The Prisoner: Or How I Planned To Kill Tony Blair

Introduction

The invasion of Iraq was hailed as bringing democracy to the country after the fascist rule of the now deceased dictator Saddam Hussain. Ignoring the complete rewriting of history as the reason for the invasion and lack of mention about the mass of WMD in this country, the invasion was to have made Iraq a shining example of Western-style democracy in the region and make the lives of ordinary Iraqis much better. Has it? Has it really?

Yunis Khatayer Abbas is a journalist with a story to tell, and a disturbing one at that.



Growing up in an Iraq ruled by Hussain, Abbas had a happy youth and always wanted to be a journalist and aspired to be like those reporters on CNN and the BBC. He achieved this ambition but found himself in hot water, maybe literally, in 1998 after daring to write about the UN embargo on his country. Arrested by Uday Hussain, he was sent to Uday's 'special' prison in Al-Radwaniya for writers, journalists and (oddly) athletes. Abbas was tortured via beatings and electric shock treatment for three months and two days before getting a bit of a stern warning from the main man and sent home.

After the invasion of Iraq by the US-led coalition forces and the imminent fall of Baghdad, Abbas seized his chance to do something and so with a bike and camera, he compiled a visual document of his home city as it fell. Working as a freelance cameraman was a dangerous job and he ran the risk of falling foul of the remaining authorities and rogue militia, but he managed (with some of his work highlighted in a brief slideshow during the film).



Then one night after attending a wedding party, Abbas was asked to film it, US forces raided his family's house and arrested him and his brothers after a tip from an informant that Abbas was involved in a plot to assassinate Tony Blair - the arrest itself was first documented in Michael Tucker's film Gunner Palace, the film maker intrigued enough about the arrest he filmed (and shown here again) that he came back to follow it up. In the grand spirit of the US to pick 'great' names for all their operations (compare the US Operation Desert Storm to the more subtle British Operation Granby for the first Gulf War), the mission to grab Abbas and his brothers was named Operation Grab-Ass. Still, I'm sure the Iraqis saw the funny side and there's a nice screenshot below that illustrates their level of humour quite aptly.



Abbas was interrogated and tortured by US troops and then transferred to Abu Ghraib, and was there during the period when this prison became infamous globally, gaining a reputation beyond that earned under the previous dictatorship. Abbas was then moved to Camp Ganci, a camp for detainees with no intelligence value, but that didn't stop him being kept without charge before being released much much later with just a 'sorry' from the Camp Commandant.

Yunis Khatayer Abbas - prisoner # 151186. The US Army has no record of him and no one can tell him the real reason for his arrest and unlawful detention.

Visual

Essentially a talking head interview documentary but broken up visually with some nice original pop art that illustrate points being made during the documentary.

Audio

2.0 Stereo soundtrack but sadly no subtitles, although there are occasional on-screen captions. Yunis Abbas speaks very good English but occasionally he is either too low in the mix or hard to follow what he's saying.

Extras

None

Overall

The amazing thing about this film and Yunis Abbas' story is that it appears little has changed in the rule of Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussain. Substitute Hussain and his gang of thugs for the US Army and in places you'd struggle to find the difference. The war on terror has captivated the Bush administration like nothing else and the conspiracy theorists believe that the invasion of Iraq was always on and that 9/11 just provided a convenient excuse. Don't know about that myself, but after serving in what I believed was a just first war in the region involving Iraq, I found myself sat on the sidelines this time, not in the Army any more and much more politically aware than I was in 1990. The invasion of Iraq was uncalled for, there was no justification for it; the excuses of non-compliance with UN resolutions, the sidelining of Hans Blix and his UN weapons inspectors, the now prevalent excuse of dictatorship removal (oh really, what about China, North Korea, Zimbabwe and a few other choice countries you could throw into the mix). Still, it's done now and we should be making the best of it.



The odd thing is that to really make the best of it, you have to win the hearts and minds of the native population in order to bring stability and promote democracy (whichever version of it that the host country deems fit for purpose). So what do the US forces do in order to win hearts and minds? Oh, they just arrest people on flimsy pretext and keep them detained without charge indefinitely - hmm, remind anyone of anything closer to home? Let's not even mention Gitmo.

War does strange things to people on all sides. Experiences shape the thoughts and deeds of all participants, not to mention politicians and staff officers who have ideas but have no real experience of how it's going down in the theatre in question. So what we have is a US occupational force that arrests people on the word of informants (or intel as it's referred to) and another section of the same force that houses and interrogates these prisoners. No one higher up the chain appears to know exactly what's happening, making checks or giving directions. Therefore people keep being arrested, keep being interrogated and keep being imprisoned without charge until someone remembers to let them go. The numbers mentioned are staggering and I just wonder what the point is. Does no one in Washington actually know what is happening on the ground or do they just not care?

You couldn't make it up.