How many principles have we scrapped since 9/11? A new Guantánamo film reminds us
Istarted work at Liberty, the civil rights advocacy group, the day before the September 11 attacks. I recall the feeling of doom: it is important to remember the devastating loss of life on that day – 3,000 people from all over the world – in an event that is now often subject to denialist conspiracy theories. Soon after, British ministers were contemplating far-reaching “security measures” against the background of fear that the same could happen in London. Surveying the entire population was a price worth paying, they said.
Having worked at the Home Office before joining Liberty, I knew the that way Britain treated migrants – who are subject to fewer protections than citizens – might well become the framework for the UK’s draconian approach to anyone suspected of terrorism. But I never predicted how long the post-9/11 legacy would linger. And with my Hollywood ideals of Anglo-American constitutional norms, reflected in movies such as A Few Good Men, I never imagined that the use of torture would become a systematic technique of interrogation.
This September will mark 20 years since 9/11 and the start of the “war on terror”. So the imminent UK release of The Mauritanian, based on Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s 2015 bestselling book Guantánamo Diary, is timely.
Kevin Macdonald’s film tells of Slahi’s 14-year imprisonment without charge in the facility now emblematic of human rights abuses, as well as the violent and sexual torture he experienced at the hands of his interrogators. It dramatises the legal battle that led to his eventual release in 2016. Tahar Rahim plays Slahi and Jodie Foster is his renowned defence attorney, Nancy Hollander. Benedict Cumberbatch is prosecutor Lt Colonel Stuart Crouch. It is a must-see, not least for the generation that remembers neither the New York skyline before September 2001 nor the transatlantic legal landscape before that horror.
The Mauritanian has been compared to A Few Good Men, the 1992 classic about a military trial that also emerged from an injustice in Guantánamo Bay. “You can’t handle the truth,” shouted the infamous Col Nathan Jessup (Jack Nicholson) in court. But one stark difference is that the Aaron Sorkin-penned drama existed in a world in which the system could be plausibly portrayed as ultimately sound, ultimately good. It was before George W Bush’s defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, declared “the new normal”, and the UK’s prime minister, Tony Blair, announced that “the rules of the game are changing”. Guantánamo was just a US naval base and inspiration for a catchy Cuban folksong. Two great democracies had yet to mortgage their souls with practices of kidnap, internment and torture.
Disappointingly, even Barack Obama, a constitutional lawyer before he became the 44th US president, broke a campaign pledge to shut down the prison that once held 780 people, and incarcerates 40 to this day. There are hopes that President Joe Biden will finally honour that promise. Obama may seem saintly compared with who followed him. Still, he presided over an escalation of the US’s drone strikes programme and the infamous White House “kill list”.
When the brilliant US human rights lawyer Amrit Singh describes Guantánamo as “paradigmatic of the lawlessness and exceptionalism that characterises post-9/11 US policy and practice”, I think of desperate caged people on the Mexican border. Injustices that are perpetrated abroad eventually come closer to home. Hollander tells me that, even now, “9/11 is the excuse to broaden the definition of material support for terrorism, to restrict immigration and speed up deportation; and as we have seen in Guantánamo, to indefinitely imprison people without ever charging them with any crime”.
The torture sequences in The Mauritanian are mercifully fleeting, as if in remembered nightmares. However, at a moment when Boris Johnson’s government is trying to limit the law’s reach in regard to future overseas operations, it is important to remember the denials and then apologies in relation to the UK’s own complicity with torture.
More positively, there were and continue to be military lawyers on both sides of the Atlantic who fought back against the shredding of legal norms – at personal cost. Lt Col Nicholas Mercer was the British army’s senior lawyer in Iraq before being effectively blocked and bullied out for his commitment to treating prisoners humanely. In the movie, Crouch begins by working towards the death penalty for Slahi. But his discovery that Slahi’s confessions have been obtained by torture change everything for the US army prosecutor with deeply held principles of justice.
