Interviewer: Okay, good morning. - Morning. Interviewer: We are very grateful to you for participating in the Witness to Guantanamo Project. We invite you to speak of your experiences and involvement in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. We are hoping to provide you with an opportunity to tell your story in your own words. We are creating an archive of stories so that people here in America and around the world will have a better understanding of what you and others have observed and experienced. Future generations must know what happened at Guantanamo. And by telling your story, you're contributing to history. We appreciate your willingness to share your story with us today. And if at any time during the interview you'd like to take a break, just let us know. And if there's something you say you'd like to retract just let us know and we can remove it. - Okay. Interviewer: And we'd like to begin with some basic general information about you including your name and your hometown, your birthday and age. Maybe we can start with that. - Okay. Yeah my name is Colby Vokey and I'm from Dallas, Texas. I'm 47 years old. Interviewer: You're birthdate. - June 30th, 1965. Interviewer: And your marital status? - I am married, I've been married for 25 years. Interviewer: With children? - Three children. Interviewer: And can you tell us a little bit about your education? - Sure, I went to, got my undergraduate degree, Bachelor of Science and Political Science at Texas A&M University. After that, I went through the law program in the Marine Corps and I went to the University of North Dakota School of Law. I graduated there, JD with distinction. And then after that I attended the Army Judge Advocate General School in Charlottesville, is co-located there with University of Virginia Law School. And I got my LLM there. Interviewer: And what's your current occupation? - I'm an attorney and I do nothing but trials, mostly criminal law. And most of that military cases. Interviewer: As a private practice? - As a private practice, right. Defend soldiers, marines, courts martial, around the world. Interviewer: Really? - That's what I do. Interviewer: Do you have a firm or it's just yourself. - I'm part of a firm in Dallas, Fitzpatrick Hagood Smith & Uhl. It's a mostly criminal defense firm. Do a lot of state federal criminal defense. A lot of white collar type, cases. Interviewer: Well, we'd like to begin by having you describe how you first got involved in the military and then how you got involved in Guantanamo. So maybe you could just start with those and, - Sure. - I graduated from Texas A&M in 1987 and I went through the ROTC program there. So upon graduation, I was commissioned to second lieutenant in the Marine Corps. And when I, go on active duty and went through the initial training and became an artillery officer in the Marine Corps. So I served two tours as an artillery officer including a combat tour in Operation Desert Storm, as an executive officer for an artillery battery. After a couple of tours, I decided, I always had kind of an interest in the law. I actually served as a member of a court, like on the jury for a couple of courts martial. And I thought, I can do that job. I'm just looking at some of the lawyers thinking I could probably do it better. I just need to know what's in those little books he's got on his table. And put in for the law program and was fortunate enough to be selected for that. And so they sent me off to law school, up in University of North Dakota and went to school of law there. So, in the summers, I would go to a marine base and work, not during the school year. And upon a graduation from law school, they sent me to the Naval Justice School where you have to go through another school to be certified as a military judge advocate. So I did that. And after leaving Newport Rhode Island, after leaving the Naval Justice School, I got assigned back out in the Marine Corps and I started doing military law in the Marine Corps. And I spent all of my time as a lawyer in the Marine Corps in trial (indistinct) either as prosecutor or defense. With the exception of one year getting my LLM. So that's all I did the rest of the time. The Marine Corps as either prosecutor or defend, mostly defend. That's all I wanted to do. I wanted to be in the courtroom, so. Interviewer: And what year are we talking about when you started doing this trial work? - 1997 I think it was. Interviewer: And was it in the states. It was, I did most of mine in the States, absolutely. Yeah Camp Pendleton. I was stationed quite a bit at Camp Pendleton for about nine or the last 10 years, I think my career was at Camp Pendleton, California. Interviewer: And where were you in 911? - 911, I was at Camp Pendleton. Interviewer: Did you think something would change after 911 in your life? - Yeah, we all knew it would change. Matter of fact, we had court that morning and I heard some rumblings about something happening. And I ran out from the building across to another building where I knew they had a TV on and sat there and watched as, you know, sat and watched The Twin Towers come crashing down. And we all knew, we all knew that something was gonna happen as a result of this. So, Interviewer: What did happen to you? - Well we already heard, pretty quickly, we already had people kind of speculating as to what we're gonna be doing, what we're gonna be moving. We knew that we're gonna be mobilizing some forces. I mean, it was kind of common sense, that we were gonna put in some kind of response. And solely that information would come trickling down that that's what we're going to do. After we made the decision to go in to Afghanistan there in 2002, interestingly enough, I was selected as a person to go over to do, kind of on the government side to do, almost like a legal triage, which was to conduct these, what should have been Article 5 tribunals for detainees that they captured. So initially organized something where they had a couple of attorneys from the different services. We were gonna go over there to help run Article 5 tribunals. Interviewer: Really? - Absolutely, that was the initial plan. Interviewer: And this is in 02 or later on? - This was in 02. Interviewer: Do you know the month? - It was, no, it was early in 02. Interviewer: 'Cause they started sending people to Guantanamo in January 11th, 02. Was this before then you think? - I just, I don't remember, I know it was in early 02. I know there were two, myself and another Colonel. In Marine Corps, we had the set of orders that said, we gotta be prepared on 24 hours notice to jump on a plane and fly over there. So that's what we were expecting to do, as running Article 5 tribunals. That was, the word came down, that was changed, and it was, the army was gonna take that piece. And then as we all know now, they completely changed that and they didn't run these Article 5 tribunals. They did this, whatever they wanna call it, detainee review. And it's funny, when that happened, and again, I'm on the government side when this happens and we hear that they're not gonna be running Article 5 tribunals. I mean, there was kind of a general feeling of, "This is a bad thing." You know, why on earth would we not do these things? We're not granting anybody additional rights. Why not just run the Article 5 tribunals to be safe? I mean, it made the most sense. So that was the first little, I don't know bump in the road that kind of was an indicator that this was gonna be anything but, what it should have been. Interviewer: Were you familiar with the (indistinct) conventions at that time? - No, not really. I had some, some introduction to it throughout the military, but really not much. I started boning up when I was, when these designated lawyers to go over there for this purpose. But I didn't have a copy of Pick Days commentaries or anything like that. I'd heard about them and that's about it. So I started reading, little bit, specifically about Article 5 tribunals. And then when I got the call, they canceled it, we're not going over there, I didn't think more, anything more about it. I went off and got my LLM. And then, but we, while I was in Charlottesville, you kind of keep hearing about what they're doing with the folks in Guantanamo. And how is this sort of evolving, because within the military, Charlottesville, the Army's JAG school, is kind of the pinnacle of legal education in the military. More so, the Naval Justice School or the air force's school. Because its status, offers an ABA accredited LLM, is co-located with University of Virginia Law School. And they're just, that's really kind of the, you wanna know where the academics in the military loss area would be, that's where you're gonna find them. So you get a lot of the kind of the current information that's coming up, and so we're hearing these things about, different ideas of how this is going to work, what they're doing. All unclassified stuff but you're hearing this stuff and you're thinking, "What on earth are we doing?" Interviewer: Were people really questioning it? - Yeah, absolutely. Especially in Charlottesville at the school house. 'Cause it was, it's definitely, believe it or not more of an academic environment than anywhere else. So, yeah, you had, instructors on the staff were kind of questioning it as well. And believe me, throughout the military, there are plenty of guys who questioned what we did in Guantanamo and disagree with what we did. They just, you just not real vocal, so. Interviewer: So, okay, so let's go on. So you finished, you got your LLM and then what happened? - I ended up going back to Camp Pendleton again. I was the regional defense counsel. So my job is, I'm in charge of all the Marine Corps, and a few Navy defense counsel in the West half of the U.S. and in Iraq. So, it was a pretty full-time job. Plus I would take cases myself. So we had all the war crimes cases, that were coming up out of Iraq. Interviewer: This is 03? - This is starting in 03. I stayed in that job until retirement. So which is, in the military terms five years in one job is a very long time. And those were five remarkable years, that's for sure. Interviewer: And how did you end up representing Omar Khadr and go into Guantanamo? How did that happen? - It was in 2005. And again, I was pretty busy in my job, but we hadn't had the big war crimes cases coming up yet. The Haditha and Hamdania cases. Those had not come up yet, but in 05, they had charged five additional detainees. I think it made a total of 10 at the time. Omar was one of them. And, the chief defense counsel for the military commissions was Colonel Dwight Sullivan. And I don't know if you've had the opportunity to talk to him. One of the greatest man I've ever met in my life. Incredibly smart, someone you definitely need to talk to. So Dwight Sullivan was the chief defense counsel, and they had a certain number of lawyers there, military lawyers, to a point as, counsel for these detainees because once they were officially charged, they had to have a military defense lawyer. And Dwight didn't have enough lawyers in his office for these new five. So he calls me up saying, "Look, we've got these new detainees. I'd really like you to take one of these. And by the way I've called your boss to make sure you're available and she said you're available." I could've have said no, but I got a heads up that Dwight was gonna call me anyway, so I was looking into who the new charged detainees were, and decided that if I'm gonna take one, it's gonna be Omar. Interviewer: Why? - One, they're charging a juvenile for a war crime. Something that we just don't do. He was the only one of the detainees charged at that point, who was charged with actually harming somebody. All the rest of them had been, it's all conspiracy, you know supportive terrorism type things. Omar is the only one charged, actually with doing harm to someone. They charged him with murder. And, so those things kind of drew me to the case. A child, kind of a child soldier actually charged with harm and murder. So I kind of decided if I'm gonna do one of these cases, it's gonna be Omar. And another benefit is, Omar speaks English. Which makes your life a whole lot easier. And knowing that his family was from Canada, made it a little more attractive as well. So instead of having to fly to Yemen, going to Toronto was a little bit easier. So really, all those reasons, I was kind of, I thought it was kinda, compelling story of a 15 year old that