 back to Think Tech, movies you can learn from. This one is a drama, maybe closer to a documentary. It's called The Mauritanian. It's very interesting. It's a very interesting movie to help us understand how this country was operating in the days and years after 9-11. Maybe we have forgotten, you know, it's been more than 20 years and maybe we have forgotten. But this movie is a, it's not a movie that makes you feel good. That's the title of our talk show here today. And George Casey is going to help me review it. George Casey is going to help me put it, you know, within the context of history. And it's very important that we understand it, because it is not a pretty picture at all. So, George, this is a story about a fellow, this name was Ahar Rahim. I guess that was the, He's the actor. He's the actor. French algae and actor who played the role, pretty good, pretty good role. Yeah. So, he plays the role of a guy who was at a wedding and the police came in Mauritania, which is in West Africa, an Arab country, a small poor Arab country, and took him away one day. And the next time he noticed, he pops up in an American base in Germany. And from there, he has steered it off to Guantanamo, where he spent 14 years trying to establish he had done nothing wrong. And they had no evidence on him. They had nothing to demonstrate that he was wrong, that he did anything wrong. And so, you had Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld and all those guys in the Bush administration who caused him to be nevertheless prosecuted and tortured. We got a good showing of torture in this movie. And so, there's so much to learn here. This is a movie that you can learn from. It's also a movie that shakes you up about the American dream. So, why don't you describe the movie, describe the plot line, describe the way this unfolded? Basically, they show him in prison with, as you alluded to, the end of this torture. And he's insisting that he's innocent. He had been a very intelligent student in Mauritania, West Africa. He got a scholarship in Germany to go to engineering school. He got a degree in engineering. The guy was pretty sharp, you know. And then he moved to Canada. He was in Canada. And when 9-11 hit, he was living in Canada working too. And the Canadian Secret Service or whatever, you know, the equivalent of CIA did research on him and said, the guy's clean. He's not, you know, he's not in any way involved with this. But the Bush administration, George W. Bush administration and Donald Rumsfeld and Attorney General Ashworth and Dick Cheney was the VP. They insisted that this guy had some involvement with 9-11, just because it's a familial thing or whatever. So, they concocted a plot that let him know that his mother was going to be arrested in Mauritania to lure him back to Mauritania. And when he went to this wedding, as J.J. was alluding to, right, they arrested him. And as J. said, they took him to Germany first and then to Guantanamo. And 14 years, he was in Guantanamo without being charged with anything. And what's that legal term, habeas corpus or whatever, he wasn't charged. So, they were trying to get him to spill something that he didn't know. I mean, he, you know, it's just basically, I think one of his relatives or cousin had called him on a phone, you know, who had had, was involved with 9-11. So, this sort of implicated him by, you know, hearsay, evidence or whatever. So, this movie shows this woman, Hollander, who was a civil rights attorney, ACLU attorney, that took his case up because she felt that this was extra legal. I mean, what the Bush administration was doing was not under the Constitution. So, then what they show is they show all the different aspects. Shailene, Jody Forster placed the attorney, Hollander. Her assistant attorney is by Shailene Woodley, right? And then Tahar Rahim, as I said, he's a French-Algerian actor, really good. Those are the three main players. Then Benedict, something, an English actor played another Benedict as president, another car here. Got Cumberbatch. Benedict Cumberbatch placed Stuart Couch, who was the prosecutor. Exactly. So, then there's other smaller players, you know, actors and actresses. But the bottom line here is this guy was taken, tortured, and yet in the end, this attorney was able to free him. But it took the Obama administration seven years to release him, even after he was acquitted, right? Even though it wasn't an acquittal, it was a heaviest corpus. They could not prosecute him. They didn't have any evidence. They just left him in jail. She got a heaviest corpus rip, but they wouldn't release him, even after the heaviest corpus. Right. So, there's politics. You know, it's our CIA that medals everywhere in the world created, brought down the shot. Look what we got over there in Iran now. So, bottom line is, you know, disguise rights were completely taken away because he was a Muslim, because he was an Arab, right? And they had to find somebody, you know, to pin this on. And they show