WEBVTT
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Morning
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Good morning.
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We are very grateful
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to you for participating
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in the Witness to Guantanamo Project.
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We invite you to speak of your experiences
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and involvement with issues concerning Guantanamo.
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We are hoping to provide you
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with an opportunity to tell your story
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in your own words, we are creating an archive
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of stories so that people in America
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and around the world will have a better understanding
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of what you and others have experienced and observed.
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Future generations must know what happened in Guantanamo
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and by telling your story you're contributing to history.
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We appreciate your willingness to speak with us.
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And if any time you want to take a break, just let us know.
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And if you say something
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and you want us to remove it,
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we can remove it if you let us know.
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Okay.
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And I'd like to begin
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by asking you your name and your hometown
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and birth date and age.
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My name is Julia Hall.
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I work for Amnesty International.
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I previously worked for Human Rights Watch.
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I am 51 years old.
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When were you born?
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I was born in 1963.
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And where do you live?
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I live in Buffalo, New York,
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which has been my outpost office
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for almost my entire career.
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So I've been very lucky to work out of my home,
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but my offices have been in New York and in London.
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Your marital status and education?
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I'm happily married to my husband
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Patrick Mahoney for 21 years.
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I am a lawyer.
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So graduated law school, I don't know, maybe 18 years ago,
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18 or 19 years ago.
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Have prior degrees in sociology,
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Middle East studies, things like that so,
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So maybe you give us a little background
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as to where you began after law school
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in terms of human rights work and then
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up to the present and some titles along the way.
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I went right from law school to Human Rights Watch,
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they have a fellowship program for new graduates
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and was happy enough to get one of those,
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went to New York and spent 13 years at Human Rights Watch
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starting in conflict zones,
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working in Northern Ireland during the first cease fire
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and then following the Northern Irish situation
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right through to the peace in 1998, the Belfast Court.
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So did that, went on to Bosnia, looked at sexual violence.
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Post-war in Bosnia,
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traveled to 17 towns and cities there in 1997,
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right after the war had ended, talking to women,
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went from there to do immigration
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and asylum issues across Europe.
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And then September 11th happened.
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And it was a really stunning shift
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in everything that we were doing
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in the human rights movement.
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We thought that the debate over torture was over.
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We thought that the notion of Western governments engaged
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in enforced disappearance was no more.
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And so it was like a back to the future kind of thing,
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where you really felt yourself punched in the stomach
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by the event itself, which was so horrible.
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And then by the way that the United States
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and other governments responded to it
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which just compounded the injustice.
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And so from September 12th, 2001 to the present
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I have worked almost exclusively on counter-terrorism
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and national security cases,
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both in north America and in Europe
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You were still with Human Rights Watch
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at the time of 9/11?
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I was.
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And when you say torture,
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we didn't know about torture on September 12th.
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When did you find out about torture
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and how did that inform everything you did?
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How did that all unfold?
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The first cases that came to our attention
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that indicated that there was something going on,
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at least for me, was December 18th, 2001.
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So very shortly after 9/11, when you think about it,
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you think about security council resolutions.
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You think about Afghanistan.
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It was a pretty compressed period of time between 9/11,
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and we heard of people being apprehended
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in ways that were clearly extra judicial
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and people were being sent back to places
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where they were almost certainly going to be harmed.
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Those cases were two Egyptians.
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They were living in Sweden at the time,
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and they had been apprehended, brought to the airport,
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they were frisked ,the whole rendition thing.
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You know, they'd been stripped of their clothing.
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They've been put into jumpsuits.
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They've been shackled, hooded,
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had depositories, placed in their anuses,
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And then they were handed over to US officials,
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put on a plane at Bromma airport and transported to Egypt
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where they were put into prison and they were tortured.
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So that happened in December of 2001.
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And that was the first rendition that we had heard of.
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So, when 9/11 happened,
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it was very clear right from the start
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that there was going to be backlash.
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We didn't actually know how bad it was going to be,
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but we started to understand
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how bad it was going to be by December.
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How did you hear
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about that incident in December 18th?
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Amnesty International actually issued urgent actions
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on behalf of these men.
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Their section in Stockholm was on top of these cases.
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The one guy's name was Ahmed Giza
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and the other guy's name was Muhammad Al-Zari.
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And so Amnesty started,
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because it's got so many offices all over the world
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and it's a movement,
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looking, these cases started to come up on their radar.
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So Amnesty issued urgent action the day it happened,
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And you knew the US was involved?
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We knew that those men
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had been handed over to the us
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to some agency of the United States government
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and taken to Egypt.
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We knew that, we didn't understand the rendition program
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at that point.
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We had no idea at that point
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that the US was going to be secretly
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detaining people on European soil.
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Now, what was going
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on in other places, you know, Afghanistan,
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I can really only speak to the rendition program
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as it pertains to European locations
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and to the complicity of European governments
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and Sweden was completely complicit.
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They've acknowledged their complicity.
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They've apologized to the two men.
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They've rescinded those original expulsion order.
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They've offered them compensation.
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They've brought one of the men
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from Egypt back to Sweden,
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Ahmed Giza is now in Sweden.
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So, the Swedish scenario, the situation in Sweden
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was really kind of an A to Z kind of thing, right?
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Giza only went back to Sweden.
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I believe it was last year, but this started in 2001.
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So it was 13 years of,
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from the time that it happened
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through a series of accountability processes.
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I mean, he took his case to the United Nations,
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to the United Nations committee against torture.
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And they ruled in his favor against Sweden.
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So there was accountability for Sweden
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but absolutely no accountability to date
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for anything that the United States government has done
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in terms of these operations.
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What happened to the second man
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who was taken to there?
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He is still there.
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He decided for various reasons to stay in Egypt,
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of course, Ahmed Giza's entire family was in Sweden.
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The Swedish government really tried to make amends,
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what we would call an, in human rights law,
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to give effective redress to the family.
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They offered off Ahmed Giza's wife asylum
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and his five children.
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So naturally when he got out of prison in Egypt
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he wanted to be with them.
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They had asylum.
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So they were well situated in Sweden
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and to the Swedish government's credit,
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they brought him back home.
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What was the next incident you heard
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right after that?
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I would have to say in my memory
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it was the 2003 kidnapping of Abu Omar in Italy.
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He was under surveillance by what was SISMI,
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which is the FBI of Italy,
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for having connections, you know,
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he was suspected of having connections.
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Of course, now, what that means is so unclear,
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connections with whom, connected to do what?
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It was so unclear, but he was under surveillance
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by the Italian intelligence apparatus.
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That apparatus began cooperating with the CIA.
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They hatched a plan to basically kidnap him
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and he was kidnapped.
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And then he was rendered back to Egypt
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where he also was subjected to torture.
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And again, Amnesty International was very critical,
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even though I wasn't working for them at the time,
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in following these cases.
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So that was the next one that I can think of
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that was quite an affair.
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And since then, you'll note
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that the Abu Omar case has been written about
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in nonfiction form, there've been articles, documentaries.
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It's been one of the most dissected rendition cases
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in the history of the program,
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and to the Italian prosecutor's credit,
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Armando Spataro, he actually gathered evidence
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on this kidnapping.
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He gathered cell phone records.
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He gathered receipts from hotels.
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He gathered car rental receipts, and he built a body
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of evidence that led to the prosecution of 26 US nationals.
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And I don't know, half a dozen Italians.
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And they were very, very successful prosecutions.
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Of course, they happened in, in absentia,
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which is a big problem under international law,
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but it was definitely a process
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whereby you can see how these cases can be investigated.
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Evidence can be gathered despite the stonewalling
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of both the Italian government and the US government,
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how they can be effectively investigated
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and people can be held to account
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and brought to justice for the violations
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that they perpetrated against these people.
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So what were you thinking?
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You personally, and then also the people
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you worked with, in terms of all of sudden
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discovering that the US was complicit in torture?
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You said that you had never thought you'd see that again.
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How did Human Rights Watch
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and then later on Amnesty react to that?
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Well, look, we weren't naive,
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we didn't think the US government never,
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whether it was intelligence operations,
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military operations, or even in Brooklyn MDC,
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that they never tortured people.
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But the reality was is that it wasn't a policy,
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it wasn't a formal way of approaching a problem, right?
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I mean, things happened.
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We understood that, we would call them to the carpet
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for torture practices, let's say,
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whether it was a police department
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or substandard conditions in detention centers
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or prisons that amounted to torture and ill treatment.
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So I don't want to give the impression
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that the United States government was completely clean
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on September 10th, 2001
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and then only became dirty afterwards.
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But the unique thing about the operations after 2001
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is that they were authorized
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at the very highest levels through a series
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of memos that somehow tried to justify the use of torture
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and ill treatment in pursuit of people
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that they suspected of having links
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to the terrorists who brought down the trade centers.
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And that's a completely different ball game then.
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When you have the president of the United States
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all of his kind of kitchen cabinet
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Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld,
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you know the cast of characters and then the lawyers,
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then the lawyers, through a series of memos
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helping to justify these practices,
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talking about them as enhanced interrogation techniques,
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euphemisms for torture and ill treatment,
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was stunning, frankly.
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And I don't think that there is a person
271
00:13:33.640 --> 00:13:37.250
who can honestly say that, oh ,we would have,
272
00:13:37.250 --> 00:13:40.870
of course we would have expected that no, it was stunning.
273
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And it was, from a lawyer's point of view,
274
00:13:44.070 --> 00:13:47.090
a regression in rights protection
275
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and the rule of law that we still live with today.
276
00:13:50.930 --> 00:13:52.103
Did you go to the media
277
00:13:52.103 --> 00:13:57.063
and how did the media respond when you saw these incidents?
278
00:13:59.470 --> 00:14:04.470
You know, it was the Europeans who began, European experts
279
00:14:05.260 --> 00:14:07.600
in international governmental organizations.
280
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So let me explain what those are.
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So the council of Europe
282
00:14:10.110 --> 00:14:13.760
and the European Parliament, who began to say
283
00:14:13.760 --> 00:14:16.690
we really need to investigate Europe's complicity
284
00:14:16.690 --> 00:14:17.650
in these practices.
285
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And they started to do that investigation in 2005.
286
00:14:21.880 --> 00:14:24.920
It was December 5th, 2005
287
00:14:24.920 --> 00:14:28.230
that Condoleezza Rice was going to Europe.
288
00:14:28.230 --> 00:14:31.000
And she was at some airport in the US,
289
00:14:31.000 --> 00:14:32.390
I wish I could remember which one now,
290
00:14:32.390 --> 00:14:33.770
but she was still in the US,
291
00:14:33.770 --> 00:14:36.680
and she admitted that the US government
292
00:14:36.680 --> 00:14:38.590
had a rendition program.
293
00:14:38.590 --> 00:14:42.730
She chastised the Europeans
294
00:14:42.730 --> 00:14:46.500
for being naive about the fact
295
00:14:46.500 --> 00:14:50.950
that this rendition program was necessary,
296
00:14:50.950 --> 00:14:52.080
it had saved lives.
297
00:14:52.080 --> 00:14:56.100
I mean, she really was like the schoolmarm on the Europeans.
298
00:14:56.100 --> 00:14:58.390
You don't understand how serious this is.
299
00:14:58.390 --> 00:15:00.710
This rendition program is absolutely necessary.
300
00:15:00.710 --> 00:15:02.720
We can't get these people any other way.
301
00:15:02.720 --> 00:15:06.000
And we are helping to save European and American lives
302
00:15:06.000 --> 00:15:10.870
by transporting people illegally across borders,
303
00:15:10.870 --> 00:15:12.210
holding them in secret detention
304
00:15:12.210 --> 00:15:15.970
and interrogating them in by using coercive
305
00:15:15.970 --> 00:15:19.373
and violent means that is actually helping Europe.
306
00:15:20.330 --> 00:15:21.600
So that was the message.
307
00:15:21.600 --> 00:15:23.980
Well, the European intergovernmental organizations
308
00:15:23.980 --> 00:15:26.350
saw how harmful this was,
309
00:15:26.350 --> 00:15:28.570
and they decided to do their own investigation.
310
00:15:28.570 --> 00:15:30.360
So Senator Dick Marty
311
00:15:30.360 --> 00:15:34.820
a Swiss Senator began an investigation 2005, 2006,
312
00:15:34.820 --> 00:15:39.820
released reports in 2006 and 2007 on the constellation
313
00:15:40.880 --> 00:15:44.290
of European governments who had been complicit
314
00:15:44.290 --> 00:15:47.420
with the US in rendition in secret detention.
315
00:15:47.420 --> 00:15:49.570
The European Parliament did the same thing.
316
00:15:50.650 --> 00:15:52.490
When those reports came out
317
00:15:52.490 --> 00:15:56.740
the European governments were so categorically insulted
318
00:15:58.161 --> 00:16:01.570
by the idea that they would have done such a thing.
319
00:16:01.570 --> 00:16:05.790
And they pushed back hard and poor Dick Marty.
320
00:16:05.790 --> 00:16:07.463
At that time, poor Dick Marty.
321
00:16:08.420 --> 00:16:11.130
His reputation was at stake.
322
00:16:11.130 --> 00:16:13.240
The European Parliament's reputation was at stake
323
00:16:13.240 --> 00:16:15.973
with their own report, which they released in 2007.
324
00:16:16.860 --> 00:16:20.680
So the media at that time
325
00:16:21.640 --> 00:16:26.640
I really felt very strongly that the media was of two minds.
326
00:16:28.820 --> 00:16:31.197
The first was they love a juicy story,
327
00:16:31.197 --> 00:16:32.830
and this is as juicy as it gets,
328
00:16:32.830 --> 00:16:35.730
US government, rendition, secrets, detention,
329
00:16:35.730 --> 00:16:38.080
torture, disappearance, you know,
330
00:16:38.080 --> 00:16:40.880
basically that happened in the 1970s and 80s
331
00:16:40.880 --> 00:16:43.170
in Central and South America, right?
332
00:16:43.170 --> 00:16:45.100
So they loved that aspect of it.
333
00:16:45.100 --> 00:16:47.630
And they played that up to a certain point,
334
00:16:47.630 --> 00:16:52.440
but they also were somewhat complicit
335
00:16:52.440 --> 00:16:56.640
in the government response saying, where's your evidence?
336
00:16:56.640 --> 00:16:58.530
Where's your hard evidence?
337
00:16:58.530 --> 00:16:59.750
Where's the smoking gun?
338
00:16:59.750 --> 00:17:02.453
Where's the body, where's the secret center?
339
00:17:04.460 --> 00:17:06.990
To Human Rights Watch's credit, in 2005,
340
00:17:06.990 --> 00:17:08.770
Human Rights Watch actually released
341
00:17:08.770 --> 00:17:11.870
the names of countries, Poland and Romania,
342
00:17:11.870 --> 00:17:13.640
where two of the centers have been held.
343
00:17:13.640 --> 00:17:14.970
And they had been situated.
344
00:17:14.970 --> 00:17:19.970
The Washington Post, in a shameful act of deference
345
00:17:20.110 --> 00:17:22.280
to the administration had decided
346
00:17:22.280 --> 00:17:25.610
not to publicize the names.
347
00:17:25.610 --> 00:17:26.580
They wrote a story
348
00:17:26.580 --> 00:17:29.010
that there were secret detention centers in Europe,
349
00:17:29.010 --> 00:17:31.720
but at the behest of the administration,
350
00:17:31.720 --> 00:17:34.023
decided not to publish the locations.
351
00:17:35.290 --> 00:17:37.610
So there were highs for the media,
352
00:17:37.610 --> 00:17:39.880
there were lows for the media,
353
00:17:39.880 --> 00:17:43.780
and it really, there still are highs and lows for the media.
354
00:17:43.780 --> 00:17:46.590
You know, sometimes the media is our friend in pursuit
355
00:17:46.590 --> 00:17:49.050
of justice for victims of human rights violations
356
00:17:49.050 --> 00:17:51.540
and sometimes they're complicit.
357
00:17:51.540 --> 00:17:54.040
I would have to say that there are some journalists
358
00:17:54.040 --> 00:17:58.780
who deserve credit for helping to expose this Jane Meyer
359
00:17:58.780 --> 00:18:00.903
from a New Yorker, Scott Shane
360
00:18:03.760 --> 00:18:05.000
I'm sure I'm forgetting others.
