The Prisoner Or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair represents a follow-up to husband-and-wife filmmaking team Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein’s critically-worshipped, defiantly nonpartisan documentary Gunner Palace (2004), on the day-to-day of American soldiers stationed on the Iraqi front. In that earlier picture, Tucker and Epperlein stumble across Yunis Khatayer Abbas, a Middle Eastern man who merely confesses, “I am a journalist,” before American soldiers drag him off to incarceration. The Tuckers reconnected with Abbas at a later point, and disinter his backstory in this film.

Tortured by the goons of Saddam Hussein’s brother, Uday Hussein, Abbas later became a key terrorist suspect of the U.S. government, who believed that he intended to kill British prime minister Tony Blair. American authorities had Abbas thrown into the notorious Abu Ghirab prison (and other penitentiaries) and subjected him to month after month of grueling interrogation. Eventually, they released him… (Barnes & Noble)

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

“The Prisoner” or “How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair” concerns Iraqi journalist Yunis Abbas who is arrested, along with his brothers, by American forces in Baghdad in 2003. Abbas was accused of conspiring to kill Tony Blair. After his arrest, he was carted off to Abu Ghraib where he remained for 9 months. Those at the scene filmed the arrest, and the arrest was so cheesy, I thought it had to be some sort of reenactment.

No, these were real scenes, and it’s not something that makes you feel proud. As the film continues it’s impossible to connect what happens to Abbas to high-sounding words such as “freedom” and “democracy.” Once in Abu Ghraib, Abbas, who’d already been tortured under Sadaam Hussein’s regime, finds himself the object of interrogation yet again, and even after it’s quickly established that Abbas has “no intelligence value,” he isn’t released.

Instead he’s placed in Camp Ganci along with all the other low-profile prisoners. The conditions at the camp are appalling. Since the camp is vulnerable to attack, many prisoners are killed by insurgent attacks, and even more prisoners are killed while rioting against the deplorable conditions.

By presenting the case of one man, the film personalizes the travesty of Abu Ghraib. Abbas was innocent of the charges brought against him, but instead of being granted his “freedom” he was stripped of all rights. (Amazon)