Interviewer: Morning - Good morning. Interviewer: We are very grateful to you for participating in the Witness to Guantanamo Project. We invite you to speak of your experiences and involvement with issues concerning Guantanamo. We are hoping to provide you with an opportunity to tell your story in your own words, we are creating an archive of stories so that people in America and around the world will have a better understanding of what you and others have experienced and observed. Future generations must know what happened in Guantanamo and by telling your story you're contributing to history. We appreciate your willingness to speak with us. And if any time you want to take a break, just let us know. And if you say something and you want us to remove it, we can remove it if you let us know. - Okay. Interviewer: And I'd like to begin by asking you your name and your hometown and birth date and age. - My name is Julia Hall. I work for Amnesty International. I previously worked for Human Rights Watch. I am 51 years old. Interviewer: When were you born? - I was born in 1963. Interviewer: And where do you live? - I live in Buffalo, New York, which has been my outpost office for almost my entire career. So I've been very lucky to work out of my home, but my offices have been in New York and in London. Interviewer: Your marital status and education? - I'm happily married to my husband Patrick Mahoney for 21 years. I am a lawyer. So graduated law school, I don't know, maybe 18 years ago, 18 or 19 years ago. Have prior degrees in sociology, Middle East studies, things like that so, Interviewer: So maybe you give us a little background as to where you began after law school in terms of human rights work and then up to the present and some titles along the way. - I went right from law school to Human Rights Watch, they have a fellowship program for new graduates and was happy enough to get one of those, went to New York and spent 13 years at Human Rights Watch starting in conflict zones, working in Northern Ireland during the first cease fire and then following the Northern Irish situation right through to the peace in 1998, the Belfast Court. So did that, went on to Bosnia, looked at sexual violence. Post-war in Bosnia, traveled to 17 towns and cities there in 1997, right after the war had ended, talking to women, went from there to do immigration and asylum issues across Europe. And then September 11th happened. And it was a really stunning shift in everything that we were doing in the human rights movement. We thought that the debate over torture was over. We thought that the notion of Western governments engaged in enforced disappearance was no more. And so it was like a back to the future kind of thing, where you really felt yourself punched in the stomach by the event itself, which was so horrible. And then by the way that the United States and other governments responded to it which just compounded the injustice. And so from September 12th, 2001 to the present I have worked almost exclusively on counter-terrorism and national security cases, both in north America and in Europe Interviewer: You were still with Human Rights Watch at the time of 9/11? - I was. Interviewer: And when you say torture, we didn't know about torture on September 12th. When did you find out about torture and how did that inform everything you did? How did that all unfold? - The first cases that came to our attention that indicated that there was something going on, at least for me, was December 18th, 2001. So very shortly after 9/11, when you think about it, you think about security council resolutions. You think about Afghanistan. It was a pretty compressed period of time between 9/11, and we heard of people being apprehended in ways that were clearly extra judicial and people were being sent back to places where they were almost certainly going to be harmed. Those cases were two Egyptians. They were living in Sweden at the time, and they had been apprehended, brought to the airport, they were frisked ,the whole rendition thing. You know, they'd been stripped of their clothing. They've been put into jumpsuits. They've been shackled, hooded, had depositories, placed in their anuses, And then they were handed over to US officials, put on a plane at Bromma airport and transported to Egypt where they were put into prison and they were tortured. So that happened in December of 2001. And that was the first rendition that we had heard of. So, when 9/11 happened, it was very clear right from the start that there was going to be backlash. We didn't actually know how bad it was going to be, but we started to understand how bad it was going to be by December. Interviewer: How did you hear about that incident in December 18th? - Amnesty International actually issued urgent actions on behalf of these men. Their section in Stockholm was on top of these cases. The one guy's name was Ahmed Giza and the other guy's name was Muhammad Al-Zari. And so Amnesty started, because it's got so many offices all over the world and it's a movement, looking, these cases started to come up on their radar. So Amnesty issued urgent action the day it happened, Interviewer: And you knew the US was involved? - We knew that those men had been handed over to the us to some agency of the United States government and taken to Egypt. We knew that, we didn't understand the rendition program at that point. We had no idea at that point that the US was going to be secretly detaining people on European soil. Now, what was going on in other places, you know, Afghanistan, I can really only speak to the rendition program as it pertains to European locations and to the complicity of European governments and Sweden was completely complicit. They've acknowledged their complicity. They've apologized to the two men. They've rescinded those original expulsion order. They've offered them compensation. They've brought one of the men from Egypt back to