Smash hit

Of course, there is poetic licence in the film. Anwar enjoys a six-figure salary, 700 times more than the average Yemeni victim of rendition. And Isabella is better placed to find him than her counterpart in an Arab village. She heads to Capitol Hill to meet an old flame, Alan Smith (Peter Sarsgaard), a senior aide to a senator. Yet even with Smith’s assistance, Isabella never tracks down Anwar.

Even here the film is not so far from reality. Binyam Mohamed’s American sister, Zohra, spoke to an FBI agent, who told her that Binyam had been freed, when in truth he was being tortured in Morocco. She searched for her brother from Britain to Pakistan, with no success. Three years later she heard he was in Guantánamo Bay.

Ultimately, what does the CIA get from relying on torture? Eventually, Anwar lists 11 men as his “accomplices in terror”. Freeman finds that the names match those of the 1990 Egyptian football team, which convinces him that Anwar is innocent.

Unfortunately, in real life, it would probably have earned Anwar another beating. When Binyam was tortured, the janitor from London who did not speak Arabic described how he dined on April 3, 2002, with four of Osama bin Laden’s associates, and advised them on their campaign of terror. Two of the four were in US custody at that time, but when the “mistake” was noticed the interrogators tortured him some more, to reshape his story.

Would thatRendition was a work of history. Sadly, the rendition aircraft are still flying; the prisoners are taken to ever darker prisons – whether in Jordan, Egypt, Morocco or ships off the coast of Somalia – farther from the media and the rule of law.

Sheep politics

So here comes Rendition, another “devastating indictment” of the Evil Empire. We know all about America’s Religious Right, but there is a Religious Left, too, and its message is preached in multiplexes rather than mega-churches. It’s a paradox of Hollywood that the nonconformists in the “creative community” are sheep when it comes to politics.

In the Seventies, films attacking the excesses of the CIA and big business were fresh. But lazy thinking set in a long time ago. So we shouldn’t be surprised that the sheep are prepared to laud a film-maker as transparently dishonest as Michael Moore. Hell, he’s antiBush, and that’s all that matters. Even one of the more intelligent films of the past couple of years, Good Night, and Good Luck, could not resist sugar-coating the Cold War, insinuating that Soviet spy-rings were a product of Joe McCarthy’s imagination. Will things ever change? Not as long as American politics is locked in its Left v Right trench warfare.

Clive Davis

Rendition is released on Oct 19 Clive Stafford Smith is the legal director of Reprieve (www.reprieve.org.uk), a UK charity providing legal representation to prisoners. A book about his work, Bad Men: Guantánamo Bay and the Secret Prisons, is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson

Explore Film

• Film Reviews

• Trailers

• DVD

• London Film Festival

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010