make that point when joni talks about that she's taking the words right out of an op ed i did in 2010 where i said i was a terrorist lawyer and proud of it i'm not saying that i'm famous he had to kill 3000 civilians and we're doing everything we can to get him out and we're doing our job i didn't take the l. phrase legal fund that's not a part of my job my dad told me i'm not welcome for thanksgiving this year that's not a part of my job. get out what. turkey and pumpkin pie with mom and dad and uncle joe. i want get out go home. you can't win a case. if you don't provide your own and given what happened when muhammadu visited the set in south africa and saw what you were up to i think. i may see that people might not know there's a mcdonald's in guantanamo bay prison camp and a gift shop and so on well they get shot in the dogs are

a little way from the actual prison camp but yet they they they're very depicted in the film. the when maplin 102 came to south africa which is where we shot the bulk of this movie we were filming the guantanamo scenes and it was the 1st place he'd been to in the world actually going taliban in mauritania for 20 years and so i think it was a degree of excitement about traveling in day in beautiful cape town but at the same time being a let's say which was reconstructed to his memory really of what he seen and experienced at the find that very difficult he didn't last very low the 1st day he went home pretty quickly back to his photo out and i think it i think it brought back an awful lot of you know post-traumatic stress disorder that sort of thing not to tell me what happened but it because you asked me to set fire to this place but i'm still. writing and that's where the pages are for writing down. you need to tell me the truth you need to tell me what happens i can't defend you

do you understand that to take it nothing whatever i say. it doesn't matter it's an island i hear outside my family my brother their lives go on terror is life goes on but be here i'm like a statue i mean that's it we've been told that people watch this show in guantanamo bay what did you 1st think when you saw the cut that kevin gave you of the film about it's as much your life as well as a mom would. say you know i watched it and then i watched it again and then i watched it again and i cried. the scenes of guantanamo were just amazing they were so real and i was with my mom to do in cape town and when we walked in to what would have been the kind of pal way to is to his prison camp i gassed i said i feel like i'm back in guantanamo.

i mean kevin you have won an oscar you got jodie foster's won 2 oscars in this film people have already been talking about why you have no oscar nominations for this film is it really gives people thaw whatever that is saying about how bad it was there were grounds for the u.s. authorities to. lock him up and deny habeas corpus to moment or so i wrote up 1st of all i'm not the president answer the question about the legal runs but my understanding from talking to nancy talking to your cat shoes the letter the prosecution lawyer for the government in america that everybody else is that there are the whole point of this story is there were new grounds for having him there there were suspicions and he was taught to associate with some people who may have done some bad things but there was no evidence at all in the still to this day

remains no evidence at all against guantanamo he was an innocent man who was locked up for more than 14 years and there are many many other people in one time in the same situation as in even today there are 40 people there and it sure is nancy will tell you many of them have never been charged with anything at all and are caught in a kind of legal limbo still in that prison you think that the academy members of the academy looking inwards more of revolutionary african-americans then i think that it's rag that you know i think you know i don't know i suspect the truth is that not enough people watch the movie because i think people in the academy tend to be older tend to be a little sensitive and they fill out a film by going time and during the covert crisis to really want to watch that so i suspect that i know that most of the people i know who watched it remembers it can be really really enjoyed and appreciated it but i think just getting people to

watch a film like this is hard which is obviously why we have journey for. but it come rushing willy all these big stars is to try and you know who people ain't and i would say see you at your audience that it is you know you think it's a movie like when time is going to be relentlessly grim it is actually also an entertaining movie it is presented like it's really are and i think for a mainstream audience they will they will they will enjoy it right from the mauritania we know not to trust the place that it i believe that the united states of america can't win use of fear and terror to control a couple simple sights and that's in the film something comes up where it appears that president bush personally gets your case in his daily briefings what's happening in your case did that happen under obama as well. well i said he was going to close guantanamo. but he had numerous opportunities to free

people including muhammad umami who won we won his abs case in 2010 the judge said the government did not have evidence sufficient to hold him and that's a very low bar for the government they only have to prove that it's more likely than not and they couldn't prove it and yet the obama administration's justice department appealed that case pealed our case appealed others there was no reason that they could have just let these people go home if they wanted to close guantanamo and some people would have left then there are 6 people right now who have been cleared for release one of whom since 2009 those people want on a motion close and we should end indefinite detention but those people are the easiest to release is the obama lawyers the put him back in prison i don't give in about how that affects the narrative just tell me why the obama lawyers would have