they're charging with murder as a war crime. I said, "If I'm gonna do one of these cases, it's gonna be that one." So I called up Dwight and told him, "Okay, I'll do it. I want Omar's case." And he said, "Well that's the only case I wanted you on in the first place," so. But right from the start I knew, I should have known, I should have just turned around and ran away because, I get assigned as Omar's counsel and I'm flying out for the first time to go meet him before we have a hearing out there. And I get as far as, I stop in Charlottesville for a, actually for a CLE and to meet with some folks from the commission's office in DC. And, I'm just on my way about to fly to Guantanamo, when a Marine general calls up Colonel Sullivan and tells him to stop sending me anywhere, cancel my orders, I'm off the case. So I mean, I'm already, I'm hours away from getting in the plane to actually fly there. So they removed me from the case, temporarily. Interviewer: Do you know why? - No, I still don't know why. I'm not really sure. I think it was, well, I think I sort of do know why. The Marine Corps did not want really anybody participating in Guantanamo if they could help it. Matter of fact, at some point you get a lot of the services not wanting to, at first Guantanamo is this big sexy, this is the big story, but it also sucked a lot of personnel and people would get kind of lost in the middle there and sucked forever, sucked away forever. And, I think on the Marine Corps side, they saw that issue and they didn't want to get people involved from the start. So I think that had something to do with it. There was also an issue over who had the authority to tell me what cases I can and can't do. And this general somehow thought that he could determine what cases I did and didn't do, which is not correct. It's not, the way the regulations say or the law says. But I had not formed an attorney client relationship with Omar, so they ordered me to stand down and I did. So they went forward with a hearing in Guantanamo anyway. We had, that time we had, there was still three lawyers representing Omar. We had two law professors from American University and an army captain who was assigned in lieu of me. A guy named, he was a captain named JJ Merriam, fantastic guy. So they did the first hearing without me. And the issue they're raising is, he's being denied his right to counsel, because I was removed from this case. And they kinda, they kind of threw JJ under the bus or JJ threw himself under the bus by, remarkably enough, the military lawyer they assigned to defend Omar has never defended a case in his life. This is the first case he's ever defended. And they made the point there of, "We have Captain Merriam as a great guy, but he's never even defended a jaywalking ticket." And his first case is, defending an alleged terrorist in Guantanamo Bay. Pretty quickly after that, I was back on the case and flying back out to go see Omar. But, that's how the whole thing kind of started. And I should've known right from the start, that bad things are gonna happen, that's for sure. Interviewer: What were your expectations as you were flying down to Guantanamo? - Well, kind of interesting. I really expected this to be much like a military, any other military case that you have. I expected it to be similar to a court-martial. I expected the government to have all the power and all the evidence and all the money, and it was going to be a fight. But I expected it to be much like a court-martial. And there's reasons why I had that expectation. Because, we had the manual for court martial and the uniform code of military justice. And when that was passed, just after World War II, the UCMJ and the manual for courts that implements it were made for the purpose of courts martial and for tribunals and commissions. So if you read the very first page of the manual for court martial, it'll state right there that, this was, this is also designed for commissions and tribunals, for exactly what we're doing there. So I kind of expected it to be very similar to that, because I expected them to use that, the same red manual for court martial that we use for courts martial because that's the way it was designed. And I found out pretty quickly that the last thing they wanted to do was follow any kind of established law whatsoever. So, my expectations are pretty much blown out of the water, the very first hearing that I had in Guantanamo Interviewer: Who's they, didn't wanna follow it? When you say they, who are you talking about? - The Bush administration. You have, kind of spearheaded by secretary of defense with, when Donald Rumsfeld was there, who knew, who else had such a hand in the details of how it was gonna be designed but a lot of it came from the secretary of defense's office. I mean, I know you had some other folks that were instrumental in how Guantanamo was gonna be run like Alberto Gonzales and some others. But, all the promulgated rules and procedures, all came from the secretary of defense's office. So, he sorta, they sorta became public enemy number one in my view. Because they did not use a manual for court martial, matter of fact, they specifically kept it out of any kinda, issue whatsoever. And instead, they come up with these ridiculous, they had these, Military Commission Instructions and, what was the other one there called, they had the instructions, Military Commission Instructions and Military Commission, it was another kind of directive that they had come out using. These came out of secretary defense's office. They were specifically for the military commissions and they created everything. Rules of procedure, rules of evidence, restrictions on counsel. It was kinda crazy. It was like, walking into a third grade class and say, "Okay class, for fun today, I want you to write the laws for some country." And some of them were just haphazard and random. And, make no mistake about it, the initial rules, when they first came out in Guantanamo, before Congress stepped in, before the Supreme court struck anything down, they were absolutely a system designed to convict. They were a system designed to not allow the defense to really present any meaningful evidence. No question about that. They had these Military Commission Instructions and Orders, I think there was Military Commission Orders, Military Commission Instructions. And, then they also had Presiding Officer Instructions. Now, when we first started this whole process, yeah I should've known something was up because we didn't have military judges. We didn't have anybody called judges. We had presiding officers. And it became pretty apparent that these presiding officers were there to bully us around to do whatever it took to try to convict these guys but had no real power, such as, you could file a motion to dismiss and he couldn't grant it. You could file motions to do anything, and you didn't know whether he had the power to grant anything at all. And it was, it seemed pretty apparent that they had no power to do anything. One of the frustrating things for me is, you had no idea whether he had the power or not. So we had several conversations with our presiding officer, our judge, Colonel Chester of, we would have a complaint about some issue, and he'd say, "File a brief," and I'd say, "Okay your honor, but do you have any power to act on that? I mean, I'm I filing this brief for nothing?" "Well you have to file the brief to find out." "Well, I mean, your honor, you should know if you have the power to grant that or deny that or not at all." And to kind of quote the movie "Zoolander," I feel like I'm taking crazy pills here. So, we would sometimes, it wasn't that common that we, 'cause your time in Guantanamo when you go to those visits is so short, that we'd spent all night writing some brief, we'd file it, and we'd never get an answer. And even if we did get an answer, you would never get an answer that contained any law. So, I mean, think of a normal attorney, you wanna go in there, a great example of a big issue would be, whether his statements that he gave were voluntary. Great question, since they tortured the hell out of Omar. And there's no way any of those statements he ever gave should ever be considered voluntary in any court of law. But, so you wanna file that motion okay. I mean, if we were in state court here in San Francisco, you'd file a motion, you'd cite, you'd cite the constitution in United States. You'd cite the constitution of California. You'd cite the laws of California. You'd cite precedent, California law, U.S. law. And you'd say, "Here's the issue. Here's the remedy we're looking for. Here's my sources of authority to rely upon. And judge grant this motion." I mean, it's pretty basic simple stuff. In Guantanamo, you go in there and you say, "Well okay, this is wrong, but why?" I mean, what source of law do you look at first? Do you look at military cases? Constitutional law cases? Just federal cases, international law cases? And you quickly realize that there, since they won't cite any law in what they do, you have no idea. You could be citing Ukrainian law, for all the good it would do you. And, I mean, and we would cite all kinds of things. Now the funny thing is, usually when we file a motion, we never got any answers back on our motions we filed. Any brief we filed. And if we did get any answers back, they would be remarkably free of any kind of legal ruling. So, the only, but the only case they would cite ever or any source of authority was kairos, that was it. And of course they would cite these Military Commission Instructions. These Military Commission Orders, these Presiding Officer Orders, they would cite that all with all along. As a matter of fact, they came out with, some of those commissions rules that these, quote laws that they came up with. I have a few that were my favorite, all right. I'll just tell you those. The first one was, when they came out with an instruction that was telling the attorneys that we were supposed to refer to, these Military Commission Instructions as commissions law. So there was actually a rule telling us to call it law. And I had a big debate with the judge in the courtroom. "Absolutely, we're not gonna call it law. There's been no notice and comment. There's no legislative action. This is not law. This is some rule you pass and now you're trying to tell us that we have to call it law and I won't do it." I mean, it was crazy. Interviewer: And you had no expectations? You had no idea when you (speaks faintly) - Oh, I was very naive when I walked into this thing. Again, I really imagined this more being like a court martial, like the manual court martial says, that you use these, you use those very same rules and there are changes in the annotations you can make, when you apply those rules. But that's kinda what I figured it was going to be. And boy was anything but that. Interviewer: Did other attorneys have the same response, you did? The other defense attorneys. - Yeah, I think they did. Now at the time, I think most of them did. But being a military attorney in Guantanamo, is a very difficult thing. And you get put in very, very difficult positions. Now, I had the luxury a little bit of, I was probably the most, I think it was almost certainly at the time, the most senior military lawyer representing a detainee. I was a Lieutenant Colonel at the time. The overwhelming majority of the other council were captains or Navy Lieutenant, so that level. So, anywhere you go in the military system you're gonna be junior to the prosecutors, the commissions people, the judges. And, the military is naturally oppressive anyway. I mean, that's just the way it, I don't necessarily mean that in a negative sense, but it's a naturally oppressive environment and it must be because of the discipline. And that carries over into the legal field as well. Now you have military attorneys who stand up and do the right thing all the time, but it makes it very difficult for them. A lot of pressure can be put on, threats can occur. It can affect your career. So as a general rule, being a military defense lawyer is a great job. But depending on where you are, the bigger the case that you're handling, it's not necessarily the best thing in the world for your military career. Interviewer: Why not? - Because in a general sense in the military when you're doing military law, it is the commanders who are the ones who determine whether somebody is going to trial or not. So when you have a defense