Six months after 9/11, the CIA captured Abu Zubaydah and announced he was number three in Al Qaeda. Frantic to thwart a much-feared second wave of attacks, the U.S. rendered him to a secret black site in Thailand, where he collided with retired Air Force psychologist James Mitchell. Arguing that Abu Zubaydah had been trained to resist interrogation and was withholding vital clues, the CIA authorized Mitchell and others to use brutal “enhanced interrogation techniques” that would have violated U.S. and international laws had not government lawyers rewritten the rulebook.

Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy recount dramatic scenes inside black sites through the eyes of those who were there, trace the twisted legal justifications, and chart how enhanced interrogation, a key “weapon” in the global “War on Terror,” metastasized over seven years, encompassing dozens of detainees in multiple locations, some of whom died. Ultimately that war has cost 8 trillion dollars, 900,000 lives, and displaced 38 million people—while the U.S. Senate judged enhanced interrogation was torture and had produced zero high-value intelligence. Yet numerous men, including Abu Zubaydah, remain imprisoned in Guantanamo, never charged with any crimes, in contravention of America’s ideals of justice and due process, because their trials would reveal the extreme brutality they experienced.

Based on four years of intensive reporting, on interviews with key protagonists who speak candidly for the first time, and on thousands of previously classified documents, The Forever Prisoner is a powerful chronicle of a shocking experiment that remains in the headlines twenty years after its inception, even as US government officials continue to thwart efforts to expose war crimes.

Silenced by a CIA pledge to keep him imprisoned and incommunicado forever, Abu Zubaydah speaks loudly through these pages, prompting the question as to whether he and others remain detained not because of what they did to us but because of what we did to them.

Praise for The Forever Prisoner:

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice

“Comprehensive . . . Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy—who have published several previous books on similar themes—interweave the stories of captive and interrogator, showing how fatally unprepared they were to understand each other . . . Impressively thorough.”—Robert F. Worth, New York Times Book Review

“British journalists Scott-Clark and Levy team up again to take a hard look at the CIA’s program of rendition and torture after 9/11 . . . Building on The Exile, the authors deliver an impressively researched investigation of government malfeasance and ineptitude. A forceful book that demands greater oversight of the nation’s intelligence services and justice for the wrongly imprisoned.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Journalists Scott-Clark and Levy chronicle the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program in this disturbing and deeply reported history . . . A crucial record of how the U.S. government betrayed its ideals to wage the war on terror.”—Publishers Weekly

“The Forever Prisoner is a powerful investigation into the origins of the US official policy of torture. Focusing on the case of Abu Zubaydah, the ‘patient zero’ of the CIA’s ‘enhanced interrogation’ techniques, Scott-Clark and Levy manage to get to virtually everyone, which allows them to tell a riveting tale and the authoritative account.”—Alex Gibney, acclaimed documentarian and winner of the Academy, Emmy, and Grammy awards

“A deeply reported and well written account of Abu Zubaydah’s descent into the darkest reaches of the war on terror and of Jim Mitchell who engineered the CIA’s coercive interrogation program. It is a key account of the post-9/11 era.”—Peter Bergen, author of The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden

“Being kidnapped and tortured as an innocent person, the prospect of never seeing my family again, was the worst feeling in the world. The nightmare became a reality after the death of my mother. Eventually, I did win my freedom, however. Abu Zubaydah is still held incommunicado, along with others. This book gives him a voice for the first time and gets to the heart of what it is like to be a forever prisoner.”—Mohamedou Ould Slahi, author of Guantanamo Diary