Sweden, Ahmed Giza is now in Sweden. So, the Swedish scenario, the situation in Sweden was really kind of an A to Z kind of thing, right? Giza only went back to Sweden. I believe it was last year, but this started in 2001. So it was 13 years of, from the time that it happened through a series of accountability processes. I mean, he took his case to the United Nations, to the United Nations committee against torture. And they ruled in his favor against Sweden. So there was accountability for Sweden but absolutely no accountability to date for anything that the United States government has done in terms of these operations. Interviewer: What happened to the second man who was taken to there? - He is still there. He decided for various reasons to stay in Egypt, of course, Ahmed Giza's entire family was in Sweden. The Swedish government really tried to make amends, what we would call an, in human rights law, to give effective redress to the family. They offered off Ahmed Giza's wife asylum and his five children. So naturally when he got out of prison in Egypt he wanted to be with them. They had asylum. So they were well situated in Sweden and to the Swedish government's credit, they brought him back home. Interviewer: What was the next incident you heard right after that? - I would have to say in my memory it was the 2003 kidnapping of Abu Omar in Italy. He was under surveillance by what was SISMI, which is the FBI of Italy, for having connections, you know, he was suspected of having connections. Of course, now, what that means is so unclear, connections with whom, connected to do what? It was so unclear, but he was under surveillance by the Italian intelligence apparatus. That apparatus began cooperating with the CIA. They hatched a plan to basically kidnap him and he was kidnapped. And then he was rendered back to Egypt where he also was subjected to torture. And again, Amnesty International was very critical, even though I wasn't working for them at the time, in following these cases. So that was the next one that I can think of that was quite an affair. And since then, you'll note that the Abu Omar case has been written about in nonfiction form, there've been articles, documentaries. It's been one of the most dissected rendition cases in the history of the program, and to the Italian prosecutor's credit, Armando Spataro, he actually gathered evidence on this kidnapping. He gathered cell phone records. He gathered receipts from hotels. He gathered car rental receipts, and he built a body of evidence that led to the prosecution of 26 US nationals. And I don't know, half a dozen Italians. And they were very, very successful prosecutions. Of course, they happened in, in absentia, which is a big problem under international law, but it was definitely a process whereby you can see how these cases can be investigated. Evidence can be gathered despite the stonewalling of both the Italian government and the US government, how they can be effectively investigated and people can be held to account and brought to justice for the violations that they perpetrated against these people. Interviewer: So what were you thinking? You personally, and then also the people you worked with, in terms of all of sudden discovering that the US was complicit in torture? You said that you had never thought you'd see that again. How did Human Rights Watch and then later on Amnesty react to that? - Well, look, we weren't naive, we didn't think the US government never, whether it was intelligence operations, military operations, or even in Brooklyn MDC, that they never tortured people. But the reality was is that it wasn't a policy, it wasn't a formal way of approaching a problem, right? I mean, things happened. We understood that, we would call them to the carpet for torture practices, let's say, whether it was a police department or substandard conditions in detention centers or prisons that amounted to torture and ill treatment. So I don't want to give the impression that the United States government was completely clean on September 10th, 2001 and then only became dirty afterwards. But the unique thing about the operations after 2001 is that they were authorized at the very highest levels through a series of memos that somehow tried to justify the use of torture and ill treatment in pursuit of people that they suspected of having links to the terrorists who brought down the trade centers. And that's a completely different ball game then. When you have the president of the United States all of his kind of kitchen cabinet Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, you know the cast of characters and then the lawyers, then the lawyers, through a series of memos helping to justify these practices, talking about them as enhanced interrogation techniques, euphemisms for torture and ill treatment, was stunning, frankly. And I don't think that there is a person who can honestly say that, oh ,we would have, of course we would have expected that no, it was stunning. And it was, from a lawyer's point of view, a regression in rights protection and the rule of law that we still live with today. Interviewer: Did you go to the media and how did the media respond when you saw these incidents? - You know, it was the Europeans who began, European experts in international governmental organizations. So let me explain what those are. So the council of Europe and the European Parliament, who began to say we really need to investigate Europe's complicity in these practices. And they started to do that investigation in 2005. It was December 5th, 2005 that Condoleezza Rice was going to Europe. And she was at some airport in the US, I wish I could remember which one now, but she was still in the US, and she admitted that the US government had a rendition program. She chastised the Europeans for being naive about the fact that this rendition program was necessary, it had saved lives. I mean, she really was like