counsel who's fighting what the machine is trying to do in the first place, you're kinda getting in the way. So, and Guantanamo was not a whole lot different, except it wasn't just one single commander that you can point to that you're kind of fighting. It is basically the entire U.S. government, all secretary defense. And it can be a very uncomfortable position to be in. Matter of fact, in my opinion, we've had some military lawyers do incredible things in Guantanamo. And in my opinion, we shouldn't have them. Not because they're not capable, but because of the position that they're forced to be put in. It's not fair to them and it's not fair to their clients, if you have some that aren't willing to risk everything by representing a detainee. Interviewer: Did they want you to plead Khadr out? Is that what they wanted? - No, no, not at all. These were all to be show trials. They wanted to parade in all the evidence they wanted to do and convict them in front of the world jury. They didn't really want pleas. At least not at first, I never got that impression. To them, it didn't matter. Interviewer: Well, can you tell us a little bit about, when you met Khadr the first time. How that was like. - Absolutely. The first time I met him, well, I was a Marine Lieutenant Colonel, so I probably couldn't be in any more of a difficult position to get along with Omar, because Marines kind of have a certain reputation of being pretty tough. Omar was very well aware of that based on guards that he's had. So you want probably pick the worst possible combination you know, to put in front of Omar to have him trust you, it'd be a Marine Lieutenant Colonel. So my first trip over there, travel there is, first of all is a nightmare. It was, especially when they first started this thing. It's so difficult getting over there. Basically a one day visit, you gotta block off about eight days of your life, because of all the travel requirements and all the restrictions. And they, every time you go visit your client there, they completely changed the rules of visitations at the camp. You don't know what the rules are, they won't tell you and they'll change them constantly. So sometimes it wasn't uncommon to show up and they told you, you need to be there at nine o'clock. So you show up at nine o'clock, "Oh no, no, you were supposed to be here at eight, now it's, now we can't move him. So you'll have to come back at one." You come back at one, "I don't know what you're talking about, you were supposed to be here at nine." That happened all the time. And at first you think it's just mistakes but when it keeps happening over and over again, it's either they are so callous that they absolutely don't care whether this guy gets represented or they're deliberately doing things to interfere with your representation. And depending on what day it was, you could ask me which one I thought it was. They definitely did do things to interfere with your representation of your client. And they took steps, knowing it would interfere with it and they didn't care. So my first visit with Omar was delayed by, some of these little delays, by the time I finally got in there it was probably a half a day later than I was originally supposed to meet with him. At that point, I didn't know if anything was up. But I met with him right off the bat. He wasn't real forthcoming with me. He was kind of wary at that point. Interviewer: What did you say to him when you first met him? - I told him who I was, a little bit about what I do, that I'm there for him, that I don't work for the government. Anything we say, is confidential between us, except what they may be recording. Interviewer: And you think they were? - They told me they were not. They did have video that they had with no sound is what they said. And initially when we were interviewing him and, it was in what? Delta or Echo, that we were, I think where we did all the interviews, most of them. I don't think they were, but they just had a camera that saw the rooms. They have eyes on Omar the whole time, but with no sound. I believe that was the truth. I do know that, in another location where interviews were conducted they were listening in. Interviewer: How do you know that? - I'd rather not say how I know that. Interviewer: How did he appear to you when you saw him the first time? - He was kind of, my daughter was a teenager at that time, he just kind of looked like a, he seemed like your average teenager honestly, to be honest with you. He wanted to know about his family, if I'd talked to his family. There were certain things he'd like, he wanted me to get him some things. I mean, we took him some, I think we took him like Burger King. But there were some things he wanted me to get him. And it had nothing to do with this case. He wanted Harry Potter books. If I can get him a Harry Potter book. He loved Harry Potter. So we talked about a lot of, I mean I think we spent probably the first 30 minutes of me giving kind of what the nature of our relationship. And I think really after that, we just talked about things that had nothing to do with the case. And it was kind of nice. I mean, after about the first 30 minutes, I realized that he really doesn't wanna talk about the case. He really, I mean, he was a kid, so, I thought it went okay but he still didn't trust me at that point. And trying to get other things into him, that's a whole nother story. You can't get anything in there into him. You try to mail letters to him, I don't think he ever got any letter I ever sent to him. Interviewer: Really? - No, which is not surprising. I know they were going through his mail and they would either redact everything or they just wouldn't put it through. Interviewer: Even from a legal counsel? - Oh, yeah, absolutely, even from legal counsel. I tried to get him some, he liked nature photography kind of thing. I would try and get him a magazine of just pictures. That way, when they had the guys go back, go through that, redact everything, I mean, there's no hidden meanings to a national geographic. As long as it didn't contain current events, that was a problem too. So I didn't get him national geographic. It was some kind of nature photography thing that had nothing to do with current events, but that, they wouldn't allow that or it just wouldn't get into him. I bought him, one or two Harry Potter books that obviously never made it to him. Interviewer: Was he kept in isolation all this time, that you knew him? - Parts of the time he was, parts of the time, he was not. When I first met him, he was not in isolation. It was later on right before one of the hearings that they threw him back in isolation. And that's what created this, end up leading to this big fight I had with the judge, the presiding officer, Colonel Chester. Interviewer: I wanna talk about that, but I just wanna get a sense on who he was to you back at the beginning. And how he seemed to you, and whether, how did he physically look? - Well, he did complain of, he had some ailments. You know, they would control the temperature in the room, he was staying, especially when he got to isolation, that was a big problem. He had some physical problems based on the wounds he sustained when this happened. He's blind in one eye and he's still got shrapnel in his body. So some of these things were bothering him. He was not getting the medical care that, he complained of pain and stuff but they didn't do that much for him really. They kept him, kept food in him, they kept him alive. That's really what they were out there to do. Interviewer: You told us he had been abused. How do you know and what kind of abuse did he suffer? - Okay, for abuse, you're talking about, on interrogations, he went through a number of different things. He, Omar was not waterboarded, or at least he's never told me about waterboarding. But he went through just about everything else. Sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation. They would go through, short shackling. He was hit, he was kicked. So he was beat-- Interviewer: This is during interrogations? - Some of these during interrogation, some of it's just during the course of being a detainee. But some of the, probably one of the worst examples of treatment during interrogation for Omar was, one incident where Omar was placed in a room, as a matter of fact there's a movie called "The Road to Guantanamo," if you've seen it. And they describe in there, an incident where they're placed in a room that's dark and there's a strobe light flashing and it's heavy metal music. And they're yelling at these guys. Something very similar happened with Omar. He was in one of these interrogation rooms with interrogators and military uniforms coming in and out. He was placed there, dark room, strobe light flashing, this hardcore heavy metal music playing. And he was short shackled, which means, his hands were chained together behind his back. His feet were chained together. And then his, the chain from his hands was attached to the chain in his feet. And it was all attached to an iron in the floor. So he was chained to the floor, with his hands behind his legs, in that bent position. And he would sit there with the stroke flashing, the music going, in this uncomfortable stress position that cause incredible pain to your joints. And after a while, he would fall over, and they'd walk back in the room, they'd start screaming and yelling at him. They grab him by the hair, they pull him up again and this would happen repeatedly. So after some amount of time, we don't know exactly how long four to six hours, he couldn't hold it anymore and he urinated on himself. So they come back into the room, they unhook him from the floor, they squirt pine Sol on the ground where the urine is and they grab Omar, one by the hands, one by the feet, so he's faced down but is kind of bowed like that, and they use them as a human mop and they mop up the urine and pine Sol with Omar, on his clothes. Then they chain him back up again. And he's in these clothes for several more days. Interviewer: How do you know this happened? - This is the account that Omar told us. Now, whenever you would recount, kind of give a recount of some of these treatments, of course the government would deny everything. This never happened. They would say, "We've never tortured anybody. We don't torture people. This is all," the story would be, "This is all, this is part of their game book. This is part of the game plan that the," what is it, the Manchester doctrine or whatever it was called, the document, of what they're trained to say. But we're talking about a 15 year old boy who was captured. Who was not part of Al Qaeda training. But they would deny everything. They would say, "Oh yeah, that's Colonel Vokey going off again," and discredit it. You know, if you could go back in time and look at that time about 2005 for the next couple of years, the U.S. government was denying everything. That no one was ever tortured. I mean, it wasn't just that we're not aware of it, they would deny it outright. And it wasn't till I think 2008 when Susan Crawford first acknowledged that they had, I think the first time that the U.S. government acknowledged they tortured anyone and refused to prosecute the one detainee because of it. And all of a sudden, all these complaints from the attorneys the detainees were starting to be validated. But my source of information, this was Omar telling me. And we went through with Omar, we put them in that situation and asked him to go through it. And what he was seeing, what he was hearing, what he was feeling. So that's how we know that happened. Interviewer: Why were they doing that to him? Do you know? - Omar was a potential source of a lot of information, because of who his father was. Omar's father was very well known over there. You know, Omar's father was of Egyptian descent but he's from Canada, the whole family's from Canada. And Omar's father ran orphanages, refugee camps over there. He started doing that with the first Jihad, the one we liked against the Soviets. When, they created so many refugees and orphans and he got involved with different groups way back then. And that carried forward all the way through the fall of the Soviets. And then when United States became the enemy, he kept pretty active in the area. So for years and years, and he would travel back and forth from Canada to Pakistan and Afghanistan. And, so Omar's father was known often as Al Kennedy, because, you know the Canadian. He was