The Mauritanian

Rabelais

Dagobah Resident
FOTCM Member
"Mohamedou Ould Salahi fights for freedom after being detained and imprisoned without charge by the U.S. Government for years." IMDB

"Mauritanian (now in theaters, though you’re more likely to catch it when it goes on-demand starting March 2nd) begins with both a return and an exit. A man named Mohamedou Ould Slahi (Tahar Rahim) has come home to North Africa for a wedding. He’s been abroad, studying electrical engineering in Germany and living briefly in Montreal. It’s November 2001, two months after 9/11. While visiting with his family, the authorities drop by to see him. The Americans are interested in you, they tell Slahi. They want to know if you can help them locate your cousin, Mahfouz Ould al-Walid, a.k.a. Abu Hafs al-Mauritani, a.k.a. a member of Al Qaeda and advisor to Osama Bin Laden. If you could please come with us, we’d just like to ask you a few questions. His mother is worried. Slahi comforts her: They’re letting him drive to the station, he says. There’s no cause for alarm. He will be right back.

"Should you already be familiar with Slahi’s story or have read his 2015 book Guantanamo Diary, you know what happens next. He’ll spend the next 14 and a half years detained at Gitmo, and subjected to all of the horrors those particular three words imply. To the guards and his interrogators, he is Prisoner 760; after befriending a French national who occasionally throws over a soccer ball into his outdoor pen, he dubs himself “the Mauritanian,” after his native land. But he is still Mohamedou, and if nothing else, Kevin Macdonald’s drama is determined to put a name and a face to the legion of largely anonymous casualties of the War on Terror — not the victims of attacks, but the other ones, i.e. mostly Middle Eastern men who, by some circumstantial evidence, slivers of association or maybe just their nationality, became wards of the state held in a perpetual purgatory. It also wants to remind you that yes, the War on Terror happened, something that folks may have forgotten given how much policy turnover and domestic turmoil we’ve experienced over the past four years." Rolling Stone


I watched this today. Its a sobering look at the power grab of bureaucratic psychopaths and their ponerized subordinates in the immediate aftermath of 911. The damage done to the rule of law in the US has never been rectified, instead it has served as the precedence for the collapse of justice that we see today. The ineffectiveness of the cruelty inflicted at Guantanamo, on persons rounded up on flimsy evidence that was hearsay at best, is laid bare. Mohamedou was renditioned on the coerced statements of a person he had only had fleeting contact with once, when he graciously opened his home to a stranger for an overnight stay.

Powerful performances by all involved, although some whiny Karen-laden websites like Rotten Tomatoes attempt to nit pick it to death.
 
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I saw it and thought it was well done. They torture him and even threaten to bring his mother to gitmo to elicit a 'confession.' The officer who was supposed to be prosecuting the case wasn't allowed to get the unredacted files on the specifics of how that confession was obtained until 7 years had passed. A judge ruled it (confession) inadmissible and ordered his release, but they kept him there another seven years anyway. They simply needed confessions to support their narrative. It's was never about actual guilt as we well know.
 
Mohamedou was renditioned on the coerced statements of a person he had only had fleeting contact with once, when he graciously opened his home to a stranger for an overnight stay.
Pretty much the same story for most people 'renditioned' by the US into its global gulag archipelago. Some were 'legit terrorists' though - either beforehand or afterwards, when they were released on condition of 'working for us'.

Sometimes this led them to becoming 'freedom fighters' in the 'humanitarian interventions' in Libya and Syria. Sometimes this led to them joining the ranks of one of the Al Qaeda/ISIS branches that 'sprang up' in North Africa, the Middle East or Southeast Asia.

Since then, this model of mixing informants/assets (tasked with 'radicalizing aggrieved brothers') with prisoners has been transplanted into the regular correctional (prison) system of many countries. In Western countries like France, with sizable Muslim populations, certain prisons became 'terrorist factories' that churned out stooges for use at home and abroad.
 
Thanks for the recommendation @Rabelais, going to see if I can find it on Netflix or Prime, it will give me something to watch tonight. Never can find much worthy of a watch on either except documentaries or an occasional movie based on real life.
 
The movie Rendition is excellent. This stuff really happens. I'm aware of one case involving a US attorney.
 
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