“Guantánamo Diary Revisited”: Online Screening of New Documentary as a Fundraiser for My Guantánamo Work

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I’m delighted to announce that, next week, from April 20-23, filmmakers and distributors Cinema Libre Studio are hosting an online screening of the new documentary film, “Guantánamo Diary Revisited,” followed by an exclusive Q&A session, on April 23, as a fundraiser to support my ongoing work on Guantánamo via my website, and via the website of the Close Guantánamo campaign that I co-founded in 2012 with the US attorney Tom Wilner.

“Guantánamo Diary Revisited” is directed by the investigative journalist John Goetz, and has just been released by Cinema Libre Studio in the US and Canada on DVD and on a variety of streaming platforms. It follows former Guantánamo prisoner and best-selling author Mohamedou Ould Slahi (aka Salahi), after his release from Guantánamo in October 2016, as, with John, Mohamedou set out to find the “Special Projects” interrogators, including the mysterious Mr. X, who tortured him at Guantánamo on the orders of the now-deceased defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, “in order to seek revenge … by inviting them to tea,” as the film’s publicity blurb explains.

Mohamedou, extraordinarily, realized that the only way to avoid being trapped by the torture to which he was subjected was to forgive everyone who had wronged him, the significance of which I first noticed soon after his release, when, in a video made for the ACLU, he said, “I wholeheartedly forgive everyone who wronged me during my detention, and I forgive because forgiveness is my inexhaustible resource.”

In addition, in January 2017, Larry Siems, the editor of Guantánamo Diary, who had recently visited Mohamedou in Mauritania, told me that, as I later described it, he had “elaborated on his theory of forgiveness, explaining that, if people do not forgive those who have wronged them, then they cannot let go of their pain, and it will, essentially, eat away at them or drag them down, whereas he, as he said, is absolutely free.”

Having just spent time with Mohamedou on his recent UK speaking tour, where I finally met him for the very first time, I can confirm that forgiveness remains central to his worldview, as does the importance of kindness, which, after his torture and subsequent years of isolation, he said he discovered was all that was important about life when existence was stripped down to its basics.

In tracking down Mohamedou’s torturers, John Goetz succeeded in getting them to reflect on what they had done, with a variety of responses ranging from guilt to denial, which makes for a very powerful documentary.

To book a ticket to watch “Guantánamo Diary Revisited” online between Wednesday April 20 and Saturday 23, please visit the Eventbrite page here, where you can book a free ticket, and where you will also be asked to make a donation to support my work. The suggested donation is $25, but you can pay whatever you can afford — and if you’re feeling particularly generous you can always pay more.

Donations are via PayPal, but, as Cinema Libre note, “If you do not have a PayPal account, select below the PayPal sign in option ‘Pay with a Debit or Credit Card,’ where you can make your donation via Credit or Debit.”

Following the screening, the live Q&A session will take place via Zoom on Saturday April 23, 2022 at 1pm Pacific Time/9pm UK time, with Mohamedou, John Goetz and myself all taking part. The Zoom link is here.

I do hope the above is of interest, and that you’ll be interested in watching the film, donating to support my work, and joining Mohamedou, John and I for the Q&A.

Please see below for the trailer for “Guantánamo Diary Revisited,” via YouTube, and please also feel free to like the film’s Facebook page here.

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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.50).

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the struggle for housing justice — and against environmental destruction — continues.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.