Friday, November 03, 2006

The Road to Guantanamo - coming soon

Movie posters for "the Road to Guantanamo" are being plastered everywhere across Melbourne's mostly left-wing independent cinemas, who are always eager to screen any Michael Moore trash, Al Gore panic-mongering film about global warming or anti-capitalist documentary.

After seeing this film at the Berlin film festival, Amnesty International put their foot in their mouth and claimed that "surely, Guantanamo is the gulag of our times". Leftists everywhere, especially those who are already opposed to the war on terror, are up in arms as if this is proof that the entire war is about capturing and torturing innocent muslims. The film only focusses on the three British Muslims who flew to Pakistan for a wedding, decided to take a side-trip to Afghanistan, were captured on the front lines during the war between the Northern Alliance and the Taliban and then later transferred to US custody.

But honestly, this film gives no thought to the hundreds of other detainees at Guantanamo, undoubtedly many of which are members of Al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups. In fact, the story of the 3 British-Pakistani Muslims in this film, known as the Tipton 3, sounds a bit fishy to me.

The American Spectator has the details:

That's if they are innocent. I must say that the three men's story sounds a bit thin to me. They were in Pakistan for a wedding and just decided one day to take a trip up to Afghanistan where they were "basically just chilling out"? They could hardly not have known that American warplanes were bombing the hell out of the place at the time, yet they just wanted to play tourist? Then, when they got scared and wanted to return to Pakistan, a sinister and unknown bus driver took them in the opposite direction, toward the front line. It all sounds just the tiniest bit fishy to me.
Dean Esmay, who considers himself a liberal and is usually balanced in his opinions, is also a skeptic:
Here's the timeline as I remember it. I invite you to check me on any of this:
1) America is struck on September.

2) On September 20th, the world was put on notice that the Taliban was given a set of absolute non-negotiable demands or would face military action.

October 7 2001, air attacks on Afghanistan begin, and six weeks later on NOVEMBER 25, 2001, U.S. ground forces invade Afghanistan and begin taking prisoners.

And these three carefree lads just happened to be there on or after November 25 for that wedding, and accidentally got taken prisoner eh?
So my conclusion is that the film-makers were far too eager to create a work of fiction that sways viewers (propaganda) rather than doing a well researched and balanced documentary. All the key facts that contradict their one-sided narrative are conveniently omitted.