Here is a scenario for you. You are a middle ranking US army officer, a Captain or Major. It is a month after 9/11. America has (justifiably) invaded Afghanistan in an attempt to overthrow the Taliban regime that aided Osama Bin Laden and others who wished to harm this country. You are allied with the Northern Alliance, who also opposes the Taliban. One day, after an air strike over an Al Qaeda area, the Northern Alliance has captured about fifty people over this region. Among them are three British citizens who left the UK a week after 9/11, flew to Pakistan, and from their crossed over the Afghanistan border. They passed through the two biggest cities, Kandahar and Kubul, and rode a van to this isolated Al Qaeda region out in the middle of nowhere. What do you do?
I would detain and question them. The men, named Ruhul Ahmed, Asif Iqbul and Shafiq Rasul were later released after two years in the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, apparently because they were innocent. Their story is recounted in Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross, with Whitecross filming documentary interviews of the subjects and Winterbottom shooting realistic re-enactments of the men (now known as the Tipton Three). According to them (I don't see any reason why not to believe them) they were repeatedly subjected to inhumane conditions and torture. Where I am not sure I entirely believe them is there reason for being in Afghanistan. They claim they flew to Pakistan for Ahmed's wedding, then saw a speaker promoting charitable trips onto the neighboring country. After two weeks, they realized the charity was scam and asked to go back, but boarded the wrong van and ended up in an Al Qaeda area.
Now, these guys must have been both really naïve AND really unlucky. Everyone knew an American invasion of Afghanistan was imminent after 9/11 it strikes me as rather fishy that they just happened to spontaneously go on a (non-existent) charitable mission into what everyone knew was about to be a war zone. And then, they just accidentally happen board the wrong van. Of course, it's possible that there story is true and they were just haplessly in the wrong place and the wrong time. Wouldn't it be reasonable for someone to question them until figuring that out?
At this point, it seems that I have made a pretty good case against the film's position, but the scenes in Guantanamo are powerful and shocking in of themselves. Everyone was repeatedly subjected to medieval treatment. One scene shows the men and handcuffed in a stress position in a room with no light, and then forced to listen to industrial metal for hours on end. Another shows a British ambassador (later revealed to be an American posing as one) claiming that Ahmed's entire family will be deported to Pakistan if he does not confess. None are ever allowed to see a lawyer (although they are eventually permitted to see real representatives of the British embassy). After countless hours of torture, they admit to being in at an Al Qaeda rally in 2000, which ends up being their ticket out of there, because the British government has documented evidence that they in the UK at that time. Two weeks ago at a Republican presidential debate, John McCain, who was tortured in an North Vietnamese prison camp, was the only candidate from his party to oppose torture. He argued it didn't work, that eventually the victim will say anything just to stop the abuse, even confessing to something they didn't do, as is documented in this film (another example of this is Jim Sheridan's In the Name of the Father).
So we have an interesting quandary here. I believe it was reasonable to for the US government to be suspicious of these men and detain them, but the methods by which they interrogated them was not only sadistic and wrong, but ineffective. Winterbottom and Whitechapel correctly argue the second point, but are intentionally blind at ignoring the first. What was the government supposed to do? As them if they were terrorists, and if they said no, release them immediately?
Afterthought: After reading many reviews for this movie, I was disturbed by the knee-jerk reaction of many critics, and the blatant anti-American bias of foreign ones. The torture was and is wrong, ineffective and evil, but to read these reviews you would think the US government framed these men, and also ignore the fact that there are certainly lots of people imprisoned by at Guantanamo who really are terrorists who mean the country harm.
The Road to Guantanamo (2006)