Guantanamo: Honor Bound to Protect Freedom
Brittain and Slovo intercut interviews with more than a dozen people, devoting most of the first act to the detainees and their families. Most of the first 20 minutes goes to Mr. Begg, a Pakistani banker whose son Moazzam was held at Guantanamo (he was released in January 2005 without ever being charged). As a young boy, Mr. Begg says, Moazzam announced that he wanted to “make a society…to help older people, feeble people, and people with disabilities and all that.” Once he completed school, the devout Muslim went to Afghanistan to build schools and wells because he believed “the Afghan people are the people in the world who are most deprived.” But after American forces invaded, he was taken for Taliban and detained first at Bagram and then at Guantanamo, where he suffered many abuses.
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This feels like a play with an ax to grind rather than a truth to unveil. It’s a terrible thing to beat, chain, humiliate, and torture innocent people. But a script in which the detainees were in fact the cold-blooded killers Donald Rumsfeld describes would have had greater moral complexity. Also, Slovo and Brittain finger the politicians and military commanders who’ve created this international disgrace but never allude to the voting populace who let it continue. And now that Congress has appropriated funds to build a permanent prison at Guantanamo, we’ll have many more years to face the complicity these playwrights ignore.
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