I'm trying to imagine what it would be like for Shafiq Rasul at a job interview. The interviewer would look at Shafiq's CV and probably wonder about the gaping hole in it. "So, Shafiq, you had a job at Curry's in the summer of 2000. Then it all goes a bit quiet on the work front. On every front, in fact ..."
Shafiq would perhaps mention that he'd been travelling.
"Travelling? Anywhere nice?"
"You know, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Cuba for a bit ..."
"Cuba? Lovely I've heard. Very friendly, great music."
But Cuba wasn't so friendly for Shafiq. He was bored and scared there, and very lonely. He was put under extreme pressure - physically and mentally. He was stripped of his dignity, and of his rights. The music wasn't so great either - thrash metal, turned up to 11, right in his ears.
If our interviewer probed further he would uncover an extraordinary story - one that started as a great adventure but turned into a nightmare. And he might wonder how today Shafiq appears, from the outside, to be so remarkably undamaged, calm even. Remarkably, Shafiq says the experience changed him for the better.
Our mythical interviewer doesn't need to probe further, because Michael Winterbottom has. The Road To Guantánamo (Channel 4) is his film about Shafiq and his friends Asif Iqbal and Ruhel Ahmed. Together they are the "Tipton Three", the West Midlands lads caught with Taliban fighters in Afghanistan by US troops in 2001, who were flown to Guantánamo Bay and imprisoned without charge before eventually being released in 2004.
The film, which recently won the Silver Bear award for direction at the Berlin film festival, is beautifully constructed. Winterbottom skilfully splices together the young men's accounts of their experiences with a dramatised version of events, shot in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran. It's the same technique that Kevin MacDonald used in Touching the Void - but here the snow has been replaced by sand, the icefalls by falling US bombs, the unbearable cold crevasses by unbearably hot cells.
As an argument against the injustice of Guantánamo Bay, the film cannot be faulted. Graphic scenes of men in orange with their hands and feet shackled together, forced to kneel in the sun, banned from communicating and subjected to psychological interrogation, drive home how extraordinary it is that this place exists, in this century. And that nearly 500 people remain there still, uncharged. None of the practices shown in the film have been denied. Blair calls Guantánamo an anomaly, anyone who cares about human rights calls it a disgrace.
Where the film loses some credibility is in its unquestioning acceptance that these three lads are as good as gold, and the lack of proper questioning of what they were doing in Afghanistan in the first place. They'd gone to Pakistan for Asif's arranged marriage - fine. But the whole wedding is forgotten. They're walking past a mosque in Karachi, people are going in, they go in, a man is calling for help for the Afghan people. They were thinking of going to Afghanistan anyway, they say; it's only 250 rupees on the bus; they can help. Oh, and the food's really good they've heard, especially the jumbo-sized naan breads. So it's a just a little gastro-tourism trip, an odyssey in search of big bread. Such a pity it coincides with the start of the US air attack.
"We stayed in Kabul for about two and a half weeks," says Shafiq. "We were basically just chilling out." Chilling out? As the B52s drop bombs from above? Who are these people they're staying with? What kind of help were they expecting to give? And how come they suddenly end up with a bunch of foreign fighters who are fighting for the Taliban? I think a few more questions should have been put to Shafiq, Iqbal and Ruhel, as I'm finding it hard to swallow this whole lads on tour thing.
Waterloo Road (BBC1, not Scotland), a failing comprehensive, makes Guantánamo Bay look like Sunday school. It's like Grange Hill's bigger, badder brother with a hint of the glitz of Footballers' Wives. In fact, the creators of Footballers' Wives, Maureen Chadwick and Ann McManus, are also behind this new drama, so it's not surprising to see some of these kids driving around in limos. The behaviour really is very bad. About 30% of the children at Waterloo Road are on Asbos, 40% are on drugs, and 50% of them are pregnant. And it's a mixed school. It all looks very promising.
