After the September 11 attacks, the United States opened a prison camp at Guantanamo Bay and classified the men held there as unlawful combatants rather than prisoners of war, stripping them of the legal representation and trial rights the Geneva Convention would otherwise guarantee. This film traces the line from that legal decision to the interrogation methods used both at Guantanamo and in Iraqi prisons. Mehdi, a former detainee from Sweden, breaks a long silence to describe his time in the Cuban camp. Senior officers stationed at the base explain, on camera, the reasoning behind their treatment of prisoners, with one describing an instruction to treat detainees "like dogs" to keep control of interrogations. A former officer from the Iraqi prison system adds her own account, saying she was misled about how prisoners would be treated and that authorization for torture methods came from senior command. The film sets these testimonies side by side, letting the officers' justifications and the detainees' experiences of the same policies sit in direct contradiction.