Film Review: Road to Guantánamo
I watched The Road to Guantanamo. If you haven’t seen it yet, go do so. (Trailer) Right now. I mean it. Heck, I’ll even pay your cab fare and the price of a ticket.
The film centers on the “Tipton Three,” three British citizens of Pakistani descent who were arrested in Afghanistan, sent to Guantanamo, and later released. The actual three are in the film, narrating and remembering what happened, although much of the film is a dramatization with their narration of it. It starts off with them in Pakistan to attend a wedding in 2001, and told they could make a difference if they brought supplies into Afghanistan. Of course, they get stuck because of the war and wind up in US custody. They were sent to Guantanamo and tortured into admitting they were physically with Bin Laden years earlier, until the UK passport check proved they hadn’t even left the UK until a year after the video. The film is graphic in its recreation, and it will leave you horrified at the abuse: to me it was like reading Elie Wiesel’s book, Night, or watching a movie about the Holocaust. The Northern Alliance rounded up and killed lots of prisoners, and that’s mentioned. We all left the film feeling a bit shaken.
Interesting tidbit: After the film, I saw Shafiq Rasul, one of the main characters, on CNN. Wolf Blitzer’s first question was, What do you think of Osama Bin Laden? Shafiq was trying to say, I’m not a fan but what difference does that make? Wolf Blitzer dropped the ball on this interview, the interview was very unproductive and I didn’t learn anything new about Gitmo, which Thomas Friedman called “the anti-Statue of Liberty.”
I think this film highlighted some of the nasty stuff that went on in Guantanmo and seems to be building here. CAIR had an alert about some idiots fairly south who decided to buy a Quran, shoot it full of bullets, and throw it at a mosque, videotaping it and posting it online. It reminds me of the jerk who purposely threw the detainee’s Qurans into the waste area of the camp. Multiple times.
I disagree with Umar Lee on how innocent they were. Yeah, it was a foolish idea, and they said on CNN they regretted it. However, their treatment and the sheer barbarity of the entire thing made me walk out of the theater ashamed to be American. If you want to criticize that, go see it first.