some of these, you know, right-wing military guys saying that somebody's got to pay for the 3,000 Americans. I mean, my mother's friends lost their son from Manhattan, North Shore, Long Island, Tante Fitzgerald. Their kids died there, right? I mean, we know people in Farmingdale, four or five of my high schools. Well, it takes you back to the time when the U.S. was reacting to the World Trade Center. And I think we forget. We forget just exactly how ticked off everybody was. This was an attack into the heartland of America, into the heartland of Wall Street. And it was brutal. And all these people died. Actually, you know, I remember thinking, hmm, 3,000 people, it could have been much more. We were kind of lucky that it was only three, but that's a lot. And all the people were, you know, brutally murdered by this attack. So people were really ticked off. And the question is, how as a politician, because at the end of the day, politics, how as a politician do you want to handle this? Some people are opportunistic. Some people think that they've got to have a fall guy. And that's what he was. This fellow out of Maritania, the Maritanian, he was, they made him a fall guy. They somehow connected him with very loose connection to Osama bin Laden and stuck with it. They had no evidence. The prosecutor, as I mentioned, was Benedict Cumberbatch Stewart Couch, was a senior Marine lawyer. They gave this to him because he was a crack-a-jack and he was going to prosecute. But he was also a good lawyer. And he said, wait a minute, boys, I don't have any evidence. You want me to prosecute without evidence? I can't do that. And he ultimately, which is true, he rejected the case. They found someone else, but he rejected the case, which is to his credit. He becomes the hero from a legal point of view. But this is, this is, this covers Guantanamo. They found people who they wanted to make into scapegoats. And I'm not sure they ever got any, you know, real convictions. I think, and there are still people there. There are still people there who have, you know, how long has it been? Well, way more than 20 years. And, you know, they're still in detention. And Bush didn't know what to do with them. And Cheney and, well, his name didn't know what to do with them. And so they left them in hiatus. You know, my brother and my sister-in-law, my brother, Jane, my sister-in-law, Linda Greenhouse came out here and spoke at the law school about the legality of this way back when. And it's really shocking to find out how many rules, how many American moral rules were broken in creating Gitmo and perpetuating it for so many years. And still now today, if you remember, Obama was going to terminate it, but he didn't. And certainly Trump didn't. It's still there. The Marines are still there. And this was, you know, a very detailed examination of the brutality. It doesn't make you feel patriotic. It makes you wonder why we didn't apply the rules of fairness, the rules of prosecution and, you know, finding people guilty on the basis of beyond a reasonable doubt and not using torture to extract confessions. I mean, it was really third world. And the government out of Washington, out of the Oval Office, was determined to make this poor guy pay, even though he didn't do anything wrong. So, Jody Foster was, she wasn't, I don't think she was ACLU. She was in a law firm. Then she got, but it was this kind of liberal law firm. And I mean, I'm taking this in the movie, but I think it's all true. And she had to argue with her partners, but she ultimately took the case. Not because she felt that he was innocent, but she felt that he needed counsel. He deserved counsel. And she fashioned her, you know, her legal strategy on habeas corpus because there was no prosecution. They just left them in jail for years. And she succeeded in that, and that was to her credit. But what was remarkable was that from a political point of view, they didn't care. They left them in jail after the habeas corpus. They ignored the order from the federal judge. So, you know, this is not something to be proud of. You know, we talk now about the lack of patriotism. We talk about the divisiveness in the country. Trump talks about the swamp and how he's going to, you know, correct a wayward government and all this. I don't think he was thinking about Guantanamo. But this story is not, is not complementary to the United States. At some point along the way, they all knew, every player knew that this man had done nothing. That there was no evidence to implicate him in any way. And yet they left them in jail. Worse yet, they continued to try to extract the confession using all manner of torture. And the movie goes through that. The movie shows you the torture is very uncomfortable to watch this movie because they keep on doing it. And these guys are marines. They're supposed to be our troops, our soldiers. And they're doing hideous things to a guy who was an ordinary fellow. There's nothing remarkable about him. But they figured if