361
00:18:05.000 --> 00:18:08.620
There have been some really, Michelle Shepherd up in Canada,
362
00:18:08.620 --> 00:18:13.140
without a doubt, and some of the European press,
363
00:18:13.140 --> 00:18:17.270
but on the US side of things, even to this date,
364
00:18:17.270 --> 00:18:20.040
when we know so much about these operations,
365
00:18:20.040 --> 00:18:23.023
when the European Court of Human Rights, two weeks ago,
366
00:18:24.660 --> 00:18:27.250
issued two judgments, finding Poland complicit
367
00:18:27.250 --> 00:18:31.020
with the CIA in torture and enforced disappearance.
368
00:18:31.020 --> 00:18:33.150
We still have journalists in the United States
369
00:18:33.150 --> 00:18:35.510
who refuse to use the word torture
370
00:18:35.510 --> 00:18:37.490
when describing these practices,
371
00:18:37.490 --> 00:18:39.380
who refuse to talk about the issue
372
00:18:39.380 --> 00:18:42.590
of accountability in terms of criminal prosecution.
373
00:18:42.590 --> 00:18:46.140
So, you know, I'm of a mixed,
374
00:18:46.140 --> 00:18:50.300
I have very mixed feelings about the media on these issues.
375
00:18:50.300 --> 00:18:52.340
There are some real heroes, Carol Rosenberg,
376
00:18:52.340 --> 00:18:54.050
who writes in the Miami Herald,
377
00:18:54.050 --> 00:18:57.083
has done heroic work on Guantanamo.
378
00:18:58.730 --> 00:19:00.610
So during those early,
379
00:19:00.610 --> 00:19:02.980
by the way what title did you have
380
00:19:02.980 --> 00:19:06.133
with Human Rights Watch after 9/11?
381
00:19:07.890 --> 00:19:09.690
I was senior legal counsel
382
00:19:09.690 --> 00:19:12.690
in the terrorism and counter terrorism program.
383
00:19:12.690 --> 00:19:14.600
And when did you just,
384
00:19:14.600 --> 00:19:17.290
when did you switch over to work for Amnesty?
385
00:19:17.290 --> 00:19:18.920
In 2009.
386
00:19:18.920 --> 00:19:21.820
Okay, well, going back to the early years,
387
00:19:24.508 --> 00:19:26.270
did you find this work very different
388
00:19:26.270 --> 00:19:28.300
from the work you had done in the previous
389
00:19:28.300 --> 00:19:32.663
10 or 15 years when you worked in Ireland and in Bosnia?
390
00:19:33.661 --> 00:19:37.870
The work in Ireland was informative
391
00:19:37.870 --> 00:19:41.610
in terms of the post 9/11 era.
392
00:19:41.610 --> 00:19:44.940
I mean, what we were doing in Ireland was looking at,
393
00:19:44.940 --> 00:19:49.260
you know, the IRA and loyalist paramilitaries,
394
00:19:49.260 --> 00:19:51.500
were labeled as terrorist groups.
395
00:19:51.500 --> 00:19:54.530
The techniques that the British government used
396
00:19:54.530 --> 00:19:58.823
against the Irish had been called torture or ill treatment.
397
00:19:59.670 --> 00:20:02.100
We had a whole national security overlay in terms
398
00:20:02.100 --> 00:20:04.030
of all the work that we did in Northern Ireland.
399
00:20:04.030 --> 00:20:06.350
So that work was instructive.
400
00:20:06.350 --> 00:20:09.920
And one of the questions I repeatedly ask
401
00:20:09.920 --> 00:20:12.170
in the various fora within which I speak
402
00:20:12.170 --> 00:20:13.550
or where I'm writing
403
00:20:13.550 --> 00:20:18.550
is why we don't draw more from the Northern Irish experience
404
00:20:19.630 --> 00:20:23.040
in terms of understanding the post 9/11 period.
405
00:20:23.040 --> 00:20:26.350
There's so many parallels between the two.
406
00:20:26.350 --> 00:20:28.790
I think that people think that the Irish experience
407
00:20:28.790 --> 00:20:30.100
is a small experience.
408
00:20:30.100 --> 00:20:34.520
It's a little thing, but you know, people who were labeled
409
00:20:34.520 --> 00:20:38.257
as terrorists in the north, you know, they trained in Libya
410
00:20:38.257 --> 00:20:39.550
they were hooked up
411
00:20:39.550 --> 00:20:43.340
with international terrorist organizations.
412
00:20:43.340 --> 00:20:46.410
It was an international phenomenon that played itself out
413
00:20:46.410 --> 00:20:48.670
at a micro cosmic level,
414
00:20:48.670 --> 00:20:53.053
but it has lessons that we really haven't learned from.
415
00:20:57.776 --> 00:21:00.690
Remind me of the question again?
416
00:21:00.690 --> 00:21:02.900
Your background in Ireland and Bosnia,
417
00:21:02.900 --> 00:21:05.990
how that informed and how you understood
418
00:21:05.990 --> 00:21:09.200
what was happening post 9/11
419
00:21:09.200 --> 00:21:12.017
and whether it was very different
420
00:21:12.017 --> 00:21:15.360
and you perceptions based on your background.
421
00:21:15.360 --> 00:21:19.550
Well I definitely think that the post 9/11 period
422
00:21:19.550 --> 00:21:24.550
did cause a paradigm shift for us in a lot of ways.
423
00:21:25.070 --> 00:21:29.500
Everywhere we go now, we see the opportunity effect
424
00:21:29.500 --> 00:21:33.100
of invoking national security,
425
00:21:33.100 --> 00:21:36.400
right across the globe, you know
426
00:21:36.400 --> 00:21:40.130
where their people are assessed suspects,
427
00:21:40.130 --> 00:21:41.780
where there's militancy.
428
00:21:41.780 --> 00:21:44.690
We see the invocation of national security
429
00:21:44.690 --> 00:21:47.500
in order to deviate from the rule of law,
430
00:21:47.500 --> 00:21:50.350
in order to deviate from protecting people's human rights
431
00:21:50.350 --> 00:21:52.180
right across the globe.
432
00:21:52.180 --> 00:21:53.900
And I don't think
433
00:21:53.900 --> 00:21:58.900
that we had that kind of global phenomenon pre 9/11.
434
00:22:00.200 --> 00:22:02.130
We had it in certain places.
435
00:22:02.130 --> 00:22:04.490
We had it rear its ugly head every now and then,
436
00:22:04.490 --> 00:22:07.420
but now every place that I work in
437
00:22:11.310 --> 00:22:14.660
uses, in a very discretionary way,
438
00:22:14.660 --> 00:22:19.660
national security as an excuse to target people,
439
00:22:20.730 --> 00:22:25.730
minorities, to target and suppress free expression.
440
00:22:27.800 --> 00:22:32.120
And so I do think that what we really have post 9/11
441
00:22:32.120 --> 00:22:33.580
is a whole new world
442
00:22:33.580 --> 00:22:35.640
in terms of the invocation of national security
443
00:22:35.640 --> 00:22:37.713
to justify oppressive practices.
444
00:22:39.910 --> 00:22:43.740
So early on,
445
00:22:43.740 --> 00:22:45.640
did you know much about Guantanamo?
446
00:22:45.640 --> 00:22:47.500
Was that part of what you worked on
447
00:22:47.500 --> 00:22:50.973
and did you ever, what did you hear about Guantanamo?
448
00:22:52.130 --> 00:22:54.070
Well, we knew from the minute it was open,
449
00:22:54.070 --> 00:22:58.063
I mean it was public when it was opened.
450
00:22:59.600 --> 00:23:01.587
Karen Greenberg has written this book called
451
00:23:01.587 --> 00:23:03.660
"The First hundred Days of Guantanamo"
452
00:23:03.660 --> 00:23:08.480
where she makes the argument that there were possibilities
453
00:23:08.480 --> 00:23:13.460
for a more just approach
454
00:23:13.460 --> 00:23:14.510
to those detainees.
455
00:23:14.510 --> 00:23:18.680
But it became clear very, very quickly that
456
00:23:18.680 --> 00:23:20.580
that was not going to be the case.
457
00:23:20.580 --> 00:23:24.810
That Guantanamo was really going to be a legal black hole.
458
00:23:24.810 --> 00:23:27.650
And no matter what the administration said about, you know,
459
00:23:27.650 --> 00:23:30.340
this safeguard or that safeguard or whatever, I mean
460
00:23:30.340 --> 00:23:33.140
Guantanamo's just been a stain right from the beginning.
461
00:23:34.350 --> 00:23:36.010
So yeah, we've been following Guantanamo
462
00:23:36.010 --> 00:23:37.710
since the very, very beginning.
463
00:23:37.710 --> 00:23:39.060
Since it first opened
464
00:23:39.060 --> 00:23:39.893
You personally,
465
00:23:39.893 --> 00:23:40.930
were you following Guantanamo,
466
00:23:40.930 --> 00:23:43.920
or were you following more the rendition cases or both?
467
00:23:44.850 --> 00:23:46.593
I followed both.
468
00:23:47.540 --> 00:23:49.130
You have to remember that many of the people
469
00:23:49.130 --> 00:23:52.150
who were victims of rendition ended up at Guantanamo.
470
00:23:52.150 --> 00:23:54.850
So there are links between
471
00:23:55.800 --> 00:23:58.810
these post 9/11 operations in Europe,
472
00:23:58.810 --> 00:24:03.280
in West Africa, in the Middle East and North Africa
473
00:24:03.280 --> 00:24:06.620
and people who are currently in Guantanamo Bay.
474
00:24:06.620 --> 00:24:08.510
Some of those people were held in secret detention
475
00:24:08.510 --> 00:24:11.023
in Europe, in Thailand and Morocco,
476
00:24:12.420 --> 00:24:13.253
it's been reported
477
00:24:13.253 --> 00:24:14.920
that some people were held in Uzbekistan,
478
00:24:14.920 --> 00:24:16.893
we've never been able to verify that.
479
00:24:17.920 --> 00:24:21.970
So I guess the way that I look at my work was
480
00:24:21.970 --> 00:24:24.940
as making these links, you know,
481
00:24:24.940 --> 00:24:29.940
between and among all of these different operations,
482
00:24:30.370 --> 00:24:35.150
but Guantanamo really became more real for me
483
00:24:35.150 --> 00:24:37.100
when I actually went down
484
00:24:37.100 --> 00:24:40.100
to observe the first military commission.
485
00:24:40.100 --> 00:24:42.320
And I wrote an article after that,
486
00:24:42.320 --> 00:24:45.940
that no matter what you read in the press,
487
00:24:45.940 --> 00:24:48.210
doesn't matter, Western, Eastern, Asian press,
488
00:24:48.210 --> 00:24:49.879
it doesn't matter.
489
00:24:49.879 --> 00:24:50.760
You really have to go to Guantanamo to really
490
00:24:50.760 --> 00:24:54.680
understand the physical geography, the psychic geography
491
00:24:55.750 --> 00:24:59.190
and the disorientation that comes from a system
492
00:24:59.190 --> 00:25:01.050
that is completely different
493
00:25:01.050 --> 00:25:06.050
from what you learn is the rule of law in law school.
494
00:25:06.340 --> 00:25:09.990
And so that is, it was in 2007,
495
00:25:09.990 --> 00:25:12.615
I think I went down for Salim Hamdan's trial.
496
00:25:12.615 --> 00:25:13.770
Could you tell us?
It might've been 2008.
497
00:25:13.770 --> 00:25:16.627
Could you tell us about that experience?
498
00:25:17.470 --> 00:25:19.120
Well, I didn't wanna go.
499
00:25:19.120 --> 00:25:23.285
I wasn't in the queue to go to Guantanamo,
500
00:25:23.285 --> 00:25:26.090
but I was fairly low enough on the totem pole
501
00:25:26.090 --> 00:25:29.470
that going to Guantanamo in July
502
00:25:29.470 --> 00:25:32.270
was gonna be my in my basket of things to do.
503
00:25:32.270 --> 00:25:35.470
And so I went down at a time
504
00:25:35.470 --> 00:25:37.530
when you could just catch a commercial flight,
505
00:25:37.530 --> 00:25:40.410
I flew to Florida and then I took Air Sunshine,
506
00:25:40.410 --> 00:25:43.200
or something like, that to Guantanamo,
507
00:25:43.200 --> 00:25:44.620
I had to have clearance,
508
00:25:44.620 --> 00:25:46.640
but now people who go to Guantanamo
509
00:25:46.640 --> 00:25:49.870
have to go on military transport planes through DC.
510
00:25:49.870 --> 00:25:51.920
And I was there at a time
511
00:25:51.920 --> 00:25:55.070
when things were much looser, so to speak.
512
00:25:55.070 --> 00:25:59.360
And so I flew down and was met at the airport
513
00:25:59.360 --> 00:26:04.360
by a charming bunch of young military guys
514
00:26:04.450 --> 00:26:05.600
and on a little boat.
515
00:26:05.600 --> 00:26:07.363
And they ferried me across the bay,
516
00:26:08.270 --> 00:26:10.240
over to my tent.
517
00:26:10.240 --> 00:26:13.810
I was the first class of people at Guantanamo Bay
518
00:26:13.810 --> 00:26:16.280
who were not privileged to stay
519
00:26:16.280 --> 00:26:18.530
in the combined bachelor's quarters.
520
00:26:18.530 --> 00:26:21.010
I got a notice about a week before I was to leave
521
00:26:21.010 --> 00:26:23.660
that we were going to be housed in tents,
522
00:26:23.660 --> 00:26:26.590
which if they thought was going to be disincentive
523
00:26:26.590 --> 00:26:29.343
for the NGO, they were very, very wrong.
524
00:26:31.200 --> 00:26:34.740
So anyway, I went down, I was one of four observers.
525
00:26:34.740 --> 00:26:36.410
I was the only woman observer
526
00:26:36.410 --> 00:26:39.310
from an NGO for this first military commissions trial.
527
00:26:39.310 --> 00:26:40.840
I was there for eight days
528
00:26:40.840 --> 00:26:45.840
with ACLU, Amnesty International, myself,
529
00:26:46.300 --> 00:26:49.940
and I can't remember the other organization,
530
00:26:49.940 --> 00:26:53.839
but in any event, we observed the trial for eight days.
531
00:26:53.839 --> 00:26:55.870
And I've written about my impressions
532
00:26:55.870 --> 00:26:58.370
of that first military commissions trial.
533
00:26:58.370 --> 00:26:59.540
You know, a trial where the judge
534
00:26:59.540 --> 00:27:01.880
acknowledges openly in court
535
00:27:01.880 --> 00:27:04.023
that this person was subject to coercion.
536
00:27:04.870 --> 00:27:08.030
And yet these very liberal rules for the admissibility
537
00:27:08.030 --> 00:27:11.120
of evidence permitted his coerced testimony
538
00:27:11.120 --> 00:27:12.770
to be entered into evidence.
539
00:27:12.770 --> 00:27:14.575
So a first year law student knows
540
00:27:14.575 --> 00:27:17.940
that this is not on, right?
541
00:27:17.940 --> 00:27:20.610
So there was very little confidence
542
00:27:20.610 --> 00:27:24.420
that this trial could actually produce justice.
543
00:27:24.420 --> 00:27:27.783
And the key thing for a lot of us was,
544
00:27:28.640 --> 00:27:32.550
people always say, "You defend terrorists.
545
00:27:32.550 --> 00:27:35.260
You want justice for terrorists."
546
00:27:35.260 --> 00:27:37.110
But the key thing is that
547
00:27:37.110 --> 00:27:39.390
if the US government is making the argument
548
00:27:39.390 --> 00:27:42.520
that they are actually prosecuting people who were linked
549
00:27:42.520 --> 00:27:46.650
in some way to 9/11 in these unsafe, unfair trials,
550
00:27:46.650 --> 00:27:50.123
then the 9/11 victims, they don't get justice either.
551
00:27:51.200 --> 00:27:55.310
So on either side of it, nobody got justice.
552
00:27:55.310 --> 00:27:57.926
Hamdan was a small fry.
553
00:27:57.926 --> 00:28:02.600
He was convicted in an unsafe conviction.
554
00:28:02.600 --> 00:28:04.450
He served a certain amount of time
555
00:28:04.450 --> 00:28:06.300
and then he was released.
556
00:28:06.300 --> 00:28:07.550
The judge gave him time served,
557
00:28:07.550 --> 00:28:09.210
he'd been in Guantanamo for five years
558
00:28:09.210 --> 00:28:11.440
and then they sent him back to Yemen,
559
00:28:11.440 --> 00:28:14.563
where I understand he's doing fairly well.