wanted to put him back in prison after the habeas corpus element was one i don't know they were the same lawyers who started this case in the civil division of the department of justice under bush. but the attorney general the the u.s. attorney could have stopped it i think you have to ask president obama and perhaps mr holder why they didn't but as far as i'm concerned they were speaking out of both sides of their mouth when they said they would close guantanamo mohammed who spent 6 long years in in guantanamo after we won the hay b.s. and only got out through it entirely different non-court process called the periodic review board that obama finally set up where 6 intelligence agencies had. to agree unanimously that he was not a significant threat to the u.s. and its allies and they agreed to that and he got out which shows that frankly he

should never have been in in the 1st place where we invite obama in the whole they're on they never seem to want to come on i mean having a bomb and put him back in jail after he wins that doesn't happen in an innocent man narrative plot to a film i think that. that's a terrible twist on the end of the movie and we shouldn't really be giving it away it's actually the part that more people have said to me oh my god because you've been through this incredible and sometimes harrowing journey and you think you're coming out the other side because there's been this courtroom victory. and then the roughest fooled from for monday you and you get a small sense of what it must have been like to be mamadou or nancy. you know feel like you did finally you had a victory in your sights and steak in a way so you know i think that it has been controversial in the u.s. that the movie does have

a card in the end which says it was the bomb of history shouldn't which share was responsible for him you know repealing and keeping him locked up there for the 6 years. i think some people would like to see obama the same to vomit completely and so from a responsibility that you there's no getting away from the fact that he continued the he continued to use the policies of his greatest us. how did that feel after winning and then as family do today i understand he cannot easily travel is a kind of president today well he is a kind of prisoner who didn't get a passport for 3 years after he got out that was a deal the u.s. made with mauritania they wouldn't get in the passport and now he has not been able to get a visa so far to 2 european only go. on a visit to south africa we are hoping he and his american wife and baby can

someday find a country that will give the give him citizenship and allow them to allow him to travel he's a free man he should be allowed to travel because you're representing our dollar e run a mile and nationally who is accused of the u.s.s. cole bombing in 2000 and he correct update on that case. well in. you know he's been there a long time he's facing the death penalty the case is not anywhere near going to trial he was tortured brutally in the black sites we have been able to win some cases for him in the european court of human rights which at least show the world what his what was done to him and got 200000 euros to his family but in terms of getting closer to trying him no those those cases his and the others who have been tried their cases need to be resolved and they can be if joe

biden wants to really do it more for what's going on kevin mcdonald and lawyer nancy hollander after this break. the law straight frauds going all the way back to the twenty's they're not different they're repackaged rebranded and sold again it's the same why is it a bottle so the smack frog is just a variation on the dot com frog which is a variation of the mortgage sub prime frog if you will frog the g.d.p. would be they would be negative 20 percent. and you know became the bottleneck is a valid excuse your movement and you know full well you see cooperation that is

a girlfriend to some little food we call to do division we said action on this lead before we go out today socially. topical least the so-called peace with the palestinians solution and between so you won't vote with them you know it's those who say you know. an entire village in alaska has had to move if another country trying to wipe out an american town. we do everything in our power to protect. water they escaping climate change causes the same threat right now alaska has seen some of the fastest coastal erosion in the world we lost about 30 feet. 35 feet of ground in just about 3 months while we were measuring. he is fast and

happiness the river is 35 closer to hound them was nearly 4 i think we're part of america 1st from america. were. welcome back here's part 2 of our interview with oscar winning kevin macdonald and guantanamo lawyer nancy holland kevin tell me about when you 1st read the great animal file of the torture scenes and how you went about thinking of how to direct torture by u.s. authorities in an occupied cuba. well obviously that was an essential part of the story to know that marmaduke was tortured for i think $75.00 days something like that and. it's. the center of

his the dark center of his experience there. and it needed to be depicted but i didn't want to make film where people walked out where they switched off their t.v. sets had to be done in a way that was viewable and so the decision i took was to try and be as. subjectivists possible to try and go inside mohammad whose head and try to show the audience what he would have been feeling what he would have been experiencing psychologically so it becomes quite surreal it becomes a bit of a fever dream we flashback within 2 scenes of his childhood with his father in the desert and camels we we go to. see this were his mother is in prison within appears to be in prison with him in guantanamo these roll things that in his book he describes the tricks that his mind played on him as he was going through this awful this awful treatment so we try to do present the torture in a way that's right different i think than it has been shown in the past in films

