This is the second part of the story. Go Here To see the beginning
Asif is wounded in the bombing, and the others find him covered with blood. He and one of his friends are taken on one truck while the third is split apart from the others. The Northern Alliance soldiers force him and hundreds more people into the back of a metal truck trailer, they keep forcing more and more of them on, until they are crushed together, and the doors of the truck are then closed. Everyone is consumed by fear, and pitch darkness. They begin pounding on the side of the truck but to no avail. Soon people are passing out in the blackness, they are piled up on top of each other, there is nowhere for anyone to go to the bathroom so they are laying on top of each other with some dead, and everyone having to urinate and defecate on each other. At one point the truck stops, the soldiers get out and start blowing holes in the sides of the truck with machine guns for ventilation which kills many more of the people.
Asif and his friends Ruhel and Shafiq are transported to a couple of different prisons where they are interrogated and beaten. All 3 eventually wind up at Guantanamo, first at Camp X-Ray, later moved camp Delta. While they are being transported they are dressed in orange jump suits and forced to wear white face masks with blacked out goggles, headphones to prevent them from hearing anything, and they then have burlap sacks put over their faces which are taped up on the top and bottom with prisoner numbers written on the tape.
While at Guantanamo they are treated to and endless cycle of torture, humiliation, and interrogation. They are forced to squat in a stress position without looking up for hours at a time. When one of them falls over because he could no longer maintain the position he is beaten severely with a rifle butt. Whenever one of them is to be interrogated, five American soldiers burst into the cell, drag the guy out tackle him, jump on his back, handcuff, and shackle him, put a sack over his head, and make him run in the shackles while the soldiers are screaming and cursing in his ear. Their treatment of the prisoners whom they know are unarmed is ridiculously excessive at every point. No one ever gets to sleep because every hour every they are waken up for "Inspection" where the American soldiers again come in screaming and beating on anyone while they mistreat the prisoners for no good reason.
This film illustrates in crystal clear detail why the U.S. military needs to recruit very dumb, totally uneducated, and mostly southern cracker soldiers who are already racist bastards who have never left their hometowns and believe all the garbage they are taught in school about how we are the good guys, and everything we do is just and right. The Army can then brainwash them to treat other human beings in such a grotesque and inhuman manner. Anyone who had any previous education, intelligence or just plain decency, would never consent to treat people in the unbelievably harsh manner in which these prisoners, most of which were just swept up in raids and had nothing to do with he Taliban, were treated.
The interrogations by American, and British Officers, CIA, and MI5, are not much better. In one scene one of the men is being ed by an American Officer. He screams, "Are you a member of the Taliban?" The detainee says "no," Then a soldier who is also in the room punches the prisoner, knocking him to the floor. The officer tells the solider to pick him back up. The officer again screams the same , the prisoner again says no, and is again punched to the floor. The process is repeated over and over. The interrogator eventually saying, "We can keep doing this all night." They have no interest in the truth, only justifying what they are doing.
Eventually as word gets out as to what is going on down there in Cuba the prisoners start to get treated a little better, the beatings become less frequent, but the interrogations continue in a most ridiculous manner. The prisoners eventually become hardened to the whole routine and are not even fazed by it anymore. Another scene in the movie has a female CIA officer showing one of the prisoners a completely grainy, blurry tape of Osama Bin Laden giving a speech and accusing the detainee of being in the audience. "Look," she keeps saying, "that's you," pointing to someone who is so blurred out his own mother wouldn't have recognized him. She was completely uninterested in the fact that the detainee had an air tight alibi that would have placed him in a courtroom in England on the day of the Osama speech, which would have proved it was not him in the video.
Finally, after two years and much pressure from the British government, the three men are sent back to England where they are ed and released the next day with no charges filed against them. At the end of the film it is told that of the 760 prisoners who are initially brought to Guantanamo, only 7 have ever been charged with any crime, and the total number of convictions: 0. Meanwhile over 500 detainees remain in Guantanamo held without charges and with no lawyers.
The film itself is brilliantly photographed in a grainy film resolution that lends itself perfectly to the desert conditions in which it was shot. Director Michael Winterbottom presents scenes that are so realistic that you are not sure if the people in them are actors, or if it is actual documentary footage. The film clocks in at 91 minutes but seems longer due to the sadistic ruthlessness of the soldiers at Guantanamo. At one point I began checking my watch because I couldn't take much more and just wanted the savagery to end, and I was sitting in a movie theatre. How anyone could endure what these guys went through is beyond me. This is however a must-see film for everyone. The scenes of the hurricane fence cages with the razor wire at the top and the way the captors acted with total disregard for people who had not been charged with any crime, and had possibly done nothing, brought back memories of my own stay at the place they called Guantanamo on the Hudson, (although my experience was nowhere near as bad as the people in this movies was) when I was arrested at The Republican National Convention in New York in 2004. I began to wonder: How long will it be until this kind of thing is happening in The U.S. to American Citizens on a regular basis?