Those who defend civil liberties lost a great many moral arguments in the UK. Yes, we won the landmark Belmarsh case: in 2004, the House of Lords ruled that indefinite detention for foreign nationals (but not British ones) suspected of “links” with terrorism breached the vital principle of non-discrimination in the Human Rights Act and European convention on human rights. That was in no small part down to Britain’s own Hollander, the great civil liberties solicitor Gareth Peirce. But far from being expunged as an aberration, the principle of punishment without charge or trial continued via control orders, then terrorism prevention and investigation measures and a host of other antiterror, immigration and even criminal justice measures that infected minds and statute books, displacing the previously almost sacred “golden thread” of presumptive innocence for the accused. Today, the description “activist lawyer” is a term of abuse and the government threatens to roll back even the principle of judicial review itself.
Maya Foa, director of Reprieve, reminds me that the “war on terror” never ended. She points to northeastern Syria where tens of thousands of European people – most of them children – are detained in inhumane and degrading conditions, instead of being repatriated and prosecuted (where appropriate), in what has been dubbed “Europe’s Guantánamo”. Like offshore incarceration, depriving one’s nationals of citizenship is another attempted loophole in the responsibility for affording due process.
“My client, he’s not a suspect. He’s a witness,” says Foster’s Hollander at a crucial moment in the narrative. We, too, have been the witness to a slow and steady evacuation of principles from Anglo-American justice over the past 20 years, as the use of Orwellian doublespeak (“detainee” rather than prisoner, “enhanced interrogation” rather than torture) tried to blur the lines between victim, suspect and perpetrator. The Mauritanian may reach the right conclusion, with Slahi winning his personal freedom, but we still have a long way to go before we recover what we’ve lost.
Mohamedou Ould Salhi is also the subject of new Guardian documentary My Brother’s Keeper, about his unlikely friendship with his Guantanamo prison guard - watch it here
Lady Shami Chakrabarti was shadow attorney general for England and Wales from 2016 to 2020 and director of Liberty from 2003 to 2016
Once again the world held its collective breath when the scene of a car crash was broadcast on live television and the name Tiger Woods flashed across the screen. From what we know, Woods was involved in a motor vehicle accident early in the morning on Tuesday. His car rolled multiple times, but fortunately he was wearing his seat belt, which very likely saved his life. The golfing legend was transported to HarborUCLA,
which is one of the busiest trauma centers in Los Angeles county and staffed with top-notch experienced surgeons.
Thankfully, his injuries aren’t lifethreatening. We do have some clues in the released statements as to what injuries Woods has suffered. First, we heard about “compound” fractures, which are another term for an open fracture in which the broken bone pokes through the skin. Anytime the skin barrier is broken, bacteria and other contaminants can enter into the bone and possibly cause an infection. The first important step in treating open fractures is to get intravenous antibiotics coursing through the bloodstream to the bones and the rest of the body. Second, the bone ends are cleaned in the sterile operating room before being fixed straight again.
Woods is also said to have had a rod placed down a bone. This is one way to treat a fracture since bones are hollow. A stabilizing rod can be placed through smaller incisions, allowing the bone to heal in a better position. Sometimes, the patient can even put their full weight on the fracture if it is an isolated bone injury since the rod provides structural stability. Given the multiplicity of fractures, Woods may have also had plates with screws inserted, or something kept outside the skin called an external fixator, which appears like scaffolding outside the skin. This is most commonly used during a “damage-control” process with high-energy traumas.
The most recent statement concerning Woods mentioned releasing the covering of his muscles to relieve pressure. Of all the potential injuries mentioned, this is the most rare, and often the most serious. It points to a condition called compartment syndrome, which is a true orthopedic emergency. As bleeding or swelling occurs in the leg, the pressure can overpower the body’s ability to pump blood
to the leg muscles. As a result, the muscle can lose blood flow and begin to die if the pressure is not released. This may require multiple large incisions around the leg. Once the swelling goes down, the skin can sometimes be closed again side-to-side, but other times the leg may require a skin graft.
