Gitmo - the New Rules of War

A free flight, a stay in a hotel for only $12, the sun is shining and you have a most charming tour guide: "On your right you see the golf court. Take care when you feed the iguanas." Sometimes, life is a bed of roses for a documentary filmmaker. Especially if you want to make a documentary about Guantanamo Bay, the American army base on Cuba where 637 suspects of terrorism have been detained. The directors Tarik Saleh and Erik Gandini, whose film won the 2003 Silver Wolf, were pampered when visiting the camp. But prisoners were nowhere in sight. Back in Sweden, the investigation continues, because what exactly is going on in "Gitmo," as insiders call the base? Saleh´s and Gandini's friendly, almost naive questions sometimes yield surprisingly candid answers. Interviews are alternated with brazenly inserted speeches by Bush, Bin Laden and Donald Rumsfeld. A former prisoner, the Swedish citizen Mehdi Ghezali, still does not want to talk about his time in Gitmo, but an English friend does. The interrogation methods were unusual, to say the least. The quest for the truth brings the filmmakers via the Abu Ghraib prison - yet another emotionally charged name - to the world of war outsourcing, Romanian mercenaries and to the story of an American general and former commander at Guantanamo who was dismissed for being "too nice."