like 0 dark 30 which are very much from the american perspective very much from i kind of external view looking at someone who being tortured who don't know who that person is and it becomes very rapidly kind of pornographic i think i mean nancy have you ever come across a case where u.s. authorities have threatened your client with their mother being raped. well only an aberration on the streets case was also the same thing clearly these are clear violations of the geneva convention but then again everything about guantanamo is a violation of the geneva convention and although what mohamedou went through was much worse than could be portrayed in the movie. everything bad that cameron does put into the movie actually happened to mohamedou. my turn

let me ask you. what if you. were in the west why. he built this place. you abandon all of your principles all your law is. wrong. and it's the it's the 10 year anniversary of the going time of leaks from wiki leaks julian a songe of course the un accuses the authorities here of torture and you are here in london and we would you really have won the case nancy if you hadn't had this meeting with the us prosecuting attorney we had to file motions to compel as it shown in the in the movie over and over again to get documents from the government and finally the government the senate armed services committee report the schmidt report there were numerous reports that released this information. so that the judge could see it and the judge also saw a classified information but it was just clear after all this time that the

government had nothing they gave up on the millennium plot when they started they gave up on is having anything to do with 911 all they were left with was that he joined al qaida in 1990 and 92 and of course the us as far as i'm concerned also joined the us and the u.k. provided the funds that went to pakistan that went to the mujahideen. who at that time were fighting the russians and we were on the same side as he says in the movie and the judge agreed yet nancy in the film there seems to be i don't know whether they're laughing at your client mama dislike or they're confused when mamadou says i was fighting on the same side of the americans something you kind of mentioned just just before because the united states was backing what would become al-qaeda or arguably. yes it seems like they're laughing at him not believing him

because they keep going back to he must have been involved in 911 he must have been the one who recruited ramzi bin al s'shibh which of course could not have been true he met him over 2 years before anyone even thought about guantanamo we have to remember that bush and his people rumsfeld and cheney creating guantanamo to be a place outside the rule of law i mean gannon actually brian de palma made a film called unredacted about the war in iraq didn't get much distribution he made he made scuff a softer a lot of you know about depicting the redactions of the documents nancy go well obviously it's very hard to make lawyering sexy on screen and it's even harder to make out paperwork sexy on screen so. you know we had i think we succeeded as well as you possibly can with jodie foster and benedict cumberbatch as they are

reaching the underage actually don't they finally get their hands on the uncensored redacted documents and they read those and they're such good actors that they can for trade the emotions that they're feeling is they read something and there we are there is an audience seeing what they're reading the u.s. government is holding up with the 700 prisoners by the time since when did we start locking people up without a trial in this country. because the. prosecution won't show us the evidence they have against atomic back and get a problem take it up the government will ask that's about in a 2nd but in the film kevin you the wall street journal doesn't come out very well doing a hit piece on on nancy i think that's why a film is the revill i have to say other than i gave you a review of it. that is actually. a moment of fictionalization the wall street journal did not actually write that it is a legacy the that is its essence can slay. 2 things one is that stuart couch did

write his article. which was saying why he had resigned from the case he did write that for the war so the street journal or the interview was done with him for the worst wall street journal and nancy had written this op ed piece actually for the new york times golden a terrorist lawyer and proud of it and so we kind of conflated those 2 things to keep it the same newspaper i think in the movie actually you'll find it's cool that the the washington journal or something is going to like to say well apologies the rumor not the paper but but that's the end you know a theory if that's what it like when you're in a case and and things are appearing in the press suggesting that you are an apologist for 911. well that is exactly what happened and that's why i wrote that piece in 2010 because dick cheney was saying these these lawyers should not be doing this. mrs this is wrong they shouldn't be representing these people and it

really made me angry so i wrote much of what jodi says when the journalist comes to see her which is that when i represented murderers there are people who rape little babies nobody accuse me of being like them and all the sudden i'm like my clients and i ended it by saying that if dick cheney or any of these other people who are accusing me found themselves on the wrong side of the law i hope there's a lawyer to represent them and we still have the rule of law in this country which at that time concerned me i mean kevin some people who will watch this film won't even alive in that $911.00 not the chilean one of his if you tax on the world trade center and the pentagon what why you said we are all living in the shadow of 911 almost all of our history of the last 20 years in some ways been accepted by might

by 911 and i think that we can see the wars in the middle east obviously directly resulted from that. one could say that the. above was a reaction lend to jibberish everyone thought that he was going to close guantanamo but. even trump you know even trump i think is is existing in a kind of was 'd existing in a post 911 world and you know he used one town i'm a he said he is not going to close he's going to put more bad guys there really for the phrase was that he used so. i think america was traumatized by 911 and i do we try to depict that a little bit in in the film and with the trauma i went reason and. when the rule of law or certainly the respect for the rule of law in the highest echelons of the u.s. government and it's taken quite a long time for that to come back and it was that people with trump people were talking about the same thing you know he's trying to he's trying to break the rule