560
00:28:15.910 --> 00:28:17.290
So are you telling us
561
00:28:17.290 --> 00:28:20.030
that you were surprised in your observations
562
00:28:20.030 --> 00:28:21.010
when you went to Guantanamo,
563
00:28:21.010 --> 00:28:22.420
you had different expectations
564
00:28:22.420 --> 00:28:25.201
than what you actually observed?
565
00:28:25.201 --> 00:28:27.910
No, I'm not saying I had different expectations
566
00:28:27.910 --> 00:28:29.270
from what I observed.
567
00:28:29.270 --> 00:28:32.730
I'm saying that given the rules that we understood existed
568
00:28:32.730 --> 00:28:34.920
and governed the military commissions
569
00:28:34.920 --> 00:28:38.110
all of our worst fears were realized.
570
00:28:38.110 --> 00:28:39.730
No, I didn't have high expectations at all.
571
00:28:39.730 --> 00:28:42.430
You don't take people to an offshore prison,
572
00:28:42.430 --> 00:28:45.450
set up a separate court outside the federal system
573
00:28:45.450 --> 00:28:49.090
with rules of evidence that so clearly deviate
574
00:28:49.090 --> 00:28:52.090
from what you find in the federal system
575
00:28:52.090 --> 00:28:54.400
and have high expectations.
576
00:28:54.400 --> 00:28:56.780
No, we had low expectations
577
00:28:56.780 --> 00:28:59.110
and they were, they were realized
578
00:29:02.520 --> 00:29:03.353
Did you ever go back
579
00:29:03.353 --> 00:29:04.540
to Guantanamo after that?
580
00:29:04.540 --> 00:29:05.820
I did not.
581
00:29:05.820 --> 00:29:08.230
I have actively sought not to be
582
00:29:09.425 --> 00:29:10.500
traveling back and forth
Why is that?
583
00:29:10.500 --> 00:29:12.100
To Guantanamo Bay.
584
00:29:12.100 --> 00:29:15.683
I think that once for me was enough.
585
00:29:16.630 --> 00:29:19.300
And I also find that what Guantanamo Bay
586
00:29:19.300 --> 00:29:22.520
has done to people who routinely go, you know,
587
00:29:22.520 --> 00:29:23.690
there's people who basically
588
00:29:23.690 --> 00:29:26.350
cycle in and cycle out all the time,
589
00:29:26.350 --> 00:29:30.923
is it causes a hardening, a sarcasm,
590
00:29:32.660 --> 00:29:36.010
a real sense that there's no hope.
591
00:29:36.010 --> 00:29:39.470
And I don't think that you can really be
592
00:29:39.470 --> 00:29:42.100
as effective as you want to be
593
00:29:42.100 --> 00:29:45.870
in doing human rights work if you're that hardened.
594
00:29:45.870 --> 00:29:49.390
And so my decision was to try to do the work
595
00:29:49.390 --> 00:29:53.140
where I thought that I could do the most good
596
00:29:53.140 --> 00:29:55.700
and maintain a sense of hope.
597
00:29:55.700 --> 00:29:57.840
And I know how that sounds,
598
00:29:57.840 --> 00:30:00.250
but I would never hire anyone to do human rights work
599
00:30:00.250 --> 00:30:02.150
who didn't have a hope that they could have impact.
600
00:30:02.150 --> 00:30:05.400
Why would I hire someone who is hard and sarcastic, cynic,
601
00:30:05.400 --> 00:30:06.670
why would I do that?
602
00:30:06.670 --> 00:30:09.793
So why would I want to become that myself?
603
00:30:10.750 --> 00:30:15.750
And so switched up a little to the resettlement issue,
604
00:30:16.430 --> 00:30:20.430
which seemed much more positive to me, much more hopeful,
605
00:30:20.430 --> 00:30:23.700
and to actually helping to reveal more
606
00:30:23.700 --> 00:30:26.460
and more about the rendition in secret detention programs.
607
00:30:26.460 --> 00:30:29.710
Those seem to be the places where the energy,
608
00:30:29.710 --> 00:30:32.840
my psychic energy, felt better spent.
609
00:30:32.840 --> 00:30:35.210
So that takes us right to
610
00:30:35.210 --> 00:30:37.870
could you tell us about some of the resettlement cases?
611
00:30:37.870 --> 00:30:40.340
Let's start with the one in Ireland.
612
00:30:40.340 --> 00:30:44.680
Yeah, well, I got an email in 2007.
613
00:30:45.574 --> 00:30:50.170
I'd worked on a European court case years ago,
614
00:30:50.170 --> 00:30:54.300
where a bunch of Uzbeks were going to be sent
615
00:30:54.300 --> 00:30:56.890
from Turkey to Uzbekistan .
616
00:30:56.890 --> 00:30:58.710
And it was so clearly the wrong thing
617
00:30:58.710 --> 00:31:00.190
for the Turkish government to do.
618
00:31:00.190 --> 00:31:03.410
Uzbekistan is a place where torture is systematic,
619
00:31:03.410 --> 00:31:06.170
where people with a religious profile
620
00:31:06.170 --> 00:31:08.490
are routinely targeted.
621
00:31:08.490 --> 00:31:10.360
They're apprehended.
622
00:31:10.360 --> 00:31:12.170
They're tried on trumped up charges,
623
00:31:12.170 --> 00:31:13.840
they're tortured in detention.
624
00:31:13.840 --> 00:31:15.530
They have long prison sentences
625
00:31:15.530 --> 00:31:18.800
in the most horrible prison system.
626
00:31:18.800 --> 00:31:21.030
So I'd worked on that case.
627
00:31:21.030 --> 00:31:25.590
So Guantanamo Bay council,
628
00:31:25.590 --> 00:31:26.720
named Michael Mone,
629
00:31:26.720 --> 00:31:28.470
sent Human Rights Watch an email.
630
00:31:28.470 --> 00:31:32.250
I think it was in 2007, and the email got booted around.
631
00:31:32.250 --> 00:31:35.460
It was like, can you help me make the case
632
00:31:35.460 --> 00:31:39.750
that my Uzbek detainee in Guantanamo Bay
633
00:31:39.750 --> 00:31:42.840
should not be repatriated Uzbekistan.
634
00:31:42.840 --> 00:31:44.520
So eventually it came to me,
635
00:31:44.520 --> 00:31:48.570
based on this work I had done on this European court case.
636
00:31:48.570 --> 00:31:50.837
So I called Mike Mone, up and I said,
637
00:31:50.837 --> 00:31:52.260
"So what's the deal?"
638
00:31:52.260 --> 00:31:55.410
And he said, "I have this Uzbekistani guy
639
00:31:55.410 --> 00:31:59.250
and there's another Uzbek, and there's a rumor
640
00:31:59.250 --> 00:32:02.100
that they might be sent back to Uzbekistan."
641
00:32:02.100 --> 00:32:03.487
And I said, "Well, that can't be the case.
642
00:32:03.487 --> 00:32:06.360
The US doesn't send people to Uzbekistan.
643
00:32:06.360 --> 00:32:08.400
Ordinary asylum seekers who come
644
00:32:08.400 --> 00:32:10.200
to the United States from Uzbekistan,
645
00:32:10.200 --> 00:32:11.450
they don't get sent back.
646
00:32:12.730 --> 00:32:16.890
So this began what was a long-term partnership
647
00:32:16.890 --> 00:32:19.840
between me and Mike Mone
648
00:32:19.840 --> 00:32:24.230
to A, prove that they couldn't be sent back to Uzbekistan,
649
00:32:24.230 --> 00:32:28.000
and then B, which was the only logical next step,
650
00:32:28.000 --> 00:32:29.950
where could they be sent?
651
00:32:29.950 --> 00:32:33.100
Which meant you gotta find a place for them.
652
00:32:33.100 --> 00:32:35.770
So it was easy enough to say
653
00:32:35.770 --> 00:32:37.420
they shouldn't be sent back to Uzbekistan,
654
00:32:37.420 --> 00:32:40.290
in 2003, the UN special rapporteur in torture
655
00:32:40.290 --> 00:32:45.060
had definitively, written a report
656
00:32:45.060 --> 00:32:47.870
that torture in Uzbekistan was systematic.
657
00:32:47.870 --> 00:32:49.960
So that wasn't the real problem.
658
00:32:49.960 --> 00:32:52.300
The real problem is who the hell
659
00:32:52.300 --> 00:32:57.300
is going to take two Uzbek Guantanamo Bay detainees?
660
00:32:57.360 --> 00:32:58.320
Who's going to do that?
661
00:32:58.320 --> 00:33:03.240
So, we started to search around.
662
00:33:03.240 --> 00:33:06.050
So I was asking anybody that I could find
663
00:33:06.050 --> 00:33:07.620
who was good on Uzbekistan?
664
00:33:07.620 --> 00:33:09.590
Who's good on humanitarian issues?
665
00:33:09.590 --> 00:33:13.640
Who would actually take the leap of faith?
666
00:33:13.640 --> 00:33:15.780
And we went through a whole range of countries
667
00:33:15.780 --> 00:33:19.210
and I was in Brussels in, I think late 2007
668
00:33:19.210 --> 00:33:21.990
early 2008, in my office in Brussels.
669
00:33:21.990 --> 00:33:23.440
And I went to the director there,
670
00:33:23.440 --> 00:33:25.960
Lotte Leicht, who's still there.
671
00:33:25.960 --> 00:33:29.840
And I said, "Lotte, we have these two Uzbeks in Guantanamo
672
00:33:29.840 --> 00:33:31.929
and we need to get them out.
673
00:33:31.929 --> 00:33:33.810
What country would take them?"
674
00:33:33.810 --> 00:33:35.300
So we sat for, I don't know how long.
675
00:33:35.300 --> 00:33:36.440
And then she said, "You know,
676
00:33:36.440 --> 00:33:39.970
the Irish have been really good on Uzbekistan."
677
00:33:39.970 --> 00:33:41.740
They've spoken out,
678
00:33:41.740 --> 00:33:45.670
there'd been a massacre in Uzbekistan and Andijan in 2005,
679
00:33:45.670 --> 00:33:48.290
the EU had imposed sanctions,
680
00:33:48.290 --> 00:33:51.010
then they became very lax with the sanctions.
681
00:33:51.010 --> 00:33:53.370
And in 2007, we were in despair that the EU
682
00:33:53.370 --> 00:33:56.000
was not keeping up with the pressure on Uzbekistan,
683
00:33:56.000 --> 00:33:59.160
but Ireland had maintained its position and been good.
684
00:33:59.160 --> 00:34:02.720
So we said, Ireland, that seems so bizarre.
685
00:34:02.720 --> 00:34:04.270
It's just seems really bizarre.
686
00:34:05.276 --> 00:34:06.970
And of course I knew Ireland well
687
00:34:06.970 --> 00:34:09.690
from the years that I had worked there,
688
00:34:09.690 --> 00:34:13.150
so started to feel people out.
689
00:34:13.150 --> 00:34:14.463
And as it turns out,
690
00:34:15.440 --> 00:34:19.180
one of the Uzbeks there had learned English.
691
00:34:19.180 --> 00:34:21.920
He was a sheep herder in Uzbekistan.
692
00:34:21.920 --> 00:34:24.890
So we started to make these fairly bizarre,
693
00:34:24.890 --> 00:34:29.140
and sometimes, dare I say, comical arguments
694
00:34:29.140 --> 00:34:31.830
about why Ireland would be really, really good.
695
00:34:31.830 --> 00:34:34.160
And then we started to reach out to the Irish government,
696
00:34:34.160 --> 00:34:35.900
to MPs, to various people.
697
00:34:35.900 --> 00:34:38.450
And that was a brick wall.
698
00:34:38.450 --> 00:34:40.420
It was just a brick wall.
699
00:34:40.420 --> 00:34:44.000
So Mone and I are on the phone the one day.
700
00:34:44.000 --> 00:34:47.650
And he's despairing because his client is getting depressed.
701
00:34:47.650 --> 00:34:50.320
He's got children he wants to see,
702
00:34:50.320 --> 00:34:51.730
he's clearly not of interest
703
00:34:51.730 --> 00:34:53.440
to the United States government.
704
00:34:53.440 --> 00:34:54.760
They can't send him home.
705
00:34:54.760 --> 00:34:55.990
They won't let them in the mainland
706
00:34:55.990 --> 00:34:57.830
of the US what are we going to do?
707
00:34:57.830 --> 00:35:00.593
So I said, you know, I said, let's go to Ireland.
708
00:35:02.210 --> 00:35:03.640
Just get on a plane.
709
00:35:03.640 --> 00:35:05.860
You get on a plane, I'll get on a plane,
710
00:35:05.860 --> 00:35:08.560
and we'll go, and we'll bring the documents
711
00:35:08.560 --> 00:35:12.190
showing why this would be a good fit.
712
00:35:12.190 --> 00:35:14.400
We'll talk to as many people as we can.
713
00:35:14.400 --> 00:35:16.090
We'll we'll see what we can do.
714
00:35:16.090 --> 00:35:17.540
And so we did, I mean we got,
715
00:35:17.540 --> 00:35:18.680
to Human Rights Watch's credit.
716
00:35:18.680 --> 00:35:21.120
I said, "I really want to go to Ireland to see
717
00:35:21.120 --> 00:35:23.830
if we can get this guy from Guantanamo to Ireland."
718
00:35:23.830 --> 00:35:25.520
And they said, "Sure, go ahead."
719
00:35:25.520 --> 00:35:27.260
And Mone had good means
720
00:35:27.260 --> 00:35:30.001
and good connections in the Irish American community.
721
00:35:30.001 --> 00:35:33.500
And so we went over and that began a year
722
00:35:33.500 --> 00:35:37.900
of direct advocacy, but I'll never forget the guy we met
723
00:35:37.900 --> 00:35:38.930
in the Americas division
724
00:35:38.930 --> 00:35:42.490
of the foreign affairs department in Ireland.
725
00:35:42.490 --> 00:35:44.400
And he looked at us
726
00:35:44.400 --> 00:35:48.880
like we had come from Mars, he just looked at us,
727
00:35:48.880 --> 00:35:52.107
and he said in, the most gentle way,
728
00:35:52.107 --> 00:35:56.630
"Why would you ever think that Ireland
729
00:35:56.630 --> 00:36:01.630
would take two Uzbekistani Guantanamo Bay detainees?
730
00:36:02.480 --> 00:36:03.850
And it was a really good question.
731
00:36:03.850 --> 00:36:06.190
It wasn't a bad question, right?
732
00:36:06.190 --> 00:36:10.280
But then we just started to talk to everybody, everybody.
733
00:36:10.280 --> 00:36:13.440
Now that first trip was very interesting because the Irish,
734
00:36:13.440 --> 00:36:15.360
anybody in Ireland we talked to said
735
00:36:15.360 --> 00:36:17.500
the US has never even asked us.
736
00:36:17.500 --> 00:36:19.370
Here you guys come,
737
00:36:19.370 --> 00:36:22.163
but of course, this is a bilateral political issue.
738
00:36:23.000 --> 00:36:25.270
And you're asking us to take them,
739
00:36:25.270 --> 00:36:27.313
but the US has never asked us.
740
00:36:28.730 --> 00:36:30.950
We get out of, I can't remember what meeting it was.
741
00:36:30.950 --> 00:36:32.590
Maybe it was interior.
742
00:36:32.590 --> 00:36:36.100
And I got on the phone, I got on the phone.
743
00:36:36.100 --> 00:36:40.690
And I said to various people who I knew at the time
744
00:36:40.690 --> 00:36:43.040
the Irish think that you've never even asked.
745
00:36:43.040 --> 00:36:44.750
To various people in the US government?
746
00:36:44.750 --> 00:36:46.860
In the US government
747
00:36:46.860 --> 00:36:50.567
and said "The Irish think that you've never even asked."
748
00:36:50.567 --> 00:36:53.380
"No we've asked everyone, they're mistaken."
749
00:36:53.380 --> 00:36:55.290
And I said, "Well, if you've asked everyone,
750
00:36:55.290 --> 00:36:59.470
you've asked them so secretly
751
00:36:59.470 --> 00:37:00.860
that even the people who could help you
752
00:37:00.860 --> 00:37:02.700
now don't know that.
753
00:37:02.700 --> 00:37:05.707
And maybe you should actually ask again."
754
00:37:06.700 --> 00:37:08.480
So it was this combination of events,
755
00:37:08.480 --> 00:37:10.350
us being on the ground,
756
00:37:10.350 --> 00:37:13.250
the Irish actually being seized of the question,
757
00:37:13.250 --> 00:37:15.000
the US being seized with the idea
758
00:37:15.000 --> 00:37:16.830
that the Irish might be open
759
00:37:16.830 --> 00:37:20.260
that led over the course of a year,
760
00:37:20.260 --> 00:37:25.170
to eventually the Irish saying yes,
761
00:37:25.170 --> 00:37:27.610
but there are many people responsible for that.
