Amnesty International Supporters Petitioning to Close Guantanamo Bay (from casmeron on Flickr)

Recently, I had the privilege of attending a screening hosted by Amnesty International.  The film was called “The Response” and, at the time, all I knew about it was that it involved Guantanamo Bay and had Aasif Mandvi from the Daily Show in it.  Watch this movie!

My jaw dropped when I watched the thematic representation of Guantanamo Bay tribunals.  The movie is set up like a courtroom drama, and broken into two parts.  The first part is a near verbatim re-enactment of an actual Guantanamo Bay military tribunal (Combat Status Review Tribunal, or CSRT), based on legitimate transcripts released by the United States military.  Aasif Mandvi plays a detainee claiming to be wrongly accused of being a terrorist and a bomb maker.  Sig Liebowitz produced the film. This is a brief synopsis:

For his screenplay, Libowitz used numerous transcripts from the Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs) (months of research yielded several hundreds of pages of additional tribunal transcripts which were used in the creation of the screenplay) and fashioned them into the fictional story of one particular detainee — Al Aqar, a Ph.D. engineer who has studied in the West. The government has accused Al Aqar of being a terrorist and a bomb maker. Shackled and chained to the floor, the detainee is questioned by three military judges — Colonel Richard Jefferson, Colonel Carol Simms, and Captain Joshua Miller — who must decide his fate.

(Taken from the film’s website)

The second part of the film, a short period of maybe 10 minutes, consisted of scripted dramatization of the deliberation between the three officers present at the CSRT who will ultimately decide the prisoners fate.  Constitutional rights form a deliberative conundrum with the United States’ fear of terrorism, and this film is a personification of this conflict. . . .

Why am I mentioning this?  Well its a good question considering the movie came out in 2008.  I was unfortunately just recently introduced to it, as opposed to when it came out.  Watch the film, especially the first segment which is based primarily on actual transcripts from a real tribunal.  The lack of a fair trial is an understatement when referring to the detainee in the film.  A brief quip from the film’s website gives a bit more detail on just how these trials are conducted.

While the officers see the classified evidence, the detainee does not. While the officers know who has accused the detainee, the detainee does not. In response, the government counters that to release such classified information could assist the terrorists and undermine U.S. national security

The Response has been shown not only by Amnesty International screenings, but by screenings to places such as the United States Congress, the Pentagon, the Department of Justice, and several other high-profile foreign policy bodies.

I was sparsely educated on the proceedings and procedures that occur at Guantanamo Bay before this movie, but now it has sparked my interest.  It opens your eyes and brings you inside the stingy courtroom of a Gitmo tribunal, and displays firsthand the injustices of that particular legal system.

Check out the movie if you haven’t, I highly recommend it.