Sadly, this story is just one among countless others in which people of color become collateral damage in not only the War on Terror, but other groups that are seemingly ‘anti-American’—from the Black Panthers in the ’60s to the rap artists today who talk about more than just bling.
right The Road to Guantanamo shows that it’s all one struggle—from driving while black or Latino to the law enforcement’s War on Hip Hop. Hip hop is our sanity, our solace, our freedom, and the “Tipton Three” (as they are named because of their hometown in England) showed that you can maintain resistance, no matter how trying the situation.
The Tipton Three actually started out as four young Muslim buddies from Britain who decide to go to Pakistan a few weeks after the terrorist attacks of September 11th because one of them planned to get married there. Before the wedding, the young men naively decide to go to Afghanistan to help out with the devastation. But when they cross the border, they’re met with bombs and confusion as the United States begins its invasion of the country. They decide to return to Pakistan, but in the chaotic process one disappears (he still hasn’t been seen to this day and was presumably killed) and the other three are taken captive by the Northern Alliance. They are thrown into prison where they are overcrowded, underfed, and miserably treated.
After a month, the threesome are then taken as prisoners of the United States government and are shipped to Guantanamo Bay in Cuba - which has since 2002, been used to house suspected Al-Qaeda and Taliban members - where they suffer more unimaginable brutalities at the hands of the U.S. military, including being unable to pray, months of solitary isolation and intense interrogations about their supposed terrorist activity. It’s important to note here that in recent months, three Gitmo detainees have committed suicide, while dozens of horror stories about forced feeding in restraint chairs have emerged.
Idiotic and brutal military officers repeatedly applied intense pressure to the “Tipton Three” to admit they are members of Al Qaeda. But the men maintain their innocence and fiercely stick together. They are eventually freed because ironically one of the three had a police record that proved they weren’t in Afghanistan during 2000. Why the investigators do not initially check this fact is never revealed.
The true story comes full circle with all three traveling back to Pakistan to attend the wedding almost three years later, which is what they originally planned to do.
While the story definitely critiques the hypocritical pseudo-Christian United States government, it shifts its focus to the friendship and the resilience of the men themselves. At the end of the film, one of the survivors reflects on the experience and says, “It can either destroy you or make you stronger. It made me stronger.”
The movie was striking and remarkable, mainly because it didn’t shy away from the violence but instead embraced it. The format of the movie, which interspersed interviews from actual survivors, with reenactments of the events that took place, never lets you forget that it was a real story.
This summer is filled with big-budget Hollywood flicks with gory violence, big-name actors, and special effects, but The Road to Guantanamo would make even the hardest gangstas flinch at some of the things these young men suffered. And what’s even scarier, is the horrors of Guantanamo still continue.
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