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Two years ago, David Rose was the first journalist to interview the Tipton Three after their release from Guantanamo Bay. Now he applauds Michael Winterbottom's award-winning film of their ordeal - and finds out what has happened to the men since Sunday February 26, 2006 The Observer 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 rematerialised 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 this newspaper, exposing both Guantanamo and the process
that consigned them there as a horrifying mixture of incompetence and brutality.
Gaunt and
hollow-eyed, their faces betrayed the stress of both their 29-month ordeal and
their sudden change in circumstances. 'I just can't believe we're sitting here,'
Ahmed told me. 'This time last week, we were in the cages at Guantanamo.' They
had been given almost no warning they were about to be released, while the long
flight home - their first experience of being unchained outside a cell since
their capture - had left them jet lagged and disorientated.
Their voices were subdued, but what they said had an almost explosive
force. Before their transfer to American custody, they had survived a massacre
of prisoners by the Northern Alliance troops of the Afghan warlord General
Rashid Dostum, who herded them and hundreds of others into sealed truck
containers in which dozens suffocated and were (much later) found by US
investigators in a mass grave. 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 neutralise its influence. In the
US, Pentagon spokesmen told reporters that the Tipton Three's claims were simply
untrue. According to Steve Rodriguez, Guantanamo's chief interrogator, he and
his staff had gathered intelligence so valuable that, 'We have been able as a
result of information gained here to take operational actions, even military
campaigns.' As the New York Times dutifully recorded, he emphatically denied
'the specific allegations of mistreatment made by prisoners recently returned to
Britain'. Less than three months later, internal US administration memos
confirmed that the treatment described by the three men corresponded exactly to
official Pentagon policy.
In London, the spin machine chose Trevor Kavanagh, then political editor of
The Sun. Sourcing his claims to the London US embassy, he wrote that two of the
three Tipton men had trained to be killers at an al-Qaeda camp in Afghanistan in
2000 - ignoring the fact that MI5 had already proved that they did not leave
Britain at any time that year. Kavanagh quoted an anonymous cabinet minister:
'God knows why we are bringing these people back to Britain. The best thing that
could happen is that they fell out of the plane somewhere over the Atlantic.'
Now, with The Road to Guantanamo, a partly dramatised feature film directed
by Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross, Rasul, Iqbal, Ahmed and the furore
surrounding them are back. Due to be screened on Channel 4 on 9 March 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. One put it to Winterbottom that the Tipton Three had indeed been part
of al-Qaeda, and had taken part in a last-ditch firefight with the Taliban in a
network of caves. Told that there was no evidence to support this allegation, he
retorted that it was merely an 'alternative view'.
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
Rasul, 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 publicise 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'.
Afterwards, says Riz Ahmed, 'Rasul just said to me, "Come on, let's go and
get some breakfast." For me it had been a degrading and humiliating experience.
He said it happens to him every time he travels but he doesn't let it get to
him. Working with him and the others has been a humbling experience. They have
such strength of spirit. At the same time, they're just regular guys, standard
lads, diamonds.'
Adopting the technique used by Kevin Macdonald in his film of Touching the
Void, Joe Simpson's book about his escape from a mountain crevasse in Peru into
which he fell after his companion was forced to cut their rope, The Road to
Guantanamo intercuts interviews with each of the real Tipton Three with TV news
footage and dramatised 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.
Riz Ahmed confirms how tough it was just to act it. 'Compared to what they
went through, the film-makers had to soften our treatment. While we were filming
together in Pakistan, Shafiq would roll up his trousers and show me the
indentations still left in his ankles by shackles. I came to understand that:
when you wear those chains and they press on your shins, it's agony. After a
while, it became so unbearable that we had to cushion them with Tubigrips. It
was the same with the interrogation stress positions. We couldn't last an hour
in those positions. They had to put up with them for eight hours, till they
soiled themselves with urine and excrement, not knowing when it would end.'
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
Iqbal'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, having heard an imam urge his flock
at Friday prayers to offer charitable aid to families. In the film, their
journey comes across as a teenage lark (at the time, Ahmed and Iqbal were 19,
and Rasul 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, Iqbal 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: a guard who asks one of the
three to perform a rap for him in Camp X-Ray and another who enters a cell at
night in order to stomp a menacing tarantula while a prisoner lies asleep.
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: Rasul 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. He tells
the three men: 'You guys fucked up. You were belligerent and uncooperative.'
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. One line, barked by guards and interrogators, runs
through the film repetitively - 'Shut the fuck up!' At present, it serves as an
unintentional metaphor. 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 characterisation of The Road to
Guantanamo might begin to pierce the carapace.
