PATH OF BLOOD: JONATHAN HACKER'S JIHADI DOCUMENTARY

Path Of Blood opens with Ali, a young jihadi, struggling to record his suicide video. He is distracted by his comrades, he wants coffee, he is to all intents and purposes a class clown brought to the front of the classroom to recite a lesson for which he is not prepared. Ali struggles to read the script written for him; he doesn't seem to understand it; in fact he doesn't seem to understand. In April 2004, Abdul al-Mudyaish carried out a bombing aimed at the Traffic Directorate in Riyadh.

The footage of Ali was a small part of a horde of jihadi home-movies captured by Saudi security services which makes up the bulk of Path Of Blood—the only additional material is police and other video shot in the aftermath of terror attacks, during police assaults on jihadi hideouts, and Saudi leaders on inspections or meetings. It is presented without narration or commentary, and it provides a mesmerisng look inside the world of Islamic terror at the very heart of Islam itself, Al Queda's war on the House of Saud, which Osama Bin Laden ordered in 2001, and which has been being fought since at least 2003.

Since 2001, the West has been focused on Islamic terror as it strikes at western targets. It has launched invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and seen much of the Middle East crumble into chaos. Yet in the heart of Islam, Saudi Arabia, from where most of the 911 terrorists came, the threat is just as great. Where we see the Saudis subtly propagating terror elsewhere, they also face a fundamentalist assault from those who see them bending to the will of the West.

At the heart of this paradox lie these young men—drawn to the simple answers fundamentalism offers, drawn to the excitement of violence, drawn to the camaraderie of the jihadis. The parallels with various fundamentalist and nationalist organisations in the West is not hard to draw, especially as the footage in Path Of Blood shows their thrill at fighting the repression of Saudi security, their conviction that theirs is indeed a holy war. It also shows with chilling starkness, their manipulation: when a young jihadi is chosen for a suicide mission, we are struck by the detachment of the leaders sending him, not themselves, to die.

There is an element of The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight here too. These kids are not worldly wise, they are just kids. We watch their drive to a training camp in the desert, like boys off to summer camp, and the thanks they give to Allah for the beauty of the setting. When they arrive the camp is a quagmire pelted by fierce rain, the tents ill equipped to cope with the muddy morass. As we watch the final raid on oil storage facility, the car with the bombs is about to run out of gas short of the target. We half expect the driver to ask if he needs to fill the tank.

This does not mean they are not dangerous. Such lightness contrasts sharply with the violence and destruction we also see. But by turning the terrorists into real people, Path Of Blood makes clear that these youngsters are victims themselves, while raising the painful spectre that their attraction to the cause is inevitable under our present circumstances, and likely to increase.

I was reminded more than once of the documentaries of Frederick Wiseman—for the way the producer/director Jonathan Hacker leaves the viewer free to make up his own mind, but more for the careful way in which the story, and the options, are presented. As with Wiseman, he does not moralise, he presents material which requires that you moralise, and as with Wiseman, the audience comes to see the problem lies deeper, it's more systematically ingrained in the situation, that we are led to, or like to, think. This is a remarkable, bravura piece of documentary making, a must-see for anyone concerned with the problem of terrorism, which should be everybody.

Path Of Blood is on show at Picturehouse in London

MANHUNT: LONDON FILM FESTIVAL'S WAR ON TERROR II

Manhunt might be billed as the counterpoint, or indeed antidote, to Zero Dark Thirty or Homeland, in the scripts and iconography of which a single (in both senses of the word) beautiful American woman, obsessed with her task, either because she's the best or bipolar or both, tries to defeat a 21^st Century Fu Manchu, head of a monstrous third-world army about to swallow up America and its 'freedom they hate'.

Made for HBO by Greg Barker, based on Peter Bergen's book, and featuring Bergen among its interviewees, Manhunt tells the story of the decade-long search for Osama bin Laden in different terms, a manhunt against a small gang of criminals, spearheaded by 'the Sisterhood', a team of women analysts more like soccer moms than secret agents. From that premise, the film examines h the contrast between the reality of that hunt, which culminated in the killing of Bin Laden in his compound in Pakistan, and the perception foisted upon the public. It also addresses cogently the entire structure of the so-called 'war on terror', its uses and abuses of torture, and its relations to what might be seen as that war's ultimate aims.

It's a balanced picture, filled with interviews that lay out the moral dilemmas and the practical problems. The most interesting at first are with the members of 'the sisterhood', whose tracking of Al Queda began in the 1990s, and became obsessive, and whose warnings about his plans were largely ignored. In the wake of 9/11, however, with Bin Laden elevated to the levels of a Hitler as worldwide public enemy number 1, their work became more and more important, though they often found themselves in conflict with the agents on the ground. Nada Bakos and Cynthia Storer, tasked with following and tracking Al Queda from afar, are given more depth when set against the agents on the ground, here represented by Marty Martin, who worked the Middle East, and Jose Rodriquez, who ran counter-terrorism at the CIA.

Storer talks about how the women were called 'obsessive', as if that were a female characteristic, before the whole CIA became obsessive. And Bakos, assigned to find Musab al Kawaki, who was finally killed in an airstrike in 2006, explains in plainest terms 'my job was to hunt a person down, to capture or kill. I had to be okay with that.' It was Bakos who provided the key link to the courier, whose tracking finally located Bin Laden.

The contrasts are worthy of an episode of Homeland, though more chilling for their reality. A smug reference to 'black sites' as 'boutique locations' where suspects can be tortured by American proxies, is a chilling reminder of what the reality of intelligence work is like. But the former deputy director of the CIA, John McLaughlin, introduced performing sleight of hand tricks, is unconvincing when he speaks about the CIA feeling 'alone' with their responsibility to prevent another 9/11. When considered in the wake of what that excuse has been used to justify, from domestic surveillance to political repression, he sounds chilling. One of the Sisterhood, Jennifer Matthews, was actually killed in the suicide bombing at Khost, bringing home the reality, and the frustration.

What becomes most clear is how false the Zero Dark Thirty portrayal, and argument, is, and how much domestic politics impeded an early elimination of Bin Laden, during the Clinton years. Zero Dark Thirty's celebration of torture is scoffed at most effectively by Ali Soufan, an agent and interrogator, who points out the intel that finally got Bin Laden came through research by the Sisterhood and more traditional interrogation techniques. It demonstrates how Barker's documentary not only raises questions, but presents them in depth and context, something sorely lacking in most mainstream media. In this context, the absence of reference to the Bush administration, and the early connections between Bin Laden and the US, seems odd, and when President Obama is portrayed announcing Bin Laden's death, he is almost literally seen as a hologram figure, a PR construct worthy of Orwell. Barker includes an interview with General Stanley McChrystal, whose criticisms of the adminstration when he was in command in Afghanistan, which makes the most crucial point, when he says, 'I'm not sure America has made the effort to understand what it is we just went through...the key is why are the enemy the enemy? If you don't understand why they're doing it, it's very difficult to stop it.'

In the larger sense that question it seems to get lost in the rush to action. Philip Mudd, former deputy chief of counter-terrorism sees things more simply: 'There are philosophical debates you can have, but at the end of the day, the question is: Are you gonna move or not? Yes or no? Go or no go? That's it.' If you've watched Zero Dark Thirty, or network news, you know the answer to that one already.