known, in some circles, pretty well. Had contacts with Bin Laden, and sometimes his family's with him. Sometimes living over there in Pakistan or Afghanistan. Sometimes going back and forth. So Omar had a very unusual childhood from, early on of sometimes living in Toronto or in Scarborough, Canada. Sometimes living in Pakistan, Interviewer: Pakistan. - Afghanistan, different spots there. Definitely an interesting childhood. Interviewer: And they, and were there other instances of abuse that you can recall that, - Well, a lot of it would've been, really have been psychological as well. I mean they were, they were doing a lot of things to him. They would tell him horrible things that would happen to him, being raped, things happening to his family. He was, he was beat. That, is kind of ironic it sounds, was kind of the least of it. Getting beat or kicked was not a big deal I think to Omar, as much as, just the mental pressures, they put him through, the tortures that they put him through. Interviewer: When you talk about sensory deprivation, could you define exactly what that was? - Yeah, take away the censors, cover his eyes, his ears, the mouth is really more for med, but they'd cover his ears and his eyes. They would also do other attacks on his sensory perception, such as, have him in a room with the lights on 24 hours a day and you don't know whether it's day or night. They would do temperature controls in the room, where they constantly keep it cold. He wouldn't have a blanket, so he's not in danger of hyperthermia but just constantly in this cold, uncomfortable state. And the whole point of all these things is to make him so uncomfortable that they're preparing him to talk and to make admissions and to say whatever they want him to say. So that's the whole point of it. Now, some of these things are not necessarily illegal. Not against, necessarily against international law. Some of them, in my opinion without a doubt are. So, of all the interrogation methods and control measures they took on Omar, there were a lot of them that were over the top. A lot of them that I think are offensive. Some of them that I don't believe are illegal, some of them are clearly illegal. But one of the things, if you take any one individual measure, they take against him and examine it, oftentimes you'll say, come to conclusion, "Well, this is just an interrogation method. It's permissible. It's not, doesn't violate international law. Doesn't violate any kind of U.S. domestic law either." But when you combine all the different treatments against them, where you get to the point where you're gonna drive someone insane, then it becomes illegal. Then it becomes torture. So it's how they measure that. Matter of fact they would use medical personnel on their staff and a psychologist to see how far they could push him to the breaking point without killing him. Interviewer: How do you know that? - Well we were trying to, we had a 15 year old boy, who had been wounded in combat, a heck of an interesting childhood being raised. He'd gone through hundreds of hours of interrogations. We needed to get him shrunk. We needed to get him evaluated by somebody that we could trust who could evaluate him. There were so many issues there. It got to the point where we don't even know if he is capable of making the proper election for council. Or whether he can, or that he's being influenced on whether he should fire attorneys or not. That was always an issue with Omar. Can he make some of the basic choices of how to plead, of his right to counsel? Can he participate in his defense? It was always an issue. Interviewer: Why? - Because of, for lack of a better word, the brainwashing that he'd received from, through the interrogations, through the guards, that the Guantanamo itself, influence from other detainees because he was kind of the young one and he was kind of the, everybody's nephew. So we were worried about that as well. And he had been through so much, and he was basically, even when he was 19 years old, he's basically, kind of the mind of a 15 year old still or younger. I mean, he spent his adolescence in Guantanamo and who knows what that'll do to you. But, sometimes he would be irrational. He would say things that wouldn't make sense. He really got to a point where he just wanted to block out any part of the legal process. Just did'nt wanna discuss it. All he wanted do is talk about normal things. Which we did with him quite a bit. I actually really like Omar. I think he's a pretty good kid. I liked him a lot. Matter of fact, probably the two of his family that I think I was most fond of, were the two that were being held, him and Abdulla. Those are the two, I probably liked the most. But I mean, of all the treatment they did to him, and you're watching Omar, as much as I watched him change over just a couple of years that I'm dealing with Omar, there were serious concerns over whether he would wanna try to take his own life. I mean, he's receiving that kind of treatment. The legal system was a complete joke to him. I mean, at first I think he was hopeful. And then he saw it for what it is, which is, it doesn't really matter what happens in there. These are show trials. And even if you won, they weren't gonna necessarily let you go. So, and he would see, sometimes how powerless we were to, through our usual legal tools or filing motions and everything, and for everything to be so unresponsive. And it was demoralizing to him. And the longer he was there, the more I was worried about him. Interviewer: Do you know if he ever did try to commit suicide? - Not that I know of. Interviewer: We interviewed a number of detainees and several of told us how they were broken by the system. Would you say that happened to Omar? - Yeah, yeah, he was definitely broken. Interviewer: Could you describe what that means? - Completely hopeless, serious depression. Now, you know I'm no doctor, but all the symptoms I would describe to the expert we try to get in, no question, going through depression. I mean, sometimes it's pretty obvious. So serious depression, hopelessness. Lack of ability to concentrate. Jumpy, and I think it came down to he just didn't care at some point anymore. Interviewer: Was there a suicide watch on him at all? - I don't know. And you may think to yourself, "How the hell do you not know if there was a suicide watch?" Well, they wouldn't tell you anything. And the information I did get from folks in Guantanamo was often, you couldn't trust it. I was lied to several times in regards to Omar's case. Stuff that really, kind of stuff that really disgusted me and made me probably even more bitter at the time. Interviewer: Could you tell us what? - Absolutely. There was an issue, a lot of it surrounded this one hearing where, we flew out to Guantanamo Bay and we're having a hearing. I don't remember what the issue was we were litigating or supposedly litigating, and they threw him in solitary confinement. We had no idea that it happened until we went to go visit him the afternoon before the hearing. So nobody informed us. We fly into Guantanamo and you go through the same hassle when you get on the Island and where you can go and where you can't go. And, so by the time we get out to see Omar, it's in the afternoon and the following morning is our hearing. And we meet with Omar and that's when we find out, and Omar's angry, that all of a sudden he's now been placed the day before in solitary confinement. And he believes it was because he's cooperating with us. Because if you look at the other detainees who won't cooperate with their lawyers, they're not in solitary confinement, but he and one other were. And his thinking wasn't that far off, honestly. So we're like well, "Omar, we'll find out what's going on, why this is happening and if something's wrong we'll, I don't know that we were thinking, we'll file a motion. We'll bring it up with the judge, right. So we try to do that. And they won't even answer our questions. I can't even get them to say, "We can't disclose that, that's confidential or whatever." You'll call and they'll say, "Well, hold on," and then nobody will pick up on the phone. Or they'll just hang up on you. We couldn't get anybody to answer our question of, "Why has he been moved into solitary?" Other than the fact that one person said, "Well, it's not solitary." I said, "You've got him in a room, a small room by himself where he has no contact with anyone else. How on earth is that not solitary?" Well, the government's position was, because there was a gap under the door, with a little bit of a space, that the detainees could lay down on the floor and stick their face to that little crack. And if they talk loud enough, somebody else could hear him, so therefore it wasn't solitary. Interviewer: They said that to you? - They said that to me. That's why it wasn't solitary, 'cause he could possibly communicate, if he crammed his face down at the door and yelled out loud to others. Of course they were also running these big giant fans so that you couldn't hear anyway, which was on purpose, that they would use those fans to keep people from communicating. So this non solitary, they call it, it was no question it was solitary. So Omar says, "That's it. I'm not participating with you and I'm boycotting like all the rest of them." And we are scrambling, trying to get anybody on the phone we can. Trying to see people on, why is this happening? So we can raise it in court, file a motion, wherever the case may be. Nobody will even talk to us. So it's the next morning when we're in there with the court, with the judge who was a guy named Colonel Chester, the wrong guy for me to draw as a presiding officer in Guantanamo. I knew him very well before this. He was a Marine Colonel and I'd been before him in court before. And, we first start off and Omar stands up and he's boycotting now. And Colonel Chester is fit to be tired and he's mad. And he starts yelling at me and screaming at me, about why I didn't bring this to his attention and why I'm wasting his time and all of these kinds of things. And I yelled right back. I slammed my fist down on the podium and I'm yelling right back at him in court. He orders a, counsel in his chambers. So we leave the little courtroom, the weird courtroom that we had at the time. And we have, there's other observers in there, including some media. So they're already pretty interested in this shouting match I'm having with Chester already. So we file into his little chambers. And this is something that Colonel Chester and a lot of the judges at Guantanamo loved to do, something that Chester used to do as a judge anyway, which is, if there's any really hard issues, he'll get all the counsel in one room and he'll just start yelling at people until they agree. So then he'd go back and put it on the record and make it sound like everything was all happy and everybody agreed to these things, right. I don't play that game, certainly I don't allow Colonel Chester to do that to me. This was going to be one of those times. But, you know, something else happened in there. So we go back in the chambers, there's three prosecutors, three military prosecutors and there's four of us, myself, captain Merriam, and two law professors. Everybody files in and sits down except for me. And the reason why is, in any other court in the land, military, state, federal, if you're gonna have a sidebar, meet in chambers, the accused is entitled to be present for any of those things. Now, usually you don't have it and they probably don't want you there, but you're entitled to be there, if you're the accused. I did a case in federal court, in the, just a couple of years ago in Western district of Louisiana, in Lafayette, Louisiana, and the judge specifically said, "No," to my client, "Come on over here, you're entitled to listen to all of this as well." That's standard jurisprudence. Guantanamo, no. So they can hold these, chambers type, there was a certain number of, it was a, I forget the name of it though. It was like a, in military justice it would be called 802 Conference. This was called a different number, for some other silly rule number they came up with in Guantanamo. But we had this conference in chambers. And, but I didn't wanna do this because, you're trying to get a client to trust you, especially one who's accused of terrorism and you're a Marine Lieutenant Colonel, the last thing you wanna do is have secret meetings with the prosecutors and the judge and he doesn't