tom. a not so happy easter in europe some states expand covert curbs while others announce the partial closure of terms. also with millions of americans losing their jobs and small businesses shuttered shot shattered during the pandemic it's revealed that some of the country's biggest companies paid no federal taxes last year. and a new hollywood movie borat tanian depicts the story of the man considered the most tortured detainee in guantanamo bay talks to the prisoners lawyer and the director of the film. there was no evidence at all of the still to this day remains no evidence to hold against. there is always pressure against cases and. in guantanamo. those are world news headlines for this hour stay tuned for more in

just about 60 minutes. time action or times you were going underground 10 years to the month wiki leaks began releasing the secret guantanamo files detailing torture and the detention of more than $150.00 innocent people you know by cuba the youngest who 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 the hall and saw his lawyer who is played by 2 time oscar winner jodie foster. where he jab visiting your client about incidents of inmates spitting in female lawyers. you want to represent the crew for 911.

mauritanian held in guantanamo. he recruited the guys who flew your friend's plane into the south tower. he put those men only has been the plane. i'm going to make it even to anyone just me push back away from the table beginning as quick as we can. kevin mcdonald as a holiday thanks so much for coming on going underground nancy how real is the mauritanian the film i mean when you 1st met mohammad you say it's it is real and that is pretty much the way we 1st met it 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 has 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 was always pressure against cases in more in guantanamo or cases involving alleged terrorists and we did 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 title in mauritania for 20 years and so i think it was a degree of excitement about traveling and day in beautiful cape town but at the same time being all that sat which was reconstructed to his memory really of what he had 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 write it 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 terror is life goes on but me 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 this

mohamedou 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 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 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 at 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 and everything else is that there are the whole point of this story is there it 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 jurors 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 than i think that of faggot you know i think look 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. jodie foster but it come rushing willie 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 is you know you think it's a movie like when time is going to be relentlessly great 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 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 know given 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 mohammad 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 and the whole they're on they never seem to want to come on i mean kevin 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 rub is pooled 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 of 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 sainted of ahmed i'm completely absorbed from a responsibility that you there's no getting away from the fact that he continued the he continued to use the policies that was very dishonest. 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 to europe he 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 because you're representing up dollar right a mile or nationally who is accused of the u.s.s. cole bombing in 2000 and he corrects update on that case well. 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 has what was done to him and got 200000 euros to his family

but in terms of getting closer to trying him know those those cases his and the others who have been tried their cases need to be resolved and they can be if if joe biden wants to really do it more from what's going on kevin mcdonald and lawyer nancy hollander after this break. humanity has never seen such strange natural phenomena before giant coming to appearing in the young mountain in. one off or another. never again you give us. your boy you know him does. he want to be at. this one appeared in 2020. how often and where will new creases appear.

how dangerous are they for human the slum only you get to the 18 and 2021 russian scientists came quite close to working out what's going on. they built a full scale 3 d. model of the black hole. 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 guantanamo files the torture scenes and how you went about thinking of how to direct torture by u.s. authorities and you know occupied cuba. well obviously that was an essential part of the story the unit mamadou was tortured for i think $75.00 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 mohammad 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 we we go to. see these were his mother is in prison within appears to be in prison with him in guantanamo these are all 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 is 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'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. but 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 going time of leaks from wiki leaks julian a songe 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 a moment is lying 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 back in 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 canon 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 reading the underdog actually 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. prosecution won't show us the evidence they have against atomic clock and you know probably taken 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 again to review even. 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. should of 2 things one is that your cat she did write his article. which was saying why he had resigned from the case he did write that for the war still 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 to remember not to the paper but but nancy and 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 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 is a reaction then 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 guide rid syria or 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 i think it is trying. i'm looking forward to doing remand to comedy to be honest yes i do yes i do injuries not is not is is us 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 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. 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 at and dale it's coffin there isn't it sounds good be interesting to see how much quickly cinema spends back i do think there's

a pent up appetite for people wanting just to go right. to be in their eyes to experience something in a communal setting like a cinema and i hope that you know people will get that sufficient numbers that it 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 it has had a theatrical release south korea was very pleased saudi arabia. dubai so. there are some places where still being seen 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 like the universe and everything with

pentagon and space advice that neil de grasse tyson until then join me on the ground to form a social channel. an entire village in alaska has had to move if another country threaten to wipe out an american town. we do everything in our power to protect the. want of a escaping climate change poses the same threat right now alaska has seen some of the fuss just coastal erosion in the world whilst about 35 feet. 35 feet of ground in just about 3 months while we were measuring. is fast.