Jodie Foster: ‘Guantanamo is inhumane. It’s not who we are as a country’
Los Angeles, Feb 5 (efe-epa).- Jodie Foster and Benedict Cumberbatch star as lawyers on opposing sides of a habeas corpus case in Kevin Macdonald’s drama The Mauritanian, based on the memoir of a longtime Guantanamo Bay detainee, played by Tahar Rahim, who just earned a Golden Globe nomination for his role.
“Guantanamo will close eventually because it’s so expensive to run”, said Foster in an interview with Efe. “And that really is the reason why Guantanamo will close, whether it’s now or whether it’s in a number of years. (…) What’s laid bare by the film is that there shouldn’t be an apparatus for American justice, that specifically works outside of America offshore so that we don’t have to follow any of our rules”.
“That’s inhumane. And it’s not who we are as a country”, she added.
The Oscar-winning actress discussed the need to look back on the country’s past and revisit its history. “We do that process of truth and reconciliation and say how could we have done it better? You know, where do we mess up? And who do we leave behind? Who do we hurt? You make those kinds of restitutions because if you don’t, you’re just gonna do it again and it just becomes a terrible pattern,” she said.
“And you certainly learn that with our experiences in the Jim Crow South or Native Americans or Japanese internment camps… What this country has done with dark parts of our history…. We have to return to them and understand them so that we don’t do it again”, Foster warned. EFE-EPA
dvp/mg/ks
