“The Mauritanian” and a Girl from Gitmo
In 2006 I was in Guantanamo Bay. I was not in the military. Nor in the detention camp. Nor in a family stationed on the base. I was in a circus. The first, and to my knowledge, only circus to ever perform in Guantanamo Bay, “Cuba”. My Junior High School band director always said I’d go far.
“Who doesn’t want a free trip to Cuba?” Schailene Woodley’s character “Teri Duncan” in the upcoming film The Mauritanian sarcastically replies when told she was on a case to defend accused terrorist Mohamedou Ould Slahi.
Except, Gitmo is not really Cuba. It is on the island, but it is considered US soil. It is a sanctioned off area, completely separate from the country, for which the United States pays approximately 4K in “rent” a month. Allegedly, Castro has yet to cash the checks.
Guantanamo is a mysterious, surreal, and controversial place. Having spent a week of my life there, as an “undercover clown” observing as much as I could access, and even eventually translating my experience into a short documentary titled Guantanamo Circus, I can always ascertain in journalism whether a person has actually been to the base or not. It is actually so much more than a base. It is a town, with a couple restaurants or clubs such as The Bay View, a convenience store selling Guantanamo branded souvenirs, a Subways, beautiful beaches, a marina for private boats, and even a graveyard of ships. (We visit the graveyard of ships and their legends in our documentary). So I was interested when I received an invitation to a preview of The Mauritanian online via my union’s screening committee, complete with a live zoom Q&A with a SAG moderator, actors Jodi Foster and Tahar Ramin, lawyer Nancy Hollander (whom Ms. Foster portrayed) and subject of the film Mohamadou Ould Slahi. Yes, a friendly, warm, cozy, live zoom with Jodi Foster and a former, trained, “bayat-e -Islam” Al-Qaida member. Talk about taking “woke” to an entirely new level.
Of course, the portrayal of naval base Guantanamo Bay in the movie suffered many inaccuracies, which always makes me question the legitimacy of the rest of the film, and the narrative it is portraying. The film made it appear as if the detainee camp, known as “behind the wire” for those of us who were actually there, was sequestered off on a remote part of the island, instead of where it actually stands, on a hill, directly across from the amphitheater smack dab in the middle of town, as a hypnagogic reminder of the United States defying habeas corpus. One doesn’t just land “in Cuba” as a scene in the movie depicts, and then take a bus to Camp Delta. It is an extravagant ritual of processing, filing, and transferring boats, to ferries, to get across the Cuban section into the Guantanamo territory. A large statue of Ronald McDonald representing American capitalist imperialism isn’t standing there to greet you, as is shown in the film. And it is not so desolate, cold and windy, but rather, in reality, a 1950s’ Twilight Zone version of a Club Med resort, furthering the abnormal atmosphere.
However the film nailed the authenticity of the beloved, protected, giant Iguanas local to the land, and the signs reading “Do Not Harm Iguanas. $10,000 fine.” Yes, I’m sure everyone can grasp the irony on that one. Another hypocrisy perhaps, which is dealt with in Guantanamo Circus, but does not come up in The Mauritanian, is the situation of Haitian and Jamaican laborers, who are paid $1.75 an hour by the US government, with the caveat of after 20 years of service they can obtain US citizenship.
Jodi Foster’s character, based on civil rights attorney Nancy Hollander, who defended Mohamadou Ould Slahi, states that she is not fighting for a terrorist, but fighting for the law. I agree with this. Who wouldn’t? And yet, in true egalitarian Hollywood fashion, an A-Qaida sympathizer, who trained at the Al-Farouq camp where the 9–11 hijackers trained, is transformed into a suffering hero and martyr. Yes, Slahi was eventually released from Guantanamo. Nancy won the case, mainly due to the fact that his confession was extracted by “enhanced interrogation techniques” otherwise known as torture. When we were in Guantanamo in 2006, the hot topic was still “is there torture?” to which everyone working there professed “absolutely not”. While participating in a seminar at Brown University, for the Colombia University Guantanamo Memory Project, I served on a panel with an MD who had been stationed “behind the wire.” He stated that his Hippocratic oath forced him to ask to be reassigned. Water-boarding, sleep deprivation, extreme cold and noise exposure, and sexual humiliation all did occur, according to government documents as well. In The Mauritanian the “sexual humiliation” was dramatized into a female GI in a rabbit mask similar to a Masked Singer costume, actually forcefully copulating with Slahi. I wasn’t there, so I can’t say that didn’t happen, but if it didn’t, I find that fabricated scene offensive on so many feminist levels it would take an entire other article.
No question “torture” is unethical, amoral, and essentially ineffective. A person will confess whatever is needed to make the pain stop. And then the confession doesn’t stand up in court. That being said, I personally know a number of military men and women who have voluntarily been subjected to the exact “enhanced interrogation techniques” as part of their training. And I’m sure at the Al Farouq Al-Qaida training camp, attendees underwent similar drilling.
When I lived in Muslim West Africa, I dated a Lebanese-Senegalese man named Jihad, so I can profess to be relatively open-minded. And yet, even if Mohamadou “severed all ties” with Al-Qaida in 1993 as he claimed, he still received 2 phone calls from Osama Bin Laden’s cell phone in 1998 and allowed Ramzi bin al-Sibh to spend the night at his home in Germany in 1999, indicating he was operating an Al-Qaida safe house. But because he could not be proven entirely guilty of any connection to 9–11, he was released. I don’t dispute the outcome of the trial or that justice was served. Director Kevin MacDonald described Slahi as “a wonderful, warm, humorous individual,” and in the zoom Q&A I was privileged to witness Mohamadou Slahi was an incredibly poetic and cheerful individual. I have worked for years with combat veterans and prisoners who are the most gentle, truthful people I’ve ever known, despite the blood on their hands. And yet, as a woman, an assault survivor, and a coach to other women survivors, I still wonder about our need on the Left (and I still consider myself a Leftie, albeit frequently questioning) to uphold males with violent pasts as mistreated victims. Despite MeToo, I personally can’t help but feel that social justice is more oriented towards men.
The most touching relationship to me, in the film, is the true to life friendship developed between Slahi and guard Steve Wood. It reminded me of my most poignant Guantanamo experience. After our circus performance four wistful young boys, 18 and 19 years of age approached me with the most refined manners, to compliment our performance. They were stationed “behind the wire”, the first tour of their military careers. I asked them what it was like, and they said terrible. They would give anything not to be there. Their duties were to bring play stations and ice cream to the detainees. Their gym equipment had been taken away to be given to detainees and they were hosed off every few hours because the detainees frequently flung “cocktails” at them. These cocktails consisted of every sort of bodily excrement and fluid imaginable. Now don’t get me wrong, I could see myself doing exactly what the detainees were doing if I were held without trial indefinitely. But I don’t fault the guards (note there were young female guards behind the wire as well) for their roles as pawns in the game orchestrated by the Masters of War. My heart broke for these young GIs. Some extremists I know would blame them for joining the military in the first place, yet completely defend detainees even with proven terrorist ties. Why do we politicize and rationalize our interpretation of social justice? To fit our partisan narrative we condemn violence of some and condone it of others. How can we be so certain of universal right and wrong? Can anything really be black or white? Many initially questioned my ethics for going down to Gitmo in the first place, with a circus nonetheless. In the zoom Q&A the actual Mohamadou Ould Slahi said “a human being is like a story.” To me, we are all of us clowns, living in this circus of life.
