LONDON: Almost two years ago, I sat in a room for most of a day in a house in north London with three men who seemed to have achieved the impossible. Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal and Ruhel Ahmed, childhood friends from Tipton in the West Midlands, had just rematerialized after more than two years in the legal black hole of Guantanamo Bay, where they had been denied all contact with the world beyond the wire. Having been cleared of any involvement in terrorism by the British and US authorities, they told their story in a five-page interview for the Observer, exposing both Guantanamo and the process that consigned them there as a horrifying mixture of incompetence and brutality.
The first English-speaking prisoners to be freed from Guantanamo, they told of abusive interrogation sessions, of worthless false ‘confessions’ and frequent beatings by an ‘immediate reaction force’ of guards.
In the days after the story’s publication, government agencies on both sides of the Atlantic did what they could to neutralize its influence. In the US, Pentagon spokesmen told reporters that the Tipton Three’s claims were simply untrue. Less than three months later, internal US administration memos confirmed that the treatment described by the three men corresponded exactly to official Pentagon policy.
Now, with The Road to Guantanamo, a partly dramatized feature film directed by Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross, Shafiq, Asif, Ruhel and the furore surrounding them are back. Due to be screened on Channel 4 on March 9 and released in cinemas and on DVD the next day, the film is provoking a familiar backlash. At a question-and-answer session following a press screening last Monday, some of the journalists present seemed intent on recycling the arguments of 2004.
In 2004, when the men returned to Britain, Scotland Yard arrested them, releasing them hours later saying there were no grounds on which to charge them with any offence. Last week, however, when the three former prisoners and the actors who play them arrived at Luton airport from the Berlin Film Festival, where Winterbottom and Whitecross collected a joint best directors Silver Bear, they were detained for nearly two hours by Special Branch under the Terrorism Act.
Riz Ahmed, the Oxford graduate actor and rapper who takes the role of Shafiq, says the officer who questioned him ‘asked me what my political views were, and what I thought about the Iraq war’, adding: “Did you become an actor mainly to do films like this, you know, to publicize the struggles of Muslims?” Somewhat farcically, he says she followed this up with an attempt to recruit him as an informant, asking ‘whether I would mind officers contacting me regularly in the future, in case I might be in a cafe and overhear someone discussing illegal activities’.
The Road to Guantanamo intercuts interviews with each of the real Tipton Three with TV news footage and dramatized reconstructions of what happened. The result is an object lesson in the way that film can clarify and magnify a story’s impact. For example, the men had described to me some of the interrogation methods they had endured at Guantanamo, such as being bound tightly in a crouching ‘stress’ position while chained to the floor of a chilled room for hours on end, forced all the while to listen to rap or heavy metal played at deafening volume under the flicker of strobe lights. But try as one does to convey the sense of such abuse in journalistic prose, the visceral power of hearing and seeing it on the screen is of an altogether different magnitude.
Winterbottom’s avowed objective of ‘humanising’ their story, of showing through their own words how three ‘ordinary British teenagers’ got caught up in tumultuous, global events, also succeeds triumphantly. “We were all told that the people in Guantanamo were the most dangerous terrorists in the world, and that’s why it was necessary for America to create this bizarre extra-legal prison,” he says. “We wanted to show the gap between what you thought people in Guantanamo would be like and the reality of meeting them, and maybe relate to them in a different way.”
The film’s early scenes — notably the three men’s trip to Pakistan for Asif’s planned wedding — depict what Winterbottom aptly describes as a ‘holiday from hell’, a saga of buses missed and bad food, rip-offs and diarrhoea. In October 2001, shortly before the US-led attack on the Taliban regime begins, they decide to visit Afghanistan on impulse. In the film, their journey comes across as a teenage lark (at the time, Ruhel and Asif were 19, and Shafiq 23), a naive search for adventure. But when they reach Kabul, and giant US bombs begin landing in residential areas, it suddenly turns very serious. Until then, Asif tells the camera, “We were basically just chilling out.” Now, with their lives in danger, they try to escape in a minibus taxi to Pakistan. But the driver takes them deeper into danger — to the city of Kunduz, which is about to be surrounded by the forces of General Dostum. The Tipton Three should have been four. Until then they had travelled with their friend Monir Ali. In the panic and chaos of Kunduz’s capture, he disappears and has never been seen again.
