Accidental tourists: The Road to Guantanamo, an unflinching dramatization of the case of Britain's Tipton Three, depicts degradation just for degradation's sake.

HAD THEY BEEN BORN AND RAISED on this side of the Atlantic, they might have turned up as characters in a Bruce Springsteen ballad. They are the sort Springsteen tends to memorialize: Their roots are in a faded manufacturing neighborhood; their brushes with the law were petty serapes that did not keep them from retaining their jobs as mail sorters or retail clerks, or from studying at a local university. All three have that knockabout way of going through life. It makes them neither aimless nor directed, but somehow it carries them along.

In the fall of 2001, the happenstance of ...

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