We all tend to focus on the bones in these cases, but the bones may only take six to eight weeks to heal. The bigger issue for Woods may be the strength in his legs. High-level athletes use their whole body when competing. Whether it’s pitching, boxing or swinging a golf club, generating energy and momentum are keys to optimal outcomes. Woods has already had segments of his spine fused due to repeated surgeries to remove bulging disc material. Once parts of the spine fuse together, more and more rotation is lost. And with Woods’s powerful swing, every degree counts. Moving forward, he will need to heal his bones, but also his muscles. He will also need to strengthen those muscles and reestablish the orchestral performance that is a powerful golf swing. That can take a year or longer even with an arthroscopic knee surgery, let alone multiple fractures and compartment syndrome.
It is far too early to say whether he will play professional golf again, and there is no doubt his injuries are a severe impediment to his chances of ever returning to the tour, particularly because he is in his 40s, and has suffered other career-threatening injuries.
Woods’s tragedies are what makes him human, but his comebacks are what make him inspirational. He should make sure he is surrounded by a good support team, both physically and emotionally. He will need to turn to his family, which will likely be his No 1 priority. Woods’s story has been marked by several peaks and valleys. Let’s hope this is the deepest valley before the greatest peak.
• Jonathan D Gelber, MD, MS is an orthopedic surgeon and sports medicine specialist. He is the author of Tiger Woods’s Back and Tommy John’s Elbow: Injuries and Tragedies That Transformed Careers, Sports, and Society. You can follow him on Twitter at @JonathanGelber
Ah, the Golden Globes. The much-mocked yet still influential show must go on, despite a pandemic delay, renewed scrutiny on its ethics, and widespread criticism of snubs for black performers (none of the four blackled ensemble films were nominated for best picture, nor was Michaela Coel’s critically beloved I May Destroy You nominated for anything). The Globes are known to be unpredictable and leftfield – a strange ritual in which Hollywood kicks off awards season with trophies granted by an insular group of 87 international journalists known as the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA). This year’s TV nominees run the gamut – controversial nods to Netflix’s ambient TV hit Emily in Paris, predictable tips to the final season of Schitt’s Creek, and a host of streaming gems in between. With mega-hit favorites such as The Queen’s Gambit and The Crown, it’s shaping up to be a Netflix evening, but Globes being the Globes, it’s anyone’s game.
Best actress in a TV series – musical or comedy
Nominated: Lily Collins, Emily in Paris; Kaley Cuoco, The Flight Attendant; Elle Fanning, The Great; Jane Levy, Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist; Catherine O’Hara, Schitt’s Creek
This category could go in any direction (save maybe Lily Collins for Emily in Paris). The prize should go to Elle Fanning as young Catherine the Great of Russia, whose calibration of The Great’s arch, absurdist tone is sharp as a needle. Kaley Cuoco’s shift from comedy ensemble on the The Big Bang Theory to anchor of HBO Max’s psychological romp The Flight Attendant could nab the network star her first Golden Globe. But given the sweeping love for Schitt’s Creek at last year’s Emmys, it seems a safe bet that O’Hara will take home the prize for her final season as Moira Rose, the midAtlantic-accented socialite stranded in middle-of-nowhere Canada.
Will win: Catherine O’Hara, Schitt’s Creek
Should win: Elle Fanning, The Great
Best actor in a TV series – musical or comedy
Nominated: Don Cheadle, Black Monday; Nicholas Hoult, The Great; Eugene Levy, Schitt’s Creek; Jason Sudeikis, Ted Lasso; Ramy Youssef, Ramy
This year’s slate is a mixed bag–, featuring stars of new shows –Nicholas Hoult for his zany turn as Emperor Peter in The Great and Jason Sudeikis for Ted Lasso – as well as the Hollywood veterans Don Cheadle and the Schitt’s Creek star Eugene Levy, and last year’s surprise winner, Ramy Youssef. The Globes, being the Globes, probably won’t fall as uniformly for Schitt’s Creek as the Emmys, which granted the show a full buffet of comedy awards in 2020, so odds are in favor of Sudeikis’s midwestern-sweet, endearing portrayal of a Kansas football coach turned English football manager.