of law unfortunately he didn't win his 2nd his 2nd term in or be able to prove that because it was joe biden who was on the senate foreign relations committee you facilitated the the iraq war the followed 911 i mean right now people are talking about strange alliances with saudi arabia continuing with defacto isis al guided syria or in in yemen have things changed. i don't know how much things have changed you know. what created kuantan i'm all the wars in iraq and and afghanistan probably some measure of creating isis it's very hard for me to see that a great deal is changed when we still have 40 people outside the rule of law and who knows how many in prisons in afghanistan for example under the u.s. we just don't know and maybe the real real suspect of of the person was recruiting

the 911 hijackers out there somewhere kevin just tell me about only reportedly you were hesitant about taking on this project. has he taken the securities they did with the project and why were you there to know i wasn't present for that reason i mean i think that. there have been many movies far more critical of the of of the bush regime than this one. i think this is really. a human portrait so i think that's what's radical about this film is not i'm going to sing politically it's about the fact that it's humanizing somebody who is being who is of a group who has been other more than almost any other i'd like you to consider releasing in letters. to his paper. maybe a book. people need to reach a story for themselves. and it'll put pressure on the government to give us

a court date. come ready for that you're looking forward to working on a fill about oprah winfrey and i figured maybe think of it as trying. i'm looking forward to doing remand to comedy to be honest yes i do yes i do when she's not it's not is is maybe not such a revolutionary subj. unless you are monkeys which i know. well i mean that you also worked on the chelsea manning case have how his chelsea manning coping she's she said that without you she would never been able to get on with her life she of course the source of wiki leaks is revelations about so many elements of the war on terror. chelsea is actually doing well now fortunately one of the one great things that i think we were able to accomplish chelsea and my

partner minutes more now i was was getting her out. it was it was amazing i didn't believe it would happen but she's out she's free she seems to be doing quite well no pardon though from joe biden. was no not at this time of the expected like that i mean of course kevin they'll be watching this film presumably in a lot down around the world and how do you think coronaviruses affecting film with the end of the silver screen. well i hope not is certainly and dale it's coffin there isn't it sounds really interesting to see how much it quickly cinema's sense back i do think there's a pent up appetite for people wanting just to go right. to be in their highs to experience something in a communal setting like a cinema and i hope that you know people will go back to sufficient numbers that

that economically still makes sense to have cinemas but there's no doubt is it getting away from it it is a crisis in cinema going on in the cinema industry and the street speed a great boon for the streamers i mean our movie is down here in the u.k. . completely bypassing at the actual release of this coming at all amazon and likewise a lot of in a lot of territories around the world there are some places as at the actual release south korea i was very pleased to saudi arabia. dubai so. there are some places we're still being seeing the actually that's the honda kevin macdonald thank you thank you thank you very much that's it for this special show we'll be back on easter monday to tell god life the universe and everything with pentagon space advisor neil de grasse tyson until then join me on the road to war my social media channel.

in the 1920 s. and thirty's several 100 african-americans moved to the soviet union and many of their descendants still live in russia. saying at the risk of i know nobody but us the opposite of us to get truthful on the. definitional scale back home back american suffered from racism and a complete lack of prospects. in the real land dealers also run by else a strong. well. so they decided to leave everything behind and start a new life in a country about which they knew almost nothing at all some of the african americans who were thrilled union you know if you heard round the crowd. moulay is golf you know you're going to call close to you and now

almost a 100 years later the history is repeating itself my great grandfather george time went to russia. on probable worst time to go anywhere why not me. when i come here. for. this and you know became the bottleneck is a valid excuse your movement and you know you see cooperation there is a government to some little food we call to do this vision we said action on this lead before it's not you go to laos and socially then don't copy it at least those so-called peace with the palestinians all against you between so you know what about me and you know it's those who say only.

people. not so happy easter in europe or some e.u. states expand the scope of curbs while others announce the partial closure of vaccination centers. u.s. firms lay off staff amid the pandemic it's revealed some of america's biggest companies paid no federal corporate tax. so the hollywood film the mauritanian depicts the see. the man widely regarded to be the most tortured detainee. speaks to the director of the film and the president's lawyer. who is new evidence a tool is still to this day means no evidence against one. there is always pressure against. more.