know what's going on. And I thought, that's absolutely so wrong. We're trying to have, they keep claiming this is so open and transparent, well, why can't the accused be in there and listen to what decisions are being made for them. So I refused to do this. So we walk in there and everybody sits down except for me. And Colonel Chester walks in, he is mad and I am mad. And, he first starts telling me what to do. And I say, "Colonel, I refuse to participate this. I want, my client has a right to be present here. And I will not conduct this conference without my client." And he is right in my face a few inches and he's screaming at me and he's yelling, "I don't give a fuck, what your client wants. Sit down." And it kinda went downhill from there. So he tries his yelling, intimidating, "And this is what's gonna go on." And I'm saying, "No, it's not gonna go on." And it kind of went like that in there. So we go back into the court and Chester does, Colonel Chester does what Colonel Chester normally does is, "Well, we had a meeting in chambers and the following were discussed. And, this is what was decided. Counsel is this an accurate representation of our conference?" And the prosecutor's, "Oh yes your honor." And I stand up, "No sir, it was not." And I go on to describe what it was like in there. And you can just see him getting more angry. And then he's already going to this legal issue. And he says, "Is there anything else, counsel?" "Yes, yes your honor. This time defense desires to voir dire the presiding officer." So, I spent the next, I think it was about five or six hours voir diring Colonel Chester. And I ended up challenging him and trying to get him to recuse himself, which he didn't do. And that's a whole nother story. That's, his whole recusal was, was a great example of what was wrong with Guantanamo. If you want me to tell you a little bit about that. Interviewer: Sure, but I just wanna ask you, what were you thinking in taking him on like that? Did you think about your career or did you think about the normalcy of situations where you deal with a judge? - I mean, this is a type of thing that, that you were used to from Colonel Chester anyway, but in the context of Guantanamo, I mean this is, everything is so patently unfair. Nobody is interested in justice. The rules are designed to convict. The discovery rules are a disgrace. All I wanna do is convict him and they want you to go along. And I just got angrier and angrier and angrier. And I'd like to say it was, you know some, I don't know noble sense of justice, but I just got really pissed off, and, I just, I really just got, I got really pissed off. I got incensed and I took an oath to support and defend the constitution of the United States. And what I'm now participating in, is something that absolutely attacks that. And it was very offensive to me. I would get very angry and I couldn't, it was real demoralizing to watch other members of the military go along with what I thought was a complete farce. And it made me really, really angry. And I'm not exactly your most, well, I mean I've spent a number of years as a prosecutor as well, so, I'd like to think I was sort of reasonable in my expectations and this, it just made me really angry. Interviewer: And this all came as a surprise, watching yourself over these months and years even, I mean, what were you, did you see yourself changing in ways that you'd never expected? - I did, I think my political views changed forever. I think, I gained a sense of skepticism that I never had before. One of the things I always kinda like to say is, well, at least with the military guys, you can kind of trust them on the other side. They may tell you no, or they may do things against you but at least you can trust them. And a lot of that trust for me was shattered, through different events that happened there. It was very discouraging. It was kind of disgusting, what I saw there. And this is not every military person there. Matter of fact, a majority of these guys wanna do the right thing. But that was demoralizing for me. Interviewer: Well, I'm sure, if you wanna tell us about the recusal of your thinking, it would be interesting for the audience. I'd be happy to have you tell us, if you think it's important to understand, dynamics of what was going down there. - I think it's a good illustration for how the early rules were and how unfair they were. I mean, there were so many different rules that were bad. For example, one interesting one was, how the detainees could be dressed when they showed up for court, okay. They put the onus all on the defense for, if you want your client dressed any other way than what he's issued, you have to bring the clothes yourself. Now, which is not an easy thing to do because, we don't have like, we didn't have like permanent offices. We had to buy these clothes. We had rubber made boxes that we would keep the clothes in and find some place that we could storm, so that we wouldn't have to carry them every single time. So we'd do that. And when we dress Omar for one hearing, he looks like, well, kind of your average teenager. Matter of fact that's what the newspaper said the next day. And he had Dockers on and he had like a FUBU or an IZOD shirt on. And one of, a couple of newspapers said, he just looked like your average teenager. Right after that, they adopted a new rule saying, you couldn't dress him that way, that he either had his native garb or his prison issue. Now, there's only one reason for that, is they don't want anyone to look human or normal. They want them to look like a terrorist. And all of a sudden, their rule which was meant to inconvenience us, all of a sudden we've humanized him. So they're gonna change that rule. The recusal came about when, when I'm voir diring Colonel Chester, and we discovered a number of different conflicts, the primary conflict of which he has a pending application to be an administrative law judge as an immigration judge. And the way the rules worked is, if you're selected for that, I mean, you're working for the attorney general of the United States basically. And, now, just because you're doing this doesn't mean Alberto Gonzales himself is going to be, selecting you to be an ALJ. But the U.S. provision is, if you were retired military and there's a chance you can get additional compensation that is decided by the attorney general himself. So Alberto Gonzales is going to weigh in on the application and the compensation for my sitting presiding officer, my judge, Colonel Chester, that's a little bit of a conflict. As a matter of fact, if you look at law, which of course there was mistake number one that I make, there is a case exactly on point. I mean, you always talk about, "It's not quite on point." This case was exactly on point. A federal case, Judge Ponder wrote the decision that involved someone who is a sitting judge, who's has an application as an immigration law judge, the exact same facts other than had nothing to do with Guantanamo. And they said, "No way, even if he drops the application that conflicts there, he's off." So we, I asked Chester to recuse himself. He of course says, no. Now, here's where the craziness comes in. Well, usually there's some way to address that. Whether if the judge refuses to recuse himself, there is, at the time was, you would go to the military commissions, the Office of Military Commissions. So we go to them and say, "Look, we asked him to recuse himself. We want you to hear this." What we eventually wanna do is get in the federal court with the issue. Because if we can get into a real court, on U.S. soil, we're gonna win on this. I mean, it's a no-brainer. But we gotta get there first. We gotta exhaust our remedies and go through the process they have established. Chester, won't recuse himself. We go to the office of commission saying, we want this appealed. And they say, response to us is, "Well, we can't do that until the issue has been certified by the judge." But the judge won't certify the issue. We've asked him and he just ignores us. "Well, what can I tell you? We can't look at the issue until it's certified by the judge." "Well, how do we contest the fact that he won't certify it?" "Until it's certified, we can't touch it." It's those kinds of rules that are designed to, it's a joke. So, I mean, we're left with, do we try to go into federal court with, the remedy hasn't been exhausted yet. Do we have to wait a certain amount of time before it becomes ridiculous and then we can do that? I mean, where do you go from there? And these rules are just, were just like that, they're ridiculous. And Omar would see this. We'd tell him, "Hey Omar, look, they can't do this. This is what we'll do." And we would try to take some action and he would see that nothing would happen. And no matter what we did and great rulings, and even the Supreme court rulings that struck down the commissions and other great things. From Omar's perspective, who cares? It doesn't change one thing for him. All it just assures is, his case is dragging on. And even that doesn't really matter, he's still in Guantanamo. He's gonna wake up the same day. It's gonna be the same as the next day and the day before. It's groundhog day for Omar, no matter what happens in those proceedings. And sometimes the proceedings are even more of an inconvenience for him, for all the moving they have to do of him and sometimes not getting to eat. And some things like that. So in some ways, these hearings are more of an inconvenience to Omar than anything else. So from Omar's perspective, and really, I don't blame him. I mean, we can have lawyers, thumping our chest about all the (indistinct) decision and all these great, legal decisions and these fights are being made by some fantastic lawyers. But from Omar's perspective, who cares. Because it's not a real legal system, that you can't get any real relief there anyway. So, for every time we had something where it felt like a victory and we'd tell Omar about it, it was like, you get done telling him about it, and he would have that certain reaction and you can't blame him and it deflates you too. Interviewer: So my understanding was that, ultimately Omar fired all his attorneys in, and I'm sure he did it more than once, from what I understand. Could you explain how that happened and how you, you know, what, how you were impacted by that? - Sure. Omar, Omar, a lot of the detainees fired their attorneys, that wasn't uncommon. Interviewer: Why was that? - Could be for various reasons. Some of them didn't wanna participate in the proceedings at all. They just, they don't even wanna recognize it. Some of them, I think like Omar believed that by cooperating, it was actually hurting him. And that was really with Omar's case, of, and I can't quite blame him that much, so. I think, there was several firings. It wasn't always the entire team. Sometimes it was, on the law professor side. But we understood, I mean there was no hard feelings with the Omar, I would just wanna talk to him and say, "You understand what's gonna happen here. Omar, do whatever you want me to do, but I know why you're doing this but it's, what you're doing it may not be accomplishing what you want to accomplish." So that's not always an issue, with the firing. When I was finally off in 2007 and Omar fired me, the word got to me and I wasn't even in Guantanamo. I was actually in Hawaii at the time doing, teaching some trial advocacy training. And it still upsets me because I never had the opportunity to go back to Omar to talk about terminating that relationship. I got told third hand that he was firing me. To me, I think legally it's not acceptable. But no one would allow me to go to Guantanamo to speak to Omar. And the real shame of that was because, what was happening at the time, and there were people that wanted me off the case for a very specific reason. It was because I was bringing on another co-counsel, who was gonna take over as lead counsel for the case. As a matter of fact, he had agreed, he'd already been designated as Omar's new counsel, was gonna be the lead counsel. All we were waiting on was his security clearance to come through and to get down there and meet Omar. And, when I got fired the last time that stopped it. And his lawyer was Gerry Spence. So Omar Khadr had Gerry Spence as a lawyer and he has never known it. And he never got to formally see it. Now, Interviewer: Could you tell us who Gerry Spence is for the audience. - Gerry Spence is probably one