Will win: Jason Sudeikis, Ted Lasso Should win: Jason Sudeikis, Ted Lasso
Best television series – musical or comedy
Nominated: Emily in Paris (Netflix), The Flight Attendant (HBO Max), The Great (Hulu), Schitt’s Creek (CBC), Ted Lasso (Apple TV+)
The nomination of Emily in Paris, Netflix’s fizzy comfort comedy about a beret-wearing American abroad from Darren Star, creator of Sex and the City, raised some eyebrows (including one of its own writers’), especially in light of the Globes’ egregious snub of Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You (although it should be noted that the two are different categories, comedy series v limited series. It should also be noted that, according to the Los Angeles Times, Emily in Paris’s studio, Paramount, treated HFPA members to a tour of the set and two nights at a five-star Paris hotel). Anyway, the Paris nomination makes this a more scrutinized category, and while voters could sway toward Ted Lasso’s sweetness or the swan song of the beloved Schitt’s Creek, odds are probably in favor of HBO Max’s escapist caper The Flight Attendant, somehow both frantic and fun and anchored by a career-best turn from Cuoco.
Will win: The Flight Attendant Should win: The Great
Best actress in a limited series or TV movie
Nominated: Cate Blanchett, Mrs America; Daisy Edgar-Jones, Normal People; Shira Haas, Unorthodox; Nicole Kidman, The Undoing; Anya Taylor-Joy, The Queen’s Gambit
This is a stacked category of veteran stars (Nicole! Cate!) and impressive new talent, playing a slate of braced, inscrutable female characters. There’s an argument to be made for the kaleidoscope of vulnerability and heat Daisy EdgarJones brought to Normal People’s hyper-closeup, extended scenes of intimacy. And there’s always a case for Cate Blanchett, who delivers yet another fantastic performance as the 70s anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly in Mrs America. But there’s almost no way they’ll beat out Anya Taylor-Joy’s magnetic, star-cementing performance as the orphan turned chess champion Beth Harmon in The Queen’s Gambit, a role and global hit that is catnip for the Globes.
Will win: Anya
Queen’s Gambit
Should win: Cate Blanchett, Mrs America
Taylor-Joy, The
Best actor in a limited series or TV movie
Nominated: Bryan Cranston, Your Honor; Jeff Daniels, The Comey Rule; Hugh Grant, The Undoing; Ethan Hawke, The Good Lord Bird; Mark Ruffalo, I Know This Much Is True
This category could be anyone’s, though Hugh Grant –– fresh off his Globe-nominated performance in A Very English Scandal –– probably has an edge for his somewhat self-satirizing role as Nicole Kidman’s witty, wicked husband in HBO’s whodunnit The Undoing. But there’s strong competition here, notably from Mark Ruffalo’s double role as tragedy-afflicted twin brothers in the bleak I Know This Much Is True and Ethan Hawke’s frenetic, irreverent take on the American abolitionist John Brown in The Good Lord Bird, in what some have called a career-best performance.
Will win: Hugh Grant, The Undoing Should win: Ethan Hawke, The Good Lord Bird
Best supporting actress in a series, limited series or TV movie
Nominated: Gillian Anderson, The Crown; Helena Bonham Carter, The Crown; Julia Garner, Ozark; Annie Murphy, Schitt’s Creek; Cynthia Nixon, Ratched
Another stacked category (for white people –– let’s not forget the I May
Destroy You snub or, again, any nominations for black-led ensembles in the film categories) with Emmy champ Julia Garner for Ozark, Sex and the City alum Cynthia Nixon in Ratched, and The Crown costars Gillian Anderson (as Margaret Thatcher) and Helena Bonham Carter (Princess Margaret), either of whom are likely to ride goodwill for the British drama to the win. Which is a shame for Annie Murphy, whose expressive performance consistently lifted a potentially easy-to-hate character into one of Schitt’s Creek’s strengths.
