The Road to Guantanamo (2006)

I need to begin by saying that Guantanamo was and remains to be a huge disgrace for the United States of America and everything most of us feel we represent, things like freedom, human dignity, and the rights of man. This torture chamber dreamed up by Dick Cheney goes against all of that. Whatever problems I had with this film don't change the fact that I think this prison is disgusting, illegal, and immoral."My parents went to Pakistan and they saw a bride for me," are the first lines spoken by Asif in the film. And the bride? Perhaps a first cousin as is all too common amongst Pakistanis in flagrant disregard for the health risks their children will incur. Or perhaps she is a child also under the complete control of family. He decides to marry her after four days. OK, I think Asif really has to ask himself if England is a place where he feels comfortable living.I'm not sure that turning this into a drama was the best road to take to Guantanamo, an illegal prison that I have opposed from the beginning. Using actors and putting this into a phony documentary format places it more alongside "This is Spinal Tap" than any of the better films in this genre. I am aware that documentaries made with nothing but archival footage can lie as well as in a dramatic recreation but I found it difficult to see the line in this between fact and fiction, where fiction is hearsay and the testimony of the four boys.I still don't know if 100% of this was a dramatization or if they used any news clips. Dramatization or prevarication? The film lost any sense of verisimilitude once American soldiers were introduced because evidently the director didn't bother to ask any in the know about just what sort of uniforms and insignias American soldiers wear. Even the American accents were phony.When they arrived at Guantanamo the Marines were the worse Marine impersonators ever.A few unanswered questions: How did all of the men die who were in the truck? It looked as if at least half of those who entered had perished inside yet they don't say how.

