Dilawar, RIP

Thanks to the attention that "Taxi to the Dark Side" is garnering in the mainstream media (Post, WSJ, Salon), for a while at least, innocent Afghan Dilawar is remembered as a victim of American military institutionalized brutality.

'Taxi to the Dark Side'

Finally a "big" documentary about the Bagram homicides. Abu Ghraib has elicited a huge reaction especially in the past two years, by artists, writers and documentarists. But the sad fate of those tortured to death in Afghanistan has been largely forgotten. Recall that of the original 27 men recommended to prosecutors by Army investigators the killing of innocents Dilawar and Habibullah, only 6 were convicted or pled guilty. The stiffest punishment handed down has been 5 months in a military prison.

Involved among others as executive producer was journalist Sid Blumenthal. The film by Alex Gibney "Taxi to the Dark Side" portrays the arrest of taxi driver Dilawar and to his killing at Bagram Air Base. It premiers at the Tribeca Film Festival next week.

Tom Tomorrow shares his thoughts after seeing a preview.

The Prisoner or: How I Planned To Kill Tony Blair

The film had a "limited release" in the US in March after debuting at the SWSX Festival in Austin. I would like to see this in a theater and not on DVD!

The Prisoner

Another documentary on Abu Ghraib, featured in this month's Vanity Fair, is sure to make waves in the US in March. "The Prisoner or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair" is a surreal film about the arrest of journalist Yunis Khayater. His arrest, caught on tape by documentarist Michael Turner who included the footage in his awarding-winning Gunner's Palace. After the release of this documentary, Turner received an email from a "friend" of Yunis' -- Benjamin Thompson, an American who served at Abu Ghraib. He wanted contact Yunis, saying, "I felt that these people were my good friends and that we survived that hell together with support from one another. I truly love these people."

The story has a number of surreal elements, starting with Yunis' arrest for an alleged, far-fetched accusation that the journalist was plotting to kill Tony Blair. He was plunged into the nightmare world of Abu Ghraib where he met Thompson.

Read more in Vanity Fair, visit the film's site, or see the trailer here.

Rory Kennedy's documentary "The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib," which debuted at Sundance Film Festival in January, will be airing on HBO in North America next week starting February 22.

Sundance produced a promo piece, with interviews with Kennedy. The film features ex-military intel Sgt. Sam Provance, who has been ostracized for speaking out to the media after reading the Taguba Report.

For schedules, please follow this link to the HBO website.

Interrogation and detention on Youtube

A review of the available material on YouTube yields some interesting additions to the growing body of material on this topic.

An October 2006 Sky News interview with former army interrogator Tony Lagouranis is worth a listen.

An undated speech by Janis Karpinski on Abu Ghraib's early days paints a pathetic picture of its admininstration.

Also from CCR (the Center for Constitutional Rights), Prof. Scott Horton, Adjunct Professor of Law at Columbia University on command responsibility and the Military Commissions Act of 2006.

Bush press secretary Tony Snow on detainees in October: "They don't wanna be torturing people, they don't wanna be setting a bad example."

MSNBC's Olberman on the impact of the Military Commissions Act on Habeas Corpus.

Clips from a British documentary "simulation" of Guantanamo Bay with willing volunteers.

A trailer of the docudrama "Outlawed" provided by Amnesty International.

NOW's interview with British national Moazzam Begg, who was picked up in Pakistan and sent to Guantanamo.

What claims to be video of a Canadian raid on a Taliban compound in Helmand Province.

In this clip from the same source, but in Kandahar province, we can see Canadian troops along side Afghani troops. All in a village setting.

Another amateur video, this time of the Dutch forces in Uruzgan supposedly of in 2005 being ambushed with a really bad "soundtrack."

A British news crew that went unembedded in Helmand Province, Afghanistan in early 2006 made this report, which included a hair-raising encounter with Taliban and Afghan police. The police are beating the Talib prisoners with automatic weapons.

I cannot tell if this is a parody of hunters and videogamers, but this video reveals attitudes of a certain segment of the population in America towards Afghans and Iraqis. It is disturbing.

About this blog

We have not been able to maintain the blog from March-December 2006. We have republished it at this site, and hope that it will serve as a record and resource. If you have not already seen it, or if you would like to view it again, please take a moment to watch Taliban Country, the film which inspired this site.

Taliban Country was featured in a number of film festivals in 2004-5, and aired in six countries. It continues to be a reference and interest has not abated. It has only become more relevant in recent months with the recognized resurgence of the Taliban and the escalating war with NATO in Southern Afghanistan.

For queries regarding purchase, please contact Journeyman Films.

"Taliban Rising"

This film is a brief (highly pessimistic) interview with The Nation's Christian Parenti, who claims many of his westernized friends in Afghanistan have started to make increasingly sympathetic statements towards the Taliban.

The article provides deeper insight. Many of these same issues he brings up existed three years ago already, and are examined in Taliban Country, such as the impact of searches of residential compounds.

He describes the "Iraqization" of the insurgency in Afghanistan and provides a portrait of life in the southern part of the country.