Will win: Gillian Anderson, The Crown
Should win: Annie Murphy, Schitt’s Creek
Best supporting actor in a series, limited series, or TV movie
Nominated: John Boyega, Small Axe; Brendan Gleeson, The Comey Rule; Dan Levy, Schitt’s Creek; Jim Parsons, Hollywood; Donald Sutherland, The Undoing
Given the widespread love for Schitt’s Creek, Dan Levy is the favorite to win, but if the insular Hollywood Foreign Press, not known for valuing performers of color and particularly black actors, knew what was good for them, they’d reward John Boyega for his performance as the trailblazing British police officer Leroy Logan in Steve McQueen’s British-Caribbean history anthology Small Axe.
Will win: Dan Levy, Schitt’s Creek Should win: John Boyega, Small Axe
Best limited series or TV movie
Nominated: Normal People (Hulu/ BBC), The Queen’s Gambit (Netflix), Small Axe (Amazon Studios/BBC), The Undoing (HBO), Unorthodox (Netflix)
The limited series category is haunted by the inexplicable snub of I May Destroy You, whose psychological acuity on consent, identity and the aftermath of trauma easily matched if not surpassed The Undoing’s portrayal of an unraveling marriage/murder mystery, Unorthodox’s escape from an insular religious community, and Normal People’s exploration of a foundational sexual relationship. The win should go to Steve McQueen’s Small Axe, which nimbly roves through underrepresented tales of the black BritishCaribbean experience from the late 60s through mid-80s. But it would be a surprise if the HFPA didn’t ultimately vote for the feel-good underdog story in The Queen’s Gambit.
Will win: The Queen’s Gambit Should win: Small Axe
Best actress in a TV series – drama
Nominated: Olivia Colman, The Crown; Jodie Comer, Killing Eve; Emma Corrin, The Crown; Laura Linney, Ozark; Sarah Paulson, Ratched
The Oscar winner Olivia Colman triumphed last year for her portrayal of middle-aged Queen Elizabeth II over the Emmy winner Jodie Comer’s deranged hitwoman Villanelle in Killing Eve, a scenario which could very well repeat in 2021 despite stiff competition from Ozark’s Laura Linney and perennial the Ryan Murphy favorite Sarah Paulson in Ratched. But the interest in The Crown’s portrayal of Princess Diana was overwhelming, and her appeal remains strong. It’s a dauntingly high bar to take on the late royal’s early days in the public eye, but the newcomer Emma Corrin cleared it.
Will win: Emma Corrin, The Crown Should win: Emma Corrin, The Crown
Best actor in a TV series – drama
Nominated: Jason Bateman, Ozark; Josh O’Connor, The Crown; Bob Odenkirk, Better Call Saul; Al Pacino, Hunters; Matthew Rhys, Perry Mason
Jason Bateman and Bob Odenkirk, awards season staples, return for Ozark and Better Call Saul, along with outside nominations for Matthew Rhys’s interpretation of Perry Mason and Al Pacino’s turn as a Nazi hunter in the little-discussed Amazon series Hunter. The evening probably belongs to The Crown, though, and this award to its Prince Charles, Josh O’Connor.
Will win: Josh O’Connor, The Crown Should win: Josh O’Connor, The Crown
Best television series – drama
Nominated: The Crown (Netflix), Lovecraft Country (HBO Max), The Mandalorian (Disney+), Ozark (Netflix), Ratched (Netflix)
It’s an almost entirely blank slate this year for best TV drama, with The Crown as the only repeat nominee (last year went, deservedly, to Succession, whose third season was delayed by the pandemic). There’s an outside, outside chance that affection for Disney’s well-received Star Wars franchise The Mandalorian or Netflix’s Ozark could slip in for the win. But The Crown might as well be lab-engineered for Globes favoritism –– European setting, lavish budgets, rich historical detail, committed performances of constraint, enough international buzz to invite a rebuke from the UK culture secretary over its historical accuracy. It’s as much of a lock as can be for the Globes (which, again, isn’t saying much).
Will win: The Crown
Should win: The Crown