Having been captured by Dostum’s troops and survived both the massacre and a subsequent month of near-starvation in Shebargan prison, the men expect their handover to Americans to provide relief. Instead, it marks a further descent into a twilight world as bafflingly counterproductive as it is cruel.
Winterbottom insists that the film is not anti-American, ‘because there are plenty of Americans who are against Guantanamo Bay too’. It also shows instances when Americans behave with humanity and compassion. To anyone with an open mind, however, it cannot but evoke a sense of outrage at the behaviour of the world’s most powerful nation and self-proclaimed custodian of legality and human rights. One also despairs at the grudging refusal to acknowledge error. After months of solitary confinement and intense interrogation, the three admit to having been present at an Afghan camp in 2000, at a meeting between Osama Bin Laden and Mohammed Atta, the leader of the 9/11 hijackers. In fact, as MI5 is able to demonstrate, they were in Britain at the time: Shafiq had been working at the Wednesbury branch of Currys. But the US official who breaks the news that they are no longer considered to be top Al-Qaeda terrorists seems unable to countenance the idea that the tortures inflicted by his colleagues might have been to blame for this fiasco.
To date, says producer Andrew Eaton, the film is set to be shown in 18 countries. But as yet, although there have been expressions of interest, there is no distribution deal for the one nation where it most urgently needs to be screened — the United States.
Faced with international criticism not only for Guantanamo but other outrages, such as the ‘extraordinary rendition’ of terrorist suspects for torture by friendly Third World dictatorships, much of America has resolutely closed its ears. In the big East Coast papers, and in publications such as the New York Review of Books, the use of torture in the war on terror has been exposed, debated and condemned. Elsewhere, it barely seems to register: in the 2004 election, John Kerry failed to mention Guantanamo even once. Just possibly, the vivid imagery and warm characterization of The Road to Guantanamo might begin to pierce the carapace.
Since it opened in 2002, Guantanamo has become a rallying point, cited time and again in the Arab press as a justification for creating more suicide bombers. For two-and-a-half years, the Tipton Three’s families lived in a state of anguish, unaware what their boys were supposed to have done, or whether they would ever be free. Replicated across the Muslim world, such experiences have tapped new veins of anti-American rage.
Tessa Ross, head of film and drama at Channel 4, which provided the entire £1.3 million budget, admits she is ‘concerned’ about the possible effect on some Muslim audiences. Then neither she nor the filmmakers created Guantanamo, and arguably, until this story has been fully and widely told, its injustices will never be redressed. (Pressed by the Commons Foreign Affairs committee two weeks ago, Tony Blair refused to go further than his previous comment that the camp is merely an ‘anomaly’.)
At least the Tipton Three’s own stories have become happier. When they first came home, local Tipton extremists hung effigies of men in orange, Guantanamo-style boiler suits from lampposts. At Berlin, they stood on the stage with Winterbottom and Whitecross, to be given a standing ovation. “It was a very emotional moment,” says Riz Ahmed. “Until then, I don’t think they’d realized the strength of people’s empathy or support.”
“When you are first released it’s hard to sleep,” Shafiq told the festival audience. “You keep hearing soldiers banging on the cells and you wake up sweating and thinking of soldiers and then you realize you’re back home. But as time goes on, you have to move on and live your life.”
Since his release, he has married, as has Asif — to the girl he had planned to wed before his capture in 2001. The film ends with his and the other two’s return last summer to the village near Faisalabad where his bride lives, to be greeted with garlands and fireworks; then comes the wedding itself, and a procession through the streets, with Asif dressed not in chains but a dashing ceremonial turban.
Others have been less lucky. In the summer of 2004, the case of Shafiq, Asif and 14 others came before the US Supreme Court, which granted Guantanamo detainees the right to bring habeas corpus petitions challenging their imprisonment in American federal courts. At the end of last year, an amendment to a Congressional bill co-sponsored by Senator John McCain, possibly the next US president, once again removed it. Earlier this month, the camp authorities confirmed that they were using special ‘restraint chairs’ and nasal tubes, inserted and removed at each feeding, to break despairing prisoners’ hunger strikes.
“Please make sure you mention those we left behind,” Shafiq told me as we parted in 2004. “There’s still a lot of innocent people.” —Dawn/The Observer News Service
—David Rose is author of Guantanamo: America’s War on Human Rights
