decided to leave everything behind and start a new life in a country in which they knew almost nothing of some of the. ground great crowds. if you go on to. you. know almost a 100 years later the history is repeating itself my great grandfather george time went to russia. the worst time to go anywhere why not me. when i come here. so what we've got to do is identify the threats that we have it's crazy. let it be an arms race in this very dramatic development the only place. i don't see how that strategy will be successful very. time to sit down and

talk. time action returns you were going underground 10 years to the mother wiki leaks began releasing the secret guantanamo files detailing torture and the detention of more than 150 innocent people in occupied cuba the youngest whom was 15 u.s. president joe biden has still not close the prison come down and now one of its inmates he's the focus of award winning film the mauritanian it's directed by oscar winning touching the void of the last king of scotland director kevin macdonald i only spoke to him and nancy hall and saw his lawyer who is played by 2 time oscar winner jodie foster. many where he jab and visiting your client about incidents of inmates spitting in team elmore's. you want to represent the head recruiter for 911

. in mauritania held in guantanamo bay recruited the guys who flew your friends plane into the south tower. those men only has been playing. a little make it even to anyone just when you push back away from the table because we can. see all that thanks so much for coming on going on the ground nancy how real is the mauritanian the film i mean when you 1st met mohammad you. it's it is real and that is pretty much the way we 1st met he was shackled he put his arms out and we walked into his arms the only thing that's different is that it was 2 of us at once and he said my lawyers and the way kevin is done it so that the

seem to be a lot of pressure going to class pressure i don't know for you to drop the case all through well that there is always pressure against cases in more in guantanamo or cases involving alleged terrorists and we tried didn't make that point when jodi 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 saying that he helped 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. people might not know there's a mcdonald's in guantanamo bay prison camp and a gift shop and so on. well the gift shop only dolls are a little way from the actual prison camp but yet they they they're both depicted in the film. the women when 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 one time to live in mauritania for 20 years and so i think it was a degree of excitement about traveling in big and beautiful cape town but at the same time being on that set which was reconstructed to his memory really of what he'd seen and experienced the find that very difficult he didn't last very low the 1st day he went home pretty quickly back to his hotel and i think it i think it brought back an awful lot of you know post-traumatic stress disorder that sort of

thing you got to tell me what happened how did you like it you asked me to set fire to this place but i'm still. a gun and that's what the pages are for writing down. you need to tell the truth you need to tell me what happened how i got the pain do you want to take it nothing whatever i said. it doesn't matter. and i and i died here outside my family my brother their lives go on. tara's life goes on but the 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 muhammad. so i 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 us to do in

cape town and when we walked in to what would have been the kind of hallway to his to his prison camp i gassed i said i feel like i'm back in in guantanamo. i mean kevin you have won an oscar you've got jodie foster has 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 for 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 got up 1st of all i'm not the person to answer that question it'll be no runs but my understanding from talking to nancy talking to your cat shoes the letter the prosecution lawyer for the government in america and everything 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 a 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 i sure as nancy will tell you many of them have never been charged with anything at all and are 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 than i think dowd saget yeah i think look i don't know i suspect the truth is that not enough people watched 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. did it come direct shipping would be all these big stars is to try and you know 2 people ain't and i would say see you at your audience that it 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 public to doubt it i believe that the united states of america what 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 to turn

a motion to 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 but we invite obama in the hole there 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've finally you know had a victory 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 in history shouldn't which it was responsible for and 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 zone from a responsibility that that you there's no getting away from the fact that he continued the he continued to be the policies that was very decisive. 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 misa so far to 2 european only guy. it means that 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 yeah because you're representing our dollar e nasser he who is accused of the u.s.s. cole bombing in 2000 any 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 than lawyer nancy hollander after this break. the law straight frogs going all the way back to the twenty's they're not different they're repackaged rebranded and sold again it's the same wine it in a bottle so the smack frog is just a variation on the dot com frog which is a variation of the mortgage sub prime fraud to remove the fraud the g.d.p. would be it would be negative 20 percent.

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 quentin will file 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. mamadou was tortured for. i think 75 days something like that and. it's it's it's this is the center of his the dark center of his experience there. and it needs to be depicted but i didn't want to make a film where people walked back to 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

subjective as possible to try and go inside mohamed who's 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 which we go to. see these were his mother is in prison within appears to be in prison with him in guantanamo are these role things that in his book he describes the tricks that his mind played in him as he was going through this awful this awful treatment so we try to do is present the torture in a way that's very 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'd been 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 run. we're in the west why. he built this place. you abandon all of your principles all the law is. wrong. and it's the it's the 10 year anniversary of the time of

leaks from wiki leaks julian assigns of course the un accuses the authorities here of torturing you were 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 at paperwork sexy on screen so. you know we have i think we succeeded as well as you possibly can with jodie foster in 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 president's primetime since when did we start locking people up without a trial in this country. to keep. prosecution want to show us the evidence they have against atomic back in a problem take it up the government will ask that 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 that is essential can slay. should have 2 things one is that your couch didn't write his article. which was saying why he had resigned from the case he did write that for the warsaw 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 called on 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 called the the washington journal or something or not 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 raped little babies nobody accused me of being like them all of

a 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 wasn'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 way has been affected by it not 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 existing in a post 911 world and you know he used guantanamo 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 reasoning. 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 ate with the project and why are you here to know i wasn't present for that reason i

mean i think that sam there have been many movies far more critical of the of of the bush regime than this one. i think this is really. i guess 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. somebody for that will be looking forward to working on a fill about oprah winfrey and that he figured hey 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 is not is is maybe not such a revolutionary subj. unless you are among 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 mansoor no 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 is coughing 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 do that sufficient numbers that economically still make sense to have cinemas but there's no doubt as it is 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 is down here in the u.k.

this is completely bypassing of the actual release is coming out all amazon and likewise a lot of in a lot of territories around the world there are some places it has had a theatrical release south korea is very pleased saudi arabia. dubai so. there are some places where still being seen the african on economic all thank you . thank you thank you very much that's it for this special show will be back on easter monday just old dog life the universe and everything with pentagon space advisor. enjoying the underground to go on social media channels.

a not so happy easter in europe some 6 coalwood curbs while others and the partial closure of the nation's centers. also ahead on the program with millions of americans losing their jobs and small businesses shuttered really. it's revealed that some of the country's biggest companies paid no federal taxes last year. during hollywood release the mara cheney and depicts the story of the man widely regarded to be the most tortured detainee in guantanamo bay talks to the prison.