of the prominent trial lawyers of all time in the United States. He heads the Trial Lawyers College. He's had some of the biggest cases, kind of in recent memory both civil and criminal. He represented Karen Silkwood, from the movie "Silkwood." Defended Imelda Marcos. Interviewer: Who brought him in? - I did. Interviewer: You knew him? - I did. Interviewer: And he was willing to come in and be council, lead counsel for, was he in the military at that time?" - No, Gerry Spence? Oh, no, Gerry Spence has never been in the military. But Gerry became, I think incensed with what was going on in Guantanamo, wanted to do something about it. And I kind of heard through the grapevine that he decided he would like to do one of these cases as well. And there was another army attorney who knew that too. So he went out to go visit him, this is in Gerry's house in Santa Barbara. And, when I heard that, I called up a friend of mine and said, "Hell no, if Gerry's coming on a case, he's coming on Omar's case." So I get in my car, boom, right away I drive up to Santa Barbara and spent a week with him out there. And, yeah, we both kind of talked to him and laid out the different cases. And I convinced Gerry that if he's gonna do a Guantanamo case, it should be Omar's. And he agreed. So I had him designate it in writing. I gave him a copy of all the unclassified information on Omar. We were just again, waiting for a security clearance so that he could go down there and meet Omar, when everything else kind of exploded and happened, and I got removed from the case. Interviewer: And by firing you or having you removed, why does that stop Gerry Spence from becoming the lead counsel? - Well, interesting enough, his security clearance never came through. Nobody did anything else to try to get him on the case. Omar had no idea that he was designated on the case and still, I'm sure still doesn't know. I mean he's got, one of the greatest trial lawyers in American history gonna represent him and he had no idea. Interviewer: Do you think that could be behind why, quote, Omar released you? Do you think there's some connection there? - Of bringing Gerry Spence on? Interviewer: Yeah. - Yeah, yeah, I know there was. Interviewer: Really? - Yeah. I think there were a number of people who did not want Gerry Spence to come on board and do something with Guantanamo. I think there were a number of people that didn't want that. So, because Gerry Spence has got that kind of star power too that he's gonna get a lot of media attention time. I mean, how many times has he been on CNN in the last 15 years? You can't even count the number of times. So I think there were a lot of people who did not want that to happen. And why his security clearance took so long to get approved, I still have no idea. Somebody slowed that down. Interviewer: The way you describe yourself in Guantanamo, you didn't get the kind of respect that I would have thought a lieutenant colonel would have gotten, 'cause you were very high ranked relatively. - Right. Interviewer: Does that seem surprising? I mean, just as a lieutenant colonel, you should have gotten more respect than perhaps a new fledging defense attorney. - Yeah and that upset me in a lot of ways. When it came to, you know, especially when it came to, handling classified information, security of information. I can't count how many times I was questioned. It was kind of an insult to me. I had a top secret SCI clearance. I've been to combat and been shot at by the enemy before. And I'd done a lot for the country. I felt at that point, to be treated like that, that lack of trust, that lack of respect, that it, but I think more importantly they, all the things they did to try to keep me from being able to do my job, that's what made me angry. You walk in, for example, there was one incident where I'm walking in to go visit Omar and we'd already gone through the whole, I was supposed to meet him at a certain time. I show up there and they tell me, no that's not the right time. There's no way, he's not available. So for, actually for a couple of days, that happened. And, so on one afternoon I get, go in to meet Omar, the next day, I'm going back to visit Omar again and I'm going through it. And I've got a briefcase or something and they wanna check my bag. That's fine, that's normal in any jail. And we'll make sure you don't have things that can be used as weapons. And, so the guard, the military guard starts looking through my stuff and he starts grabbing my notepad, from my notes, from my interview from Omar the day before. Confidential client, attorney client information. And he starts reading through my notes and I'm like, "Hey soldier, you can't do that." I said, "You cannot read through my notes, that's confidential stuff." "Oh no, no, I'm not reading it, I'm just looking for certain information." I was like, "You gotta be kidding me, right." Now, I don't know the soldier's name because they blank out all the name tapes for security reasons, obviously. And I'm livid. And I said, "You go get your boss." He goes and grabs a staff Sergeant. I'm doing the same thing to this staff Sergeant. "Oh no, no, sir, we don't read this stuff. I said, "Your guard who was just here, is flipping through my notes, reading my confidential notes. You cannot let that happen." And it starts off as one of those, the kid just made a mistake, until it morphs to realize that, no, it's not just a mistake, this is what they're telling him to do. You realize that. And I'm not gonna let this go on. But at the same time, I don't wanna make too big of a stink of it, because if I raise it, I'm gonna lose my visitation time with Omar in the afternoon. Because, if they screw you out a half of a day, they won't make it up to you at the back end. You just don't get it again. So I have to wait till this time is over, before I can go raise too much of a stink about it. So I go through several different layers of people saying, "Hey, your people are doing the wrong thing." To finally, I end up talking to a, another lieutenant colonel, or is it, maybe it was a Navy commander who was working there at Guantanamo. One of the officials, I think one of the lawyers is who it was. And I'm telling them, "Look, you gotta tell your guards, they're going through, reading my confidential notes for my client, somebody's gotta get these guys entitlement." "No, no, we don't do that here." "No I'm telling you, it just happened this morning. That's what I'm trying to tell you. One of the guards is flipping through my notepads and he's reading in my notes." And I told this guy what the guard told me. He said, "No, we don't do that here in Guantanamo." "No, I know you think you don't do it but it happened this morning. So you need to correct it." "I'm telling you, we don't do that here in Guantanamo. That didn't happen." So, when I make a stink of this later on, of course department defense will deny anything that Lieutenant Colonel Vokey says, "We don't interfere with attorney, client relationship." I mean, that's kind of illustrative of the process that you go through. And it wasn't just a soldier making a mistake, which I initially thought it was. I think this is a conscious effort to exactly do that very same thing. He's not trying to violate any rules. He's just told, look through their notes and look for certain things. So it's, it was, Interviewer: So I wanna ask you about your career, but I just wanna, before I forget, ask you about, whether Omar ever saw and whether you ever saw as well, doctors or psychologist in the time that you represented him. Did doctors come to check on his health? And did psychologists come to check on him? - There were some medical attention given to Omar. While I represented him not, on the mental health issue, no. The mental, they had a psychologist employed by the detention facility there but his job was to advise investigators on the how to best interrogate. So, we try to get our own expert because of all the issues I told you before, whether Omar can even make his right decisions, his state of depression. Whether he could participate in his own defense. So, we went to find out, we wanted to get our own consultant someone who could evaluate Omar and tell us how bad he is. As a matter of fact, we provided that person with a lot of information that he gave us some forms that we we did as much as you could, a layman's evaluation and have Omar answer some questions that could provide him kind of a baseline for where to start. And we want, we needed him to evaluate Omar desperately. But we knew it was gonna be problematic, if you get just any psychologist or psychiatrist from anywhere, that there's security issues. So we found a retired army brigadier general who was a psychiatrist. Who also happened to be kind of an expertise in adolescent psychiatry. I mean, he was perfect. Security clearance, you name it. I mean, how can you do, he's an army general for God's sake. They would not grant him. Denied him, denied him, denied him. Interviewer: Denied him what? - Denied any kind of mental health help for the defense team. The ability to evaluate Omar. Would not grant him as our expert, so that he could go in and evaluate Omar. Interviewer: Did they give a reason? - I don't think so. I don't think they did at that time. Now eventually, his name was Xenakis, Dr. Xenakis. So eventually he was brought into it. Now, the other thing about doctors Xenakis is, he had done some things for Senator McCain as far as providing some information on Guantanamo to Senator McCain at one point. So you couldn't have had a more trustworthy better guy than retired army brigadier general, who's done some things for members of Congress on this very issue, yet they would not approve it, would not allow it. And their response, the only response I remember getting was "Well he's had a, there has been a psychologist who's been attentive to him." Of course, that guy was the one who was advising the interrogators. There was nobody providing mental health. Now eventually after I came off the case, my understanding they did get some assistance later on, but that's after the rules changed several times. But that was, that was also pretty disgusting to see. Interviewer: Did you see your career imploding as a result of this work, the work you did? - Well, I mean for me personally, yeah, it definitely took a toll on me. I think professionally, personally. It solidified my decision to retire from the Marine Corps. I won't say that I did not get promoted to full colonel because of it, 'cause I don't think that'd be a fair thing to say. In reality by agreeing to take this case, I was pretty much, I knew I wasn't gonna get promoted to colonel, because I was foregoing other opportunities that would put myself in a spot to get promoted. But certainly once I got on Guantanamo, any hint of being, still being promotable went out the window with this. I was threatened, threatened-- Interviewer: What does that mean threatened? - Threatened with, to be charged with criminal offenses. I was threatened with ethics complaints. I had a gag order placed on me at one point. Interviewer: Could you explain those, what that means? - Sure. I was, in addition to defending Omar, I had some other things going in my regular job as well, which was the, in charge of the Marine defense lawyers on the West, half of the U.S. in Iraq. And we also had some of the biggest military justice cases since Vietnam, come up. And those were the Haditha cases. And they got so much attention and, so I'm on, on one front, defending these Marines and supporting my military attorneys, on those issues, and that's creating enough bad relations as it was. And on the other hand, now I've got Guantanamo as well. It was kind of the perfect storm. And I am, just like, it felt like there wasn't a person in the U.S. government that I wasn't fighting at one point. So, Interviewer: So threatened, what kind of threats would you, - Threats, and some of them were, sometimes I get some threats where I couldn't tell, if it was because of Guantanamo or because of Haditha. But I was called up after a, talking with a newspaper, a media story that came out that I was threatened, I was gonna be charged with violating orders for speaking to the media without permission. I had, number of times threatened with ethics issues of, one in particular was after an interview that we did with ABC Evening News. That one in particular, that resulted in the gag order for me. That one they were, threatening me