🎥 Watched The Mauritanian.
In an era where people that should know better are expanding the remit of the infamous Guantanamo Bay detention camp, I finally got around to watching this film. It’s the true story of one person’s experience of Guantanamo’s original setup.
It’s absolutely horrific. The person in question is Mohamedou Ould Slahi who was alleged by the authorities to have been involved in planning the appalling 9/11 terrorist attack on the US. He certainly had some prior contact with al-Qaeda, having trained in one of their camps back in 1990, but claimed that he had severed all connections with the organisation in 1992.
The authorities claimed otherwise, although according to the film they really had very little evidence for it. He certainly wasn’t actually charged with any offence or permitted a court trial before being incarcerated in Guantanamo Bay. Whereupon all the horror stories you may have read about that went on there were visited upon him. Per Wikipedia:
Slahi was subjected to sleep deprivation, isolation, temperature extremes, beatings and sexual humiliation at Guantánamo. In one documented incident, he was blindfolded and taken out to sea in a boat for a mock execution.
Basically he was tortured. They even threatened his family. This would have course all been illegal on American soil, but was seemingly par for the course there.
Eventually he was released - but not before having to undergo 14 years of this appalling treatment.
When he came out he wrote a memoir which was published as “Guantánamo Diary”. The Mauritanian is the film adaption of that. Which makes it extremely disturbing of course.
A lot of the focus of the film is on the lawyers who finally defended him - Nancy Hollander and Theresa Duncan - and the difficulties of doing so when your suspect is locked up in Guantanamo, sections of the public are very against the idea of defending anyone who might remotely be involved in terrorism, evidence be damned, and, at times, you’re not quite certain that your client isn’t guilty of a horrific offence.
Nonetheless no-one should face punishment without a fair trial - essentially on the whims of the authorities - and certainly no-one should be tortured.