AWorld To Win News Service

4 September 2006. A World to Win News Service. The Road To Guantanamo won the Silver Bear award at the 2006 Berlin Film Festival. It was directed by British filmmakers Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross. The movie uses interviews, news footage and dramatic re-enactments of the real-life experiences of three young British men of Pakistani descent who were imprisoned by the US authorities at Guantanamo.
The opening scene zooms into the streets of Karachi, Pakistan, crowded with rickshaws, lorries, cart donkeys and animals sharing the road with pedestrians – all seemingly moving in chaos. The scene presents a vivid picture of the bazaars of Third World countries, an amalgamation of high-tech luxury Western goods sold along with local items.
The story is about Shafiq (played by Riz Ahmad), Ruhel (Farhad Harun), Asif  (Arfan Usman) and Monir (Waqar Siddiqui) who live in Tipton, England. The four men depart the West Midlands in England to attend the wedding party of Asif, who is getting married in Karachi. As they arrive in Karachi, the events taking place in late 2001 on the borders of Pakistan and Afghanistan change their lives. Asif, instead of getting married, hooks up with Shafiq’s cousin, Zahid, who is involved in supporting the resistance forces against the US invasion of Afghanistan.
The unjust war waged by the US-led Coalition pulls all four men across the border into Afghanistan to help support their Afghan brothers against the invaders. Their sense of justice, enthusiasm for freedom, and yes, their naïve political understanding of the situation, puts them among the Taleban fighters. With their Islamic convictions, they don’t see the reactionary nature of the Taleban movement, which was initially put in power by the US. After a torturous journey to Kabul, they move to Kandahar and then to Kunduz province, the Taleban’s last stronghold. Under heavy US aerial bombardment, Monir disappears. Perhaps he died like thousands of other innocent people who were buried under the impact of the US smart bombs and bunker busters.
For Asif, Shafiq, and Ruhel who survive the bombing, life brings another twist. All three are captured by the Northern Alliance and taken to Sheberghan Prison. There, they encounter the Coalition forces led by the US interrogators – the real masters of the prison. In their first encounter with American officers, the young men breathe a temporary sigh of relief. Between their English language skills and their faith in Western democracy, they think they will find sanctuary in the arms of the US intelligence officers. However, soon they wake up to the reality of Western democracy and its mode of operation in third world countries – especially against those forces who dare to resist it.
When the US intelligence officers learn these young men speak English, they quickly penetrate the young men’s psyches and break their will. The CIA agents, in close collaboration with British intelligence, pile up forged documents to “prove” these men have had links with Al-Qaeda and that their trip to Afghanistan had nefarious intent. Repeated beatings, screaming, holding them in stress positions and more outright torture force the young men to “confess” they have been Al-Qaeda operatives.
After this “successful” interrogation in Sheberghan Prison, the CIA wastes no time in using these men to back up White House claims that the US’s prisoners are all “bad guys”. With hoods over their heads, hands shackled behind their backs and chains on their feet, the men are marched into a CIA secretly operated plane heading to Guantanamo prison in Cuba.
Life in Guantanamo proves little different than Sheberghan Prison. More than two years of interrogation brings no real proof to substantiate any real links between the detainees, by now known as the Tipton Three, and Al-Qaeda. The CIA rounded up and abducted hundreds of people just like the Tipton Three in countries around the world and shipped them to Guantanamo. If these three were released, apparently it was not because they were any more or less “guilty” than others, but because of the support movement for them that grew up in the UK. Close to 600 men and boys were brought to Guantanamo, where most of them still remain after what will soon be five years.
Despite the secrecy surrounding the prison camp, where no cameras or media representatives are allowed to record the conditions, the film’s directors successfully bring out the bitterness of life there by recreating the scenes Asif, Shafiq and Ruhel experienced, based on 600 pages of transcripts of interviews with them. Just as the opening scene vividly documents the chaos of bazaars in Karachi, the re-enactment of Guantanamo’s chicken wire cages creates a vivid picture of this concentrated example of American justice. Dozens of prisoners there have attempted suicide, with three known to have been successful.
As far as the artistic merit of The Road To Guantanamo is concerned, the movie shocks its audiences with the reality of what American democracy is all about. Film reviewer Victoria Oac wrote, “I do not doubt the details of the experience of the ‘Tipton Three’ as dramatized. The first half is so real that it feels as if you are watching a documentary. The visualization of this intense reality makes the second half’s production values look even more artificial. Never mind, this is not the point. The point is the horror of what we are doing as a country.” (Stealth Democracy, June 26, 2006).
As far as the US mainstream media is concerned, even a reviewer for the pro-imperialist The New York Times was moved to write, “In a sense, then, the film, which is based on the testimony of three British Muslims captured in Afghanistan in 2001 and held at Guantanamo for more than two years, does not tell us anything new. It is nonetheless a wrenching and dismaying account of cruelty and bureaucratic indifference, a graphic tour of a place many citizens of Western democracies would prefer not to think about.” The reviewer continues, “there may still be some die-hards who respond to pictures of hooded prisoners and detailed accounts of physical and psychological abuse with accusations of anti-Americanism.”
The irony is that such die-hards actually do exist, in fact. While The New York Times attempts to whitewash the system by presenting the treatment of these detainees as the product of “cruelty and bureaucratic indifference” instead of the US’s drive to create a new world order in the interests of American capitalism, other media more directed as the masses of people in general simply try to throw doubt on whether the case really happened at all. For example, the daily USA Today attacked the detainees and the filmmakers who bring some of the facts to the attention of public.  In the face of the film’s exposures, the 31 July movie review says, “The fact that it is a re-enactment raises questions about the veracity of the story. Although the men seem sincere, we might have had a keener sense of their overall veracity if others were interviewed to support their story.”
How absurd can media jingoism can get in order to defend the worldwide American empire? After two years of torture and inhumane treatment, the CIA along with its counterpart British intelligence service, failed to provide a single shred of proof or documentation linking the detainees to Al-Qaeda. Now this mouthpiece for the Bush regime calls for “fairness” in filmmaking and art and “objectivity” in giving equal footage to the torturer and tortured. How ironic! What happened to the basic tenet of the law that people are presumed innocent unless proven guilty? It seems like USA Today – and the regime it speaks for – want to reverse both what used to be considered a law and the implicit verdict in this case, trying to convict those whom the US government already failed to find guilty by giving the torturers a second chance to tell us more lies in support of their story!
Sometimes the dictatorial nature of Western democracy is hidden, and sometimes it is naked. Unlike the US, this film played on British TV. But as if the UK government wanted to drive home some points made by the film and extend them to Britain as well, two of the Tipton Three and the actors who play them were detained, interrogated and threatened with jailing by British police as they were returning to the UK after the Berlin film festival. Special Branch and other police, who said they were “gathering information” on the basis of the UK’s latest “anti-terrorist” laws, pointedly asked one of the actors if he was thinking of making any more “political films”.