What happened to Abbas that night in 2003 and the following nine months while he was interrogated and abused in increasingly filthy jails -- including infamous Abu Ghraib -- are the subject of a new film documentary named "The Prisoner: Or How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair."

Prior to his arrest Abbas had been imprisoned by Saddam Hussein's son Uday in 1998 and suffered three months of electrical shocks. He welcomed the American invasion and after his arrest assumed the misunderstanding would soon be resolved.

Instead, he was subjected to interrogators bent on forcing Abbas to confess to crimes he did not commit. His captors pressed him with bizarre questions about music tastes, sexual preferences and Harrison Ford. When his intelligence value was exhausted, he was transferred to Abu Ghraib Prison.

The story does grab you, although most of it relies on Abbas' own words. Viewers do see some footage of the raid on his house, shot by director/producer/screenwriter Michael Tucker while he was embedded with coalition troops, but there is little presented -- other than his testimony -- as to what happened after Abbas' arrest.

Fortunately, Abbas'journalism background came into play while in prison. He chronicled details of his captivity, including names and serial numbers of fellow prisoners, in places guards wouldn't notice (such as the inside of his boxer shorts).

And in an attempt to compensate for the visual monotony, Tucker and fellow director/producer/screenwriter Petra Epperlein use comic book-style drawings and captions to illustrate parts of the story and fill in narrative gaps.

Late in the film, we finally meet a US soldier who confirms parts of the tale. One of the men sent to Abu Ghraib after the abuse scandals, Benjamin Thompson, was a prison guard who befriended Abbas and speaks of him with great respect as a peacemaker in a riot-prone environment. Thompson is a highly sympathetic character whose criticism of Army-run prisons goes beyond isolated abuses to grave systemic flaws.

Using Tucker's embedded footage, Abbas' home movies, testimony from former guard Benjamin Thompson and original comic book art, the film traces the unique story of an ordinary man who dreamed of being a Western journalist but became trapped in a nightmare.