Andy Worthington Discusses Al-Qaeda Film “The Oath” on Press TV
Recently, I was happy to follow up on my discussion on Press TV of “You Don’t Like the Truth,” the harrowing documentary about Guantánamo’s former child prisoner Omar Khadr, with another discussion, this time about “The Oath,” an extraordinary documentary by American filmmaker Laura Poitras. See here and here for the two parts of the Omar Khadr show.
Filmed in Yemen, Poitras’ film follows Abu Jandal (aka Nasser al-Bahri), a former bodyguard for Osama bin Laden, who left al-Qaeda before the 9/11 attacks, and was imprisoned in Yemen when the attacks took place. He then became an extraordinarily valuable informant for the FBI, and was eventually freed. When Poitras met him, he was driving a cab in Sana’a, a charismatic figure, who, nevertheless, is either conflicted or ambiguous when it comes to his beliefs.
What is clear throughout, while Abu Jandal espouses his love of jihad but his hatred of terrorism, is his guilt that his brother-in-law, Salim Hamdan, for whom he secured paid work as a driver for Osama bin Laden, was still held in Guantánamo at the time the film was made, while he was a free man in Yemen. Hamdan was eventually freed at the end of 2008, after he became the first prisoner to be tried in a war crimes trial following the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Read the rest of this entry »
Who's still at Guantánamo?
