PROJECT’S BACKSTORY:

 “Back in 2007, I wrote a story about Mohamedou Slahi for DER SPIEGEL. He was detained at Guantanamo Bay for over a decade and was considered a terror suspect. When he sat with his attorney in the secret facility in Guantanamo and read my article, he broke down and cried. It was the first time that someone had doubted that he was guilty. It was years before Mohamedou Slahi was released from Guantanamo, and it was only then that we could meet in person. We became friends.” – John Goetz

The documentary was produced by Germany’s Hoferichter und Jacobs GmbH under the title “In Search of Monsters”, Cinema Libre Studio acquired the film after team members heard John Goetz on Ira Glass’ ‘This American Life’ radio program in the episode “An Invitation to Tea.” Listen here: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/752/transcript 

EXCERPTS FROM GOETZ’S 2007 ARTICLE IN DER SPEIGEL: 

“Slahi, now 38, is believed to have been a major player in the terrorist network assembled by terrorist leaders Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri to conduct militant jihad against the "infidels" and "crusaders" -- especially against the world's superpower, the United States. Slahi apparently knew several of the terrorist pilots behind the Sept. 11 attacks, who met regularly at the apartment of their ringleader, Mohammed Atta, on Hamburg's Marienstrasse. Students like Slahi, who also led double lives. One of his relatives was even higher up in the al-Qaida hierarchy.”

“It is beyond doubt that Slahi was a promoter of global jihad. He preached in gloomy backyard mosques in cities like Duisburg and Krefeld, telling Muslims from Germany's industrial Ruhr region about the consequences their faith should have for their lives. He sent money to a high-ranking member of al-Qaida, which made him suspicious. He traveled to Afghanistan, which made him even more suspicious. He moved like a fish in water in a milieu that was home to some of the world's most-wanted terrorists.”

“Slahi's case is exemplary of the years before and after Sept. 11, 2001. His life history documents, almost without interruption, a decade of terrorism against the West, as well as the West's difficulties in finding a suitable response to it. Slahi's biography is yet another example of why the Guantanamo system has failed. Thanks to a wealth of documents, letters and testimony, it can be reconstructed in greater detail than almost any other case.” Read full article here: From Germany to Guantanamo: The Career of Prisoner No. 760 - DER SPIEGEL