Movie: The Road To Guantanamo
Summary: In 2001, four Pakistani Britons, Ruhal Ahmed, Asif Iqbal and Shafiq Rasul and another friend, Monir, travel to Pakistan for a wedding and in a urge of idealism, decide to see the situation of war torn Afganistan which is being bombed by the American forces in retaliation for the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Once there, with the loss of Monir in the wartime chaos, they are captured by Northern Alliance fighters. They are then handed them over the American forces who transport them to the prison camps at the Guantanamo Bay base in Cuba. What follows is three years of relentless imprisonment, interrogations and torture to make them submit to blatantly wrong confessions to being terrorists. In the midst of this abuse, the three struggle to keep their spirits up in that face of this grave injustice.
My Reaction: I can’t say that most of the information in the movie was a surprise to me. I’m deeply cynical about the military, about politics, about the motivations for these wars, and I have read enough and heard enough that there was no surprise that any of this happened and is happening still. I have felt sick at the thought of Guantanamo Bay (and the other prison camps), at the U.S. policies of torture, of the suspension of any semblance of recognizing that people, all people, are owed basic rights. Yet it was still fairly abstract, the knowledge I had.
So it wasn’t new information to me, other than the particulars about the “Tipton Three,” but it definitely had a big impact on me. It was made real, and it was made personal, and it will be that much harder to put aside the knowledge of what is going on in this world.
Those three kids took a risk, partially out of idealism, and partially out of the recklessness of youth, and they paid a price that is unimaginable. The land of the free is selective in who is granted “freedom”.
