1.6 million people sat down last night to watch Michael Winterbottoms’ new docu-film, The Road to Guantanamo. To be honest I actually found this article much more interesting regarding the experiences of the Tipton Three. The interviews they gave on camera were very much not what I expected. I expected to see three men from Birmingham struggling to come to terms with their ordeal and adapting to life outside the shackles. I guess I just didn’t expect to see such strength, normality and lack of resentment. Asif (I think) even stated “It either breaks you or makes you stronger — It made me stronger” — C’est la Vie and all that.

I anticipated viewing much more disturbing images and thought the film would provoke a more emotional reaction in me. In fact yesterday’s article in the Independent got me thinking more about the atrocities of Camp X-Ray/Delta/Echo and the US military and George Bush, for that matter. I feel that Winterbottom (maybe) intentionally diluted the horrific experiences of Asif Iqbal, Ruhel Ahmed, and Shafiq Rasul in order to portray a more ‘believeable’ story and offer a more comfortable viewing position? (Don’t quote me on any of this by the way). Is the film actually as controversial as it has been made out to be? I don’t think so. But read Lenin and check out the Aaronovitch link in the comments section.

Bookmark It

This entry was posted on Friday, March 10th, 2006 at 2:55 pm and is filed under Middle East, News and tagged as gitmo, human rights, terrorism. Print this blog post. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.