Surviving 14 Years In Guantanamo Bay - Mohamedou Ould Slahi | Modern Wisdom Podcast 322

... then someone start to touch me, and then manhandle me, like touching me everywhere, and then they start to cut open my clothes with scissors, stripped me naked completely, except for my blindfold and my, uh, earplugs. He start to put me in diapers. And then it dawned on me that I was not going home, I was going to prison.

What does it feel like to have a movie made about your life?

It's, it's really, like, so, like, amazing and, uh, I still, I'm still digesting because this is not in my wildest dream. I didn't dream I would have, like, a movie, you know, about me. I mean, how many people have a movie about their lives, you know? I don't know too many people, you know? I don't know anyone in person, you know, are in my surrounding. And it's just a very big blessing to have your story told on the big screen and to reach this big audience, especially in our world now.

And it's not just any movie, right? It's Benedict Cumberbatch and Tamir Rahim and Jodie Foster, and then you were contributing to the set design and the production and all sorts. This is A level, right? A-list stuff.

Absolutely. And, uh, I mean, Kevin also, Kevin won Oscars before. And, uh, yes, uh, I was involved. Uh, I mean, I didn't push myself on anyone. They just kept calling me and asking me questions and I just kept, like, answering them. And yeah, like you said, set also, like, m- I also coached Tahar Rahim on the accent and so on and so forth. It was, it was a lot of fun and pain at the same time.

How accurate would you say the movie is to what happened?

I mean, what we see in the movie is pretty accurate. Uh, you know, except, like, 'cause you cannot put on screen, like, the first 70 days of sleeplessness. You cannot put that on a screen because you just need an actor who stays sleep w- w- without sleep for 70 days, consecutive days. And that's very painful.

Take us through your story then. Why has a Mauritanian man had a movie made about his life?

Uh, so this starts with very innocent phone call. It was, like, in late '98 or early '99. I don't remember, you know, because I only knew about the call years later. So when my cousin called me, and actually it was, like, very innocent call. He asked me to wire some money to his father who was very sick in Mauritania, and then I lived in Germany. It was very easy for me. And of course, I said, "Yeah, of course, I will do that. No problem." And, uh, but there was a problem with the call. So the call was made from the, uh, f- from a phone that belonged to UBL, and my cousin was, uh, a friend of UBL. I mean, they found years later that he was not involved in the, uh, uh, atrocious attack against, uh, the United State on 9/11, but still, back then, this was before 9/11. And everything I did after that was interpreted as a m- as a vile act against the United States of America. Everything I said was interpreted in that way, that I was, quote unquote, "a bad guy." And unbeknownst to me, I was, you know, subject to so many investigations that I didn't know about. And then all the investigation done in Germany and in Canada, they found out that there was no evidence I did really something. And then I was so scared when our imam, that is our priest in the mosque, when he told me that the German police, some kind of police, like, very high level police, you know, like, they came to me and they showed him my picture and then he laughed. He said, "What do you want to know about this guy?" They said, "Yeah, we have some bad report that he is a, he's a bad guy." He was laughing. He said, "No, no, no, I know him in person. He's a very good guy. He wouldn't hurt a fly." They said, "That's what we think too, but there is a country, a country that think that he's a bad..." He told me that and I just, I just panicked. I said, "I cannot stay in this country," so. And I had already my, uh, my, uh, landed immigrant status in Canada and I moved. I said, when I move to Canada, fresh start, no one knows me, nothing. I would, you know, finish college, find job. Not f- I already finished college, but I want to study, like, PhD and that's it. That's what I did. And I was, it was so dumb because I didn't know that the intelligence, you know, agencies were so, like, connected and Canada was very close to the United States. So going there just proved the point of the United States that I was a bad guy. I was coming to Canada to do that. And as luck had it-... I ... One month after my arrival, about one month, a guy decided to cross the border by the name of Ahmed Rassam and kill innocent people. His name is Ahmed Rassam. And he was go- he- they s- they said, uh, they know that he went to the same mosque I did. And this all, like, pointed toward my person, you know? And then, I don't know whether you saw this movie, very old movie called A Man with One Red Shoe by, uh, by, uh, um ... What's his name again? The guy, you know, Cast Away.