It’s a bad reason for watching a film: I was charmed by Jody Foster’s blurted acceptance of her best supporting actress award at the Golden Globes for The Mauritanian. “Are you kidding me?” There’s also the fact my husband went to Guantánamo on a media tour in August, 2002, eleven days after the Mauritanian in question, Mohamedou Ould Slahi, was shipped there in shackles. 

The Mauritanian is a biopic about Slahi (also spelled Salahi) who spent 14 years imprisoned without charge at the U.S. military base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. There he was tortured into confessing that he’d recruited the terrorists who flew planes into New York’s World Trade Centre in 2001, a confession he later retracted vehemently.

The film is based on Slahi’s 2015 book, Guantánamo Diary, written while he was imprisoned. Slahi had been flown to Guantánamo on August 4, 2002, after initially being taken from his home in Mauritania to a top-secret U.S. military base in Jordan not long after 9/11. He was finally freed in 2016.

Not at issue is the fact that Slahi, who is Muslim, had left his engineering studies in Germany more than ten years earlier to fight for the mujahideen guerillas in Afghanistan. He was twenty years old at the time and the mujahideen and the United States were allies, fighting the Russian-backed Afghani government.

Slahi trained at an al Qaeda camp for several months, pledging allegiance to the terrorist group before returning to Germany in 1991. He went back to Afghanistan for a couple of months in 1992, but left permanently when the Russian-backed government was toppled. He later insisted that he severed all ties with al Qaeda, although he remained in uneasy touch with a cousin who was a high-ranking aide to Osama bin Laden.

The U.S. tells a different story, claiming that Slahi was a recruiter for al Qaeda in both Germany and Montreal, where he lived in 1999. He has always denied this, and according to an in-depth article in the New Yorker, authorities in both Mauritania and Jordon appear to think he was a small fish who played no part in 9/11. But there’s no question that Slahi was brutally tortured by the U.S. military in both Jordan and Guantánamo, and that after months of interrogation, beatings, sexual humiliation and sleep deprivation—not to mention a mock execution in the waters off Guantánamo—he gave a detailed confession. 

It’s a complicated story for a movie to tell, but the drama rests on the shoulders of two very fine actors. Tahar Rahim plays Slahi while Jody Foster takes the role of the American lawyer Nancy Hollander, a human rights activist who fought for Slahi’s release.

“Are you kidding me?” Foster blurted on the Golden Globes, speaking in a video feed after her supporting actress win. She was sitting on her sofa in black-and-white jammies beside her wife and a notably calm dog. “I think you made a mistake,” she said. “I’m a little speechless.”

I’ve always thought of Jody Foster as a brilliant actor who seems so intelligent onscreen that she can be frightening. Now here she was: human.

And there we were in front of the television a few days later, watching the movie.

“It doesn’t look like that at all,” my husband said, as a bus took Foster toward what was supposed to be Guantánamo. Not surprisingly, since the film was shot in South Africa. When he went to Cuba, my husband, Paul Knox, was an international affairs writer on the Globe and Mail, and the first Canadian journalist to set foot in Guantánamo. Almost a year after 9/11, he’d flown there to write about the detention of alleged al Qaeda fighters, joining TV crews from the BBC and Ecuador. Maybe some Peruvians; he can’t recall.

Many of the details he remembers are different from the ones pictured in the film, and more interesting than a movie is able to show. Jody Foster is repeatedly shown flying to Gitmo on a small plane, easily available in hanger-sized studios, and cheaper to shoot than a big one filled with extras. When Paul flew there—as the real-life Nancy Hollander would have—he took a mid-sized Pan Am passenger jet carrying U.S. military personnel and civilian contractors. 

Pan Am had gone bankrupt by that time, its routes and planes bought by several airlines. But some of the pilots had banded together and bought the Pan Am logo, picking up a contract to fly routes for the U.S. military between Norfolk, Virginia; Jacksonville, Florida; the Roosevelt Roads air force base in Puerto Rico; and Guantánamo. 

Paul ended up spending three days in Gitmo, which was already being criticized by human rights advocates for its secrecy. He wasn’t allowed to come within 200 meters of the camp and was denied access to prisoners, although at one point he glimpsed a man in an orange jumpsuit in the distance. 

When he asked his military handler if the man was a prisoner, her answer was frosty. “The only people here who wear orange jumpsuits are detainees. So if you saw an orange jumpsuit, it’s very likely you saw a detainee.” Paul remembers the handler growing increasingly testy as the tour progressed. Even more unhappy was a young guard trotted out to answer his questions.

Guantánamo is on a bay with the airport and hotel where he stayed on one side. Across from it is the base—with a famous single traffic light—and the new prison, Camp Delta. At first, Paul was taken around an older abandoned prison, Camp X-Ray, which he remembers as small and ramshackle. The bigger facility, in which Slahi had just been jailed, was billed by President George W. Bush as much more comfortable and humane, even though his administration claimed the prisoners already on site were high-ranking terrorists. 

As it turned out, there was more torture than humanity. Muslim prisoners were permitted Qurans, but it would later be reported that guards routinely threw the holy books in the toilets, among other abuses. This may explain why the military personnel were testy with journalists, and why the camp commander was eager to boot blame north, telling Paul that all important decisions were made by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. 

In the end, very few prisoners, if any, would prove to be high-ranking terrorists. Human rights lawyers would demonstrate that many of the more than 800 people ultimately incarcerated in Gitmo had been randomly jailed because of arcane grudges in their home countries. The U.S. paid a bounty for people in Pakistan and Afghanistan to denounce terrorists. If you had a long-running dispute with your neighbour, turn him in. It would net you a bounty roughly equivalent to a year’s salary.

What animated his handler, as Paul remembers, were the banana rats endemic to the camp. They were called that, she told him, “because of the shape of their turds.” She also took him to the Army PX, where he bought a souvenir Gitmo tee-shirt that he has never worn. Paul says the real shop looks more like a Stateside supermarket than the store shown in the movie. But then, I don’t suppose the U.S. military was going to let the film’s production designer tour the camp, where 40 people are still being held.

These are small, subtle and unimportant differences from the film. Yet as we watched, the word “subtle” kept coming back to me. Along with the thought of the high-wire act involved in surviving that punitive bit of America set inside Cuba.

To be continued.