(2007; English, Arabic) "Ay, but I fear you speak upon the rack, Where men enforced do speak anything." - William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice. In the airport in Washington, DC, returning from a conference of chemical engineers in Cape Town, South Africa, Anwar El-Ibrahimi (Omar Metwally), an Egyptian-born, long-time green-card American resident, gets taken into custody by order of Corrine Whitman (Meryl Streep), the CIA official in charge of extraordinary renditions.

The terrorist organization El-Hazim has claimed responsibility for an explosion from a suicide bomber, killing 19 people, mostly innocent women and children, as well as William Dixon, a CIA case officer in North Africa (apparently Egypt); the intended target, Abasi Fawal (Igal Nour), the administrator of torture, escaped injury. Denied permission to contact his wife Isabella (Reese Witherspoon) in Chicago, Anwar is accused of being involved with Egyptian nationalist Rashid Salimi, the leader of El-Hazim, because NSA tracking had picked up several calls to Anwar's cellphone from Salimi.

After Anwar repeatedly pleads ignorance to CIA interrogator Lee Mayer (JK Simmons) about such communications (other than his cellphone number, nothing suspicious turns up in any security databases about him; he's passed a polygraph test), Mayer says to Whitman: "We can't hold him here indefinitely." She replies: "Put him on a plane." In Egypt Anwar becomes Fawal's prisoner where he undergoes enhanced interrogation, including waterboarding and electric shocks, while Douglas Freeman (Jake Gyllenhaal), a CIA analyst just promoted to replace Dixon, looks on.

In director Gavin Hood's dramatization, from Kelley Sane's screenplay, of the US government's controversial program of sending detainees to other countries with friendly but authoritarian governments where the niceties of human rights and employment of torture are less of a legal concern, the past and the present run along parallel paths until they suddenly intersect in a devastating detonation. One suicide bomber can kill many people, but one person tortured can create many new, lethal enemies willing to blow themselves up.

In pointing out the chain of evidence to his uncooperative (naked, shackled, handcuffed) subject - Anwar is a chemical engineer, calls from Rashid have been placed to his cellphone, the explosives used by El-Hazim have improved of late - Fawal asks: "What are we to think?" To Freeman (the brutal methods rub his conscience raw) watching silently, Fawal says: "We save lives."

Back in the States, Izzy, pregnant with a second child, contacts a friend from her college days, Alan Smith (Peter Sarsgaard), an aide to Senator Hawkins (Alan Arkin), attempting to find out what has become of her husband: "Please don't be one of those people who turns away."

Expressing his concern about a constituent's husband being held in detention without judicial review while suggesting the press might take an interest in the story, Smith confronts Whitman: "Maybe I should have a copy of the Constitution sent to your office." Unflappable, she hurls back that Senator Hawkins might not want to be associated publicly with defending a terrorist.

Speaking to Whitman from Egypt, Freeman says to his superior, "This is my first torture," to which she responds like a loyal member of the Bush/Cheney administration: "The United States does not torture."

Throughout all of these events, another drama unfolds, involving Fawal's daughter Fatima and her boyfriend Khalid El-Emin, whose brother ("wounds of martyrdom") earlier died at the hands of the torturer. If no one stands up to stop the vicious cycle, it will just roll on, mercilessly crushing more lives in its path.

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Copyright © 2009 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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