September 5th, 2026, Paris.
Few people we know have had to think about the legacy of 9/11 as deeply, or as urgently, as Mohamedou Ould Slahi. Born in Mauritania, educated in Germany, Mohamedou spent 15 years as a prisoner at the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay, six of those long years after a US federal judge ordered him released after reviewing all the US government's classified "evidence" against him and concluding it amounted to nothing at all that justified holding him. Mohamedou, it was revealed, had been subjected to "Special Programs" at Guantánamo, which amounted to a diet of torture at the hands of US servicemen and women, including sexual abuse, beating, near-drowning, stimulus deprivation, and plenty else.
Rather than release him as the Court ordered, then-President Obama's Justice Department appealed, hence the extra years before he was eventually blindfolded, shackled, put on a military cargo planed and deposited home in Mauritania. Mohamedou wrote of his experiences while still in prison, material secreted out of the prison and ultimately published as Guantánamo Diary with the help of his lawyers, Nancy Hollander and Teri Duncan, and editor Larry Siems. The book was optioned for film before Mohamedou's release, and screenwriter/producer Michael Bronner, a long-time investigative journalist who had reported from Guantánamo, flew to Nouakchott to begin working with Mohamedou only days after his release, the beginning of a deep and inspiring friendship that endures to date.
For Bronner, the opening of the military prison marked a perilous abandonment of the rule of law on behalf of the United States and its allies, a reality brought to life in the movie that followed - The Mauritanian, starring Jodie Foster, Benedict Cumberbatch, and a brilliant Tahar Rahim as Mohamedou.
Michael and Mohamedou sat down for a conversation in Paris - joined by a wonderful audience of writers, editors, filmmakers, lawyers, journalists and friends - for a charged conversation about the path we've all been on as individuals, nations and a fractious global community since that awful day 25 years ago.
Many thanks to participants Olivia Snaije, Madhuri Sastry, Emmanuel Dongala, Lucy Mushita, Bassem Snaije, Anil Vassanji, Aurelie Daher, Khaled Al-Yemeni, Jerome Tubiana, Vivienne Walt, Jeff Schaeffer, Adrian Blundell-Wignall, Janine di Giovanni, Ken Roth and Melissa Thackaway.
Filming and editing by Hassane Mezine
Produced by Bhakti Shringarpure