At the same time, as I watched this familiar story being given such
shocking and authentic new life, I could only shudder at the thought of its
effect in the Muslim world. Since it opened in 2002, Guantanamo has become a
rallying point, cited time and again on Islamist websites and in the Arab press
as a justification for creating more suicide 'martyrs'. 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.
'The guy with the crewcut, the club and the crucifix, standing over the
detainee in goggles and chains symbolises not only American oppression of the
Third World, but also the oppression by governments friendly to America inside
Muslim countries,' Dr Tim Winter, lecturer in Islamic studies at Cambridge told
me after the Tipton men were freed. A senior US Defense Intelligence Agency
official added: 'It's an international PR disaster. Maybe the guy who goes into
Guantanamo was a farmer who got swept along and did very little. He's going to
come out a fully fledged jihadist. And for every detainee, I'd guess you create
another 10 terrorists or supporters of terrorism.'
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 realised
the strength of people's empathy or support.'
'When you are first released it's hard to sleep,' Rasul told the festival
audience. 'You keep hearing soldiers banging on the cells and you wake up
sweating and thinking of soldiers and then you realise 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 Iqbal - 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 Iqbal dressed not in chains but a dashing
ceremonial turban.
Others have been less lucky. In the summer of 2004, the case of Rasul,
Iqbal 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,' Rasul told me as
we parted in 2004. 'There's still a lot of innocent people.' As of now, as the
film reminds us as the credits roll, Guantanamo still holds 500 inmates, of whom
just nine have been charged.
· The Road to Guantanamo is on C4 on 9 March. David Rose is author
of Guantanamo: America's War on Human Rights, published by Faber & Faber
A detainee's view
Martin Mubanga
A joint citizen of the UK and Zambia, Martin Mubanga was in Afghanistan on
11 September 2001.
In March 2002 he was arrested in Zambia and sent to Guantanamo Bay. He
spent 33 months in various camps and was one of the last four Britons released
in January 2005.
What did you think of The Road to Guantanamo
It's informative and, yeah, it's a fair portrayal. I can relate to a lot of
the scenes in Afghanistan. Like the bit where the prisoners' heads were covered
with towels and they got beaten up - that happened to me. It brings back the
hard points, the painful moments. Especially when the guys are in captivity
dreaming of better days. I spent a lot of time in isolation doing that.
How accurately did it capture life in Guantanamo?
Every prisoner's story is different, but everything you see in the film did
happen. And worse. So much went on there that we still don't know about. And
even things like being chained to the floor with loud music on, people think
that's maybe not so harsh, but at least the film gives an idea of what it's
like. Just think if you have to put up with that for years. It's going to affect
you, isn't it?
What was it like being a Westerner there?
I think the British generally had it easier than people from other
countries. I was known as the rapper. When the guards hear you, they want to
hear what you've got to say, because obviously rapping is an American thing and
it shows that we're from the same culture. We may not believe the same things
but we grew up watching the same films.
After a while they brought in a rule that guards should not talk to
detainees.
Have you received any official apologies?
No. No, America never apologises.
Police interrogated some of the actors and subjects of the film on their
way back from the Berlin Film Festival. How do you feel about that?
It just shows the hype. People still see us as these dangerous terrorists.
Everyone's got their opinions about certain things, but we're no better or no
worse than anyone else. We're just human.
At the end of the film, the Tipton Three talked about positive aspects
of their experience. Was your experience in any way positive?
The most positive thing in the camps was that I learned some Arabic. I
could go on and on about the negatives but you've got to move forward in your
life and see the good things where you can. Guantanamo will always be with me,
though. Killian Fox Gitmo's history
· The base was established in 1898, when the US took control of Cuba
during the Spanish-American War.
· In 1903, the US was given a permanent lease by the Cuban
government.
· In 1964 Fidel Castro ordered that the base's water supply be cut
off, so the US built a desalination plant.
· In the early 1990s, HIV-positive refugees fleeing Haiti were held
there.
· Terrorism suspects were first imprisoned at the base in 2002.
· In June 2005 the US announced plans to build a new $30 million
detention facility at Guantanamo.
· A 2006 United Nations report called for the prison to be closed,
on the grounds that its detainees have no access to justice and their treatment
is tantamount to torture.
Cara Wides
The Mulindwas Communication Group "With Yoweri Museveni, Uganda is in anarchy" Groupe de communication Mulindwas "avec Yoweri Museveni, l'Ouganda est dans l'anarchie" |
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