Film

The War Within  

By Junius  

This fine film-drama starts where the documentary The Road to Guantanamo leaves off. When complete innocents are tortured, there can only be anger; tragedy begins when the innocence gets twisted round into revenge. The “Tipton three” were released immediately on their return to England; but that cannot be the end of it. Guantanamo is the birthplace of revenge.

And Guantanamo is not the same as an Egyptian prison or Syrian one, the kind where Mahar Arar suffered torture for months. Thank God, for the sake of his soul, that Mahar Arar, as a Canadian, can take his revenge by steadfastly bringing into the light of public attention those who were responsible.

The innocent protagonist of The War Within, being a Pakistani tortured in a secret place, has no chance to release his anger that way. Besides, his vicious torture was under the direct supervision of the CIA, and included being taunted by pictures of his assassinated brother. We are shown none of his subsequent entry into the jihad of suicide bombers. We don’t need to have laid out what we can utterly take for granted. The degree of his revenge was fixed when the match was struck to ignite the torturer’s blowtorch.

But don’t think this film dwells overly on horror nor on an easy anti-Americanism. The every day benefits of immigrant life in America are truly appreciated by the protagonist’s old friend, now a family man. The pervasive attractiveness of his secular life is such that we have to keep reminding ourselves of the crucial fact: that the friend has not been tortured and can’t behave as though he has. Equally, the one who has can’t be expected to start behaving as though he hasn’t, at least not in the few days given him in this film.

There is really no “war within” the mind of this man who, in planning revenge, has fallen into the torturer’s role. We cannot detect two sides to him, and can only watch unsympathetically while he prepares to finish off the torturer’s work, on his own body, and on the world’s body. For those promoting torture must know that they are creating a world that their victims will try to destroy. They are suicides too, in furthering the clash of civilizations that will bring themselves down in flames along with everyone else.

The friend calls 911. It is an act of lawfulness, to break the chain of revenge, though at serious potential cost to himself and his family.