imbues on her with only the best of intentions and the inability to be consciously or maliciously deceptive.

In this way Alex Gibney is recreating the same psychological, mental and emotional gymnastics that Elizabeth Holmes’ targets did when they fell under her spell. Holmes weilded her femininity like a martial art against the patriarchal system within she worked. Holmes’ juijitsu turned the unconscious sexism and paternalism of the men she targeted against them. The paternalism, sexism and soft misogyny of the powerful men she conned, who are a Murderer’s Row of Hall of Fame assholes that include men like Bill Clinton, General Mattis, David Boies, Henry Kissinger and George Shultz (who proves what a ass he is by siding with Holmes over his own grandson) among many others, caused them to fall for Holmes’ lies for two reasons. The first is that they overestimated her intellect and value because, ironically, they wanted to be seen supporting a women in order to quell their fear of being labelled sexist. The secondly, due to their paternalism and sexism, they underestimated Holmes’ ability for villainy, and she exploited the weakness of these men to her benefit.

The irony of Holmes’ epic story is that these powerful men treated Holmes different and held her to a different standard BECAUSE she was a women. The reporters and writers who aided her rise to the status of media darling and science and business genius did the same thing, failing to adequately doubt and question her simply because they never considered she was capable of straight out lying to them. Even the reporters who spoke with her AFTER her scam became public, men like Sanjay Gupta and Jim Cramer, didn’t hold her feet to the fire like they would have with a man. Holmes was able to keep her scam alive for so long because these men treated her with kid gloves.

Interestingly enough, Holmes’s scam almost never got started because of a women, Professor Phyllis Gardner, her advisor at Stanford, who basically told Holmes her idea was scientifically impossible. Instead of trying to change her advisor’s mind, Holmes changed advisors…which is a perfect encapsulation of Elizabeth Holmes approach to life. In my eyes, at best, Holmes’ suffers from a the most acute case of cognitive dissonance on the planet, at worst she is a conniving and manipulative criminal mastermind. For director Gibney, who refuses to consider that Holmes was driven by greed for money, power and fame, Holmes is earnest in intent but misguided in execution. According to Gibney, Holmes’ greatest sin is being too much of a zealot for her noble cause.

The reality is that if Holmes were a man, the idea that she wasn’t anything but a greedy and evil con artist would never even remotely be considered…and rightfully so. Think of all the Wall Street snakes who scammed Americans out of their savings with the housing bubble, nobody thinks, “oh gee…they just wanted everyone to be able to own a home”…no…people think that those pricks were trying to get rich off the backs of working people…because that is exactly what they were doing.

In the case of Alex Gibney’s film, he seems to suffer from an unconscious bias that makes him hold Holmes to a very different standard and lets her off the hook for her nefariousness activities. An example of this is that besides lowering Holmes intent and responsibility regarding fraud, he also lowers the standard for her regarding her sexual relationship at work. Holmes started dating Sunny Balwani, a tech entrepreneur twenty years her senior, when she was 19 and he was married to another woman. Balwani was a key advisor to Holmes in the early development of Theranos and after he got divorced from his wife, Holmes moved in with him. Balwani eventually became second in command to Holmes at Theranos but when the sham was exposed and things went bad for the company, she broke up with him and fired him. If a man had behaved the way Holmes did in her personal life, it would have been a much greater focus of the story of The Inventor, and would have been used to establish the lack of moral and ethical fiber of the person running the company. But in The Inventor, the fact of Holmes questionable conduct with Balwani is reduced to nothing more than a throw away line near the end of the film.

At the end of the day, Holmes captivates our imagination because she is so representative of the surreal age in which we live. Holmes is emblematic of our scam culture where style overwhelms substance, the subjective trumps the objective, where shortcuts are the only way to travel and truth is a punchline.

Holmes is similar to Trump in that her con is so obvious that it is stunning that anybody falls for it. Like Trump with his signature (and ridiculous) hair-do and his never buttoned blue suits with long ties, Holmes literally wore a costume, all black with a black turtleneck, a cheap imitation of her hero Steve Jobs.

Her use of story and language was also absurdly obvious as to her dishonesty as she simply regurgitated and repeated the same origin story over and over again and then used pseudo-scientific/tech marketing talk to cover her lack of any substance. Words like “inflection point” and “paradigm shift” or the use of “chemistry” as a verb were dead giveaways to her deceitful intent.

The most glaring giveaway though was her voice. Good Lord that voice. Her voice is so phony and put on it is remarkable no one did a spit-take in her face upon hearing it. But the voice gives away the game that she is an obvious fraud and walking lie…and those that fell for scam did so BECAUSE THEY WANTED TO FALL FOR IT. These people, and they were mostly men, wanted Holmes’ story to be true so they convinced themselves that it was.

In this way Holmes is also the symbol for today’s neo-feminism, which alleges to want equality but only accepts the diminishing of standards and the lowering of bars for women. Neo-feminism loves to demand equal opportunity but also loves to shirk equal responsibility. That said, it is pretty amusing that Holmes used the patriarchy’s literal and symbolic desire for her and their shameless politically correct yearning to be seen as “allies” to women, to advance her scam and sucker investors and big names to support her fraudulent project.

None of these types of subjects, like Holmes as symbol for modern feminism, or the ingrained sexism of the men who fell for her, or the soft treatment she got because she was a women being integral to her scam flourishing, are ever broached by Gibney in his film. Instead Gibney sticks to a very straightforward and very forgiving narrative that never gets too deep or too insightful and the film suffers because of it.

According to Gibney’s movie, Holmes’ scam is just something that happened that is not indicative of anything else and is not symbolic of the age of fraud in which we live. The reality is very different, as one glance at the news will tell you that Elizabeth Holmes is the poster girl for our times. Our charlatan president, the Russiagate hysteria, the Fyre Festival nonsense, the college admission payola scam, Jussie Smollett’s shenanigans and on and on and on including our fraudulent economy and political system…are all hoaxes, scams and frauds. This is why Elizabeth Holmes is the poster girl for our times and it is a shame that Alex Gibney did not have the insight, self-knowledge and skill to bring that much deeper and more important story to light.

In conclusion, while The Inventor is entertaining on a certain gossipy level, it lacks the insight, depth of subject and profundity to be considered a great documentary. The film is currently airing on HBO, so if you want to spend two hours being mildly amused at the absurdity of it all, then you should check out The Inventor, just don’t expect transendance.

©2019