I always thought he was innocent, until he admitted to giving the info & being offered the £40,000.
But then he was released by the american guy & went home.
If he didnt do it, why were the phonecalls made in the fist place? If he was guilty, why was that the end of the film?
I think here is the gist of it.....the CIA and government knows he is guilty, but there is insufficient evidence to charge and convict him. In a court of law, the fact that Rashid could have handed the phone off or sold it to his family members after the call, or his Egyptian uncle was radicalized without him knowing would have created reasonable doubt in a jury. I know if I served on his jury I would have found reasonable doubt and not convicted.....IF it came to trial.
But with the war on terror the rules are bent and sometimes they must be. I would find it hard to trust Anwar and I will question his loyalty to the US given that he has lived here for so long, went to college here, married an American, had kids, works here and yet he never chose to become an American citizen. Also the phone calls are very suspicious so I think its very possible he IS a terrorist or was radicalized.
You just proved why such a movie is really necessary.
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"We're with you all the way, mostly"
really? the way the movie showed it was that this was just a politician fronting to look effective amongst her peers.
I don't think she expected anything to come from the torture. She wasn't desperate to find anything out, afaik she never inquired into the case herself, she would just get annoyed whenever anyone tried to bring it up with her.
and she would only rely on the opinion of a psychopath who tortures people daily (to the point of death at least one time) when it came to even the possibility of innocence.
Anwars Little smirk as he walks toward the gates maybe was supposed to signal-Thank god. I am out of this hell..."
But the actor did a great job of conveying pain and complete innocence while tortured and here the smirk indicates-Hehe...heheehehahaHAHAAAA....orry audience,I mean;they are letting me go and I was part of this heinous deed. Back to the capitalisitic states and my family right nah...
The lack of ambiguity in the actors performance and the character as a whole,he comes off as a Saint,in contrast to this moment made me feel a better actor should have been casted. And no,he has not had any good supporting roles since this....good in hi short moment in Munich though...
Hi there!
All other answers to your post seem to say he is absolutely without a doubt innocent -- but personally I felt the ending was quite ambiguous.
I know that the confession he gave was a fake confession, but as people can be trained to manipulate their interrogators isn't it possible this was a part of his plan? Perhaps he knew exactly what to 'confess' to convince Douglas that he was innocent - consider, he did not just create names out of thin air, he wrote the names of a soccer team so that Douglas would be able to find where they came from and confirm they were not valid terrorist names. He knows his annual salary and possibly chose $40,000 very specifically as his 'reward' to further plant that seed of doubt.
I am not saying he was definitely guilty, but unless I have missed some more concrete evidence I do not think it can be said for sure that he was innocent. Based on how his character came across I would lean more towards the belief that he was innocent, but then perhaps he was simply playing a part.
Sorry, but if you are in doubt whether he was guilty or not then you missed the point of the movie. The filmmakers deliberately didn't provide any evidence for his guilt - because there was none.
You need to realize this is not a Keyser Soze thing. The one and only point of the movie is to criticize the way how the American government sacrifices civil rights and personal freedom in the name of actually protecting them, eventually leading to them doing things (almost) as bad as the terrorists they claim to be fighting.
Posters here who are actually convinced he was guilty clearly demonstrate that the brainwashing done by the American government works out as there is only one reason why you would ever be convinced of his guilt - and that's the fear and prejudice the American government has been successfully fueling over the last decade.
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"We're with you all the way, mostly"
I am not saying he was definitely guilty - as I said, based on the representation of his character, I came away believing that he was innocent.
I wonder though how you can rebuff any opinion that he may be guilty when there is no proof of his innocence either? You say the film makers deliberately gave no proof of his guilt - the same can be said of his innocence.
I wonder though how you can rebuff any opinion that he may be guilty when there is no proof of his innocence either? You say the film makers deliberately gave no proof of his guilt - the same can be said of his innocence.
There was nothing to conclusively prove he was guilty. The phone calls allegations was dismissed by a plausible explanation. They didn't even try to paint him or his family as particularly religious, and he was obviously rich and well educated, not shown as political, so what exactly would even be his motivation and incentive for helping? None. Hell he didn't even have a beard!
In real life he probably would have been monitored heavily first instead of just bundled off to be interrogated/tortured.