762
00:37:27.610 --> 00:37:30.140
I mean, the Irish section of Amnesty International
763
00:37:30.140 --> 00:37:33.990
was absolutely critical in helping to affect this,
764
00:37:33.990 --> 00:37:36.230
especially in terms of the integration issue.
765
00:37:36.230 --> 00:37:39.710
You know, how do you take someone who was, you know
766
00:37:39.710 --> 00:37:42.520
kidnapped by mercenaries, handed over the US government,
767
00:37:42.520 --> 00:37:43.860
sent to Guantanamo Bay,
768
00:37:43.860 --> 00:37:45.740
whose family came from Uzbekistan too
769
00:37:45.740 --> 00:37:47.811
and is currently in Iran?
770
00:37:47.811 --> 00:37:50.800
How do you bring all those pieces together
771
00:37:50.800 --> 00:37:53.930
to a coherent whole where a family can live peacefully
772
00:37:53.930 --> 00:37:55.500
and safely in Ireland?
773
00:37:55.500 --> 00:37:57.880
And the Irish section of Amnesty International
774
00:37:57.880 --> 00:38:02.163
was absolutely brilliant in helping to make that happen.
775
00:38:03.360 --> 00:38:05.510
There were advocates in other organizations
776
00:38:05.510 --> 00:38:07.730
who helped to make it happen,
777
00:38:07.730 --> 00:38:11.240
but I'd say the key person who made it happen was Mike Mone.
778
00:38:11.240 --> 00:38:14.249
So, when you called up American officials,
779
00:38:14.249 --> 00:38:15.540
can you tell us who you called up?
780
00:38:15.540 --> 00:38:17.460
I can't tell you who I called up.
781
00:38:17.460 --> 00:38:21.559
I can tell you that we were able,
782
00:38:21.559 --> 00:38:23.870
by a stroke of luck, I mean,
783
00:38:23.870 --> 00:38:26.030
it's not often that you just call a cell phone number
784
00:38:26.030 --> 00:38:27.350
and you get somebody.
785
00:38:27.350 --> 00:38:28.780
That's why I think there was a little bit
786
00:38:28.780 --> 00:38:31.660
of serendipity involved in this whole case.
787
00:38:31.660 --> 00:38:34.433
We haven't seen anything like this since,
788
00:38:35.860 --> 00:38:38.020
where the lawyer actually says,
789
00:38:38.020 --> 00:38:39.840
I think this is the best place for my client.
790
00:38:39.840 --> 00:38:42.560
And I'm going to really make this happen.
791
00:38:42.560 --> 00:38:44.060
There's various reasons
792
00:38:44.060 --> 00:38:46.580
why it can't happen that way anymore,
793
00:38:46.580 --> 00:38:48.800
but it was just by a stroke of luck
794
00:38:48.800 --> 00:38:51.530
that the right person picked up the phone
795
00:38:51.530 --> 00:38:55.310
and was able then to take that information to others
796
00:38:56.150 --> 00:38:59.370
and started a chain where there was an open communication
797
00:38:59.370 --> 00:39:02.793
between the US government and the Irish government.
798
00:39:06.730 --> 00:39:08.423
And I will say one other thing.
799
00:39:10.350 --> 00:39:14.930
9/11 was very damaging for the NGO community,
800
00:39:14.930 --> 00:39:16.100
for the human rights community,
801
00:39:16.100 --> 00:39:18.450
vis-a-vis its relations with the US government.
802
00:39:19.800 --> 00:39:22.990
There was so much that was happening
803
00:39:22.990 --> 00:39:27.990
that was detrimental to the whole human rights project
804
00:39:28.300 --> 00:39:31.160
that was coming from Washington.
805
00:39:31.160 --> 00:39:34.250
And I do think to some extent, as the years went by
806
00:39:34.250 --> 00:39:36.670
that people realized that, people in DC realize that.
807
00:39:36.670 --> 00:39:40.290
And I also think that this gesture
808
00:39:41.460 --> 00:39:43.760
of actually taking the information that we gave them
809
00:39:43.760 --> 00:39:48.183
and running with it was part of an attempt to repair things,
810
00:39:49.697 --> 00:39:53.019
I mean, we were credible, we were engaged,
811
00:39:53.019 --> 00:39:57.380
and, I really want to think that
812
00:39:57.380 --> 00:39:59.840
they didn't want to sideline us
813
00:39:59.840 --> 00:40:01.620
to the extent that we had been sidelined
814
00:40:01.620 --> 00:40:05.520
in the first six years after 9/11 happened.
815
00:40:05.520 --> 00:40:07.823
Was this still the Bush administration
816
00:40:07.823 --> 00:40:09.050
when you said not sidelined?
817
00:40:09.050 --> 00:40:14.050
It still was, because it was 2007, was it 2007?
818
00:40:14.680 --> 00:40:17.460
Or Obama had just been elected.
819
00:40:17.460 --> 00:40:20.930
But I want to say that it was still while,
820
00:40:20.930 --> 00:40:22.260
I did not speak with him
821
00:40:22.260 --> 00:40:24.180
and have never spoken with Clint Williamson,
822
00:40:24.180 --> 00:40:27.491
who was the ambassador at large for war crimes at the time,
823
00:40:27.491 --> 00:40:31.600
but it was during the time that he was in post
824
00:40:31.600 --> 00:40:34.630
looking for places for people that we were
825
00:40:34.630 --> 00:40:37.800
able to communicate this information to the government.
826
00:40:37.800 --> 00:40:39.510
And did you get any sense
827
00:40:39.510 --> 00:40:41.920
from the European countries
828
00:40:41.920 --> 00:40:45.140
as to why they would accept these detainees,
829
00:40:45.140 --> 00:40:47.080
if the US wouldn't accept them themselves,
830
00:40:47.080 --> 00:40:49.853
wouldn't allow them to be settled in the US?
831
00:40:51.570 --> 00:40:54.810
Every country had a different reason, right?
832
00:40:54.810 --> 00:40:57.060
So some countries,
833
00:40:57.060 --> 00:40:59.010
even though the Guantanamo Bay detainees
834
00:40:59.010 --> 00:41:01.700
were not nationals of their country,
835
00:41:01.700 --> 00:41:03.350
they had some kind of a link.
836
00:41:03.350 --> 00:41:04.510
They had lived in the country,
837
00:41:04.510 --> 00:41:07.050
they had family in the country,
838
00:41:07.050 --> 00:41:09.290
they spoke the language.
839
00:41:09.290 --> 00:41:11.060
So I think for France
840
00:41:11.060 --> 00:41:14.213
that was an issue when they took a detainee.
841
00:41:15.200 --> 00:41:19.553
For others, it was very political, very, very political.
842
00:41:19.553 --> 00:41:22.690
When we were doing the advocacy in Ireland,
843
00:41:22.690 --> 00:41:25.280
a key point, advocacy point for us,
844
00:41:25.280 --> 00:41:27.810
was the fact that Ireland had not cooperated
845
00:41:27.810 --> 00:41:30.453
with the US government in the war in Iraq.
846
00:41:31.340 --> 00:41:33.010
And they had abstained.
847
00:41:33.010 --> 00:41:36.870
And the idea was, how do you now make a gesture
848
00:41:36.870 --> 00:41:38.250
to the US government
849
00:41:40.737 --> 00:41:45.737
that could renew the relationship in a meaningful way?
850
00:41:46.070 --> 00:41:48.490
And of course at that point, we were, you know,
851
00:41:48.490 --> 00:41:50.530
we didn't know who was going to be elected,
852
00:41:50.530 --> 00:41:53.100
whether it was going to be Obama or McCain,
853
00:41:53.100 --> 00:41:56.470
but both of them had called for the closure of Guantanamo.
854
00:41:56.470 --> 00:41:59.690
So you could wield that, so to speak,
855
00:41:59.690 --> 00:42:01.210
in your advocacy and say,
856
00:42:01.210 --> 00:42:04.130
look, you've been somewhat divorced from the US government
857
00:42:04.130 --> 00:42:06.010
because of how fraught your relationships
858
00:42:06.010 --> 00:42:08.320
have been with them over Iraq all these years.
859
00:42:08.320 --> 00:42:13.130
Maybe this is a way to extend your hand, make a gesture
860
00:42:13.130 --> 00:42:15.570
to the new administration, no matter who it is.
861
00:42:15.570 --> 00:42:17.190
Although at that, you know, at some point
862
00:42:17.190 --> 00:42:20.590
we really did feel that Obama was in lead
863
00:42:21.610 --> 00:42:24.020
and start things off on the right foot.
864
00:42:24.020 --> 00:42:26.470
We don't, we will never know
865
00:42:26.470 --> 00:42:29.560
whether this was an appealing argument
866
00:42:29.560 --> 00:42:30.500
to the Irish government
867
00:42:30.500 --> 00:42:34.760
because the minute we ended our meetings with them,
868
00:42:34.760 --> 00:42:36.630
we didn't know much else.
869
00:42:36.630 --> 00:42:40.610
We never knew about the meetings that the Irish government
870
00:42:40.610 --> 00:42:43.010
had among themselves or with the US administration.
871
00:42:43.010 --> 00:42:47.350
All we knew was that at some point there was confirmation
872
00:42:47.350 --> 00:42:52.180
that Michael Mone's client, Oybek Jabbarov
873
00:42:52.180 --> 00:42:57.180
and his compatriot Sharuk were going to Ireland.
874
00:42:57.350 --> 00:42:59.510
And we didn't even know when.
875
00:42:59.510 --> 00:43:01.070
And then Mone called me one day.
876
00:43:01.070 --> 00:43:06.070
And he said, "I can now confirm that they've landed."
877
00:43:06.440 --> 00:43:08.800
Which was stunning, I mean, I knew what's going to happen,
878
00:43:08.800 --> 00:43:09.870
I just didn't know when.
879
00:43:09.870 --> 00:43:13.510
And so it was just a really, you know,
880
00:43:13.510 --> 00:43:16.960
it was a really interesting, gratifying,
881
00:43:16.960 --> 00:43:20.890
positive thing that was Guantanamo related,
882
00:43:20.890 --> 00:43:24.440
but that, as opposed to hardening you, you know,
883
00:43:24.440 --> 00:43:25.710
really gave you some idea
884
00:43:25.710 --> 00:43:28.340
that you could really have some kind of an impact.
885
00:43:28.340 --> 00:43:30.090
Well, did that inspire you as to think,
886
00:43:30.090 --> 00:43:31.480
well, if it worked with one country,
887
00:43:31.480 --> 00:43:33.560
maybe it would work with other countries?
888
00:43:33.560 --> 00:43:36.320
It did, it did inspire us in that way.
889
00:43:36.320 --> 00:43:38.380
And there were a series of resettlements
890
00:43:38.380 --> 00:43:41.870
and the Amnesty sections and the lawyers
891
00:43:41.870 --> 00:43:45.660
help to affect a lot of them.
892
00:43:45.660 --> 00:43:47.663
There weren't, as many as we had hoped,
893
00:43:48.670 --> 00:43:50.250
there are still people in Guantanamo Bay
894
00:43:50.250 --> 00:43:53.750
who should have been resettled in the mid 2000s,
895
00:43:53.750 --> 00:43:55.493
who remain in Guantanamo Bay.
896
00:43:58.247 --> 00:44:01.540
So yes, it gave people hope
897
00:44:01.540 --> 00:44:03.070
that there could be further resettlement
898
00:44:03.070 --> 00:44:04.640
and there was to an extent,
899
00:44:04.640 --> 00:44:07.200
but not to the extent that we had hoped.
900
00:44:07.200 --> 00:44:09.343
And that's where we're at right now.
901
00:44:11.320 --> 00:44:13.010
Are you saying that both
902
00:44:13.010 --> 00:44:15.240
Human Rights Watch and Amnesty,
903
00:44:15.240 --> 00:44:17.080
and this is important for history,
904
00:44:17.080 --> 00:44:19.120
was somewhat instrumental in getting
905
00:44:19.120 --> 00:44:23.580
some of these resettlements to be effective, to happen?
906
00:44:23.580 --> 00:44:27.150
I would say among many other actors, yes.
907
00:44:27.150 --> 00:44:30.560
That the NGOs, the international NGOs did have an impact
908
00:44:30.560 --> 00:44:32.830
and did help to facilitate,
909
00:44:32.830 --> 00:44:35.010
without a doubt, I would say that.
910
00:44:35.010 --> 00:44:40.010
I wouldn't say that the NGOs were the key actor
911
00:44:42.660 --> 00:44:46.810
but the big NGOs are advocacy machines,
912
00:44:46.810 --> 00:44:48.590
there's a lot of resources behind them.
913
00:44:48.590 --> 00:44:50.600
They can keep an issue alive.
914
00:44:50.600 --> 00:44:53.620
They can keep a government seized of things
915
00:44:53.620 --> 00:44:57.440
in ways that one habeas council in Guantanamo Bay cannot.
916
00:44:57.440 --> 00:45:01.490
So I think it was a perfect, the perfect storm,
917
00:45:01.490 --> 00:45:03.460
council who wanted their guys out,
918
00:45:03.460 --> 00:45:06.230
Amnesty and Human Rights Watch were the advocacy machines
919
00:45:06.230 --> 00:45:08.290
to kind of go after the governments
920
00:45:08.290 --> 00:45:13.290
and court friendly MPs and keep the issue alive.
921
00:45:13.690 --> 00:45:17.210
And the European press was very good on this issue.
922
00:45:17.210 --> 00:45:19.570
Very, very good on this issue.
923
00:45:19.570 --> 00:45:21.550
Couldn't Human Rights Watch and Amnesty
924
00:45:21.550 --> 00:45:22.870
go to the US government
925
00:45:22.870 --> 00:45:24.470
or the officials they had contact with
926
00:45:24.470 --> 00:45:28.970
and encourage them to make agreements
927
00:45:28.970 --> 00:45:31.150
with other nations who didn't,
928
00:45:31.150 --> 00:45:33.750
and did they have that kind of impact?
929
00:45:33.750 --> 00:45:34.583
I think they did.
930
00:45:34.583 --> 00:45:36.627
I mean, that's certainly what happened with Ireland.
931
00:45:36.627 --> 00:45:38.120
I know, but beyond Ireland.
932
00:45:38.120 --> 00:45:41.050
I think that what ended up happening
933
00:45:42.870 --> 00:45:46.800
was that when we could see a good fit
934
00:45:46.800 --> 00:45:50.430
between a detainee who was either cleared for release
935
00:45:50.430 --> 00:45:52.700
or who wasn't formally cleared for release
936
00:45:52.700 --> 00:45:55.500
but we knew it was not of interest to the US government.
937
00:45:55.500 --> 00:45:59.200
We could talk to both governments,
938
00:45:59.200 --> 00:46:01.230
the government, you know, government in France,
939
00:46:01.230 --> 00:46:04.840
in the Czech Republic, in Germany,
940
00:46:04.840 --> 00:46:08.200
wherever it was and say, maybe this is a good link.
941
00:46:08.200 --> 00:46:10.810
Amnesty International's formal policy
942
00:46:10.810 --> 00:46:13.610
is not to name a particular detainee.
943
00:46:13.610 --> 00:46:17.680
But to say, if you have the capacity and are willing
944
00:46:17.680 --> 00:46:20.650
you should take someone from Guantanamo.
945
00:46:20.650 --> 00:46:25.650
Now, this was very much enhanced by a European Parliament,
946
00:46:26.370 --> 00:46:30.480
by a decision in the EU to work together
947
00:46:30.480 --> 00:46:33.820
to help resolve the Guantanamo Bay crisis
948
00:46:33.820 --> 00:46:37.060
by encouraging EU member states to take detainees.
949
00:46:37.060 --> 00:46:39.880
And we were very active in helping to get
950
00:46:39.880 --> 00:46:44.880
that language in a text and formalized
951
00:46:45.610 --> 00:46:49.603
so that there was a European approach to resettlement.
952
00:46:50.750 --> 00:46:53.520
And again, it worked to some effect,
953
00:46:53.520 --> 00:46:56.440
but like I said, there are still people at Guantanamo Bay
954
00:46:56.440 --> 00:46:58.833
who shouldn't been resettled and haven't been.
955
00:46:59.850 --> 00:47:00.983
Because?
