Road to Guantanamo

I was invited to see Road to Guantamo before it opened and managed to catch it the day it closed. There are films that make you seethe with anger and this is one of them. In Australia it has to be seen through the prism of the continuing ill-treatment of David Hicks, a man abandoned by his country, its elected officials and those who are paid by taxpayers to look after our interests as citizens. Thus the seething contempt you feel is not just directed at the buffoon Bush and his cohorts but at those who interrogate the Tipton Three, lying to them, presenting them with false or faked evidence, sitting uncomprehending. They are the real knaves, utterly lacking in affect, indoctrinated themselves into believing they are doing ‘good’ and defending the world for freedom. One assumes they can sleep at night though what they must have gone through in their pitiful professional lives to get themselves to such a position beggars belief. The best part of the film is of course the fact that the prison guards and the interrogators, the lying diplomats and the so-called intelligence officials will go on living their brutish lives knowing the three triumphed over them. It will be the same for Hicks when eventually he is released no doubt without even any trumped up conviction or probably without any charge ever being tested. The gruesome Phillip Ruddock looks as if the lies he has to tell have caused a cancer in his soul. Not so the Prime Minister or Alexander Downer. They are as chipper every day as those who pathetically still try to wring confessions out of the innocent.