The Road to Guantanamo & other fictions
After getting back from the range, I have to confess to spending the rest of last night watching Michael Winterbottom’s film The Road to Guantanamo & as a piece made in the finest cinematic traditions of British comedy, it was absolutely hysterical. As the say goes, I haven’t laugh so much since Grandma died or Aunty Mabel caught her left tit in the mangle. The casting director must have searched long & hard to find the actors that played the US Marine Corps characters, all of whom aside from carrying the wrong personal weapons & appearing to be distinctly uncomfortable in their uniforms, looked as though they had never done any exercise in their lives. Even better was the British military intelligence officer whose beret was so badly shaped, it would have landed him on a charge, aside from the fact he was wearing the wrong beret! Nice attention to detail Mr Winterbottom, but we should expect no less, for scumbag apologists for the terrorist fan club.
Of course, the whole tone of the piece was pejorative – three lovable lads (the Tipton Taliban) from the West Midlands that just happened to get mixed up in a war when all they wanted to do was see Afghanistan & help old people. However when watched through jaundiced eyes it is thoroughly enjoyable.
As their captors screamed “you are now property of the US Marine Corps” at hooded & manacled inmates, Mrs FM & your humble correspondent were cheering – even the Labarador of Libertarianism wagged her tail with amusement. Mrs FM was moved to comment when one of the ‘innocents’ was protesting his case, “there’s no smoke without fire” before disappearing behind back this months edition of Foxhunter News.
Blognor Regis points us at David Aaronovitch’s excellent thoughts on this particular topic
… this week is practically Guantanamo Week in Britain. Yesterday saw the well-publicised launch of a book by Moazzam Begg, the former British Gitmo detainee, and on Thursday evening Channel 4 will screen the award-winning drama-doc The Road to Guantanamo, which purports to show the experience of three British Muslims — the so-called Tipton Three — at the hands of British and American interrogators, from Afghanistan to Cuba.
I’ll start with the Michael Winterbottom’s film, because, despite its many virtues, it exemplifies a problem in the way many have come to look at the War on Terror. Mixing dramatised sequences with interviews, and cutting to news footage, The Road to Guantanamo tells how three young Midlanders went off to Pakistan to organise a marriage, soon after 9/11. The film suggests that, after having arranged things, they were at a bit of a loose end and, walking along a Karachi road one day, were swept up by a crowd entering a mosque. There they were moved by a spirit of adventure — and a desire to eat very large naan breads — to volunteer to go to Afghanistan to help in aid projects. A few days later they departed by bus.
They make it, via Kandahar, to Kabul, where they sit around for a fortnight doing nothing, and then get a lift in a van going back to Pakistan. Except it isn’t going to Pakistan, it is heading in the exact opposite direction, and they wind up in the last remaining Taleban stronghold of Kunduz, alongside lots of foreign fighters. They are captured by the Northern Alliance, appallingly treated, then handed over to the Americans who eventually fly them to Guantanamo. There they languish until finally being released last year.
If this account is to be believed then these three are either the luckiest or unluckiest men in Britain, and certainly among the stupidest. Winterbottom, asked about their reasons for going to Afghanistan, replied: “If you’re talking about people’s motives, it’s very difficult . . . It’s very hard to pin down your motives to one thing. But what they say in the film is that they were interested to see Afghanistan, and wanted to help the people there.”
What the film doesn’t tell you is that the Karachi mosque that the three boys happened across, the Binori Mosque, had already, in 2001, been described as “the alma mater for jihadis”. The most militant elements in the battle for Kashmir studied at the Binori madrassa — a centre of the extreme Deobandi ideology — as did many members of the Taleban. It was thought to be the spiritual home of the Harkat ul-Ansar terrorist organisation, and in the autumn of 2001 the mosque and seminary were openly recruiting fighters to go to the aid of the Taleban.
There is also a curiosity in the timeline of the film. The boys left Karachi on the October 12, crossing the border on the 14th. They hadn’t, they told the film-makers, really expected that a war would actually happen. That’s how innocent they were. But the bombing of Kabul and Kandahar began at 7.45pm local time on October 7, and the battle was already five days old before they left Karachi. The film glosses over this fact, too.
However as we already know dear readers, the critics of the War on Terror are interested in many many things, but the truth isn’t one of them – Michael Winterbottom’s film just goes to prove that.
Comments
The 3 were lucky that the CIA was buying prisoners. Wonder what their Northern Alliance captors would have done with them otherwise?
Posted by: MP | March 10, 2006 5:36 PM
About what I'D have done to them, MP.
Posted by: Kim du Toit | March 11, 2006 7:55 PM