with, providing, the rule, you have the rule against extra tribunal statements that can affect a case. Although the statements that I made had nothing to do with my case whatsoever, weren't affecting my case at all. Yet they're gonna find some ethics rules, they're gonna threaten me with. They almost went forward on that one. I had some other more general subtle threats. I had a, now my boss, my normal boss, the chief defense counsel of the Marine Corps was not, had nothing to do with Guantanamo in some ways. The ironic thing was, her job prior to this, is she was the deputy chief prosecutor of Guantanamo. She left that job to become the chief defense counsel of the Marine Corps. So when I'm now dealing with a Guantanamo case, I cannot divulge anything to her. There's definitely a conflict. So we had to have this kind of wall between us. But she, there was a certain general who contacted her to suggest that myself, and at that time, Major Dan Mori, who represented Hicks was suggesting that we were somehow accepting illegal gifts from foreign governments in some way, hinting to it. So that resulted in my boss, calling me up saying, "You need to review the joint ethics regulations and," I said, "Colonel look, I think Dan's probably the same way, but I can tell you every time I travel, it's all legal, I'm on orders. There's nothing questionable about it. I haven't accepted anything except from a dinner from a lawyer in Toronto." I said, "I'm not accepting gifts. This travel is all by military money. I'm under orders." "I know, I know, but I'm just kinda worried that there may be something out there." So he kinda kept putting in her head that there was something going on there, about receiving illegal gifts from foreign governments, myself and Dan Mori. And it's that kind of pressure when you get that, it's like, you know that they're looking for you. Now, it's interesting on that sort of a subtle allegation, because that happened just two days after I spoke at a University of Virginia International Law symposium. And I was there, it's, a lot of big names that were there. William Howard Taft the fourth was there. We had, Ballenger was there. So a lot of big folks from the administration, people from all different walks of life and I was on a panel and the same general was sitting in the back of the auditorium, and after I had made my comments, you can tell you clearly displeased by the comments I made about Guantanamo, after he burst out of the auditorium, hit the doors open, you could hear it. And I thought, "Oh well so, some general's angry." Couple of days later, he's on the phone with my boss making this subtle suggestion about me accepting illegal, receiving illegal gifts from foreign governments. Now, it never went any more than that but sometimes it doesn't have to be more than that. You wanna, try to quiet somebody, make some kind of suggestion, but-- Interviewer: It goes into your record, does information, - No, no, nothing like that goes into your record, not directly but, now that the person he tells that to is the one who writes my evaluations, is it gonna be a great evaluation? Or is it gonna be a little bit hesitant? I think that's the point. There are so many ways to subtly, kind of slam you. For me it was, I receive, you're supposed to receive, somebody writes your evaluation and then somebody reviews it. And that review is probably most important. So in five years and having that job there in Camp Pendleton, I had never, not one review done of my evaluations, my fitness reports they call them. That was what killed me for promotion right there. So they would just refuse to review it. I would get, "Not observe things." So, that was the death nail right there. Interviewer: And can you just go over the gag order? What that was about. - The gag order was, we had gone to a visit in Guantanamo, and myself and, I had a sergeant who worked for me at Camp Pendleton, I had designated as my paralegal for Guantanamo as well. And we had traveled there to go visit Omar. Her name is Heather Cerveny. And, a beautiful young girl, she was a sergeant at the time. And Omar really kind of had an eye for her. That was kinda my secret weapon with Omar, because he could care less about anything as long as I brought Heather to see him, that's all he cared about. They got along swimmingly. So Heather and I go out there to visit Omar, all through the hassle, the delay, we finally do get to see Omar a little bit. And I think in that visit, we talked almost almost no legal issues at all. We took the Pepsi challenge with Omar. He kept saying he liked Pepsi better than Coke. And we had this disagreement among the three of us. So we actually were able to bring in drinks and taste it. And he took the Pepsi challenge and he likes Pepsi better than coke. So we had visited, done with our visit, now we're waiting just to be able to leave Guantanamo. Sometimes you could have to wait up to five days, you'd be stuck there doing nothing, because you're a defense guy and you don't have access just to the other flights leaving there. So, Sergeant Cerveny, Heather comes to me and says, "Sir if it's all right, I met some of the Marines that work at the Marine barracks here. And we're gonna go to the club tonight." The all hands club they have there. Yeah, she didn't wanna hang around, some old lieutenant colonel. "Yeah, go have fun." So, these are guys who were supposed to have nothing, they had nothing to do with Guantanamo. They're just like the, like the few good men in Marine barracks guys. So she goes over there dressed in civilian clothes, into the club. And, but they don't show up. So instead she meets a bunch of Navy guards, Navy guys who are guards at the facility. So they see her, invite her over. And again, she's a beautiful, beautiful girl. And they're talking to her, ask her her name, find out she's in the Marine Corps. They don't know what she does, but they invite her to sit with them. So, they're just having, everybody's having drinks and eating some chicken wings and having conversations. And she's hearing these conversations all around her. Some of them are to her, some of them she's just over hearing. And it's conversations about beating detainees, screwing with their mail. One guy was giving an account of one of the detainees he grabbed and he was beating his head against a metal door. And she's not saying anything. She's just kinda sitting there. So after about an hour and a half or so, one of them says, "Hey Heather, so what do you do?" They knew she was sergeant, but didn't know what she did. She said, "Well, I work for one of the attorneys representing a detainee." You know, you could have heard pin drop, she said. So she comes back and tells me the next day, "I meet one of the kids, matter of fact the kid who admitted to banging their head on the wall." I met him the next day. She tells me about that. And I said, "Look, you gotta write this thing down." So I had her write down an account of it. I'm reading it and I said, we had to do something about it. So I had her put it into an affidavit and I told her, "Look, we need to file this complaint." I said, "Now this is gonna be uncomfortable. And if you don't want me to do it, you don't want this kind of attention when we file this thing, you let me know now." She goes, "No, it's the right thing to do. We'll do it." So I file a complaint with department of defense, inspector general. I'm not gonna file it with Guantanamo 'cause you know what's gonna happen there. So department of defense, inspector generals, I filed this complaint, received nothing back, no response, nothing. They give you a number and that's it. And you call to check on the status, nothing. So then, Rick Wilson, my co-counsel, law professor at American University, he took a copy of the affidavit, sent it to the American, the associated press and it kind of went viral. That's how Heather and I ended up on ABC Evening News concerning this incident. Now, none of this stuff we had any idea involved Omar at all. That none of the beatings were on Omar. I mean, it could have been but we had no knowledge that affected our case at all. But, it's one more thing wrong with Guantanamo. And I think we have a duty to say something and do something about it and it's illegal activity happening. So we talk on ABC Evening News about this and, those were some of the worst threats that I had were after that interview. They tried to take Heather, Sergeant Cerveny away from me. They tried to issue these orders to her, taking her away from the job. I got those stopped at least temporarily until the following year. So, that was part of what happened there. Now, on the government side, the prosecution side, they can go on and say as many inflammatory things they want to in the press, on TV, newspapers. But if you're on the defense side, you're gonna pay some kind of price. And they believe that somehow that the, you don't have the right to say whatever you need to say. So I've had calls out of the blue. I had a call from some army Colonel. I still to this day don't know who he is, but threatened to charge me with criminal charges for talking to the press about this. I've had, public relations, public affairs Colonel in the Marine Corps call me up and threaten to charge me. I've had, I had one week where it was so bad, I can't, I didn't even write anybody's name down or remember their names. There were so many of those coming in. You get the subtle suggestions of me doing illegal activity with guests from foreign governments. It was like, you're just, you're under a microscope the entire time. I was fortunate, I felt fortunate that I was a lieutenant colonel because to me that meant, there's only so many guys that can give me that much crap. I mean, there were plenty though, I'll tell you that. I found that out. But I just, it got me more and more angry as it went along. And as long as I knew I was doing the right thing, what I was doing was right. It was moral, it was ethical, it was legal. I felt like then they can't do anything to me. It's probably a little naive. I know it's naive now, but fortunately I made it out alive, so. Interviewer: And what was the gag order explicitly? What does that mean? - It was, I'm sure I have it somewhere. It was, no more conversations to the press about Guantanamo. Interviewer: You were ordered? - That's right. Interviewer: By a superior officer? - I was. Interviewer: So what happened to the sergeant? Is she still in the military? - She is. Interviewer: Has she been able to move up the ladder? - She has, once she'd left working with me. They actually put her somewhere I think to, to control her or something like that. And then, but she's such a fantastic individual. They stuck her up at the headquarters, U.S. Marine Corps to work. And I think it was viewed as punishment at the time. But by the time she left, there is kind of effect she has on people, they were writing her up for promotion and she actually got commissioned as an officer as a result of that. Interviewer: And do you know what happened to your complaint? Did it ever see the light of day? - Yeah, yes they decided to investigate. In doing their investigation, they never spoke with me once. They came out to California, point a couple investigators came out to California to investigate Sergeant Cerveny. They walked into her office and I was not there at the time it was on my way back. So I was a few hours away from getting back to the office. They walked into the office, they talked to her for about two minutes, gave her some background information, ask you some general questions about it. And then they read her her rights and they tell her that they're suspecting her of making false statements and false claims. Fortunately, she's sitting in a building with a bunch of my colleagues, one of which, a guy named Matt Cord, who jumped, who heard what was going on, jumped in the office and says, "You're done, she's not talking to you anymore." But they actually came in and accused her of making this up. And they said that they tried to investigate and they couldn't find any of these people that she was talking about, which is ridiculous. All they had to do was come talk to me. I can give them their names and the description. I met one of the kids. Now, whether any of these allegations were true or not, we have no idea. We just know what they were talking about. But their response was, "We've interviewed people, we can't find any basis to this." So maybe they found one or two of these