well my friends, you can attribute that quote to u.s. secretary of defense (sic?) donald rumsfeld...numbs the mind doesn't it... but not the heart, eh???oh yes, there is a reason for this intro...last night lynne r and i went to push petition signatures at the belcourt theater during the film road to guantanamo...
powerful that...i don't know what i was expecting exactly but it far exceeded whatever my mind had prepared itself for...
it's the story of the tipton three who were the 3 britons of south asian origin, mixed up in petty crime...sufficiently paskistani in identity to visit that country and feel reasonably at home (one of the original 4 was returning to pakistan to visit his father and get married), they were also sufficiently british to imagine it would be a good idea to extend their trip to afghanistan, just to see what they would find...what they did find, of course, was war, the
of death a friend, and then, just when they might have thought they were safe, torture and imprisonment at the hands of the americans (and brits), first in afghanistan and then in guantanamo bay...i was very disoriented as i tried to adjust to what i thought was going to be a documentary but was a film that reconstructs their story... the reconstruction is accompanied by interviews with the men (in which they describe what happened, with little embellishment) and clippings from news stories at the time (a minority of which display what in retrospect seems outrageous bias in favour of the agreed western spin on the war). There's an element of black comedy in the way a group of uppity British lads somehow find themselves at war; but when the torture begins, it's hard not to get angry at the systematic disregard for the human rights of men who had been convicted of no crime. Also hard to escape is the sheer bone-headedness of their interrogators: convinced that their suspects work for "Al-Quaeda", which they seem to conceive of as some kind of unitary and institutional organisation, the Americans have no effective idea of what to do except to put this proposition to their suspects ad nauseam until they agree, with intermittent torture to ram home the point. That a confession in these circumstances would have means precisely nothing does not seem to have occurred to them. In fact, the men didn't break, which was presumably easier because they had no idea of the sort of information the Americans wanted from them...(paul from the u.k.)
based on documented reports from multiple sources i took the recreation as accurate and it left me fuming over both the behavior of u.s. and british interrogators and guards and their public denials that they were in any way violating the geneva convention, the international convention against torture, and the principles of basic psychology (their tactics were doomed to be ineffective from the getgo - yes, that's a joke-phrase riffing off gitmo)...
we did table, we did get signatures, i was left disturbed, angry, and ready to do more human righs education...
peace out <3
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