Guantanamo Documentary ‘We Are Not Ghouls’ at Milwaukee Film Festival

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The World Trade Center disintegrates in the opening frame of the documentary We Are Not Ghouls, followed by images of George W. Bush. “Anybody who harbors a terrorist is a terrorist,” he tells Congress during his War on Terror address. Those were heated moments in American history, and in the heat of war, ethics were suspended, and judgment calls were made in hatred.

We Are Not Ghouls’ director Chris James Thompson was previously known forThe Jeffrey Dahmer Files and an Emmy-winning short subject, “MECCA: The Floor.” We Are Not Ghouls screens at 6:30 p.m., April 30 at Times Cinema and 4:45 p.m., May 3 at the Oriental Theatre as part of the Milwaukee Film Festival. 

The U.S. responded to 9/11 by occupying Afghanistan, the base from which Osama bin Laden planned the attack. Although the leaders of the ruling Taliban and their Al-Qaeda guests slipped away, many suspects were rounded up. Some were guilty of plotting against America. Others were in the wrong place at the worst moment, fingered by their enemies or framed by corrupt local officials for reward money.

Among the latter was a young man called Binyam Mohamed. We Are Not Ghouls focuses on him and the two attorneys he was given under the rules of the military commission that tried his case, civilian counsel Clive Staffon Smith and, especially, military counsel Lieut. Col. Yvonne Bradley. Mohamed was born in Ethiopia and came to London as a refugee with his parents. Left behind when they returned home, he fell into drug addiction and found salvation in the discipline of Islam. Unfortunately, he fell in with a radicalized mosque whose leaders advised him to follow his faith to Taliban-held Afghanistan. He may have been naïve, or he may have had a young man’s sense of tearing down the system that oppressed him. Even if he once harbored the desire to join the Taliban, no evidence surfaced that he ever did.

We Are Not Ghouls reveals the toxicity of the rule bending, bounty hunting atmosphere as the U.S. and its allies rounded up suspects. Mohamed was arrested in Pakistan at Karachi airport for traveling under a false passport. As he tells it, an agent from MI5, Britain’s intelligence agency, offered tea but no sympathy. The U.K. washed its hands of the matter and handed him to the U.S., whose agencies shifted him from a black site in Morocco, where he was physically tortured under American oversight, to the infamous Black Prison near Kabul, where he was subjected to darkness, deprivation and noise intended to break him psychologically. By 2004, when Mohamed was ferried to Guantanamo, Bush had called all the detainees “killers” and the feckless Lindsey Graham declared they all deserved long prison sentences or death.

Bradley, Mohamed’s military counsel, receives much face time in We Are Not Ghouls. She is a Black, Bible-believing, Republican-leaning child of segregated Philadelphia. After graduating from Notre Dame law school, she entered the Judge Advocates General corps in preference to private practice. A believer in the rule of law, what she found to her surprise at Guantanamo was an extra-legal process that raised constitutional questions. In examining the case against her client, charged with plotting to bring a radioactive “dirty bomb” into the U.S., she discovered many discrepancies. An additional problem: the evidence against him was derived under torture. The pragmatic problem with the practice of torture is that its victims are likely to tell their inquisitors anything to stop the pain.

The director will be at all Milwaukee Film Festival screenings for Q&A, with Yvonne Bradley on Zoom. I asked him for his thoughts about the We Are Not Ghouls.

What drew you to the idea of making a documentary about the Guantanamo situation?

In 2004 I was a student at an experimental film school called University of Milwaukee, and one of my classmates was named Abdel—he was from Jordan. We were friends and worked on each other’s films as we moved through the program together. One day Abdel didn’t show up for class and the professor told me that he had been detained by Homeland Security, held in a jail downtown. After a couple weeks passed and he still had not returned to class I went to visit Abdel in detention.

Talking to him through the glass window I could see his teeth had been knocked loose and were wired shut, which he told me was an accident from playing basketball while inside. He told me this was all a big misunderstanding regarding his immigration paperwork and that it would be sorted out soon. Abdel was detained for most of the semester.

The FBI Milwaukee Joint Terrorism Task Force released a statement that said he was being held as part of an investigation called “Operation Magic Carpet,” which seemed like an absurd name for an investigation into my friend. After being gone for months, Adbel returned to school, but he didn’t want to talk about what he’d been through. Knowing how dedicated Abdel was to his school and his art, it didn’t seem logical or fair to me that he was detained for as long as he was, in the manner he was. I wondered if he would have received the same treatment if he was white, immigrated from Australia or Norway, or had a common western white English name. This traumatic experience led me to start researching the war on terror, and how our government was treating our perceived enemies.  

Do you think the American public has forgotten about Guantanamo—or were they ever paying attention?

After 9/11 in 2001-2003, the sky was falling, and the American public’s collective decision-making was (understandably) rooted in a place of fear. The state began strategically using misinformation and propaganda to portray a position of power and control, and also to steer geopolitical goals. As time has passed the population of people held at Guantanamo has been reduced from 500+ to less than 40 today, as the truth about who is being held there has been revealed. 

The most interesting answer to this question comes from the detainee featured in this film named Binyam Mohamed: since his release he said that his only wish is for the U.S. to openly admit that it practices torture so that the American public can decide if that is what they want for themselves. In 2012 I started making this film because I didn’t think we collectively understood his point. In 2023, I still don’t think we collectively understand his point. In America we are very good at looking the other way when atrocities are happening to the Other. I believe that issues like our detention center at Guantanamo Bay don’t just fade away cleanly into history—instead they re-emerge to haunt us decades and centuries later, causing new conflicts with costs that today we can’t imagine.