the schoolmarm on the Europeans. You don't understand how serious this is. This rendition program is absolutely necessary. We can't get these people any other way. And we are helping to save European and American lives by transporting people illegally across borders, holding them in secret detention and interrogating them in by using coercive and violent means that is actually helping Europe. So that was the message. Well, the European intergovernmental organizations saw how harmful this was, and they decided to do their own investigation. So Senator Dick Marty a Swiss Senator began an investigation 2005, 2006, released reports in 2006 and 2007 on the constellation of European governments who had been complicit with the US in rendition in secret detention. The European Parliament did the same thing. When those reports came out the European governments were so categorically insulted by the idea that they would have done such a thing. And they pushed back hard and poor Dick Marty. At that time, poor Dick Marty. His reputation was at stake. The European Parliament's reputation was at stake with their own report, which they released in 2007. So the media at that time I really felt very strongly that the media was of two minds. The first was they love a juicy story, and this is as juicy as it gets, US government, rendition, secrets, detention, torture, disappearance, you know, basically that happened in the 1970s and 80s in Central and South America, right? So they loved that aspect of it. And they played that up to a certain point, but they also were somewhat complicit in the government response saying, where's your evidence? Where's your hard evidence? Where's the smoking gun? Where's the body, where's the secret center? To Human Rights Watch's credit, in 2005, Human Rights Watch actually released the names of countries, Poland and Romania, where two of the centers have been held. And they had been situated. The Washington Post, in a shameful act of deference to the administration had decided not to publicize the names. They wrote a story that there were secret detention centers in Europe, but at the behest of the administration, decided not to publish the locations. So there were highs for the media, there were lows for the media, and it really, there still are highs and lows for the media. You know, sometimes the media is our friend in pursuit of justice for victims of human rights violations and sometimes they're complicit. I would have to say that there are some journalists who deserve credit for helping to expose this Jane Meyer from a New Yorker, Scott Shane I'm sure I'm forgetting others. There have been some really, Michelle Shepherd up in Canada, without a doubt, and some of the European press, but on the US side of things, even to this date, when we know so much about these operations, when the European Court of Human Rights, two weeks ago, issued two judgments, finding Poland complicit with the CIA in torture and enforced disappearance. We still have journalists in the United States who refuse to use the word torture when describing these practices, who refuse to talk about the issue of accountability in terms of criminal prosecution. So, you know, I'm of a mixed, I have very mixed feelings about the media on these issues. There are some real heroes, Carol Rosenberg, who writes in the Miami Herald, has done heroic work on Guantanamo. Interviewer: So during those early, by the way what title did you have with Human Rights Watch after 9/11? - I was senior legal counsel in the terrorism and counter terrorism program. Interviewer: And when did you just, when did you switch over to work for Amnesty? - In 2009. Interviewer: Okay, well, going back to the early years, did you find this work very different from the work you had done in the previous 10 or 15 years when you worked in Ireland and in Bosnia? - The work in Ireland was informative in terms of the post 9/11 era. I mean, what we were doing in Ireland was looking at, you know, the IRA and loyalist paramilitaries, were labeled as terrorist groups. The techniques that the British government used against the Irish had been called torture or ill treatment. We had a whole national security overlay in terms of all the work that we did in Northern Ireland. So that work was instructive. And one of the questions I repeatedly ask in the various fora within which I speak or where I'm writing is why we don't draw more from the Northern Irish experience in terms of understanding the post 9/11 period. There's so many parallels between the two. I think that people think that the Irish experience is a small experience. It's a little thing, but you know, people who were labeled as terrorists in the north, you know, they trained in Libya they were hooked up with international terrorist organizations. It was an international phenomenon that played itself out at a micro cosmic level, but it has lessons that we really haven't learned from. Remind me of the question again? Interviewer: Your background in Ireland and Bosnia, how that informed and how you understood what was happening post 9/11 and whether it was very different and you perceptions based on your background. - Well I definitely think that the post 9/11 period did cause a paradigm shift for us in a lot of ways. Everywhere we go now, we see the opportunity effect of invoking national security, right across the globe, you know where their people are assessed suspects, where there's militancy. We see the invocation of national security in order to deviate from the rule of law, in order to deviate from protecting people's human rights right across the globe. And I don't think that we had that kind of global phenomenon pre 9/11. We had it in certain places. We had it rear its ugly head every now and then, but now every place that I work in uses, in a very discretionary way, national security as an excuse to target people, minorities, to target and suppress free expression. And