The Road to Guantanamo
Farhad Harun, Arfan Usman, Riz Ahmed

Every once in a while something dark and twisted goes through your mind. When I lived in Australia, I lived next door to clowns. I am not putting them down, real clowns, pancake makeup, rubber noses, circus clowns. They were wonderful people, strange, but wonderful. In their daily life they were Glenn and Isabel, but when they were in their getup, they would only answer to the names Pinky and Rupert. So, one day when I was enjoying a cup of tea in their kitchen with them when some of their clown friends stopped by. There are moments that laughter comes out of your mouth, moments you wish you could take back. I had one of those moments. It seems that there had been an auto accident involving a couple of their slapstick cohorts. I don’t know why it entered my mind, but from somewhere in the reptilian core came the image of 2 highway patrol men standing next to a crumpled up clown car. Rainbow wigs and size 28 shoes littering the road. Two EMTs are applying CPR to one of the clowns and every time they push on his chest, it sounds like the honking of a bicycle horn. Emergency personal are removing body after body after body out of the vehicle.

I have the same reaction to the title The Road to Guantanamo. When I hear anything with “Road to” in the title, I cannot help but think of those great old On The Road movies from the 1940s and 50s starring Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, and Dorothy Lamour (Road to Singapore, … to Morocco, … to Zanzibar, … to Utopia, …to Hong Kong, … to Bali, …to Rio). They were movies that were just excuses for Hope and Crosby to sing, dance, crack a few jokes, and have wacky adventures in exotic locations. I imagine a great Saturday Night Live skit (back when SNL was good) could be made out of this title. In my mind I see Bob Hope and Bing Crosby as door-to-door salesmen in Afghanistan when they are taken prisoner by the Northern Alliance and sold to American forces. In the midst of the torture, Crosby and Hope try to tell jokes and sing songs, and it all ends with Hope singing “Thanks For the Memories.” “Thanks for the memories of flashlights in my rear, of sexual humiliation that brought me to tears. Thank you so much.”

This is not that movie. Whenever you watch a documentary about the Holocaust, there is always an interview of people who lived in the town nearby the camp. These elderly people always plead ignorance. They had no clue of the horror factory that was going on just a few yards or miles away. You, the viewer, know that they had to have known, there is no way they could not – just like we know. While it is not the same size and scope of that nightmare, abusing human beings is abusing human beings and no civilized society should allow that kind of conduct. I know, I know, some of you have no sympathy, after all, they must be bad, bad men to be in such places. Some are, but some aren’t. We don’t know. These prisoners have never gotten their trial, never gotten their day in court. The Bush administration has concocted this legal limbo. Even if they are all bad guys, here is the problem. After awhile we have released some of these prisoners, returned them back to their communities. These former POWs return home and tell the horror stories of their captivity. If we are going to win the hearts and minds of the Arab world, we have to show that the American way is a better way. “But they are doing the same thing,” says the cynic. They are not trying to win us to their side; we are trying to court them. Others will claim that what we are seeing is just a few bad eggs. The problem with this line of thinking is that you have to disregard the paper trail advocating torture coming down from the President’s office. At the same time, you have to believe that some West Virginia hillbillies some how stumbled across methods of psychological torture that our CIA spent over 3 decades perfecting and millions of dollars researching.

The Road to Guantanamo is a modern horror story based on the story of 3 Muslim boys from England, Ruhel Ahmed (Farhad Harun), Asif Iqbal (Arfan Usman), and Shafiq Rasul (Riz Ahmed), nicknamed by the British press the Tipton Three, who went to Pakistan for a wedding in 2001 and found themselves whisked off to Cuba, Camp X-Ray and Camp Delta. They decide to do a little tourism and visit Afghanistan, not knowing of the impending U.S. invasion. They are shocked to find themselves in the middle of a war zone. In the chaos that follows, they find themselves fleeing for their lives in a mob that includes Taliban fighters. They are soon taken prisoner by the northern alliance and find themselves heading into the hands of waiting Americans at Kandahar Air Base. Believing these boys are part of an Al Qaeda connection in England, they are interrogated and tortured. By January 2002, these boys were flown to Cuba. What follows is graphic and dehumanizing. Placed in stress positions, hooded, and bombarded with white noise, CIA officials work them over for several months. Then, just like that, the boys were released in 2004.

Congressmen like Duncan Hunter, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, and other right-wing chicken hawks claim that we are not torturing our prisoners. I have always wondered why one of the reporters on Capital Hill has not challenged these men by asking them to put their money where their mouth is. What I mean by this is, in England, they conducted a reality show where they took a dozen ordinary people and put them through the interrogation practices we employee at Gizmo and other sites. How about we have a US version of the show? Just like volunteering their children for the military, I don’t think we would have many volunteers from the chicken hawk, Bush punch-drinking band. Who wouldn’t respect a Congressman who went through this program and talk about how it is as easy as a day in the park? Senator John McCain, a man who still bears the marks of his stay at theHanoi Hilton, once stated that we would rather be physically tortured than go through the psychological operations we put our prisoners through. Forty, fifty years from now, when some interviewer asks us about what we are doing in the name of freedom, what will we answer? It is hard to find answers when you are standing at the foot of a cross of an innocent man being tortured. Imprisoning people and dehumanizing humans for life in the name of freedom is a black comedy, even I could not invent this.

Verdict: A decent foreign recreation