"None of us were ever told why we were in Cuba. We were told that they considered us 'unlawful combatants,' but whenever any of us asked what this meant they refused to give us a definition." - Shafik RasulThree young Muslim men journey from Britain to Pakistan to attend a family wedding. After the wedding they decide to travel to Afganistan, where they are arrested by American soldiers who, believing them to be "terrorists", ship them off to the detention camps at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba. The rest of the film consists of horrific torture sequences, the men abused for 2 years before being released without charge. Michael Winterbottom's "The Road to Guantanamo" plays like an angry sequel to his earlier film, "In This World". Both films use amateur actors, cinema verite techniques and sport an urgent aesthetic which resembles unfolding reality TV. There are differences, though. With "Guantanamo" Winterbottom splices interview footage and eyewitness accounts into his dramatic reconstruction of the trio's ordeal. These interviews are designed to validate the film's politics - its a heavy handed attack on the US, the Bush administration, the Patriot Act and the West's "war on terror" - but they also have the unintended effect of questioning the veracity of our eyewitnesses; their testimonies are as staged and self-consciously hyperbolic as Winterbottom's "reconstructed drama" itself.The film is at times gripping, albeit in a safe, agitprop way. The US soldiers come across as little Nazis, subjecting their victims to various torture techniques, beatings, abuse, racial/religious attacks (burning Korans etc) and a bevy of dehumanising techniques (refering to prisoners as numbers etc), all of which provoke suicides, tears and lots of physical and psychological trauma. And of course while all this madness unfolds, the words "Honor Bound To Defend Freedom" remain stencilled on Guantanamo Bay's cold walls. So what we have here is essentially, like De Palma's recent "Redacted", and to a lesser extent Assad's "Paradise Now", Winterbottom's "In This World" and Godard's "Our Music", the angry flip side to a wave of contemporary war mongering films like "World Trade Centre", "Blackhawk Down", "Saving Private Ryan", "United 93" etc. Where those films demonize the Other (Arabs, Germans, Middle Easterners, Africans etc) and glorify Americans and their quasi-religious sacrifices to the state's blood cult, Winterbottom attempts to humanise the Other. The irony is, this requires him to paint the American Empire as 21st century sadists. He has no inkling of the larger (psychosocioeconomic) systemic reasons for suffering.The question here is whether "Road To Guantanamo" is "bad art" because it engages in the same tactics as its opposition but applies these tactics to an opposing agenda (it portrays US soldiers as one dimensional villains). On one hand, a better director would engage with these issues with more objectivity, depth and insight, but on the other hand we have someone like George Orwell who swears by always siding with victims and underdogs. Psychologists once did an experiment where they showed participants two maps of Israel: one showing it as a large country surrounding the small Palestinian enclaves, and the other showing it as a tiny island in the middle of the hostile Arab world. In the "Palestinians as underdogs" condition, 55% said they supported Palestine. In the "Israelis as underdogs" condition, 75% said they supported Israel. In other words, you can change opinion thirty points by altering perceived underdog status. Winterbottom gains his 30 percent by decreasing the size of his underdog heroes and increasing the size of those who bully them, but of course historical truth is on his side. Which is why films like "United 93", "WTC", "Saving Private Ryan", "Black Hawk Down", "Munich" etc engage in what is called "passive victimhood" (ie – the feigning of being a victim or underdog). These films are all tragedies in which truth is skewed such that the "historical victim" is shown to be "the aggressor" and the "historical aggressor" is falsely shown to be either "the victim" or up against huge odds or facing some difficult mission. It's why we painted the Irish as devils for centuries and now as lovable rogues.Beyond this, the film touches upon a couple other themes – the fact that the majority of designated "enemy combatants" at Guantanamo have never been charged with any crime, the fact that more than two hundred and fifty prisoners have been released from the camp with no intimation that they did anything wrong, the sheer immorality and futility of using torture as a means of extracting information from someone who has no information to extract, the evils of Bush's "anti-terrorist policy", a policy which allows civilians to be imprisoned and interrogated without evidence etc etc – but it's the things which the film omits that are most interesting.For example, Guantanamo is the least shady prison in a web of illegal US prisons in Afghanistan, Iraq and Macedonia (consider the case of Khaled el-Masri, who from 2003-2004 was erroneously held in Macedonia and Afghanistan by the CIA), and the film seems very embarrassed of the fact that its "heroes" travelled from Pakistan and into Afghanistan, Winterbottom attributing their journey to a mix up with a bus.This poor explanation as to why the boys were in Afganistan has led to critics supposing that maybe the trio really were attending "terrorist camps". What no one is brave enough to say is that with the adult world long discredited, such actions by them are perfectly understandable. Its no surprise, nor their fault, that alienated young Muslim's would go so far in an attempt to consolidate their own sense of identity. Such an attempted rites of passage shames Winterbottom, and perhaps the trio themselves8/10 – Didactic, visceral, simplistic.

Although some have not heard of the Tipton Three, they are real. In fact, one of them, Shafiq Rasul should be familiar to all who were really in Guantanamo. He is the one who sued George Bush and won in Rasul vs Bush the right of the captives at Guantanamo to challenge their captivity in US courts.The movie itself has very good production values. At times, the reenactment gives the impression we are seeing a collection of clips filmed in real time and on site. Oh and by the way, of the 775 prisoners taken to Gitmo, 420 were released without charge.

This is the reality of the dictatorship that we live under today. George Bush and his neocons have completely discarded the rule of law and are engaging in torture to pursue their evil ends.This documentary shows what can happen not only to three Brits who were traveling to a wedding, but to anyone who lives in America under the present circumstances.The military, who are not to blame as they were just ignorant rednecks following orders, are made to be cartoon characters. The "interregators" are just like police everywhere, they lie and deceive just to get someone to confess. The fact that they have been unable to get a confession shows just how ridiculous they are. Bellieve me, I would have confessed to buggery under those conditions.Once we remove Bush from office in another 664 days, then Guantanamo should be closed and leveled to the ground so that not one stone sits atop another. It is too much to hope that Bush and his cohorts in crime would ever be borough to trial and punished as the war criminals they are for this sad chapter in our history.