THE GUANTANAMO TRAP directed by Thomas Selim Wallner. A KinoSmith release. 90 minutes. Opens Friday (March 30). For venues and times, see Movies.
Thomas Selim Wallner is furious.
When Barack Obama took office in 2009, his first act as president was to order the closing of the American detention facility established at Guantánamo Bay after 9/11. Three years later, the prison is still operating, a horrible legacy of the war on terror that can’t be shut down or reformed because that would constitute an admission that the people being detained there aren’t the monsters the U.S. claims they are – and that some of them might even be innocent of the crimes they’re alleged to have committed.
“It’s a real dilemma,” Wallner says, discussing his documentary The Guantanamo Trap at last year’s Hot Docs film festival. “I mean, you tell the world that you’ve got these really dangerous people. And by the way, I do believe there are dangerous people at Guantánamo – let’s not be naive. But there are a lot of people who are not.”
One of them was Murat Kurnaz, a German Muslim wrongly arrested in Pakistan and sold to the U.S. as a high-value target. Kurnaz spent five years in Guantánamo before being released, and his story is a key element of Wallner’s documentary. The director says he was aghast at the negotiations required to set Kurnaz free.
“The Americans were really making a strong case for the fact that he was extremely dangerous,” he says. “One of the conditions was that he would be surveilled round the clock when he was back, watched so he wouldn’t perpetrate any terrorist acts. And the Germans sort of gave them assurances and then just forgot about it. I’m not even sure whether the people doing those negotiations cared about whether these things were implemented or not, but to save face, I think they had to say he was dangerous. How else do you justify keeping the guy cooped up for so long?”
Another of Wallner’s subjects, Spanish prosecutor Gonzalo Boye, became an anti-Guantánamo activist once he realized the facility was making it harder for him to secure convictions against actual terrorists.
“The Supreme Court of Spain acquitted two people of very, very grave criminal offences because anything obtained in Guantánamo is not at the standard of evidence to be presented in a court of law anywhere in the world,” says Boye. “At the end of the day, I think we have the moral authority to say this is not the way.”
And Boye can’t be dismissed as a dilettante. He’s spent years steeped in genuine terrorism cases, including the trials of the 2004 Madrid train bombers.
“There’s nobody in this world, nobody, who has been able to convict more Islamic terrorists than myself,” he says. “Without crossing any [ethical] lines, we convicted 21 persons for March 11 in Madrid. Can any prosecutor in the States tell me the same?”
Interview Clips
Thomas Selim Wallner on the incident that inspired him to make The Guantanamo Trap:
Wallner on how a false accusation of terrorism can stick with someone for life:
Wallner on Diane Beaver and the “taint” of Guantanamo:
Gonzalo Boye on the different moral approaches to Guantanamo Bay:
normw@nowtoronto.com
