No Hollywood script for prisoners of Guantanamo Sunday herald Glasgow 14 March 2004
Muriel Gray argues torture claims destroy any hopes of reconciliation
HERE'S what would have happened if Hollywood had been given the chance to write the script for the detention of the Guantanamo Bay prisoners.
So outraged and heart-sore were the American administration and military following the atrocities of September 11, that they examined the depths of their souls to try and steer a new course to end the dreadful bloodshed. Having captured men they suspected of having been involved in the attacks, the authorities used the opportunity to exercise the very goodness, decency and civilised expression of equality that they were fighting to preserve, by restraining emotion and treating the prisoners with respect and humanity.
Taking a cue from Gandhi, leading by example was to be the order of the day. Top lawyers were brought in to represent the men, men being assumed innocent until proved guilty, and while in detention the very best theologians and psychologists were assembled, their task, to build relationships with the men, trading on shared parts of their faiths and cultures and trying to better understand the processes of their thought and why the yawning rift between their cultures was growing deeper. After all, the script would suggest, it's the differences between these men's idea of what is and is not decent that lies at the dark heart of conflict.
Denzel Washington plays one of the compassionate military psychologists finding an unexpected bond and growing respect for Art Malik, playing one of the suspected terrorists. They exchange ideas about family life, spiritual quests, hopes and dreams for an ordered moral society and to their surprise, find similarities. Denzel challenges Art on women's rights and gradually, Art begins to see that women can be something other than shackled wives or wanton prostitutes. Art teaches Denzel that violent and covert protectionism of global corporate America is at odds with its own libertarian constitution and undermines those small slivers of US democracy that had been regarded as forces for good.
As Art is finally found to be innocent, in a moving scene where a tearful Denzel punches the air in glee, he leaves his clean, comfortable cell and stops to hug Denzel, who hands him back a copy of the Koran that Malik has lent him, just as Art hands back a well-thumbed Bible. Then they pause, deciding, instead, to keep each other's gifts, to read and further understand their new friend's hopes and beliefs. Both men know they have made a journey into each other's hearts that will live with them forever and, as the camera lifts high over the stark beauty of the Cuban sunset and Malik is escorted to the waiting plane that will take him home to Tipton, the remaining detainees bow their heads in a moving acknowledgement that two men from such different backgrounds can touch hands across a great cultural divide. Sadly, Hollywood wishful sentimentality is nothing more than empty piddle and reality is brutal.
If we are to believe the revelations about life inside Camp X-Ray, as brought to us by the innocent and recently released Jamal al-Harith - and how could we suppose them to be false, given that the nauseating inventiveness of the torture and abuse is worthy of a top-flight scriptwriter like Joe Esterhauz and not a simple, poorly educated man from Tipton - then America has shamed itself so profoundly, unforgivably and irreversibly that it's impossible to know how we continue from this point on.
Let's assume a fantasy for a minute, that all the men were entirely guilty, caught red-handed waving off the planes that demolished the twin towers, admitted their guilt and were gleefully unrepentant when caught. Even in such a case, the treatment at Guantanamo Bay would have been disgusting, vile and utterly contrary to the values we're all pretending the West is fighting to preserve. That such treatment is currently still being served upon men like al-Harith, none of whom have had legal representation or trial, is an unthinkable abomination.
Aside from the inhuman conditions, the beatings, the starvation, even the denial of fresh water, one of the most repugnant details was the allegation that American prostitutes were brought in to masturbate in front of the most pious of the detainees, men who had never seen an unveiled woman, and that one of the women had been made to smear her menstrual blood on a man's face.
What is so dark, medieval and depraved about this is that alongside the playing of popular Western music to attempt to offend the prisoners, the detainees must have assumed that Western men would not find the use of prostitutes in this manner offensive, that such depravity is in fact as acceptable in our Satanic culture as the listening to Kris Kristofferson and Fleetwood Mac. It's a great irony that after all the empty American bleatings about protecting women's rights from the fundamentalists, they would choose to use the debasement and degradation of exploited women as an instrument of torture and humiliation.
How, one wonders, does right-wing, religious middle-America regard the fact their tax dollars might have been used to procure the services of the unfortunate prostitutes and fly them in to perform foul and repulsive acts in their name?
Is this what they think is the moral high ground, a proper manifestation of how they honour their Jesus, the man that told them to turn the other cheek and love their fellow man?
Unless the Americans can prove beyond doubt that these allegations are a pack of lies, then their posturing against the "barbarism of terrorism" and the fight against "those who would destroy freedom and justice" looks almost as lame as the terrorist trying to justify the horrors of his murder.
There will be no philosophical Denzel Washington and Art Malik moment when two men realise they share common humanity.
The only thing an American administration that would sanction such brutality will ever have in common with the terrorists is that each of them is a pack of dark- age savages.
14 March 2004