The Road to Guantánamo: Film Review

"Road to Guantánamo": Three Stooges from the Midlands go to "1984"

I don't know if it's possible for American viewers to have an appropriate reaction to "The Road to Guantánamo." I can only tell you that when I saw it, at a daytime screening during the Tribeca Film Festival, I walked out into the spring sunshine and felt profoundly confused. I was horrified, angry and upset, which are all more or less predictable reactions to the subject matter. But in all honesty, reaction No. 1 was: This can't really be happening. After that came the thought that, yeah, lots of other Americans would feel the same way: This can't be true. This isn't real. Something's wrong with this picture.

At the risk of retreating into Waffle House aesthetic relativism, I think the unsettling power of Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross' film stems from its contradictions. It combines documentary elements -- interviews with the three young British Muslims known as the "Tipton Three," from their hometown outside Birmingham -- with a harrowing fictional re-creation of what they say happened to them after they were taken prisoner in Afghanistan. It offers the most scathing possible critique of American (and British) tactics in the so-called war on terror, but only by way of a story whose details cannot be verified.
(...)

"The Road to Guantánamo" challenges American viewers to confront the possibility (note that word, please) that the worst fantasies of the Chomskyite left fringe have already come to pass. In other words, the possibility that the country some of us still believe is capable of fulfilling the rhetoric of Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt has already become a new kind of totalitarian superstate, enforcing consumer narcosis at home with a borderless secret-police apparatus that spans the globe.
(...)

"The Road to Guantánamo" will drive you crazy, if you aren't crazy yet. It documents a period of acute insanity, and all possible responses to it will sound paranoid to someone. (...) We have gone through the rabbit hole. We've swallowed the red pill. Yo, Toto -- we left Kansas behind a long time ago, dude.

Let's get more specific. Rahul Ahmed, Asif Iqbal and Shafiq Rasul were captured in late November of 2001, in northern Afghanistan, by Northern Alliance forces who were aiding the United States invasion. Along with other suspected Taliban fighters and supporters, they were packed into crowded, unsanitary prisons where many detainees died. When it was discovered that they spoke English and were British citizens, coalition military authorities became extremely interested, and they were handed over to U.S. Special Forces. They were transferred to an American-run prison in Kandahar and then to Guantánamo, where they spent two years, first in the outdoor wire cages of Camp X-Ray and then in the indoor steel barracks of Camp Delta.

I don't think any of those facts are in dispute, nor is the fact that the three men were eventually released (in March 2004) and no charges against them were ever filed. Winterbottom, who directed the fictional portions of "Road to Guantánamo," has decided to dramatize their version of events, from their first capture through their eventual release, and has admitted that no one can be certain it's absolutely all true. (It's not like the U.S. government is offering informational tours, or making the files of detainees available to filmmakers.)
...

MORE AT THE ARTICLE:

http://salon.com/ent/movies/review/2006/06/22/btm