Guantanamo film US release for early summer

The Road to Guantanamo, director Michael Winterbottom's film about three Britons' ordeal from Afghanistan to Guantanamo Bay is set to be released by a North American distributor in the US in early summer. Roadside Film's recent releases have included Supersize Me and What the Bleep do we Know?

The film will premiere in the US later this month at the Tribeca Film Festival.

"Taliban Country" airs in Germany

The reason-for-being of this blog is a powerful documentary, made in 2004, by Australian filmmaker Carmela Baranowska. Even after two years, it stands alone in its portrayal of remote, central Afghanistan. Journalists still do not spend long in Uruzgan unless "embedded." We have heard from European journalists who recently ventured into this province, but were not able to safely report from there, and returned quickly to Kandahar.

Even Kandahar, according to the Sunday Times Afghanistan correspondent Christina Lamb, is pretty off-limits at night, after a recent wave of murders and suicide bombings there.

Taliban Country airs on Sunday, Monday and possibly Tuesday (please check local listings), on WDR, German television. We hope to hear feedback from Germany, as we did from the Netherlands a couple of months ago.

"The Road to Guantanamo"

Polemical director Michael Winterbottom has debuted his film "The Road to Guantanamo" at the Berlin Film Festival. It is a documentary-fictional recreation (in the same vein of Winterbottom's In This World), following the story of four British muslims, three of whom were picked up in Afghanistan by bounty hunters in 2001 and ended up in Guantanamo for two years.

The four were 20 years old when accompanied a friend to Pakistan for his wedding, subsequently travelling to Kandahar to see Afghanistan. Caught up in the US war, three were apprehended in the desert between Kunduz and Kandahar, fleeing the US offensive in a crowd of Taliban soldiers. One was never heard from again.

photo by James Hill

Accused of being anti-American, Winterbottom says he was merely trying to capture the experience of the men. The film has created great interest in Berlin and is set to open in the UK on March 6. US release dates have not been announced.

Dutch interest in 'Taliban Country'

With the fate of the potential Dutch increased deployment to Afghanistan (and indeed the future of the ruling coalition) in the balance, the Dutch media have covered the impact of the documentary 'Taliban Country'.



Apparently, the film caused a stir with leading members of the smallest party in the ruling coalition, D66, for the footage of warlord-Governor Jan Mohammed and the negative impact that the US' cordon-and-search and detentions were having in unstable Uruzgan province.

Dutch daily Die Verdping Trouw interviewed filmmaker Carmela Baranowska, sharing her thoughts on future military deployments to 'Taliban Country'. In it she says, any military that comes to Afghanistan with an aggressive attitude will find itself mired in a "cycle of violence." Volkskrant, another daily, also featured Taliban Country in January.

Dutch parliament is scheduled to decide on the controversial deployment to Uruzgan on February 5. The other NATO member nations will be watching with anxiety, as both the UK and Canada have claimed their contributions are already maxed out. There has been speculation that the US would get 'stuck' with Uruzgan if the Dutch refuse to deploy troops there.

The weak military investigations into the abuses alleged in 'Taliban Country' concluded that the abuses were 'unsubstantiated'. But strangely, the abuses alleged in the film Taliban Country seem to have come to haunt the US military when it least suspected it.

Taliban burning TV report viewable online

The Australian TV report depicting US troops burning Taliban bodies and using the moment to broadcast inflammatory messages into the mountains, is now viewable online as it was broadcast in Australia. The report sparked dismay and outrage around the world and in the blogosphere, and that is currently under investigation by the Pentagon.

If you have Realplayer, you can view it here.

US troops caught desecrating Taliban bodies

The Australian state broadcaster SBS showed highly sensitive footage yesterday of US troops burning two bodies of Taliban fighters killed in combat in a village north of Kandahar. The US military first claimed the bodies were burned for public health reasons, as the men were killed the day before.

But in Islamic culture, burning of bodies is seen as desecration, and freelance embedded cameraman Stephen Dupont, who captured the images, also witnessed Psychological Operations troops attempting to lure Taliban in the nearby area by broadcasting offenses over loud speakers.

According to the SBS report, the PsyOps soldiers played the following message along with American pop music: "You are too scared to retrieve their bodies - this just proves you are the lady boys we always believed you to be."


Earlier, less controversial work of PsyOps in Afghanistan: "The partnership of nations is here to help"

In response to a growing uproar, and the footage playing on news channels across the world, the commander of US forces in Afghanistan, General Jason Kamiya, flew to Kandahar to consult officers about the incident. The State Department called the action "unrepresentative" of American values.

The burning of the bodies seems to have been intended to offend Muslim sensibilities, and was also in extremely clear contravention of the Geneva Conventions. The Washington Post coverage provides analysis similar to that of the Australian TV correspondents:

"If true, the incident would fit a seeming pattern that has emerged of the U.S. military gaining enough knowledge of Islamic culture and sensitivities to devise ways of offending Muslims," said Khaled Abu el Fadl, a specialist in Islamic law at UCLA law school.