The Road to Guantanamo

[Makalakumu]

I figured I would post this once Memorial Day was over and people had had a reminder of what this country was supposed to stand for.

This movie, The Road To Guantanamo, is a betrayal of those values that so many have died for.

The whole movie is on Google Video, so watch it.

Here is a quick synopsis...

The Road to Guantanamo is a 2006 docudrama directed by Michael Winterbottom about the incarceration of three British detainees at a detainment camp in Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba. It premiered at the Berlinale on 14th February, 2006, and first shown in the UK on Channel 4 on 9th March, 2006. The following day it was the first film to be released simultaneously in cinemas, on DVD and on the Internet viewable online at Google Video.

Filming took place in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran, which doubled as Cuba. Mat Whitecross is credited as co-director, and handled most of the interviews with the real-life counterparts to the main characters.[1]
The original poster made to promote the film in the United States (shown right) was refused by the Motion Picture Association of America. The reason given was that the burlap sack over the detainee's head was considered to be depicting torture, and therefore inappropriate for young children to see. The final version of the poster showed just the detainee's manacled hands.

The film tells the story of Ruhal Ahmed, Asif Iqbal and Shafiq Rasul (the 'Tipton Three'); three young British men from Tipton in the West Midlands who were captured by the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan in 2001 and detained as "enemy combatants" at Guantánamo Bay, without charge or legal representation, for nearly three years. As well as interviews with the three men themselves and archive news footage from the period, the film contains an account of the three men's experiences following their capture by the Northern Alliance, the subsequent handover to the United States military and their detention in Cuba. It contains several scenes depicting their alleged beatings during interrogation, the use of alleged torture techniques such as 'stress positions' and attempts to extract forced confessions of involvement with Al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

The Tipton Three were all released without charge in 2004.

The torture depicted in the movie had to be softened from the detainees' accounts for the benefit of the actors; according to Rizwan Ahmed, they were unable to bear the pain caused by the shackles pressing on their legs, and had to have them cushioned. They were also unable to remain in the stress positions depicted for more than an hour; the Tipton Three were allegedly left in them for up to eight hours. [3]

Watch the movie and let us know what you think...

 

[tellner]

America is no longer America.

Damn Cheney, Rove, De Lay, Bush, Wolfowitz, Yu and Gonzales to Hell for what they've turned us into. And damn us for going along with it. There should have been rioting in the streets over this. Instead Reid said he didn't want to "see any airspace" between the Dems and the Reps on the issue.

 

[OUMoose]

America is no longer America.

Damn Cheney, Rove, De Lay, Bush, Wolfowitz, Yu and Gonzales to Hell for what they've turned us into. And damn us for going along with it. There should have been rioting in the streets over this. Instead Reid said he didn't want to "see any airspace" between the Dems and the Reps on the issue.

I hope you meant "rioting in the streets" in a figurative way. It would be too easy at this point to be branded a subversive or whatever fun term they use now and be thrown to gitmo (or one of the other gulags built by Halliburton).

Everyone have their passports/papers ready for mass exodus day? Hope Canada's immigration office is ready...

 

[Sukerkin]

This is not meant in a 'throwaway line' kind of way.

Given the fairly heavy undermining of what was envisaged to be 'America' by those that crafted your founding philosophy, do you chaps think that the concept of a true republic, where the individual takes precidence over the 'state' has a chance of returning?

Or has the damage become too severe and too many steps taken along the road of becoming like the enemy that so many died to defeat not so many decades ago?

 

[qi-tah]

Oh, and let's not forget our very own "congaline of suckholes" (thanks Paul Keating) aka the Australian Government headed by John Howard, who left Aust. citizen David Hicks in detention at Guantanamo for over 5 years without trial. The govt were hoping that habeaus corpus would RIP but thanks to a large and effective publicity campaign back in oz (compounded by the upcoming fed election!), Mr. Hicks flew back to Adelaide last month... to another max security prison, despite the fact that under Australian law he had commited no crime at the time of his detention in 2001. Mr. Hicks will complete his 9 month sentence for the retroactive crime of "providing material support for terrorism" at the end of the year... but until then he remains our very own political prisoner. Makes you proud, doesn't it.

 

[tellner]

We had actual rioting in the streets back in the 30s when concentration of ownership in the beef and milk industries reached levels that are about half what they are today. If I agree and say "Yes, it was a throwaway line" I'm not exactly telling the truth. If I say "In many ways it's worse now than it was then, and it wasn't unjustified then" I'm considered a Commie or anarchist or similar. :shrug:

Sukerkin, the idea that the Republic was ever made up of atomic individuals and the State runs the Post Office, the Army and the Police and nothing else is a late 20th century myth. What is a Republic? It's a State which is not a monarchy. If you take a close look at the history of Republican (strict sense, not the neo-theo/neo-fascist Party) thought you'll see all sorts of conflicting imperatives. The individual isn't always supreme. Sometimes it's the People collectively. Sometimes the household is what's important. Other times it's the State as opposed to the national government. In fact, many of the founding thinkers of the US hated the rise of wage labor and firms because they made people unequal, gave fictions the rights of human beings and reduced collective endeavor.

In many ways the large-L Libertarian ideal of humans as independent, atomic monads is a direct result of the rise of cities and the late Industrial Revolution. These two things made such ideas possible and can not be considered essential features of the human condition or ideal forms of governance. Quite the contrary. They are radical departures from the great bulk of human experience up until about 150 years ago.

 

[Sukerkin]

It's hard to argue when you're nodding at each point in someones post :lol:.

I suppose what I actually meant in my post should've been predicated by something like "Given that the modern perception of a Republic is that the rights of the individual are protected from undue inteference by the state ... "

with a middle that has references to how similar the current restrictions on individual freedom are to those imposed by a certain political party that held sway in Germany in the 1930's ...

and ended with "is that ideal of individual, self responsible, liberty likely to be realised in the political climate of fear and repression now prevalent?".