I had the opportunity to view this film at a sneak preview in Berkeley this week. "The Road to Guantanamo" is amazing. Even as a person critical of the Bush administration, and one who strongly apposes the un-lawful holding of supposed "POWs" in Gitmo, I was shocked and horrified. All of my worst assumptions were illustrated in this film.

It so happened, that I was sitting next to three young Muslim women in the small theater. Throughout the film I could hear one of the women quietly crying. After the film, in the women's restroom the same women was explaining to a friend that she realized her brother or cousin could have been one of those young men portrayed in the film. Someone she knows and loves, could simply vanish, be held without charges and tortured.

That is what is so powerful about "The Road to Guantanamo". The three young men, who are imprisoned for two years in Cuba, were typical western guys. The film reiterates that by showing flash backs of the three prisoners playing on a scooter in a park in England and eating pizza and checking out girls. I left the theater with a more clearly defined distrust in our Administration's foreign policy. I would encourage everyone to see this film and to be moved by it.

This film has not served its purpose if the only audience it caters too is the critical left. This film is for those who are comfortable and complacent with the Bush Administration's foreign policy. It is for people who feel disconnected from the war on terror, the war in Afghanistan, and the war in Iraq (they all sort of feel the same, do they not?). I can only hope that people in the "hinter lands" have the opportunity to see "The Road to Guantanamo."

Let's say that in nazi germany, some germans were taken under similar circumstances. they are held for two years and then released. would anyone be screaming about it?

I don't believe what these men are saying about how evilly they were treated. they have come back hale and hearty. they were not starved, they were not beaten.

how about a documentary on what arabs are doing to blacks in africa? that's real and it does not involve enemy combatants. it involves slavery and ritual rape of african women and girls. if you judged that conduct by the same standards you judge the US!!!

That's right, miscreants. This is America. We are supposed to defeat our enemies without lowering ourselves to their level. Is war hell? Absolutely, that's why the Geneva Conventions were hashed out to try and ameliorate it to some degree.

Torture, under ANY circumstances, dehumanizes both the tortured and the torturer. Oh, but I suppose that's "lefty Chomskyite fringe" rhetoric, right? Actually, it's simple human decency, something we seem to have left behind in the ruins of the World Trade Center. I wonder if the ghosts who stir there are satisfied by what we have done in their memory, or horrified.

Dear Andrew

From this distance (in Australia) some of what you say in your review of "The Road to Guantánamo" seems niave.

America like all nations is a blend of light and dark. In my opinion all superpowers ( the US now and historically England and the Romans for example) act in more or less the same way. They tell themselves they are virtuous but they act in their own self interest however perceived. They do what they do because they can and at the edges they are utterly ruthless and amoral.

I have recently watched the last episode of "Six Feet Under". I have been an anglophile in cultural matters and never thought that at it's best American television could outdo the best of British television.

I was wrong.

I admire a great many things about America especially your dedication to free speech. You still have so many things to be proud about but you have a monster in your belly like all of us.

Malcolm Rieck

Yes, I think the US is going to have to keep such facilties for the immediate future until some kind of international agreement can be hammered out on how to deal with the phenomenom of the "global terrorist". I do not see this as any different (other than in scale) than what went on in the cold war with the capture and rendention of spies from both sides.

Is it right or wrong? The answer at this point is that it is grey. The potential for a few people with little scruples but lots of belief to do grevious harm to hundreds or thousands of others through the miracle of modern technology is all too real. And at this point, short of a scorched earth policy, I don't really know how to deal with it - since the ideological basis for these actions is not being addressed seriously by any government on earth as far as I can see.

As far as the US goes, I just wish we had a special court system to deal with this - a dark one like we have for national security affairs. It is not a good solution at this point, but it would be better than what we have now, and at least it would give some oversight. But at this point, I see much of this fight taking place in the dark places of the world. I do not want to see the attitude of "kill them all and let God sort it out" come to the fore either. Until someone comes up with a better solution than Guantanamo - then hold your nose and let it be.

You know, I just got back from interviewing Michael Winterbottom (we'll try to get that up shortly) and it strikes me that in my search for literary nuance I didn't make certain things clear.

1. Winterbottom says there is no real controversy about what happened to these three guys while in US custody. All the tactics shown in the film -- including things that most reasonable people would call torture -- are acknowledged techniques used at Guantanamo. He says they didn't show anything where there was any serious doubt about what happened, and that other Gitmo detainees tell far worse stories. These 3 guys were British citizens who could communicate with the guards; they almost certainly had it easy. Winterbottom's position is that if George W. Bush or Donald Rumsfeld sees the film, their response should be, "Fine, yes. Those were our instructions."

2. For him, the real issue is the following: Is it OK to react against terrorism by creating a secret extrajudicial prison where no concepts of legal rights or due process are observed, and where there are essentially no limits on the conduct of the guards or the treatment of the prisoners, except whatever limits the captors voluntarily choose to observe? If you decide it is, well all right. Winterbottom feels that is a separate question from the guilt or innocence of anyone at Camp X-Ray or Camp Delta.

3. That said, it is also true that of the 900 or so individuals processed through Gitmo, only about 10 have been charged with any terrorist-related offenses. The vast majority are people who seem to have been "associated," in some nonspecific way, with so-called terrorist activity, but where hard evidence is lacking. In other words, in an ordinary law enforcement situation with due process, most of them would never have been arrested in the first place, and if arrested would have been promptly released.

4. In the case of these 3 men, Winterbottom admits that he doesn't exactly know why they went into Afghanistan. They say they were there to lend charitable or humanitarian aid, and that none of them even knows how to use a gun. But even if they went there to fight for the Taliban, they never did so, and it takes an enormous leap of imagination to turn them into international terrorists. One letter-writer says that they belonged in the clink for two years. OK, but based on what? If they were soldiers for a foreign power, they were prisoners of war and it is illegal under the Geneva Convention to detain POWs after the end of an international conflict (unless they are charged with war crimes). For a while the British and Americans believed they had been in Afghanistan, hanging out with Osama and Mohammed Atta, in 2000. They weren't. One of them was on parole back in Tipton, and another was working at a pizza parlor. No one now claims they ever met Osama, or had any connection to al-Qaida, or any particular interest in radical Islam. One of the striking things about the film is that you see how British they really are. One of them can speak Urdu, and two others can speak Bengali. But

idiomatic north-of-England English is their principal language, and none of them speaks any Arabic (the only significant language of al-Qaida and of radical Islam in general).

5. So if you're going to apologize for this policy, call it what it is. Don't nibble around at the edges of the story and try to say, well, they must have been guilty of something and that somehow makes it all right. The US military released them without charging them with anything! Let that go! The question is: Is it OK for our government to operate a secret prison camp completely outside the law, where people are detained indefinitely, humiliated, beaten, interrogated and subjected to "harsh treatment" (leaving aside the T-word), even when they have not been charged with any crime, let alone convicted of one? It's a yes or no question.