'Guantanamo Guidebook' TV show

'Brutal, must-watch TV'

"It says something deeply peculiar about British TV when a piece of angry political polemic ends up looking like an extreme reality show. For the past few weeks, Channel 4 viewers have gloated as celebrities vomit tepid water, drink their own urine and balance atop 20ft-high poles in Celebrity Extreme Detox. So what’s so different about seven blokes volunteering for a course of sleep-disturbance, enforced nudity, violent temperature change and arduous physical exercise?

"Well, mainly that the victims in Torture: The Guantanamo Guidebook are undergoing what Jon Snow insists is the real regime for suspected terrorists at Camp Delta. It is anything but amusing. In fact, many of the US military’s techniques not only flout the Geneva Convention but fall within the United Nations definition of torture. Three of the volunteers failed to last 48 hours, and attempted suicides at Guantanamo were averaging two a week until the Pentagon slashed the rate by redefining them as instances of 'manipulative self-injurious behaviour'.

"Public enemy No 1 is Donald Rumsfeld, whose name pops up more frequently than Captain Hook at a Peter Pan panto. The programme will undoubtedly get trashed by some as bleeding-heart liberalism and a cheap stunt to boot. But Snow insists that there is no evidence that any useful information has been extracted in this way. And, anyway, how can you defend democracy and the rule of law by violating both? Either way, it’s a disturbing cocktail. What was it Germaine Greer said about reality TV and fascist states?"
Source: Times Online

[I head an interview with the show's director, a woman who said that they used mainly declassified US Government documents to make the show, but did not go anywhere near as far as the real US officers with brutality in filming the Gitmo procedures, as they were advised that the victims could suffer permanent damage. The people who were subjected to the torture on TV said at the end that they would have confessed to anything. This is what the US, Britain, Australia, et al, are basing their 'war on terror' on?]

"Of the seven, only four make it to the end of the 48-hour ordeal – one is withdrawn by doctors after just seven hours due to hypothermia."
Source: Confessions of a justified torturer

Channel 4 is condemned over torture TV show
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