so I do think that what we really have post 9/11 is a whole new world in terms of the invocation of national security to justify oppressive practices. Interviewer: So early on, did you know much about Guantanamo? Was that part of what you worked on and did you ever, what did you hear about Guantanamo? - Well, we knew from the minute it was open, I mean it was public when it was opened. Karen Greenberg has written this book called "The First hundred Days of Guantanamo" where she makes the argument that there were possibilities for a more just approach to those detainees. But it became clear very, very quickly that that was not going to be the case. That Guantanamo was really going to be a legal black hole. And no matter what the administration said about, you know, this safeguard or that safeguard or whatever, I mean Guantanamo's just been a stain right from the beginning. So yeah, we've been following Guantanamo since the very, very beginning. Since it first opened Interviewer: You personally, were you following Guantanamo, or were you following more the rendition cases or both? - I followed both. You have to remember that many of the people who were victims of rendition ended up at Guantanamo. So there are links between these post 9/11 operations in Europe, in West Africa, in the Middle East and North Africa and people who are currently in Guantanamo Bay. Some of those people were held in secret detention in Europe, in Thailand and Morocco, it's been reported that some people were held in Uzbekistan, we've never been able to verify that. So I guess the way that I look at my work was as making these links, you know, between and among all of these different operations, but Guantanamo really became more real for me when I actually went down to observe the first military commission. And I wrote an article after that, that no matter what you read in the press, doesn't matter, Western, Eastern, Asian press, it doesn't matter. You really have to go to Guantanamo to really understand the physical geography, the psychic geography and the disorientation that comes from a system that is completely different from what you learn is the rule of law in law school. And so that is, it was in 2007, I think I went down for Salim Hamdan's trial. - Could you tell us? - It might've been 2008. Interviewer: Could you tell us about that experience? - Well, I didn't wanna go. I wasn't in the queue to go to Guantanamo, but I was fairly low enough on the totem pole that going to Guantanamo in July was gonna be my in my basket of things to do. And so I went down at a time when you could just catch a commercial flight, I flew to Florida and then I took Air Sunshine, or something like, that to Guantanamo, I had to have clearance, but now people who go to Guantanamo have to go on military transport planes through DC. And I was there at a time when things were much looser, so to speak. And so I flew down and was met at the airport by a charming bunch of young military guys and on a little boat. And they ferried me across the bay, over to my tent. I was the first class of people at Guantanamo Bay who were not privileged to stay in the combined bachelor's quarters. I got a notice about a week before I was to leave that we were going to be housed in tents, which if they thought was going to be disincentive for the NGO, they were very, very wrong. So anyway, I went down, I was one of four observers. I was the only woman observer from an NGO for this first military commissions trial. I was there for eight days with ACLU, Amnesty International, myself, and I can't remember the other organization, but in any event, we observed the trial for eight days. And I've written about my impressions of that first military commissions trial. You know, a trial where the judge acknowledges openly in court that this person was subject to coercion. And yet these very liberal rules for the admissibility of evidence permitted his coerced testimony to be entered into evidence. So a first year law student knows that this is not on, right? So there was very little confidence that this trial could actually produce justice. And the key thing for a lot of us was, people always say, "You defend terrorists. You want justice for terrorists." But the key thing is that if the US government is making the argument that they are actually prosecuting people who were linked in some way to 9/11 in these unsafe, unfair trials, then the 9/11 victims, they don't get justice either. So on either side of it, nobody got justice. Hamdan was a small fry. He was convicted in an unsafe conviction. He served a certain amount of time and then he was released. The judge gave him time served, he'd been in Guantanamo for five years and then they sent him back to Yemen, where I understand he's doing fairly well. Interviewer: So are you telling us that you were surprised in your observations when you went to Guantanamo, you had different expectations than what you actually observed? - No, I'm not saying I had different expectations from what I observed. I'm saying that given the rules that we understood existed and governed the military commissions all of our worst fears were realized. No, I didn't have high expectations at all. You don't take people to an offshore prison, set up a separate court outside the federal system with rules of evidence that so clearly deviate from what you find in the federal system and have high expectations. No, we had low expectations and they were, they were realized Interviewer: Did you ever go back to Guantanamo after that? - I did not. I have actively sought not to be traveling back and forth - Why is that? - To Guantanamo Bay. I think that once for me was enough. And I also find that what Guantanamo Bay has done to people who routinely go, you know, there's people who basically cycle in and cycle out all the time, is it causes a hardening, a sarcasm, a real sense that there's no hope. And I don't think that you can