they put enough pressure on him and tortured him enough, he would admit to anything. And he did. That's the most interesting. He confessed to something he didn't do because he couldn't stand not the pain of the torture. He couldn't stand the threat that they would bring his mother to Guantanamo and subject her to the same thing, which was a lie. It was a scam on him. And so, you know, not only did they torture him, but they lied to him and they ignored federal process. They broke all the rules. It's not a pretty story. But there you have it. You know, the thing is, you and I, we look for movies that are movies we can learn from. And this one I said to myself, gee, do I want to know this stuff? Do I want to learn this stuff? I'm a very patriotic person. But this is undermining my patriotism. You know, I mean, I was in the service. I'm a Vietnam. I cared a lot about the country, right or wrong. And since, and I've always cared about the country. But when you see a movie like this, you say to yourself, it went off the tracks. Yes, we had 9-11. Yes, 3,000 people died. But did we have to do this? And we're still doing it? We broke our own rules and our own morality in this. And I don't think there was ever any accountability. Jay, we grew up in the Eisenhower administration. He was honorable. You know, I mean, my dad did top secret work to defend the distant early warning system above the Arctic. We didn't know where he was in the 50s. You know, we were patriotic. My dad used to kiss America's ground because what he dealt with in his life, right? But somewhere they went wrong. It started with, you know, Reagan with Jimmy Carter and the whole Iran thing, you know, how they played that game, right? You know, how they brought down Carter with that Iranian, the embassy, U.S. embassy. And then from there, George Bush and all these rumps felled and, you know, Ashcroft and Cheney. I mean, this really makes you think about who's running our government above the... Well, it makes you wonder about the morality of the senior officials in government, senior. These are the top guys ordering torture, really. And you realize that politics trumps all. I hate to use that term. And you realize that they heard the calls for blood in the country. A lot of people were really, really ticked off. It's like a, you know, a bad cop movie. They said, well, we've got to find somebody. We've got to make an example. Even if he's not... Didn't do anything wrong, we have to make an example and satisfy these calls for vengeance. And I'm sure that... Boogeyman, you know, George H. W. Bush, a really horton thing. Remember that really horton thing? Now, you know, African-Americans, Hispanics, other people who are marginal in our society, they find a boogeyman. And this guy was obviously Muslim and obviously an Arab. So they used him for political purposes. And all these Marines and soldiers where they had to find... Somebody's got to... One guy in the movie says, someone has got to pay for all those people who died, right? So this innocent guy has to pay, you know, because he's... What do they call it when they take a black person and they arrest them on the street, the police said, racial profiling. This is basically that, right? This guy was an engineer working in Germany. And they didn't know that much about Osama bin Laden. They didn't know about, you know, the organizations that he was involved in. They were just shooting fish in a barrel, anybody who was Arab. It's the same thing that Trump, when Trump blocked all Muslims from entering the country back when. This is American racism. That's what it is. You're right. Trump is doing... I mentioned that Ashcroft had us Armenians, you know, as terrorists, until all these Armenian business people, Republicans start screaming and Democrats, that they dropped it. Ashcroft, they were telling us they were terrorists, you know? So, I mean, basically it's a racial kind of thing. And this guy fit the bill to scapegoat. I don't remember the end of the movie, George. Maybe you do. What was the meritanian compensated? Was there any accountability? He's got a lawsuit now, I think, against the government. But at the end of the movie, the only thing I remember is they showed the actual attorney Hollander and they showed the actual slahy guy and how he's living a normal life. He got married, he's got two kids now. But the thing is, I think that the movie just ended when the attorney was able to get the, what, habeas corporate? Yeah. Well, I'm able to get him out. But that was recently. So, if he was incarcerated in, say, 2002, and you had 14 years, I think he got out in only 2016, which is not that long ago. Not that long ago. But he's made good for the last. Well, he should be compensated. But more than that, the people in government who violated his rights and tortured him for years, they should be held accountable. Shouldn't they be prosecuted? You know, remember Abergrahm, you know, in the Middle East, there was some prosecution there within the