The Oath

The world is out of joint. Abu Jandal, formerly Bin Laden's bodyguard, now a cab driver in Yemen, is outraged over the illegal military trial in Guantanamo against his brother-in-law Salim Hamdan – while at the same time justifying mass murder against civilians. After that he drinks some Coke, much to the horror of his radical listeners, saying that the Western stuff just tastes better. On the other side is the American government, making a complete and utter fool of itself with a kafkaesque judicial farce against said Hamdan, who once was Bin Laden's chauffeur and had actually already been acquitted by the US Supreme Court before Congress wrote specific laws against him. THE OATH takes the viewer down into the abyss of the insanity that is terrorism, where different djihadist fractions threaten to kill each other, where constitutional democracies define torture as a legitimate means, and where the oath of the title, which is the pledge on the US constitution on the one side and the vow of fidelity to Osama Bin Laden on the other, has long since lost all of its original meaning. Laura Poitras' sensational and taboo-breaking documentary takes you on an emotional roller-coaster between repulsion, compassion and revolt.