956
00:47:03.966 --> 00:47:04.799
Because.
957
00:47:09.210 --> 00:47:14.210
Nobody wants them really, you know, nobody wants them.
958
00:47:15.410 --> 00:47:16.810
The reports out of Guantanamo
959
00:47:16.810 --> 00:47:18.490
aren't necessarily good at the moment,
960
00:47:18.490 --> 00:47:21.890
in terms of their, their mental capacity,
961
00:47:21.890 --> 00:47:25.960
their health condition, there's the whole narrative
962
00:47:25.960 --> 00:47:29.130
about former Guantanamo Bay detainees
963
00:47:29.130 --> 00:47:31.580
going back into the fray.
964
00:47:31.580 --> 00:47:33.800
So the idea is that the US government
965
00:47:33.800 --> 00:47:38.030
requests that any resettlement host country
966
00:47:38.030 --> 00:47:41.370
has to do certain things to ensure that that won't happen.
967
00:47:41.370 --> 00:47:43.380
I mean, it's very, very complex
968
00:47:43.380 --> 00:47:47.393
the reasons why people don't want these detainees.
969
00:47:48.850 --> 00:47:53.690
And I don't think that the US government helps
970
00:47:53.690 --> 00:47:58.090
by not having taken any detainees itself.
971
00:47:58.090 --> 00:48:00.990
I mean, you can see the deep, deep hypocrisy
972
00:48:01.850 --> 00:48:04.460
in this situation that the US government goes
973
00:48:04.460 --> 00:48:06.760
to all these other governments and says
974
00:48:06.760 --> 00:48:08.513
take what we have damaged.
975
00:48:10.420 --> 00:48:15.420
Take these damaged people and we'll give you money.
976
00:48:15.830 --> 00:48:17.580
We'll give you this kind of support.
977
00:48:17.580 --> 00:48:20.440
But in addition to taking them, integrating them,
978
00:48:20.440 --> 00:48:22.270
bringing their families, giving them social
979
00:48:22.270 --> 00:48:25.150
and psychological care for their wellbeing
980
00:48:25.150 --> 00:48:28.760
you need to surveil them so that they don't run off
981
00:48:28.760 --> 00:48:33.210
to Syria, or they don't run off to Iraq
982
00:48:33.210 --> 00:48:35.930
or they don't go here or there, or go to Yemen,
983
00:48:35.930 --> 00:48:38.290
or do whatever it is that is going to
984
00:48:38.290 --> 00:48:39.770
put them back in the fray.
985
00:48:39.770 --> 00:48:41.170
I mean, who would want that?
986
00:48:43.240 --> 00:48:44.260
Well then,
987
00:48:44.260 --> 00:48:45.910
I usually save this question for later,
988
00:48:45.910 --> 00:48:49.700
but I'm going to ask it now, then,
989
00:48:49.700 --> 00:48:51.593
is Guantanamo ever gonna close?
990
00:48:54.710 --> 00:48:59.710
I am certain that at some point in the future
991
00:48:59.860 --> 00:49:03.150
the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay will close.
992
00:49:03.150 --> 00:49:08.150
Sure, I don't think that there will be any appetite
993
00:49:08.720 --> 00:49:10.610
for putting more people in Guantanamo Bay,
994
00:49:10.610 --> 00:49:15.310
although we do have certain partisan politicians
995
00:49:16.270 --> 00:49:19.430
who call every time another person, suspected terrorist,
996
00:49:19.430 --> 00:49:23.000
is apprehended or whatever for them to be in,
997
00:49:23.000 --> 00:49:24.570
you know, sent to Guantanamo Bay.
998
00:49:24.570 --> 00:49:26.370
I don't think that that will happen.
999
00:49:27.610 --> 00:49:30.210
I do fear, have very big fears
1000
00:49:30.210 --> 00:49:32.610
that there will be people who will die in Guantanamo.
1001
00:49:32.610 --> 00:49:37.610
That the way Guantanamo will close is when the last detainee
1002
00:49:37.820 --> 00:49:40.870
from the 9/11 batch dies.
1003
00:49:40.870 --> 00:49:44.372
And so that could be years and years and years.
1004
00:49:44.372 --> 00:49:46.830
The US has given itself permission to indefinitely
1005
00:49:46.830 --> 00:49:51.830
detain people in this unending, infinite war on terror.
1006
00:49:52.930 --> 00:49:56.130
So they've drummed up a legal rationale
1007
00:49:56.130 --> 00:50:00.320
for holding these people until the end of hostilities.
1008
00:50:00.320 --> 00:50:01.430
And when you think about,
1009
00:50:01.430 --> 00:50:03.180
if you look at the world right now,
1010
00:50:04.270 --> 00:50:07.700
and the proliferation of terrorism,
1011
00:50:07.700 --> 00:50:12.700
terrorist groups across the globe, either real or perceived,
1012
00:50:13.050 --> 00:50:16.390
then you can see that the war on terror,,
1013
00:50:16.390 --> 00:50:18.670
which is a fiction under international law
1014
00:50:18.670 --> 00:50:21.193
and humanitarian law could go on forever.
1015
00:50:23.350 --> 00:50:24.650
And I wanna go back
1016
00:50:24.650 --> 00:50:25.950
and you're also saying that
1017
00:50:25.950 --> 00:50:29.810
because these men have been damaged,
1018
00:50:29.810 --> 00:50:31.670
they become less and less appealing
1019
00:50:31.670 --> 00:50:35.513
for any country to invest the time and resources in them,
1020
00:50:36.730 --> 00:50:38.340
which will make it that much more difficult
1021
00:50:38.340 --> 00:50:39.600
to ever resettle them?
1022
00:50:39.600 --> 00:50:41.240
Absolutely, I mean, why do you think,
1023
00:50:41.240 --> 00:50:42.700
I mean, it makes perfect sense
1024
00:50:42.700 --> 00:50:45.070
for the host countries to send delegations
1025
00:50:45.070 --> 00:50:46.850
to interview these guys.
1026
00:50:46.850 --> 00:50:50.130
Of course, they're considering six people.
1027
00:50:50.130 --> 00:50:51.560
They're gonna take two.
1028
00:50:51.560 --> 00:50:55.070
They want to go and they want to see what is the right fit,
1029
00:50:55.070 --> 00:50:58.560
who is most mentally intact, physically intact.
1030
00:50:58.560 --> 00:51:02.510
So as not to draw on the resources of the host government,
1031
00:51:02.510 --> 00:51:03.937
of course there are deals between the US
1032
00:51:03.937 --> 00:51:05.823
and these governments as well.
1033
00:51:06.930 --> 00:51:11.930
But as the years go by, getting a completely intact person
1034
00:51:13.570 --> 00:51:16.030
who can just kind of magically integrate
1035
00:51:16.030 --> 00:51:19.510
into a very sophisticated Western European
1036
00:51:19.510 --> 00:51:22.680
or Central American society,
1037
00:51:22.680 --> 00:51:25.923
it becomes a harder and harder thing to imagine.
1038
00:51:28.114 --> 00:51:30.930
Could you stay upbeat in spite of all that?
1039
00:51:30.930 --> 00:51:33.500
Well, the game isn't over until it's over.
1040
00:51:33.500 --> 00:51:34.770
I mean, we have six people
1041
00:51:34.770 --> 00:51:36.713
who potentially could go to Uruguay,
1042
00:51:37.880 --> 00:51:41.050
you know, as the years pass,
1043
00:51:41.050 --> 00:51:43.870
it could be that people will perceive
1044
00:51:43.870 --> 00:51:46.903
some of the detainees as harmless,
1045
00:51:47.790 --> 00:51:50.880
specifically because of the abuse that they've suffered,
1046
00:51:50.880 --> 00:51:55.040
and the way that they now have been pacified or neutralized.
1047
00:51:55.040 --> 00:51:55.873
I don't know.
1048
00:51:55.873 --> 00:51:58.770
I feel very uncomfortable even using language like that,
1049
00:51:58.770 --> 00:52:01.560
but I'm not ready to throw the towel in on resettlement
1050
00:52:01.560 --> 00:52:05.091
because there is a significant enough number
1051
00:52:05.091 --> 00:52:08.480
of people who have, who need to leave there
1052
00:52:09.880 --> 00:52:10.840
and need to be resettled
1053
00:52:10.840 --> 00:52:13.643
and should have been resettled long ago.
1054
00:52:13.643 --> 00:52:15.680
And that not withstanding my absolute opposition
1055
00:52:15.680 --> 00:52:18.330
to anyone being in Guantanamo.
1056
00:52:18.330 --> 00:52:21.830
And the policy, our policies,
1057
00:52:21.830 --> 00:52:25.010
that the military commission system should be dismantled.
1058
00:52:25.010 --> 00:52:27.240
The detention facilities should be closed.
1059
00:52:27.240 --> 00:52:28.890
Anybody who should be tried
1060
00:52:28.890 --> 00:52:30.930
should be moved onto the mainland
1061
00:52:30.930 --> 00:52:33.453
and tried in a federal court,
1062
00:52:35.100 --> 00:52:37.480
but the group that has been cleared for release
1063
00:52:37.480 --> 00:52:40.030
and has been clear for so many years, clearly, clearly
1064
00:52:40.030 --> 00:52:43.873
clearly they should be resettled immediately.
1065
00:52:44.820 --> 00:52:48.939
Do you think the US government is giving,
1066
00:52:48.939 --> 00:52:51.010
can you tell us again your title with Amnesty?
1067
00:52:51.010 --> 00:52:52.683
'Cause you're now working with Amnesty.
1068
00:52:52.683 --> 00:52:54.380
I'm Amnesty International's expert
1069
00:52:54.380 --> 00:52:56.450
on counter terrorism and human rights.
1070
00:52:56.450 --> 00:52:58.220
So with that position,
1071
00:52:58.220 --> 00:52:59.500
do you think the US government
1072
00:52:59.500 --> 00:53:04.500
actually cares enough to try to resettle these people?
1073
00:53:04.560 --> 00:53:09.560
Do you think they're actively making it try to work even?
1074
00:53:10.560 --> 00:53:13.320
Well, I think the Uruguay situation is an example,
1075
00:53:13.320 --> 00:53:16.513
a current enough example of the way that these,
1076
00:53:17.650 --> 00:53:20.553
the project of resettlement is continuing,
1077
00:53:21.770 --> 00:53:25.690
of course Mujica himself is quite unique.
1078
00:53:25.690 --> 00:53:28.210
You know, he has said, we will take these people
1079
00:53:28.210 --> 00:53:32.393
because they have been victims of human rights violations.
1080
00:53:33.350 --> 00:53:36.433
That is not the narrative in Europe.
1081
00:53:37.270 --> 00:53:38.560
So he's quite unique.
1082
00:53:38.560 --> 00:53:40.567
We'll really have to see,
1083
00:53:42.854 --> 00:53:44.380
we'll really have to see as things go on,
1084
00:53:44.380 --> 00:53:47.940
but I think that there are more possibilities
1085
00:53:47.940 --> 00:53:49.083
for resettlement.
1086
00:53:52.090 --> 00:53:56.650
And you were involved in the resettlement
1087
00:53:56.650 --> 00:54:00.760
of a few other people as Syrian and Uighurs.
1088
00:54:01.654 --> 00:54:03.298
Do you want to tell us a little bit about those?
1089
00:54:03.298 --> 00:54:05.627
Are they different narrative in the one
1090
00:54:07.130 --> 00:54:09.420
The Uighur case is one of the most interesting cases,
1091
00:54:09.420 --> 00:54:13.160
I think, you know, one of the first batches
1092
00:54:13.160 --> 00:54:15.360
of people to be resettled where the Uighurs,
1093
00:54:16.550 --> 00:54:17.500
they were sent to Albania,
1094
00:54:17.500 --> 00:54:19.650
there were five of them who were sent to Albania.
1095
00:54:19.650 --> 00:54:21.600
And when nobody knew this was going to happen,
1096
00:54:21.600 --> 00:54:23.670
I mean the lawyer knew the night before,
1097
00:54:23.670 --> 00:54:25.670
all of a sudden they're not in Guantanamo,
1098
00:54:25.670 --> 00:54:26.630
they're in Albania.
1099
00:54:26.630 --> 00:54:31.250
Now, really, it doesn't take much to understand
1100
00:54:31.250 --> 00:54:33.830
that we Uighurs and Albania are not a great mix.
1101
00:54:33.830 --> 00:54:34.830
Albania is one of the poorest.
1102
00:54:34.830 --> 00:54:37.363
It is probably the poorest country in Europe.
1103
00:54:38.570 --> 00:54:42.200
It is nominally Muslim, you know,
1104
00:54:42.200 --> 00:54:45.250
but not in a way
1105
00:54:45.250 --> 00:54:49.090
that Muslim Uighurs from, you know,
1106
00:54:49.090 --> 00:54:51.950
a separatist province in China,
1107
00:54:51.950 --> 00:54:54.250
would easily be able to adapt to,
1108
00:54:54.250 --> 00:54:56.050
or you wouldn't think they would be.
1109
00:54:56.950 --> 00:54:59.770
And so when the Uighurs went to Albania, the idea was,
1110
00:54:59.770 --> 00:55:02.070
you know, how can we help the Albanian government
1111
00:55:02.070 --> 00:55:03.310
effectively integrate them?
1112
00:55:03.310 --> 00:55:04.673
What would they need to do?
1113
00:55:06.210 --> 00:55:08.180
And so there was a lot of back and forth, you know,
1114
00:55:08.180 --> 00:55:10.670
with the Albanians and the US,
1115
00:55:10.670 --> 00:55:13.340
we would say to the US, the guys need this,
1116
00:55:13.340 --> 00:55:15.590
you need to talk to the Albanians about this,
1117
00:55:16.620 --> 00:55:19.200
but then it became clear that some of the Albanians
1118
00:55:19.200 --> 00:55:21.440
or some of the Uighurs who were in Albania
1119
00:55:21.440 --> 00:55:23.313
had links with other countries.
1120
00:55:24.220 --> 00:55:25.683
And Adil,
1121
00:55:26.620 --> 00:55:30.440
the one who you interviewed in Sweden was one of them.
1122
00:55:30.440 --> 00:55:31.940
So he was in Albania.
1123
00:55:31.940 --> 00:55:34.363
I knew his lawyer very well,
1124
00:55:35.493 --> 00:55:36.480
Steven Willic,
1125
00:55:36.480 --> 00:55:41.030
and we started to think about ways that we could get him
1126
00:55:41.030 --> 00:55:42.840
to his sister in Sweden,
1127
00:55:42.840 --> 00:55:45.450
understanding that he was not supposed
1128
00:55:45.450 --> 00:55:47.103
to ever leave Albania.
1129
00:55:48.120 --> 00:55:51.980
So we hooked up with a brilliant Swedish lawyer
1130
00:55:51.980 --> 00:55:56.170
named Sten De Geer who was an asylum and immigration lawyer
1131
00:55:56.170 --> 00:55:59.620
and full disclosure, old and dear friend of mine.
1132
00:55:59.620 --> 00:56:01.690
And we started to kind of say,
1133
00:56:01.690 --> 00:56:06.690
how could, what could we do to get him to his sister?
1134
00:56:06.770 --> 00:56:08.740
So Stan emailed me one day and he said
1135
00:56:09.690 --> 00:56:12.450
why don't we invite him to human rights days,
1136
00:56:12.450 --> 00:56:16.810
which is every other year, the Swedish government funds,
1137
00:56:16.810 --> 00:56:20.630
and everybody goes to these days of seminars
1138
00:56:20.630 --> 00:56:23.510
and musical performances all about human rights,
1139
00:56:23.510 --> 00:56:25.840
typically Scandinavian, right?
1140
00:56:25.840 --> 00:56:28.820
And he said, well, why don't we invite him to speak
1141
00:56:28.820 --> 00:56:31.150
as a former Guantanamo Bay detainee?
1142
00:56:31.150 --> 00:56:33.493
And I said, they'll never let him come.
1143
00:56:34.570 --> 00:56:35.471
Who's they?
1144
00:56:35.471 --> 00:56:39.093
The Swedish government will never let him come.
1145
00:56:40.220 --> 00:56:45.220
So Sten De Geer, following to the letter of the law,
1146
00:56:46.280 --> 00:56:49.103
issuing an invitation letter to Adil,
1147
00:56:51.490 --> 00:56:52.670
talking to the Swedish government
1148
00:56:52.670 --> 00:56:53.980
about him coming, et cetera.
1149
00:56:53.980 --> 00:56:56.513
Actually gets the guy invited.
