Faces From Guantanamo

By Anthony Kaufman, AlterNet. Posted June 22, 2006.

Editor's Note: Check out an exclusive clip from "The Road to Guantanamo" here.

After three inmates at the United States' Guantanamo Bay detention center killed themselves two weeks ago, camp commander Adm. Harry B. Harris Jr. told reporters that the suicides were "not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us."

But the three men -- Mani bin Shaman bin Turki al-Habardi, 30, Yasser Talal Abdulah Yahya al-Zahrani, 22, and Ali Abdullah Ahmed, 33 -- were never charged with a crime, and no evidence has been offered to prove that they were the "smart," "creative" and "committed" warriors that U.S. officials would lead us to believe.

"The Road to Guantanamo," an engrossing new movie (opening Friday) from British filmmakers Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross, shows just how easy it is for innocent young people to be swept up in the United States' indiscriminate "war on terror" and suffer the kinds of indignities that could lead someone to take his own life.

The subjects of "Road to Guantamo," real-life British-Pakistani citizens Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal and Rhuhel Ahmed, were eventually released from the camp and returned to Britain. But the "Tipton Three" (so dubbed for their hometown near Birmingham) were first held captive, interrogated and tortured at Guantanamo, and to this day have received neither reason nor apology for their 29-month imprisonment.

Knowing the facts of their story does little to diminish the power of seeing it unfold on screen. An effective hybrid of documentary and dramatic styles, "The Road to Guantanamo" employs interviews from the real-life Tipton Three, who narrate their own journey as it is recreated onscreen by first-time actors (a credible cast of Londoners led by Riz Agmed, Farhad Harun and Arfan Usman).

A couple years back, director Winterbottom crafted a similarly stunning docudrama called "In This World," a woefully under-seen immigration tale that followed two real-life Afghan refugees on a harrowing journey from Peshawar to Britain. (One of the "actors" in the film actually snuck into the United Kingdom on his own after production finished.)

Like that movie, "Road to Guantanamo" is subtle, realist filmmaking, never beating viewers over the head in the Michael Moore mode, notwithstanding some brief damning clips of George W. Bush ("These are bad people," he offers in his typically simple-minded fashion) and Donald Rumsfeld ("There is no doubt in my mind that the treatment is humane and appropriate and consistent with the Geneva Convention, for the most part," italics added).

"Road to Guantanamo" presents the events that led to the young men's seizure and incarceration in a straightforward, factual manner. No embellishment is needed; their actual journey was just as tense and shocking as Hollywood fiction. In fact, Shafiq, Asif and Rhuhel (and another friend Monir, lost along the way) are shown as normal, rambunctious twentysomethings right out of a teen comedy. Call it "Harold and Kumar Go to Afghanistan."

Anthony Kaufman has written about films and the film industry for the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune and Utne Magazine.