Last Night, (Saturday night actually), I saw a great documentary, The Oath, at the Northwest Film Forum. Mostly filmed in Yemen, it’s about Osama bin Laden’s former bodyguard—now a chatty taxi driver in Yemen’s lively capital city, Sana’a.
He’s also the brother-in-law of bin Laden’s former driver, Salim Hamdan, of Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case that overturned President Bush’s creepy military tribunal rules, which violated the Geneva Convention and our own Constitution’s habeas corpus standards.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGHgn2-I3YU&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]
The movie is arty in a good way (it’s totally spellbinding), as Academy-Award-nominated director (My Country, My Country), Laura Poitras, shows the human side of someone who still (sort of) believes in al Qaeda, and offers a clear primer on the important Hamdan case.
Oddly, but off-script for most lefty stuff about the Bush era, the movie also makes the U.S. look pretty cool thanks to the determined U.S. military lawyer assigned to defend Hamdan.
This is a must-see movie, and it’s playing through Thursday.