1150
00:56:58.020 --> 00:57:00.410
And so he gets the invitation.
1151
00:57:00.410 --> 00:57:02.630
So Say-bin gets on a plane and I get on a plane
1152
00:57:02.630 --> 00:57:03.930
and we all go to Stockholm
1153
00:57:04.770 --> 00:57:07.363
and we're waiting for him to come,
1154
00:57:08.200 --> 00:57:12.850
because the minute he comes, Sten will be at the airport.
1155
00:57:12.850 --> 00:57:14.310
And he's an asylum lawyer.
1156
00:57:14.310 --> 00:57:16.560
And Adil ask for asylum,
1157
00:57:16.560 --> 00:57:18.658
the minute he steps foot on Swedish soil.
1158
00:57:18.658 --> 00:57:19.801
But he hasn't got
1159
00:57:19.801 --> 00:57:21.210
an Albanian passport, right?
1160
00:57:21.210 --> 00:57:25.520
He doesn't, he doesn't, he has traveled documents though.
1161
00:57:25.520 --> 00:57:29.040
And he had permission to leave.
1162
00:57:29.040 --> 00:57:32.130
So we're at the airport waiting for him to come.
1163
00:57:32.130 --> 00:57:33.700
And of course, there's the Uighur community
1164
00:57:33.700 --> 00:57:35.210
with their banner.
1165
00:57:35.210 --> 00:57:37.620
Everyone's waiting and waiting.
1166
00:57:37.620 --> 00:57:40.110
And the flight comes in and people start to come off
1167
00:57:40.110 --> 00:57:42.160
and come off and he's not there, and he's not there,
1168
00:57:42.160 --> 00:57:43.573
and he's not there.
1169
00:57:44.980 --> 00:57:47.410
So we start calling around, where is he,
1170
00:57:47.410 --> 00:57:48.243
where is he, where is he?
1171
00:57:48.243 --> 00:57:50.680
Well, he was stopped in Vienna.
1172
00:57:50.680 --> 00:57:52.394
I think it was Vienna.
1173
00:57:52.394 --> 00:57:53.680
And we're like, well, when is he coming?
1174
00:57:53.680 --> 00:57:55.090
When can he come, can he come?
1175
00:57:55.090 --> 00:57:57.560
So we're at the airport trying to figure all this out.
1176
00:57:57.560 --> 00:57:59.130
And the media is there.
1177
00:57:59.130 --> 00:58:00.640
And it's a little bit of a circus
1178
00:58:00.640 --> 00:58:03.840
because this expectation had not been met.
1179
00:58:03.840 --> 00:58:07.690
And I have to tell you, I was absolutely heartbroken.
1180
00:58:07.690 --> 00:58:09.010
I was heartbroken.
1181
00:58:09.010 --> 00:58:12.120
I had no hope that he was going to get to Sweden.
1182
00:58:12.120 --> 00:58:13.053
I really didn't.
1183
00:58:15.130 --> 00:58:17.670
Then Sten gets information or Say-bin gets information
1184
00:58:17.670 --> 00:58:19.890
that they are gonna actually put them on the next plan,
1185
00:58:19.890 --> 00:58:22.290
but the next plane doesn't come in for hours.
1186
00:58:22.290 --> 00:58:24.970
So we leave the airport and we go, and I don't know,
1187
00:58:24.970 --> 00:58:27.250
we went and had dinner and did all this stuff.
1188
00:58:27.250 --> 00:58:30.800
And then they say, yes, he's coming in,
1189
00:58:30.800 --> 00:58:33.000
but we can't confirm that he's on the plane.
1190
00:58:34.090 --> 00:58:36.893
So I looked at Sten and I said, I'm not going.
1191
00:58:37.960 --> 00:58:38.833
I can't go.
1192
00:58:40.210 --> 00:58:42.090
You know, so...
1193
00:59:05.060 --> 00:59:06.520
So I didn't go,
1194
00:59:06.520 --> 00:59:09.130
because I was really afraid that he wouldn't come.
1195
00:59:09.130 --> 00:59:11.920
But then Sten called me and he said, he's here, he's here.
1196
00:59:11.920 --> 00:59:13.870
And he said, oh, everyone's hugging and kissing.
1197
00:59:13.870 --> 00:59:14.703
And everyone's happy.
1198
00:59:14.703 --> 00:59:18.230
So it was a really lovely thing because he got there
1199
00:59:18.230 --> 00:59:20.980
and he saw his sister
1200
00:59:20.980 --> 00:59:24.350
and then he filed for asylum.
1201
00:59:24.350 --> 00:59:25.810
And, you know, he was denied.
1202
00:59:25.810 --> 00:59:26.650
And then he was granted.
1203
00:59:26.650 --> 00:59:30.240
And so there's this very happy ending for him in one way
1204
00:59:30.240 --> 00:59:31.420
because he was reunited
1205
00:59:31.420 --> 00:59:34.950
with his family and he's living in Sweden
1206
00:59:34.950 --> 00:59:38.376
which is really a better place to be than Albania.
1207
00:59:38.376 --> 00:59:42.447
But there's an downside to all of this.
1208
00:59:42.447 --> 00:59:44.890
And that is that his first wife
1209
00:59:44.890 --> 00:59:49.890
and child who were in still in China,
1210
00:59:50.100 --> 00:59:52.340
they couldn't come and be reunited with him.
1211
00:59:52.340 --> 00:59:54.430
The Chinese government wouldn't permit that.
1212
00:59:54.430 --> 00:59:58.350
And so his life was effectively wrecked.
1213
00:59:58.350 --> 01:00:01.652
And then he was able then to rebuilt it in Sweden,
1214
01:00:01.652 --> 01:00:03.540
which was a lovely thing.
1215
01:00:03.540 --> 01:00:07.040
But there is damage in the wake of all of this
1216
01:00:07.040 --> 01:00:08.193
a lot of damage.
1217
01:00:09.205 --> 01:00:11.260
Do you mind if I get a Kleenex.
1218
01:00:11.260 --> 01:00:12.910
No, let's take a break.
1219
01:00:12.910 --> 01:00:13.743
Thank you.
1220
01:00:15.439 --> 01:00:16.570
Okay, rolling.
1221
01:00:16.570 --> 01:00:19.077
So I just wanted to ask you,
1222
01:00:19.077 --> 01:00:22.690
you said the detainees in Albania have travel documents.
1223
01:00:22.690 --> 01:00:27.620
So why couldn't the other four travel to other countries?
1224
01:00:27.620 --> 01:00:29.940
Because if Albania is such a poor country,
1225
01:00:29.940 --> 01:00:32.300
not really good for them.
1226
01:00:32.300 --> 01:00:34.610
What I meant when I said that he had traveled documents
1227
01:00:34.610 --> 01:00:36.790
is that he had gotten an official invitation
1228
01:00:36.790 --> 01:00:38.910
from the Swedish government,
1229
01:00:38.910 --> 01:00:41.550
and then gotten permission to travel.
1230
01:00:41.550 --> 01:00:44.240
So the stars were in alignment
1231
01:00:44.240 --> 01:00:46.910
with respect to him specifically.
1232
01:00:46.910 --> 01:00:50.010
And like I said, we never really thought
1233
01:00:50.010 --> 01:00:52.430
that any of this would end up happening
1234
01:00:53.390 --> 01:00:57.173
and, you know, it did to great effect.
1235
01:00:58.160 --> 01:00:59.320
And you also helped,
1236
01:00:59.320 --> 01:01:01.173
you said, a Syrian detainee.
1237
01:01:01.173 --> 01:01:03.040
Do you have a story that goes with that?
1238
01:01:03.040 --> 01:01:04.600
This is something that, I mean,
1239
01:01:04.600 --> 01:01:06.990
there are Syrians remaining at Guantanamo Bay,
1240
01:01:06.990 --> 01:01:09.830
that's kind of an ongoing issue.
1241
01:01:09.830 --> 01:01:12.030
There was a letter that was written recently
1242
01:01:13.300 --> 01:01:17.340
by a number of habeas council
1243
01:01:18.810 --> 01:01:20.690
that encourage the US government
1244
01:01:20.690 --> 01:01:23.430
to follow through with Uruguayan resettlements.
1245
01:01:23.430 --> 01:01:24.950
That's a public letter
1246
01:01:24.950 --> 01:01:27.620
and I've been helping, it's Mike Mulligan,
1247
01:01:27.620 --> 01:01:29.053
my old partner in crime.
1248
01:01:30.340 --> 01:01:35.120
His client is a Syrian Guantanamo Bay detainee.
1249
01:01:35.120 --> 01:01:38.410
And we tried to be honest,
1250
01:01:38.410 --> 01:01:41.330
we tried to do exactly the same thing with him
1251
01:01:41.330 --> 01:01:44.390
that we did on the Irish front
1252
01:01:44.390 --> 01:01:48.160
and to no great effect unfortunately,
1253
01:01:48.160 --> 01:01:50.960
the appetite for that kind of, you know,
1254
01:01:50.960 --> 01:01:55.960
let's get on a plane, is that time has passed.
1255
01:01:56.290 --> 01:02:01.290
And so I think from council's point of view
1256
01:02:01.420 --> 01:02:04.520
it really is now up to the US government
1257
01:02:04.520 --> 01:02:06.700
to effect the transfers of the people that they can.
1258
01:02:06.700 --> 01:02:09.670
And so he's in the he's in the Uruguayan bunch,
1259
01:02:09.670 --> 01:02:12.450
but we looked into several other countries,
1260
01:02:12.450 --> 01:02:17.430
Denmark, New Zealand, Germany, you know,
1261
01:02:17.430 --> 01:02:20.810
there were numerous places that we thought
1262
01:02:20.810 --> 01:02:24.890
might be a good fit for this particular person,
1263
01:02:24.890 --> 01:02:29.483
Belgium, and nobody was biting.
1264
01:02:30.480 --> 01:02:32.480
Why has the time passed?
1265
01:02:39.200 --> 01:02:42.740
I think that the idea of making a gesture
1266
01:02:42.740 --> 01:02:45.270
to the United States government is no longer
1267
01:02:45.270 --> 01:02:47.980
a good advocacy tack.
1268
01:02:47.980 --> 01:02:50.730
I think there's been a lot of disappointment
1269
01:02:50.730 --> 01:02:55.160
in Obama over the fact that Guantanamo was not yet closed.
1270
01:02:55.160 --> 01:02:57.420
And that while he might say, you know,
1271
01:02:57.420 --> 01:03:00.850
Congress is obstructing my ability to do this or that,
1272
01:03:00.850 --> 01:03:05.300
that he is not prioritized and effectively advocated himself
1273
01:03:05.300 --> 01:03:09.640
with the right people to get Guantanamo Bay closed.
1274
01:03:09.640 --> 01:03:13.100
There was so much hope when Obama came into office
1275
01:03:14.022 --> 01:03:16.960
that he would be able to close Guantanamo.
1276
01:03:16.960 --> 01:03:21.800
And in the meantime, what has the administration done?
1277
01:03:21.800 --> 01:03:24.320
They've expanded the drone program.
1278
01:03:24.320 --> 01:03:27.753
They've been deeply involved in the NSA scandal.
1279
01:03:28.860 --> 01:03:31.710
They have vilified, Snowden
1280
01:03:31.710 --> 01:03:36.710
and other whistleblowers who have sought to reveal the truth
1281
01:03:37.320 --> 01:03:40.870
about government surveillance
1282
01:03:40.870 --> 01:03:42.960
and other operations that are allegedly
1283
01:03:42.960 --> 01:03:45.100
in the name of the American people's safety.
1284
01:03:45.100 --> 01:03:47.470
So I think there is a little,
1285
01:03:47.470 --> 01:03:51.623
the shine is off the idea that you want to help,
1286
01:03:52.770 --> 01:03:57.580
this particular administration may not be so strong anymore.
1287
01:03:57.580 --> 01:03:58.613
That impulse.
1288
01:03:59.610 --> 01:04:01.783
There's fatigue in general with all of it.
1289
01:04:02.920 --> 01:04:05.060
There's just fatigue in general with all of it.
1290
01:04:05.060 --> 01:04:07.840
And in the meantime the United States government
1291
01:04:07.840 --> 01:04:09.710
has carved out a niche for itself
1292
01:04:09.710 --> 01:04:11.620
to indefinitely detain people,
1293
01:04:11.620 --> 01:04:13.450
which is such a clear violation
1294
01:04:13.450 --> 01:04:17.133
of international human rights law that,
1295
01:04:20.010 --> 01:04:23.260
you know, the USs friends on these issues
1296
01:04:25.900 --> 01:04:28.093
are getting tired, I think.
1297
01:04:31.610 --> 01:04:35.510
Do you think that also is possibly why
1298
01:04:35.510 --> 01:04:39.630
the men who should have gone to Uruguay still haven't gone,
1299
01:04:39.630 --> 01:04:42.670
or that maybe they're fatigued too,
1300
01:04:42.670 --> 01:04:44.310
they've changed their mind?
1301
01:04:44.310 --> 01:04:46.740
No. I mean, I don't have any intelligence.
1302
01:04:46.740 --> 01:04:50.080
I have an opinion about this and my opinion is
1303
01:04:50.080 --> 01:04:53.530
that it's very difficult for a government to take
1304
01:04:53.530 --> 01:04:57.440
in six detainees in the middle of an election season.
1305
01:04:57.440 --> 01:04:59.720
And there is an election season.
1306
01:04:59.720 --> 01:05:02.320
There's a whole campaigning season going on in Uruguay.
1307
01:05:02.320 --> 01:05:04.083
Uruguay is a very poor country.
1308
01:05:05.730 --> 01:05:08.890
There are forces that have absolutely nothing to do
1309
01:05:08.890 --> 01:05:11.540
with those particular guys
1310
01:05:11.540 --> 01:05:16.470
and their profiles that are putting pressure
1311
01:05:16.470 --> 01:05:19.410
on the project to resettle them there.
1312
01:05:19.410 --> 01:05:22.560
That's my current take on it.
1313
01:05:22.560 --> 01:05:24.530
I don't know whether that's true or not.
1314
01:05:24.530 --> 01:05:26.370
I don't know whether they've become
1315
01:05:26.370 --> 01:05:28.780
gun shy about taking them.
1316
01:05:28.780 --> 01:05:31.500
My feeling is, is that we've seen this happen before.
1317
01:05:31.500 --> 01:05:34.640
We've had government officials say to us
1318
01:05:34.640 --> 01:05:37.120
wait until the elections are over.
1319
01:05:37.120 --> 01:05:38.890
This is not a popular issue.
1320
01:05:38.890 --> 01:05:40.313
It's not the right time.
1321
01:05:41.370 --> 01:05:43.860
And that is my feeling
1322
01:05:43.860 --> 01:05:46.480
about what's going on in Uruguay at the moment.
1323
01:05:46.480 --> 01:05:48.050
And when elections were over
1324
01:05:48.050 --> 01:05:49.710
in other situations did the governments
1325
01:05:49.710 --> 01:05:50.680
then take the, in?
1326
01:05:50.680 --> 01:05:51.721
Yeah.
They did?
1327
01:05:51.721 --> 01:05:53.229
We've seen delays.
1328
01:05:53.229 --> 01:05:57.480
Nobody's gotten sent overnight to a country.
1329
01:05:57.480 --> 01:05:59.690
You know, even in Ireland took well
1330
01:05:59.690 --> 01:06:03.600
over a year for all the pieces to be in place.
1331
01:06:03.600 --> 01:06:04.930
And I do think
1332
01:06:04.930 --> 01:06:09.750
that public opinion about Guantanamo is up and down.
1333
01:06:09.750 --> 01:06:11.940
People want to see it closed,
1334
01:06:11.940 --> 01:06:13.790
but people still by and large,
1335
01:06:13.790 --> 01:06:15.067
believe that the people who are there
1336
01:06:15.067 --> 01:06:16.820
are there for a reason.
1337
01:06:16.820 --> 01:06:20.040
So governments need to take their publics
1338
01:06:20.040 --> 01:06:22.860
into consideration, poor governments
1339
01:06:22.860 --> 01:06:26.260
or governments where their are economic issues
1340
01:06:26.260 --> 01:06:28.650
at play don't want to be seen
1341
01:06:28.650 --> 01:06:31.390
as accepting more asylum seekers
1342
01:06:31.390 --> 01:06:34.300
what they would call, you know, people who will come in
1343
01:06:34.300 --> 01:06:37.520
and drain resources that should otherwise
1344
01:06:37.520 --> 01:06:41.053
in the public mind be used on nationals of that country.
