The National Geographic Channel will be showing a new documentary about the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba this Sunday, April 5th. Part of the National Geographic Explorer series, the documentary, Explorer: Inside Guantanamo, offers an exclusive look inside the infamous facility where hundreds of prisoners have been held for years without trial.
The U.S. Department of Defense granted the Directors John Else and Bonni Cohen and their crew unprecedented access to the prison camp for three weeks, beginning in August 2008, during the final months of the Bush administration. Although the camera crew were allowed to speak with government officials and soldiers at the camp, and were allowed to film some scenes inside parts of the Guantanamo compound, they were subject to several restrictions.
The documentary filmmakers were not allowed to question detainees being held at the facility, nor were they allowed to show the faces of detainees, or any identifying information about them, in the final footage; the faces of those detainees caught on film were blurred under the direction of Guantanamo officials (though some of the detainees voices, shouting in English and subtitled Arabic, can be heard). Government officials also reviewed the crew's footage at the end of each day of shooting, and ordered the filmmakers to delete any scenes that the government considered a threat to national security. And all of the solider guards featured in the film were given pseudonyms by the filmmakers, under the direction of the Department of Defense.
There is one area at Guantanamo, Camp 7, that no journalists have ever been allowed to photograph or enter; the Inside Guantanamo crew was also denied access to this site.
The narrator and interviewers note many of these restrictions during the film, to make it clear to viewers that their access was heavily restricted. According to, Director and Cameraman Jon Else, "It was tricky because we could be kicked out at any moment. So we spent a lot of time calibrating how far into the cellblocks we could go, how close to the detainees we could be, what tough questions we could ask the senior officers."
The footage from inside Guantanamo is intercut with interviews with current and former Guantanamo officials, detainee defense lawyers, key legal advisors to the Bush administration, and former Guantanamo detainees who have been released without charge. Archival television news clips and photographs are used to contrast early days of the Guantanamo prison camp, when detainees were shackled, blindfolded and housed in open-air cages exposed to the elements, with current camp conditions that more closely resemble a modern prison facility.
Though the government censored scenes shot inside the camp, Jon Else explains,"There was actually very little that was deleted or blurred. And the Department of Defense officers made it clear that once we take the tapes off the island, they have no control. The film — its editing and completion — is entirely under our editorial control. So we feel comfortable with that."
As a basic primer on Guantanamo for those who are unfamiliar with details on the prison, as a record of military and Bush administration rationale regarding the detention center, and as an intimate look into the lives, thoughts, and stresses of the U.S. soldiers stationed there — many of whom, it turns out, are fresh recruits in their teens or early twenties who with no prior experience in prison administration and indeed, in some cases, no formal higher education outside of their military training — the film is successful.
In its best moments, Inside Guantanamo paints a striking portrait of the sheer surreality of daily life for both prisoners and guards in a place where the guards do not speak the prisoners' languages, and openly admit a lack of knowledge about the prisoners' religion and culture, the prisoners are allowed little to no contact with the outside world, and no knowledge of the accusations against them, and neither prisoners nor guards know exactly why prisoners are being held there, or when the detentions will end.
In a particularly striking moment, portions of interview with Army Colonel Bruce Vargo, the commander of the Joint Detention Group at Guantanamo Bay, are intercut with footage of a confrontation between solider guards and a detainee who has broken the rules by putting a towel over the window of his cell to prevent the guards — who are instructed to look into the cells every three minutes — from seeing inside.
The young troops, who must reach through a meal slot in the door to remove the towel, thereby exposing themselves to the possibility of being grabbed or scratched, are clearly tense and frightened; the prisoner, who, we must recall, has likely not experienced a single private moment in years, is desperate and defiant, and it is yet the glaring absurdity of the situation that overpowers the scene — a part of the viewer has to ask, all this, over a towel?
Meanwhile, in the interview footage, Colonel Vargo explains his belief that the imprisoned detainees (whom he represents as known terrorists, despite the known lack of information about many detainees' backgrounds, and the failure of the government to publicly declare clear reasons for many prisoners' detentions) view Guantanamo as a battlefield, and continue to wage war against the U.S. troops who serve as their guards.
The juxtaposisiton of the Colonel's hard-nosed rhetoric with the imagery of tense U.S. soldiers battling to remove a towel from a window brings home the intense strangeness of the situation at Guantanamo, for everyone involved, in a powerful way, a way that manages to simlutanously provoke sympathy for the soldiers forced to work in a stressful environment, and the prisoners trapped in a bizzare, frightening, and seemingly endless limbo.
