The Wisconsin Film Festival Presents “We Are Not Ghouls”: Upholding the Constitution
Above: Lt. Col. Yvonne Bradley, a JAG officer, who defended Guantanamo prisoner Binyam Mohamed and won his release
Below: Producer/Director Chris James Thompson who self-financed and took nine years producing “We Are Not Ghouls
Part 1 of 2
By Jonathan Gramling
While there had been warning signs during the 1990s like the attempted bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, the bombing of the U.S. Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, the United States was still rocked to its core on September 11, 2001 when 10 hijackers commandeered four U. S. commercial craft and flew two of them into the World Trade Center towers, one into the Pentagon and a fourth crashed in Pennsylvania short of its possible target of the White House.
America was nearly hysterical with fear as hate crimes and prejudicial incidents against Arabs and Muslims — and even Indian Sikhs — rose dramatically in the United States. And the George W. Bush administration vowed a War on Terror, it launched an invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001 with its Allies to root out al-Qaeda, which claimed responsibility for the bombings.
Over the course of the next few years, enemy combatants and suspected al-Qaeda members or sympathizers were swept up in a major offensive and were placed in “invisible prisons throughout the Middle East and tortured to find out information about possible terrorist activities and plans. Many were eventually detained at the U.S. base in Guantanamo Bay, away from the glare of the American press and public.
As with any governmental effort fueled by hysteria, the War on Terror swept up many innocent people along with some terrorists in an effort to show the American people it was making progress in the War on Terror. Many of those innocent people were also subjected to unspeakable torture that members of the Bush administration described as “enhanced interrogation techniques.
And it took the efforts of many civilian and JAG defense attorneys to eventually free these innocent people swept up by the U.S. government. One of those JAG officers was Lt. Col. Yvonne Bradley, whose tireless and brave efforts to free Binyam Mohamed from Guantanamo Bay were captured by independent filmmaker Chris James Thompson of Milwaukee in the movie “We Are Not Ghouls,” one of the premier films being featured by the Wisconsin Film Festival April 13-20 at theaters on the UW-Madison campus and at Hilldale.
Thompson was inspired by his own witness to the negative impact on innocent people while a film student at UW-Milwaukee.
“I had a classmate who was a friend of mine,” Thompson said. “He was an immigrant from Jordan. We would sit next to each other and work on each other’s movies. We moved through the program together at kind of the same pace. One day I showed up for class and he wasn’t in class. Our professor told the class that he had been arrested by the Department of Homeland Security. The teacher was trying to figure out what had happened to him. The next day, he didn’t show up nor the day after that. A week went by and he didn’t show up. And so I went to the jail facilities downtown and they allowed me to visit with him. We were separated by a big bullet-proof glass window. His teeth had all been knocked loose and his mouth was wired shut, so he had difficulty talking. I was trying to ask him how we could help him and what was going on. He was just saying, ‘Thank you so much for coming to see me. This will all be sorted out soon. It’s just a big misunderstanding.’ I left that day and the Dept. of Homeland Security and the FBI released a statement that he was arrested under an investigation called Operation Magic Carpet. He was held for months. He missed a whole semester of school. Finally when he came back to school months later, I was trying to understand what had happened to him. I was asking questions and asking how we could help him. He was just saying, ‘I don’t want to tell you about it because everyone who gets involved, it messes up their life and I don’t want this to mess up your life too.’”
In his efforts to understand more about what happened to his friend, he came across the book ‘The Guantanamo Lawyers,” a collection of essays written by over 100 civilian and government lawyers who had worked on legal cases at Guantanamo Bay. He was particularly struck by Bradley’s essay.
“I reached out to her and just wanted to see if she was interested in expanding her story or expounding upon what she wrote and turning it into a feature film,” Thompson said. “I’ve been driving back and forth between Milwaukee and Philadelphia for the last nine or so years trying to figure out who Yvonne is, what makes her tick and how you deal with someone who can stand up in those kinds of situations in the way that she did. She is a fascinating person.”
Thompson approached producing the film as a journey towards the truth, a truth that had yet to be defined. Due to his approach — and possibly the subject matter — Thompson couldn’t attract financing for his project. So he self-financed the film over nine years, drawing upon money he earned as a film editor. It made its world premiere at the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas in 2022.
“We Are Not Ghouls” looks at what happened in Guantanamo Bay through Bradley’s eyes as she recalled her years-long fight to get Mohamed free.
“I was trying to tell the people it wasn’t a matter of me, in my mind, of doing anything extraordinary,” Bradley said. “It was me doing what I thought was right and protecting the Constitution and making sure that we treat people as people. And I would do it again. I might think about it a little bit more, but I pretty much would do the same thing again if I had to.”
Mohamed had been detained in Pakistan in 2002 while returning to England from Afghanistan. A native of Ethiopia whose family moved to England, Mohamed had recently converted to Islam and traveled to Afghanistan to find out what Islam was truly about. Unfortunately, he was in the wrong place at the wrong time when the U.S. invaded Afghanistan and had difficulty trying to leave. Mohamed would be taken to several U.S. government run torture centers where he was extensively tortured before being held at Guantanamo.
“Torture does the opposite of making you secure,” Bradley said. “I tell people that the ironic thing about Guantanamo, after all of the torture and abuse, the few people whom they convicted or went through the hearings were released. It’s the only criminal justice system I know that once you are convicted, you are let go. Normally you get convicted and then you are sentenced. Everything there was backwards. I say it was like The Twilight Zone or Alice in Wonderland. It just had your head spinning all the time on how we could operate such a system, but at the same time, selling it to the world, selling it to Americans as if they are given fair trials and fair proceedings and doing what was right when it was the exact opposite. Everything was turned upside down at Guantanamo.”
It didn’t take Bradley long to assess the situation when she first met Mohamed.
“Let me put it this way,” Bradley said. “I had been doing criminal work for quite a while prior to representing Binyam. I represented people on death row. I was used to going into prisons, talking to people who had actually been convicted sitting on death row and talking with them. After a while, you kind of pick up on how people say things, people’s body language and things of that nature in terms of whether they are telling you the truth or whether they are spinning the story they want you to believe.”