1345
01:06:42.070 --> 01:06:46.040
As the hope of Obama has faded over these years,
1346
01:06:46.040 --> 01:06:48.643
the love of the United States has faded,
1347
01:06:50.650 --> 01:06:52.370
the idea that you'll cooperate
1348
01:06:52.370 --> 01:06:55.660
with the US government in the midst of, you know,
1349
01:06:55.660 --> 01:06:59.080
drone assassinations and NSA surveillance,
1350
01:06:59.080 --> 01:07:03.470
and no closure of Guantanamo Bay.
1351
01:07:03.470 --> 01:07:06.320
I mean, you can see how any politician
1352
01:07:06.320 --> 01:07:07.410
in any country is going to say
1353
01:07:07.410 --> 01:07:10.030
how am I going to make this work?
1354
01:07:10.030 --> 01:07:11.830
How am I really going to make this work?
1355
01:07:11.830 --> 01:07:14.983
And the time has to be right.
1356
01:07:15.960 --> 01:07:18.000
The time really has to be right.
1357
01:07:18.000 --> 01:07:22.850
So do you still try to go to countries to,
1358
01:07:22.850 --> 01:07:25.290
like somebody comes to South America
1359
01:07:25.290 --> 01:07:26.810
and asks them if they would take someone
1360
01:07:26.810 --> 01:07:29.360
or do you feel that is now hitting a brick wall
1361
01:07:29.360 --> 01:07:32.270
in that what you did in Ireland
1362
01:07:32.270 --> 01:07:35.260
is just not replicated these days
1363
01:07:35.260 --> 01:07:37.850
To the extent that lawyers come to us anymore
1364
01:07:37.850 --> 01:07:41.090
and ask us for help, because Amnesty
1365
01:07:41.090 --> 01:07:44.370
is such a global movement and we have offices
1366
01:07:44.370 --> 01:07:47.720
in so many places, we absolutely will put them in touch
1367
01:07:47.720 --> 01:07:50.270
with the section in that country.
1368
01:07:50.270 --> 01:07:53.600
Our section offices know the political landscape
1369
01:07:53.600 --> 01:07:56.860
very, very well, often have,
1370
01:07:56.860 --> 01:08:00.120
are able to easily communicate with government actors
1371
01:08:00.120 --> 01:08:02.830
to see what the temperature of the room is
1372
01:08:02.830 --> 01:08:04.340
with respect to this issue.
1373
01:08:04.340 --> 01:08:05.990
So we'll link them up.
1374
01:08:05.990 --> 01:08:09.521
But the days of this kind of,
1375
01:08:09.521 --> 01:08:13.100
where there was more openness about it,
1376
01:08:13.100 --> 01:08:16.650
I think they are over unfortunately.
1377
01:08:16.650 --> 01:08:19.030
And I think the rest of these resettlements
1378
01:08:19.030 --> 01:08:22.850
will be brokered at a very high political level.
1379
01:08:22.850 --> 01:08:25.380
The lawyers will know, to a greater extent,
1380
01:08:25.380 --> 01:08:30.380
what's going on, but I don't see a huge role for us anymore.
1381
01:08:31.940 --> 01:08:36.140
Except on, as I said, at field level,
1382
01:08:36.140 --> 01:08:39.500
on ground level with our sections, helping with integration,
1383
01:08:39.500 --> 01:08:41.350
communication and things like that.
1384
01:08:41.350 --> 01:08:45.700
I mean, really, to some extent, it's a formula now, right?
1385
01:08:45.700 --> 01:08:47.069
It's a formula.
1386
01:08:47.069 --> 01:08:50.520
The US government will send somebody out.
1387
01:08:50.520 --> 01:08:52.420
It's not even an ambassador anymore.
1388
01:08:52.420 --> 01:08:53.870
It's a special representative
1389
01:08:55.330 --> 01:08:57.580
to see if there's any appetite
1390
01:08:57.580 --> 01:09:00.010
by any government to take somebody in.
1391
01:09:00.010 --> 01:09:02.330
And now after all these years, there's a formula.
1392
01:09:02.330 --> 01:09:03.770
There needs to be an integration plan.
1393
01:09:03.770 --> 01:09:06.140
There needs to be a family reunification plan.
1394
01:09:06.140 --> 01:09:09.480
There needs to be a security protocol.
1395
01:09:09.480 --> 01:09:11.720
It's all, it's a little boiler plate
1396
01:09:11.720 --> 01:09:13.760
at this point to some extent.
1397
01:09:13.760 --> 01:09:16.890
And so there's not as much of a need
1398
01:09:16.890 --> 01:09:21.890
for us to be in there, fighting that fight anymore.
1399
01:09:22.250 --> 01:09:24.410
I mean, we have a whole document that says
1400
01:09:24.410 --> 01:09:27.800
here is how you integrate a former Guantanamo detainee,
1401
01:09:27.800 --> 01:09:29.460
which didn't exist at all
1402
01:09:29.460 --> 01:09:31.760
when we were first setting out and doing this.
1403
01:09:33.290 --> 01:09:35.130
Just going back to 2008,
1404
01:09:35.130 --> 01:09:36.590
when Obama was elected,
1405
01:09:36.590 --> 01:09:38.983
were you one of the people who had hope?
1406
01:09:40.430 --> 01:09:45.310
Oh, fact, yeah, of course, absolutely.
1407
01:09:45.310 --> 01:09:49.040
Within a stroke of a pen executive orders
1408
01:09:49.914 --> 01:09:52.533
ordering the closure of Guantanamo Bay,
1409
01:09:55.270 --> 01:10:00.270
tempering, but not ending the whole issue of rendition,
1410
01:10:02.914 --> 01:10:06.300
I'm talking about, the United States is not torture
1411
01:10:07.470 --> 01:10:09.220
from this point on the United States is not torture.
1412
01:10:09.220 --> 01:10:11.810
Whether that has been born out
1413
01:10:11.810 --> 01:10:15.080
in the last eight years is another matter.
1414
01:10:15.080 --> 01:10:18.910
But on January 21st, 2009,
1415
01:10:18.910 --> 01:10:23.850
it felt like it was a whole new world.
1416
01:10:23.850 --> 01:10:26.210
I think that was incredibly naive.
1417
01:10:26.210 --> 01:10:28.633
If there was any naivety, it was there,
1418
01:10:29.940 --> 01:10:32.853
there were so many considerations.
1419
01:10:34.220 --> 01:10:37.890
So many things to think about with Obama as president
1420
01:10:37.890 --> 01:10:40.313
you know, the first African-American president,
1421
01:10:41.375 --> 01:10:44.150
switched from a Republican administration
1422
01:10:44.150 --> 01:10:46.523
to a democratic administration,
1423
01:10:48.080 --> 01:10:50.870
eight years of woeful
1424
01:10:50.870 --> 01:10:53.700
severe egregious human rights violations
1425
01:10:54.720 --> 01:10:56.680
for which there needed to be accountability,
1426
01:10:56.680 --> 01:10:58.870
how to broker that with the parties.
1427
01:10:58.870 --> 01:11:00.790
I mean, there was a lot to consider.
1428
01:11:00.790 --> 01:11:05.650
So on the one hand I'm deeply forever disappointed.
1429
01:11:05.650 --> 01:11:08.880
On the other hand, I'm also, I also really understand
1430
01:11:08.880 --> 01:11:11.720
that there were pressures brought to bear.
1431
01:11:11.720 --> 01:11:13.970
On the other hand, I do think Obama have done
1432
01:11:16.200 --> 01:11:19.980
so much more to bring the Guantanamo issue to a close.
1433
01:11:19.980 --> 01:11:21.670
I think he could have, absolutely.
1434
01:11:21.670 --> 01:11:25.380
And we may still see this before his administration is over,
1435
01:11:25.380 --> 01:11:28.550
release the Senate select committee on intelligence report
1436
01:11:28.550 --> 01:11:31.370
on the rendition and secret detention
1437
01:11:31.370 --> 01:11:33.904
operations overseas, post 9/11.
1438
01:11:33.904 --> 01:11:36.410
That is now stuck because, you know
1439
01:11:36.410 --> 01:11:38.650
Diane Feinstein has sent it back because she's unhappy
1440
01:11:38.650 --> 01:11:40.900
with redactions, which is exactly what we want to see
1441
01:11:40.900 --> 01:11:43.573
but we were a little uncomfortable with more delay.
1442
01:11:45.290 --> 01:11:50.290
A key disappointment with Obama is an implicit understanding
1443
01:11:51.390 --> 01:11:53.353
that there will be no prosecutions.
1444
01:11:55.130 --> 01:11:58.170
You know, it doesn't matter what that report says.
1445
01:11:58.170 --> 01:11:59.900
We were very disappointed
1446
01:11:59.900 --> 01:12:04.020
that there be no criminal liability for what were crimes
1447
01:12:04.020 --> 01:12:06.290
under both domestic and international law
1448
01:12:06.290 --> 01:12:09.283
by agents and officials in the United States government.
1449
01:12:11.900 --> 01:12:12.733
So we'll see.
1450
01:12:12.733 --> 01:12:14.420
I mean, if he can pull a couple of rabbits
1451
01:12:14.420 --> 01:12:16.480
out of the hat before the end of his administration
1452
01:12:16.480 --> 01:12:19.570
he can shore up his reputation a little,
1453
01:12:19.570 --> 01:12:24.433
but to date, from the national security side of things,
1454
01:12:26.270 --> 01:12:27.663
I'm deeply disappointed.
1455
01:12:29.383 --> 01:12:30.990
Do you think there were too many pressures
1456
01:12:30.990 --> 01:12:33.483
from other interests that stopped them?
1457
01:12:34.876 --> 01:12:37.930
I think it's a function of both his style,
1458
01:12:37.930 --> 01:12:42.610
his having to navigate a terrain.
1459
01:12:42.610 --> 01:12:45.910
When's the last time there has been a political terrain
1460
01:12:45.910 --> 01:12:49.440
where accountability is an issue, that has been as fraught?
1461
01:12:49.440 --> 01:12:54.440
So you have to, you do have to be pragmatic in a way
1462
01:12:54.560 --> 01:12:59.560
about what he walked into, but I also feel that
1463
01:13:01.150 --> 01:13:04.350
as savvy as they were in getting elected,
1464
01:13:04.350 --> 01:13:06.880
they weren't not nearly as savvy
1465
01:13:06.880 --> 01:13:08.980
as brokering the types of relationships
1466
01:13:08.980 --> 01:13:11.750
with the Republicans and with the CIA,
1467
01:13:11.750 --> 01:13:15.500
or just taking a stand as the executive
1468
01:13:15.500 --> 01:13:20.450
to reveal the truth about those eight years of operations,
1469
01:13:20.450 --> 01:13:22.580
I think there was, it was a pity
1470
01:13:22.580 --> 01:13:24.900
and a great lost opportunity.
1471
01:13:24.900 --> 01:13:28.560
And there are victims of these practices.
1472
01:13:28.560 --> 01:13:30.770
People who've been tortured.
1473
01:13:30.770 --> 01:13:32.873
People who've been disappeared.
1474
01:13:33.740 --> 01:13:36.423
People who've been subject to unfair trials,
1475
01:13:37.340 --> 01:13:39.180
separated from their families.
1476
01:13:39.180 --> 01:13:41.480
I mean, there's a lot of damage
1477
01:13:41.480 --> 01:13:43.720
in the wake of these operations
1478
01:13:43.720 --> 01:13:46.330
and Obama has not succeeded yet
1479
01:13:46.330 --> 01:13:48.053
in revealing the truth about them,
1480
01:13:49.190 --> 01:13:51.820
holding people accountable for them,
1481
01:13:51.820 --> 01:13:54.970
or providing victims with redress.
1482
01:13:54.970 --> 01:13:56.520
And that's the package we need.
1483
01:13:57.590 --> 01:13:59.290
Is Hillary Clinton
1484
01:14:00.569 --> 01:14:03.393
the person who can provide that package?
1485
01:14:03.393 --> 01:14:05.860
Everything that I've said about Obama,
1486
01:14:05.860 --> 01:14:09.560
we have expressed publicly as Amnesty
1487
01:14:09.560 --> 01:14:11.300
in all of our public documents.
1488
01:14:11.300 --> 01:14:14.760
So I have no compunction about repeating, you know,
1489
01:14:14.760 --> 01:14:16.130
our disappointment with him,
1490
01:14:16.130 --> 01:14:18.630
with the lack of accountability, et cetera.
1491
01:14:18.630 --> 01:14:22.283
I can't speculate about Hillary Clinton.
1492
01:14:23.810 --> 01:14:26.110
Did you have interactions with her
1493
01:14:26.110 --> 01:14:27.620
when she was secretary of state?
1494
01:14:27.620 --> 01:14:30.670
I did not, not directly with her.
1495
01:14:30.670 --> 01:14:32.590
Of course there were staff underneath her,
1496
01:14:32.590 --> 01:14:33.940
always liaising with,
1497
01:14:33.940 --> 01:14:36.430
with various levels of the state department.
1498
01:14:36.430 --> 01:14:38.290
And there were people within the state department
1499
01:14:38.290 --> 01:14:41.560
who were desperately trying to correct.
1500
01:14:41.560 --> 01:14:43.530
There were people who came from the NGO community
1501
01:14:43.530 --> 01:14:45.780
or from universities,
1502
01:14:45.780 --> 01:14:47.980
who Obama brought into his administration,
1503
01:14:47.980 --> 01:14:49.900
I think as a show of goodwill.
1504
01:14:49.900 --> 01:14:54.900
And as a affirmation that he believed in the rule of law
1505
01:14:54.970 --> 01:14:57.520
and that his administration would not torture them.
1506
01:14:58.510 --> 01:15:02.290
But they swam against the tide.
1507
01:15:02.290 --> 01:15:06.400
It was really, you know, they did not have the impact
1508
01:15:06.400 --> 01:15:07.940
that we had hoped that they would have had.
1509
01:15:07.940 --> 01:15:12.940
And that was under her, under her administration in state.
1510
01:15:16.010 --> 01:15:18.462
Is there something I didn't ask you
1511
01:15:18.462 --> 01:15:20.660
that you thought of before you came,
1512
01:15:20.660 --> 01:15:21.660
with, like, you're thinking now
1513
01:15:21.660 --> 01:15:24.143
that maybe like to share with us,
1514
01:15:25.190 --> 01:15:27.153
going forward or looking back?
1515
01:15:27.153 --> 01:15:32.153
I think one final point that most Americans don't realize,
1516
01:15:33.220 --> 01:15:35.410
and I realized that your archive,
1517
01:15:35.410 --> 01:15:38.440
your documentary will go beyond the US,
1518
01:15:38.440 --> 01:15:40.380
but it's important for an American audience
1519
01:15:40.380 --> 01:15:42.610
is the fact that while there's been very little,
1520
01:15:42.610 --> 01:15:44.730
if any accountability in the US,
1521
01:15:44.730 --> 01:15:46.950
there's been some in Europe.
1522
01:15:46.950 --> 01:15:50.493
I mentioned the Swedish cases, the Italian prosecutions,
1523
01:15:51.490 --> 01:15:53.930
in Poland, the European Court case
1524
01:15:53.930 --> 01:15:56.450
that found Poland complicit with the CIA
1525
01:15:56.450 --> 01:15:59.560
in disappearing and torturing two men
1526
01:15:59.560 --> 01:16:01.540
who are now in Guantanamo Bay.
1527
01:16:01.540 --> 01:16:04.380
But there are other places where there is accountability
1528
01:16:05.581 --> 01:16:07.680
at hand, so to speak,
1529
01:16:07.680 --> 01:16:11.040
you know, there was a secret detention center in Lithuania.
1530
01:16:11.040 --> 01:16:14.360
There is an active criminal investigation there
1531
01:16:14.360 --> 01:16:18.350
into the case of a man by the name of Mustapha AL-Hawsawi.
1532
01:16:18.350 --> 01:16:21.290
He is currently at Guantanamo Bay.
1533
01:16:21.290 --> 01:16:24.090
There's also a European court case against Lithuania.
1534
01:16:24.090 --> 01:16:28.350
There was a secret detention center where suspects were held
1535
01:16:28.350 --> 01:16:30.200
and interrogated and tortured
1536
01:16:30.200 --> 01:16:34.370
by the CIA in Romania, in Bucharest.
1537
01:16:34.370 --> 01:16:37.040
There is a case at the European Court of Human Rights
1538
01:16:37.040 --> 01:16:40.480
in Romania at the moment.
