The Road to Guantanamo (2006)
Sony Pictures DVD (region 4)
d. Mat Whitecross, Michael Winterbottom; pr. Andrew Eaton, Melissa Parmenter, Michael Winterbottom; ph. Marcel Zyskind; m. Harry Escot, Molly Nyman; ed. Mat Whitecross, Michael Winterbottom; cast. Riz Ahmed, Farhad Harun, Waqar Siddiqui, Afran Usman, Shahid Iqbal, Sher Khan (95 mins)
In this combination of documentary and dramatic recreation framed by the co-operation between George Bush and Tony Blair in the weeks after 9-11, three British Muslims journey to Pakistan to attend their friend’s wedding, ending captive in Guantanamo Bay for two years until released without charge. Taliban support in Pakistan in opposition to the mounting American offensive in Afghanistan lurks in the background as archival footage, re-created scenes and interviews blend into an often harrowing but wryly ironic portrait of the celebrated media story of the Tipton three. Unlucky enough to be swept up in the War on Terror, these men were the innocents in Guantanamo: the humanity behind what the Bush government referred to as the “bad guys” held captive there.
The Road to Guantanamo recreates the conditions of the American bombing campaign against Afghanistan and the confusion that resulted in the protagonists being unable to leave Afghanistan and return to Pakistan. By the side of the road waiting for a way into Pakistan, they come under fire and flee through a corpse-ridden desert until captured by the Americans, who throw wounded men into mass graves: American military conduct in the War on Terror featuring prominently a year after the release of this film in The Situation and the documentary Taxi to the Dark Side. The treatment of prisoners in the War on Terror was a dominant subtext when co-director Winterbottom followed up his docudrama approach in A Mighty Heart.
Allusions to fascistic cruelty paint a terrible picture of American forces: terming the captured Taliban “dangerous” allows their wholesale mistreatment, including those of the innocents amongst them. Detainee treatment, military interrogation procedures and intelligence gathering from those in US custody are under intense scrutiny in The Road to Guantanamo: indeed, these would be key issues underlying the resurgence of the terrorist subgenre a year later in Rendition, The Kingdom and Body of Lies culminating in the war crimes discussion concluding Taxi to the Dark Side which takes up the theme of US conduct to examine the circumstances surrounding Abu Ghraib. These films obsess about the dehumanizing standards of the Republican-led War on Terror post 9-11 and are disturbed by what they discover and its implications about Republican ethics.
Donald Rumsfeld says to the press that the treatment of detainees in Camp X-Ray is humane and appropriate and in line with the Geneva Convention “for the most part” – claims also questioned in Taxi to the Dark Side. George Bush distances America from the detainees by saying “they don’t share the same values we share”, the dehumanization that justifies the ethics of torture in the Republican-led War on Terror. Indeed, the values that Bush evokes as American democracy justify an abuse that makes a mockery of the American claim to moral superiority in the War on Terror – an irony also followed through in Taxi to the Dark Side as evidence of the worst hypocrisy: an inversion of the Constitutional credo “innocent until proven guilty” in the presumption of guilt that justifies the Republican ethic of torture here presented as docudrama recreation.
In this context the efforts of the “dangerous” suspects to retain their humanity and psychological well-being in defiance of the American agenda to “break” them is heroic. Equally tellingly, deliberate disrespect for religious practice to provoke and offend against their beliefs – by kicking the Koran along the ground – is seen also as a form of torture, although officially such does not qualify as physical health alone determines what constitutes torture. Psychological torture such as forced positioning, sensory deprivation and religious desecration are correspondingly exempt from Geneva Convention standards, and as applied to “enemy combatants” are fully justified by the Republican-led War on Terror, not only in Afghanistan, as here, but in Iraq, as in Taxi to the Dark Side. Of course, the most ironic issue here, anticipating the 2007 wave of terrorist films, is the reliability of information extracted under the ethics of torture and the refusal of the US military to admit error.
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