However, I was disappointed by Inside Guantanamo's omission of certain facts about the prison that I believe should be presented as key issues in any discussion about the place; I worry that in an well-intentioned attempt to prove their impartiality, create a balanced piece, and give equal time to opposing views about the prison camp, the filmmakers fell into a classic media trap of accidentally supporting bias in an attempt to prevent it.
By allowing certain assertions by the military to go unchallenged, and leaving out certain vital facts about Guantanamo that support the views of those who believe the imprisonment of detainees there is immoral and illegal, I feel the film gave a little more credibility to the Bush administration argument that the creation of the Guantanamo prison camp was necessary and fair than is warranted by factual evidence.
For example, though a page about the documentary on the National Geographic website makes a brief reference to Camp Iguana, Guantanamo's special prison camp for kids, the film itself makes no mention of the fact that several children captured by American troops were held at the prison (some have been released, but most of Guantanamo's imprisoned children have grown into adulthood there).
Surely the imprisonment, isolation and interrogation of children at an adult detention center for terrorists raises serious legal and ethical issues worthy of public discussion; the film's omission of details about this practice strikes me as a serious flaw.
Inside Guantanamo also fails to mention the existence of documented medical evidence of physical torture of Guantanamo detainees in U.S. custody; a damning report on the subject was publicly released by the non-partisan group Physicians for Human Rights in June of 2008, just two months before Inside Guantanamo was filmed.
Given that the film interviews soldiers who state that they have not personally witnessed torture or mistreatment at the facility, and military officials who claim that prisoners have not been mistreated, I was disappointed to see that the filmmakers relied on a single declassified military report and paraphrased media reports of "prisoner abuse" to represent the argument that illegal torture occurred at Guantanamo, when human rights groups and former prisoners have provided much more specific, detailed, and substantiated evidence of torture of prisoners by the U.S. military.
The film also quotes an inflated, inaccurate, and widely debunked, government-issued statistic about the recidivism rate of former Guantanamo detainees; though the actual recidivism rate is difficult to determine given the government's falure to issue accurate biographical details about most released detainees, it is known that in producing the inaccurate statistic in question, the government expanded definition of "returning to the battlfield" apparently includes such things as writing newspaper op-eds about unlawful detention, or appearing in a documentary.
The documentary does feature striking interviews with several detainee defense lawyers and former detainees that seriously call into question both the legality and the logic of U.S. military detention procedures.
One detainee defense lawyer explains that her client was a victim of mistaken idenity; he was picked up by authorities because his name was similar to that of a known al Qaeda operative. Yet, despite the fact that the U.S. government has since realized their mistake, captured their actual target, and also imprisoned him at Guantanamo, her client has yet to be released.
And a former detainee, Haji Rohullah Wakil, a well-known anti-Taliban tribal leader from Afghanistan and a supporter of the U.S.-approved Karzai government, who was mistakenly captured and kept in solitary confinement for more than five years, shows petition after petition from Afghan citizens and leaders confirming his identity and his innocence and demanding his release, all of which were apparently ignored by Guantananmo officials.
Still, I would have liked to see more in-depth discussion with former detainees about the details of their treatment while in U.S. custody. For example, an interview British citizen and former Guantanamo detainee Moazzam Begg, the founder of a co-ed school in Kabul, who was captured on suspicion of being an al Qaeda financier held for more than three years in U.S. custody before being released without charge, focuses on his time in solitary confinement, and his lack of contact with his wife and children.
The film fails to mention Begg's published claims that while in detention at a U.S. base in Bagram, he was severely beaten, led to believe that a woman screaming near him was his own wife being tortured, and witnessed the beating deaths of two fellow detainees.
Perhaps as these events occurred at Bagram and not at Guantanamo, the filmmakers felt they were not relevant to their subject, but to me it seems integral to the Guantanamo story; many former detainees report being physically tortured at U.S.-run detention facilities before their transfer to Guantanamo, and whether or not they were treated more humanely after their transfer there, the fact is the continued detention of many detainees there was based in part upon confessions given by detainees under torture that have since been proven false.
In the end, Inside Guantanamo is a fascinating and revealing, if imperfect, portrait of America's most infamous prison, that shows some aspects of Guantanamo — like the stories of the American troops who work there — that few Americans have seen. I would recommend that anyone interested in the legacy of controversial Bush administation detention policies during the "War on Terror" watch it.
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