guys and they said, "Oh no, no, we never beat anybody." Okay, the investigation is done. It's like, you gotta be kidding me. So instead that they were talking about charging her. So when they finally came out with a result of this investigation, the result of this investigation was, "We've decided not to charge Sergeant Cerveny." Yeah. Interviewer: And they, the man you saw the next day, how did that happen? How did you know who it was that, you said you met him the next morning. One of the people who said that he banged a detainee's head against-- - Oh, when I was in Guantanamo? Interviewer: Yeah, yeah, yeah. - Because Sergeant Cerveny is a very attractive woman, just a fantastic person, and this kid came over, we were staying in these buildings right next to each other. So at the time, we were both, this was during the day, I think lunchtime, I think we were eating lunch together in the building doing some work at the same time, in this little condo place we were staying. So he came over to kind of pay her a visit. I think he was looking for a date or something like that. So when he walked in, that's when I met the kid and talked to him for a little bit. He was clearly uncomfortable being there with me. But, because I, I think he was over there you know trying to ask her out or something. So that's how I met the kid. And it was once he left, that's when Heather told me, "Yeah that's the one who talked about beating his head into a wall." So that's how I met the kid. Interviewer: So, any regrets about going to Guantanamo? - I'd say yes. I mean, you wanna interview my wife, she'll say it's the worst thing I have ever done. It created a lot of stress for me. A lot of stress for the family. She was, I think legitimately worried that I wasn't gonna make it to 20 years and get my retirement and they were gonna take it away. That, all those years that I'd be left with nothing, and they'd try to kick me out. So she was constantly worried that retirement was in jeopardy. When you're talking about military spouses, they serve every bit as much as the military member, what they go through and my wife was no exception. And she goes through, she sees what's going on. She sees the pressure being put on me. There's always comments being made to her. She just wanted to make it out of the Marine Corps with a retirement pension and be able to move on. And so she was constantly worried that, especially because of Guantanamo that wasn't gonna happen. So I think from my wife's perspective, she wished I'd never done it. For me, I think, I feel I did the right thing. I don't have any regrets. I have maybe a few regrets as far as actions I should have taken instead of what I did to be a little more effective. But I don't have any regrets in that way. I'm not sure I'd wanna do it again. I think it takes a personal toll on you, especially if you're in uniform doing it. I don't think we should have military attorneys representing these guys. I think they were placed in too bad of a position. And the guys who fight really hard, they may pay the price professionally. I know that Congress has stepped in. We've had the, stepped in twice as a result of the Supreme Court striking it down. That the rules have changed. They've gotten better. They've got what they actually call them judges now. So I think the procedures are better. I think the rules of evidence are better. But it still falls short of anything, you can call a real trial. It's still gonna be a sham trial, no matter what. Interviewer: So, should Guantanamo be closed down? - Without a doubt, it should be. It's the biggest black mark, black eye that we've had, and I can't remember how long. I've been a little disappointed with both the, with president Obama who said he was gonna shut it down. I know both he and McCain at the time, both said they were gonna shut it down. And I know it's easier said than done. But it's still open, it's still going. And we're still trying these guys in Guantanamo. And that's very disappointing to me. I think we have to shut it down. I think it's a terrible example. I think what we've done there, is placed Americans service members lives in jeopardy. And, I think we need to shut it down before we make things worse. And I say that because, as you know, international law, it's not like domestic law where you just pass a law and here it is or it's judicially created. I mean, international law is mostly created out of customary use by other nations. Which means that, it's a gradual change in the law over time. And we've had, certain landmark, events happen. The Hague conventions, the Geneva conventions, certain treaties. And over time we've, when it comes to human rights and especially the law of warfare, the law of arm conflict, we've built to a point in human rights, that's, I think kind of unparalleled in history. We've got, the Geneva conventions was the only treaty ever ratified by every country on the planet which just happened a couple of years ago when a couple of the little small island nations, jumped on there. In fact, I think it may have been the island you were talking about, you visited, wasn't it? Interviewer: Palau. - Palau, wasn't that the last one? So, it's taken a long time to get there. And in one fell swoop, we've knocked it all down. I mean, do we wanna go, maybe if we don't care, if we're okay with going back to the medieval ages or even the pre 20th century of, where it's okay to rape, pilage and plunder. And it's okay to torture. And if we wanna go back there, then fine, we're taking the right steps. But, we've gotten to a point where, at least we've set a standard where everybody knows what's right and wrong. About what treatment we can and cannot do. And that's happened through the Geneva conventions and through custom usage. And over time, we've built up to a certain level. And I think that's a pretty good thing. So, now, we know that Al Qaeda doesn't follow the Geneva conventions but that's not the point. Just because Al Qaeda doesn't follow, it doesn't mean we need to abandon them. Because, if we abandon them, the United States of America abandon them, then every country on earth can abandon them. The other bigger countries. There's no longer a standard that, some kind of moral high ground that everybody, all the other countries are gonna force a few countries to follow up, put pressure on them. And that's the point. That to maintain some level of civility and humanity, when we're conducting war operations. I mean, we're doing horrible things, and try to keep the suffering as minimal. I mean, that's the point. And what we've done in one fell swoop is Guantanamo, where we've thrown it all out the window. We've changed the rules on interrogations. We didn't follow the law, the procedures that we had already set up to do this. And not only did we not follow it, we intentionally disregarded it in lieu of something else. And we set up a system now where our service members, my fellow Marines, soldiers can be endangered because of what we've done. So for example some, one of the countries, say Central Asia captures some Americans and they wanna take some action against them, torture them, execute them, whatever they wanna do, all they have to do is Institute the U.S. Guantanamo model. They can come up with their own legal system, invent their completely new crimes that didn't exist before an international law. They can invent them. They can create the legal system, assign people to to represent them and run these trials and execute them. And there's not a damn thing that we can say about it, because we've created that. And oh by the way, how are they gonna get that information? Those interrogation techniques. They're gonna watch, they're gonna know what happens in SERE training. They watched the movie "GI Jane." They know what happened in Guantanamo. They're gonna do those serious same things, waterboarding, sleep deprivation, physical beating, mental anguish, all those things that they'll do to get people to confess to anything they want to. And believe me, everybody will break. There's a breaking point for everybody. For a 15 year old Canadian kid, their breaking point is a whole lot sooner than many. But there's a breaking point for everybody. And you can get there. A great example of this is, is an event, that was humongous in my mind, but not that big. But a few years ago, there was some British sailors that got captured in, by the Iranians if you remember this. They made a big stink about it, that the Iranians claim they were, in Iranian water. Everybody said they were in, everybody else said they were in international waters and they captured, there was a half a dozen or so of these British sailors. And, they had them on TV and they were all sitting there staring at the camera. "Yes we know we were in Iranian waters and we weren't supposed to be." And they basically admitted to almost like being spies, if you recall that. Now the remarkable thing is you watching that, I mean, everybody who's watching it and all the commentators in TVs, "They're making him say that. We know that's not the case. They're making those poor sailors say that." And in fact, they did. I mean, they threatened to kill them. Now, the interesting thing is, they never laid one hand on them in order to make them say that. They didn't go through waterboarding or they weren't beat. They didn't have the sleep deprivation. All they were, were threatened to be killed, that's about it. And they talked and they admitted. And throughout this whole incident, there was one cleric, Iranian cleric who made some comment about, we ought to try them. That we ought to try these, create a system and try these people. And it was just a side comment in the story and it didn't get much, they ended up releasing the British sailors. But, I thought to myself, that's perfect. All the Iranians had to do was, especially at that time was create an exact duplicate of Guantanamo in their own way, come up with their own laws, what these guys had violated and they could have executed them. And there's nothing we could have said about it. And they would have, and if the British complained, they would have just said, "We're just following the U.S. model." And they could have done a lot more than they did to them. They could have tortured those sailors. That's the kind of danger we're putting our own people in. Because, while Al Qaeda won't follow the Geneva conventions, we're not worried about what some lone terrorist group will do. We're worried about setting a standard that's acceptable. That, we're hopefully preventing other countries from taking those steps. Or more importantly, we're getting every other country to agree that that's not acceptable and that they will take steps against Al Qaeda or other countries when that happens, that's the whole point. But instead, what we've done in Guantanamo, has done nothing but endanger our Marines, our sailors, our soldiers our airmen, that's what we've done. And that makes me really angry. Interviewer: Well said. I think, I was gonna ask you if there's anything else you wanna say, but I'm not sure there is. I'll ask you that anyway, since I always ask that of people. Is there anything I didn't ask you that you'd like to share with the audience? Like, what you said is probably, would have been the answer, but is anything else that you had thought of saying before you came here that you'd like to just share with us? - No, I could probably talk for a day straight on Guantanamo and my opinions of it. Other than to note that, I got a message today, that Omar has, is finally, apparently out of Guantanamo and should be arriving in Canada today. Interviewer: How do you feel about that? - It's about time. Get him back to Canada where, now he can avail himself to the Canadian legal system. I tried to fight his sentence and his conviction. And I think he should have a lot of good luck, 'cause I think the Canadian courts are gonna, are gonna find Guantanamo the sham that it is and not uphold it. So, but the bottom line he's out of that nightmare place. He's at least back in his own country, a place where at least his family, his mother can go see him. It's about time. So, I'm very glad he's out of there and he's back in Canada. Interviewer: Well it was a good day to interview you for that. - What a coincidence? Interviewer: Well, Johnny needs 20 seconds of room tone where, before we end the interview. - Okay. Interviewer: So we just sit quietly. - Sure. Camera man: Begin room tone. End room tone.