1539
01:16:40.480 --> 01:16:41.880
the United Kingdom government,
1540
01:16:41.880 --> 01:16:45.410
which was the United States' closest ally
1541
01:16:45.410 --> 01:16:48.650
in these post 9/11 operations.
1542
01:16:48.650 --> 01:16:51.180
There's a lot of pressure in the UK
1543
01:16:51.180 --> 01:16:53.750
for an inquiry into UK complicity in this,
1544
01:16:53.750 --> 01:16:56.640
not least the use of Diego Garcia
1545
01:16:56.640 --> 01:17:00.650
as a launching pad for rendition operations
1546
01:17:00.650 --> 01:17:03.820
and possibly the holding of people off shore.
1547
01:17:03.820 --> 01:17:08.820
So I think what's a missing element of the Guantanamo story,
1548
01:17:09.990 --> 01:17:12.060
because so many of the people who were subjected
1549
01:17:12.060 --> 01:17:14.737
to these operations are currently in Guantanamo,
1550
01:17:14.737 --> 01:17:17.040
are the other places in the world
1551
01:17:17.040 --> 01:17:22.040
where there are efforts toward accountability
1552
01:17:22.640 --> 01:17:25.600
where people clearly see the need
1553
01:17:25.600 --> 01:17:27.830
to hold people accountable,
1554
01:17:27.830 --> 01:17:31.230
to have redress for victims, et cetera.
1555
01:17:31.230 --> 01:17:33.560
And that is happening in Europe.
1556
01:17:33.560 --> 01:17:37.000
And the European Parliament has issued resolutions
1557
01:17:37.000 --> 01:17:40.140
in September, 2012, September, 2013,
1558
01:17:40.140 --> 01:17:42.290
calling on all the EU member states
1559
01:17:42.290 --> 01:17:44.910
to engage in these processes to reveal the truth
1560
01:17:44.910 --> 01:17:46.470
about their own complicity.
1561
01:17:46.470 --> 01:17:49.730
So I can't help but feel
1562
01:17:49.730 --> 01:17:54.320
that while it feels very dire on the US side,
1563
01:17:54.320 --> 01:17:57.730
I'm happy enough to say that in other parts of the world
1564
01:17:57.730 --> 01:18:00.810
there is a real desire to have the truth revealed
1565
01:18:00.810 --> 01:18:02.600
about these operations.
1566
01:18:02.600 --> 01:18:05.570
And hopefully over the course of the years
1567
01:18:05.570 --> 01:18:07.870
we'll get the full picture
1568
01:18:07.870 --> 01:18:11.393
about what happened in spite of US stonewalling.
1569
01:18:12.410 --> 01:18:13.560
You've been instrumental
1570
01:18:13.560 --> 01:18:16.400
in these European movements,
1571
01:18:16.400 --> 01:18:19.410
my understanding is, did you initiate it?
1572
01:18:19.410 --> 01:18:22.000
Did Amnesty initiate it or did human rights initiate?
1573
01:18:22.000 --> 01:18:24.380
Can you give us a little background on that?
1574
01:18:24.380 --> 01:18:27.710
Actually, Amnesty's research,
1575
01:18:27.710 --> 01:18:31.610
I told you began in December, 2001
1576
01:18:31.610 --> 01:18:33.310
and it continues to date.
1577
01:18:33.310 --> 01:18:36.100
And so in all of the cases in Europe
1578
01:18:36.100 --> 01:18:39.840
I'm happy enough to say that both Amnesty's research
1579
01:18:39.840 --> 01:18:41.610
and Human Rights Watch's research
1580
01:18:41.610 --> 01:18:45.810
on rendition, secret detention has been used to bring cases
1581
01:18:45.810 --> 01:18:48.130
in domestic jurisdictions overseas
1582
01:18:48.130 --> 01:18:51.330
and to bring cases in Europe, at Strasbourg,
1583
01:18:51.330 --> 01:18:52.960
at the European Court of Human Rights,
1584
01:18:52.960 --> 01:18:54.740
for all of the rendition cases
1585
01:18:54.740 --> 01:18:56.310
at the European Court of Human Rights,
1586
01:18:56.310 --> 01:18:58.518
we have written amicus briefs.
1587
01:18:58.518 --> 01:19:02.280
What people would commonly understand is amicus briefs,
1588
01:19:02.280 --> 01:19:04.440
they're called third-party interventions
1589
01:19:04.440 --> 01:19:06.640
where we have submitted additional information,
1590
01:19:06.640 --> 01:19:10.460
legal analysis, research to bolster the cases of the people
1591
01:19:10.460 --> 01:19:12.510
who are bringing their cases in these fora.
1592
01:19:12.510 --> 01:19:14.230
And so I'm happy to say
1593
01:19:14.230 --> 01:19:17.623
that we have our fingers a little bit in,
1594
01:19:17.623 --> 01:19:22.050
in all of it in Europe, but we are not the prime movers.
1595
01:19:22.050 --> 01:19:24.370
The prime movers are the lawyers for the men
1596
01:19:25.460 --> 01:19:28.170
who actually bring the cases on their behalf.
1597
01:19:28.170 --> 01:19:30.160
So the Polish cases, for example, were brought
1598
01:19:30.160 --> 01:19:33.040
by the Open Society Justice Initiative
1599
01:19:33.040 --> 01:19:36.810
and by a London-based organization called Inter Rights,
1600
01:19:36.810 --> 01:19:38.850
with whom we work very, very closely.
1601
01:19:38.850 --> 01:19:42.220
And then we submitted an amicus brief in those cases.
1602
01:19:42.220 --> 01:19:43.700
So we own a little piece of it,
1603
01:19:43.700 --> 01:19:47.640
but there's a lot of people agitating for accountability.
1604
01:19:47.640 --> 01:19:51.700
I mean, there are people looking for any forum they can
1605
01:19:52.700 --> 01:19:54.873
to reveal the truth about these practices.
1606
01:19:55.810 --> 01:19:58.520
And that will continue, I think that will continue.
1607
01:19:58.520 --> 01:20:00.440
Have any of the nations
1608
01:20:00.440 --> 01:20:03.810
publicly apologized for their participation?
1609
01:20:03.810 --> 01:20:07.063
Yes, Sweden issued an apology to Giza and Al-Zari,
1610
01:20:10.300 --> 01:20:11.850
the Canadian government,
1611
01:20:11.850 --> 01:20:14.030
in a separate case that we haven't discussed,
1612
01:20:14.030 --> 01:20:15.790
the case of Maher Arar.
1613
01:20:15.790 --> 01:20:20.790
He was a Syrian-Canadian binational
1614
01:20:21.810 --> 01:20:23.750
who was coming home from vacation,
1615
01:20:23.750 --> 01:20:27.570
landed at JFK and wanted to go onto his home in Canada.
1616
01:20:27.570 --> 01:20:30.280
And he was apprehended,
1617
01:20:30.280 --> 01:20:34.250
accused of being a suspected terrorist.
1618
01:20:34.250 --> 01:20:35.600
He was held in Brooklyn for,
1619
01:20:35.600 --> 01:20:37.510
I think, five days, maybe a week.
1620
01:20:37.510 --> 01:20:39.596
And then he was subjected
1621
01:20:39.596 --> 01:20:44.596
to something called an expedited removal.
1622
01:20:44.960 --> 01:20:46.720
And he was sent via Jordan to Syria,
1623
01:20:46.720 --> 01:20:48.453
where he was tortured for a year,
1624
01:20:49.390 --> 01:20:52.402
with Canadian officials visiting him frequently
1625
01:20:52.402 --> 01:20:54.450
when he was in Syria,
1626
01:20:54.450 --> 01:20:56.240
he was eventually brought back to Canada
1627
01:20:56.240 --> 01:20:59.150
where he had a full public inquiry.
1628
01:20:59.150 --> 01:21:03.530
I was a expert on a panel
1629
01:21:03.530 --> 01:21:04.600
for that inquiry,
1630
01:21:04.600 --> 01:21:07.910
talking about the issue of the torture convention
1631
01:21:07.910 --> 01:21:10.910
and what the United States government
1632
01:21:10.910 --> 01:21:12.360
was obliged to do with him,
1633
01:21:12.360 --> 01:21:14.400
what the Canadian government was obliged to do.
1634
01:21:14.400 --> 01:21:16.620
So again, a tiny little piece of it,
1635
01:21:16.620 --> 01:21:18.470
at the end of the day, the inquiry found
1636
01:21:18.470 --> 01:21:21.370
that Canada was complicit with the United States government
1637
01:21:21.370 --> 01:21:23.920
in effecting his transfer to torture.
1638
01:21:23.920 --> 01:21:26.140
They apologized to him and they gave him
1639
01:21:26.140 --> 01:21:28.933
10 million Canadian dollars in compensation.
1640
01:21:30.794 --> 01:21:32.980
And then there was a very big campaign,
1641
01:21:32.980 --> 01:21:34.660
an Amnesty International campaign
1642
01:21:34.660 --> 01:21:36.210
to get the United States government
1643
01:21:36.210 --> 01:21:38.520
to apologize to Maher Arar.
1644
01:21:38.520 --> 01:21:41.070
So you can see in a lot of these cases,
1645
01:21:41.070 --> 01:21:43.390
it's not just going for the jugular,
1646
01:21:43.390 --> 01:21:47.460
and saying we want you to prosecute every last person
1647
01:21:47.460 --> 01:21:49.453
who had a finger in this rendition.
1648
01:21:50.680 --> 01:21:53.653
What Maher Arar wanted was an apology.
1649
01:21:55.040 --> 01:21:58.630
That's all he wanted and he's never gotten it.
1650
01:21:58.630 --> 01:22:03.510
At one point, he was video linked to a Senate hearing,
1651
01:22:03.510 --> 01:22:06.430
I believe, it was some sort of congressional,
1652
01:22:06.430 --> 01:22:10.300
either Senate or House, where individual senators
1653
01:22:12.520 --> 01:22:16.940
or congressmen apologized to him via the video link
1654
01:22:16.940 --> 01:22:19.440
and said we're very sorry for what happened to you,
1655
01:22:19.440 --> 01:22:21.660
but he's not permitted into the United States,
1656
01:22:21.660 --> 01:22:23.990
even though he's been completely exonerated,
1657
01:22:23.990 --> 01:22:26.120
he's not been admitted into the United States
1658
01:22:26.120 --> 01:22:30.143
and the US government refuses to apologize to him to date.
1659
01:22:35.340 --> 01:22:40.070
I'm guessing you're probably more positive
1660
01:22:40.070 --> 01:22:43.800
about European countries and possibly other countries
1661
01:22:43.800 --> 01:22:47.120
in the world looking into their own matters
1662
01:22:47.120 --> 01:22:49.570
than the US, do you see this going forward
1663
01:22:49.570 --> 01:22:52.340
in the next decade, we're going to have more
1664
01:22:52.340 --> 01:22:56.057
and more countries looking at it from their own behavior?
1665
01:22:56.057 --> 01:22:57.010
You know, it depends.
1666
01:22:57.010 --> 01:22:59.350
I mean, in some ways it's very, very good
1667
01:22:59.350 --> 01:23:02.820
that the Polish judgments came out when they did,
1668
01:23:02.820 --> 01:23:05.433
because with what's happening in Ukraine,
1669
01:23:06.690 --> 01:23:10.270
between Ukraine and Russia, the Poles feel very vulnerable,
1670
01:23:10.270 --> 01:23:14.080
and they've put their marbles with the US, right?
1671
01:23:14.080 --> 01:23:18.540
So, as I said before, the geopolitics
1672
01:23:18.540 --> 01:23:22.860
often fuel what any government is willing to do
1673
01:23:22.860 --> 01:23:24.550
on any of these issues.
1674
01:23:24.550 --> 01:23:26.890
So Poland has had a criminal investigation
1675
01:23:26.890 --> 01:23:28.960
into these renditions and secret detentions
1676
01:23:28.960 --> 01:23:31.150
that started in 2008.
1677
01:23:31.150 --> 01:23:32.523
So it was six years old.
1678
01:23:33.810 --> 01:23:36.100
And they've delayed, and delayed, and delayed,
1679
01:23:36.100 --> 01:23:38.390
and delayed, and delayed thinking,
1680
01:23:38.390 --> 01:23:39.590
we want to do the right thing.
1681
01:23:39.590 --> 01:23:42.440
I believe that there is a certain element
1682
01:23:42.440 --> 01:23:44.890
within the Polish government
1683
01:23:44.890 --> 01:23:46.790
that wants to do the right thing,
1684
01:23:46.790 --> 01:23:48.710
but it is constantly beholden
1685
01:23:48.710 --> 01:23:53.430
to the United States government for its security.
1686
01:23:53.430 --> 01:23:57.090
It feels like it is, and what the events in Ukraine
1687
01:23:57.090 --> 01:23:59.580
and with Crimea and with Russia
1688
01:24:00.740 --> 01:24:02.570
just brings all of that up again.
1689
01:24:02.570 --> 01:24:06.320
You know, in whose orb do we wanna be?
1690
01:24:06.320 --> 01:24:08.810
Poland clearly has said we wanna be in the US orb.
1691
01:24:08.810 --> 01:24:12.660
Does it in the midst of all of that
1692
01:24:12.660 --> 01:24:15.600
then have a criminal investigation that honestly
1693
01:24:15.600 --> 01:24:17.750
and truthfully reveals that the CIA
1694
01:24:17.750 --> 01:24:19.220
set up a secret detention center
1695
01:24:19.220 --> 01:24:22.281
and tortured people in it during the Bush years?
1696
01:24:22.281 --> 01:24:23.331
You know, how do you,
1697
01:24:26.250 --> 01:24:28.000
I hate when people say it's complicated,
1698
01:24:28.000 --> 01:24:29.960
but it's really complicated.
1699
01:24:29.960 --> 01:24:33.070
And the politics completely override,
1700
01:24:33.070 --> 01:24:38.070
I'm sorry to say, any desire to safeguard human rights.
1701
01:24:39.370 --> 01:24:42.500
And I think it's always been that way.
1702
01:24:42.500 --> 01:24:44.840
You know, I guess we're not naive,
1703
01:24:44.840 --> 01:24:46.453
but in the current environment,
1704
01:24:47.849 --> 01:24:51.430
it is really difficult to see how a government would ever,
1705
01:24:51.430 --> 01:24:54.920
you know, do the right thing, take the principled stand.
1706
01:24:54.920 --> 01:24:59.560
And I think if any government has tried to do it
1707
01:24:59.560 --> 01:25:01.970
I'm going to toss Poland a bone here
1708
01:25:01.970 --> 01:25:04.293
and say that the Polish government has tried.
1709
01:25:05.140 --> 01:25:06.240
I still think they should do it.
1710
01:25:06.240 --> 01:25:07.680
I think they're obliged under the law
1711
01:25:07.680 --> 01:25:09.550
to have the criminal investigation.
1712
01:25:09.550 --> 01:25:10.620
They know a lot,
1713
01:25:10.620 --> 01:25:12.920
they know people were held on their territory,
1714
01:25:14.210 --> 01:25:18.640
but I also see the political landscape
1715
01:25:19.630 --> 01:25:22.240
and we'll just have to wait and see
1716
01:25:22.240 --> 01:25:25.403
whether Poland can withstand the pressure.
1717
01:25:28.683 --> 01:25:30.705
Well, I guess
1718
01:25:30.705 --> 01:25:32.860
I'll ask you one more time, is there,
1719
01:25:32.860 --> 01:25:35.537
you've pretty much brought it up to date,
1720
01:25:35.537 --> 01:25:37.490
but is there something else that maybe
1721
01:25:37.490 --> 01:25:40.400
you're thinking you want to share otherwise?
1722
01:25:40.400 --> 01:25:41.233
No, I don't think so.
1723
01:25:41.233 --> 01:25:42.440
Thank you very much for the opportunity.
1724
01:25:42.440 --> 01:25:44.420
It was really eloquent,
1725
01:25:44.420 --> 01:25:46.650
it was a really wonderful presentation.
1726
01:25:46.650 --> 01:25:48.957
I need to wait 20 seconds.
1727
01:25:48.957 --> 01:25:53.957
Johnny has to do 20 seconds of room tone.
1728
01:25:55.790 --> 01:25:56.623
We don't say anything?
1729
01:25:56.623 --> 01:25:57.456
No.
Okay.
1730
01:25:58.960 --> 01:26:00.133
Begin room tone.
1731
01:26:13.220 --> 01:26:14.053
Okay.