military. But I don't think there was ever any prosecution around. But what about the top? The top guys, this all came down from the top. No, it was political. They were too big to fry. And really, that's a problem that we have now. As the two systems, if I tortured somebody in Abu Ghraib, then I get prosecuted. But if the guy in the Oval Office orders the torture, he doesn't get it for two systems, you know, it's the same problem as the as a Trump problem. And maybe the makers of this movie had that in mind when they showed us, you know, this very disturbing story. But let's look at it as a movie. I thought the production values were very good. I thought that Jody Foster, who I didn't recognize at first, she's aged. They aged her. I think they aged her. I didn't like her makeup. She was tough. She was a tough character. I had a little trouble understanding the dynamic of her character, because it was clear that she was not convinced she was innocent. She was only convinced that she had a job to do to get him out. And that, you know, it's different. But she was very committed, obviously, to the cause. And she stuck with it for years and years. And ultimately, he learned to trust her. But eventually, when she got that all the notes that I forgot what they call any M or something, that she they were finally was able to get those things. She realized that he confessed under torture. And that really opened her eyes to what was really going on. At first, when they heard that he had confessed, right? Well, she and Shailene Woodley felt, oh, my God, we're helping, you know, we're aiding a person who actually is guilty, right? Yeah, her assistant, Shailene, when he walked out on the case, didn't want to be involved. Exactly. Because she felt that this guy was responsible for 9-11. But it was a it was a coerced confession. And that was that was really interesting that people would do that, even though there was serious questions about the validity of the confession. She walked out on it. She didn't want to be. And you got to remember how angry people were. This is the first time since the war of 1812 that somebody came on American soil and injured and killed people. It was it was it was troubling. I remember at the time and the world changed. You know, I remember a friend of mine called me up in the morning of 9-11, told me to watch the television. And I said to him, I said, the world will never be the same. And it hasn't been the same. Jay, do you know? I know people who died in 9-11. Do you know people? I mean, I actually know people from both where I grew up and my mother's close friends up on the North Shore of Long Island, whose kids were working for these accounts. Well, it was really, really traumatic. It was so it was such a vicious, remeditated, planned and brutal, fatal attack for so many people. But the country was ticked off. You understand that they needed to find a scapegoat, a whole bunch of scapegoats. But I think we really didn't know. I didn't know. I suspected it. Just exactly how brutal they were, the Marines in Guantanamo. You know, there's a lawyer in town by the name of Ed Burke. We had him on the show a couple of times. And he volunteered to be counsel for one of the people in Guantanamo. Not this guy, but other people who were incarcerated. He said they made it so hard for him to represent his client. And the years went by and he really didn't have any progress. I'm not sure that how that ended, except that he was so frustrated at the American system of justice. As we know it from, you know, practice in continental U.S., I guess, it was not applied. There were no rights given to these guys. And they refused to allow them any constitutional rights. They just held them in this very strange prison offshore in a naval base at the eastern end of Cuba of all places. And they didn't report back. They didn't allow the press in very much. And they were violating everything. And they were doing this, why exactly? Well, it was in the name of retribution, I suppose. And this was a clear example of that. If we had forgotten, and many of us never knew, but if we had forgotten what happened in Guantanamo, this movie reminds us very starkly what happened. So I think Jody Foster was a little stiff. I never thought too much of her as an actress. I'm sorry. I thought Shailene Woodley was an interesting character, but they didn't give her as much space as she deserved in the movie. I thought the prosecutor Benedict Cumberbatch, he played a good marine. He was a stand-up, straight-laced marine. And he made the right choice. At first, I was worried that he was going to prosecute without evidence. But ultimately, professional matter, he did the right thing. However, you understand, it ruined his career. It ruined his career. They called him a traitor for failing to prosecute without evidence. And I thought, what's his name? Tahar Rahim, who played the Mauritanian, he was excellent. And at the end of the movie, they showed photographs of the real Mauritanian. And there was a similarity. There was a certain good nature. I said to myself, Jesus, God's been through so much. 14 years taken out of his life and torture for a good part of that. And here he is having a family and smiling and retaining his good nature. The character and the real person had a very good nature. And so they portrayed that. And he really was a person of good nature, even after all the torture. You have to understand the human nature. They try to forget. I know people went through the Holocaust. My family physician, all his family got killed in the Holocaust. My own parents in Turkey, what happened to them? And they move on. They go into business. So this guy, he moved on. He forgot about all this horrible experiences. Maybe it's still left a mark on but he moved on. There's a phenomenon here. If you come out of a torture situation and you're still alive, you give thanks for every day. You're stronger somehow, even though you've had a terrible time. And that was the case for the real individual. So it was interesting, as you mentioned, at the end of the movie, we see the real Mauritanian. We see the the real Jody Foster character, the defense Hollander, the real Shailene Woodley character. We see the real people. That was so interesting to see that happen. So I don't know. As a movie, I would say it completely captivated me, largely because I didn't know. I was not really attuned to how morally violent this was and how these guys who represent the United States, supposed to keep us safe, there are troops, our boys, who were involved in such awful proceedings coming from the top. This was, you know, you've heard about it, but somehow this movie brings it home. And it changes your view of all the boys in uniform. And there were women there, too, as I remember, yeah. There were women in uniform, too, who lied to him and who harassed him, though it wasn't just the boys. Anyway, so as a movie, what are you thinking of it? I like this movie because of what it means. You know, we'd all heard about Abu Ghraab and showing those people with the hoods on their heads and stuff. But unless you actually see this in a movie, it doesn't really completely hit home. I mean, you know about it. You're upset about it. But this really enraged me more, you know. I mean, I actually liked when I was growing up as a kid. I liked Eisenhower just as much. I loved JFK, but I didn't dislike Eisenhower. I mean, he was a decent guy. He was a military guy. You know, he was decent. But this George W. Bush administration, you know, God, these guys, I mean, it came, he came face to face with that this is coming from the top echelons of the administration. So to me, just on the content, I would give it a 10. But the production values were pretty good acting. You know, Jody Forster, they made her up as older. She doesn't look that old. I mean, the makeup, they wanted to make her look older and to look like Hollander, who was pretty, you know, she was sort of, you know, older, you know, wrinkles and whatever. So, but the thing is, I love this movie. I think it's a great movie. I think everybody should see it, especially in the days of Donald J. Trump, where this whole thing is going on with his fault. He's being, you know, indicted this, this way, that way. We've got to bring our country back to honor. And you know, I grew up with Republicans all around me. They were, I mean, I didn't agree with them, but they were honorable people. We've got to go back to where we have an honorable society and honorable administrations. And I don't feel George W. Bush administration was honorable at all after seeing this movie. It hit home. So really good movie. Watch this movie to your viewers. Watch this movie and learn about what the heck was going on. Leave it at that. Ten plus. I'm with you. Ten plus, because we learned so much. And we learned that government sometimes needs a scapegoat for political purposes to stay in office. And government lies to us. George Bush was lying to us. All those guys around him were lying to us. I think they knew that this Nortanian guy was innocent, that they were lying to us and to him and trying to torture him into becoming the scapegoat. That's awful. And the Marines who mercilessly beat him up, that that wasn't honor. You know, how can you say, this is very troubling. How can you say they were honorable men protecting the nation? No, torture is not honorable. Sorry. So anyway, yeah, it's a revelation. It's a lesson that we need to know now about then. And it's a lesson we have to build in going forward. And that's why this movie is a ten plus. Thank you very much, George. I always enjoy these discussions. And we'll find some more like this. George Case and a movie reviewer here on Movies You Could Learn from it. We sure learned on this one. Aloha. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please click the like and subscribe button on YouTube. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. Check out our website, ThinkTechHawaii.com. Mahalo.