really be as effective as you want to be in doing human rights work if you're that hardened. And so my decision was to try to do the work where I thought that I could do the most good and maintain a sense of hope. And I know how that sounds, but I would never hire anyone to do human rights work who didn't have a hope that they could have impact. Why would I hire someone who is hard and sarcastic, cynic, why would I do that? So why would I want to become that myself? And so switched up a little to the resettlement issue, which seemed much more positive to me, much more hopeful, and to actually helping to reveal more and more about the rendition in secret detention programs. Those seem to be the places where the energy, my psychic energy, felt better spent. Interviewer: So that takes us right to could you tell us about some of the resettlement cases? Let's start with the one in Ireland. - Yeah, well, I got an email in 2007. I'd worked on a European court case years ago, where a bunch of Uzbeks were going to be sent from Turkey to Uzbekistan . And it was so clearly the wrong thing for the Turkish government to do. Uzbekistan is a place where torture is systematic, where people with a religious profile are routinely targeted. They're apprehended. They're tried on trumped up charges, they're tortured in detention. They have long prison sentences in the most horrible prison system. So I'd worked on that case. So Guantanamo Bay council, named Michael Mone, sent Human Rights Watch an email. I think it was in 2007, and the email got booted around. It was like, can you help me make the case that my Uzbek detainee in Guantanamo Bay should not be repatriated Uzbekistan. So eventually it came to me, based on this work I had done on this European court case. So I called Mike Mone, up and I said, "So what's the deal?" And he said, "I have this Uzbekistani guy and there's another Uzbek, and there's a rumor that they might be sent back to Uzbekistan." And I said, "Well, that can't be the case. The US doesn't send people to Uzbekistan. Ordinary asylum seekers who come to the United States from Uzbekistan, they don't get sent back. So this began what was a long-term partnership between me and Mike Mone to A, prove that they couldn't be sent back to Uzbekistan, and then B, which was the only logical next step, where could they be sent? Which meant you gotta find a place for them. So it was easy enough to say they shouldn't be sent back to Uzbekistan, in 2003, the UN special rapporteur in torture had definitively, written a report that torture in Uzbekistan was systematic. So that wasn't the real problem. The real problem is who the hell is going to take two Uzbek Guantanamo Bay detainees? Who's going to do that? So, we started to search around. So I was asking anybody that I could find who was good on Uzbekistan? Who's good on humanitarian issues? Who would actually take the leap of faith? And we went through a whole range of countries and I was in Brussels in, I think late 2007 early 2008, in my office in Brussels. And I went to the director there, Lotte Leicht, who's still there. And I said, "Lotte, we have these two Uzbeks in Guantanamo and we need to get them out. What country would take them?" So we sat for, I don't know how long. And then she said, "You know, the Irish have been really good on Uzbekistan." They've spoken out, there'd been a massacre in Uzbekistan and Andijan in 2005, the EU had imposed sanctions, then they became very lax with the sanctions. And in 2007, we were in despair that the EU was not keeping up with the pressure on Uzbekistan, but Ireland had maintained its position and been good. So we said, Ireland, that seems so bizarre. It's just seems really bizarre. And of course I knew Ireland well from the years that I had worked there, so started to feel people out. And as it turns out, one of the Uzbeks there had learned English. He was a sheep herder in Uzbekistan. So we started to make these fairly bizarre, and sometimes, dare I say, comical arguments about why Ireland would be really, really good. And then we started to reach out to the Irish government, to MPs, to various people. And that was a brick wall. It was just a brick wall. So Mone and I are on the phone the one day. And he's despairing because his client is getting depressed. He's got children he wants to see, he's clearly not of interest to the United States government. They can't send him home. They won't let them in the mainland of the US what are we going to do? So I said, you know, I said, let's go to Ireland. Just get on a plane. You get on a plane, I'll get on a plane, and we'll go, and we'll bring the documents showing why this would be a good fit. We'll talk to as many people as we can. We'll we'll see what we can do. And so we did, I mean we got, to Human Rights Watch's credit. I said, "I really want to go to Ireland to see if we can get this guy from Guantanamo to Ireland." And they said, "Sure, go ahead." And Mone had good means and good connections in the Irish American community. And so we went over and that began a year of direct advocacy, but I'll never forget the guy we met in the Americas division of the foreign affairs department in Ireland. And he looked at us like we had come from Mars, he just looked at us, and he said in, the most gentle way, "Why would you ever think that Ireland would take two Uzbekistani Guantanamo Bay detainees? And it was a really good question. It wasn't a bad question, right? But then we just started to talk to everybody, everybody. Now that first trip was very interesting because the Irish, anybody in Ireland we talked to said the US has never even asked us. Here you guys come, but of course, this is a bilateral political issue. And you're asking us to take them, but the US has never asked us. We get out of, I can't remember what meeting it was. Maybe it was interior. And I got on the phone, I got on the phone. And I said to various people who I knew at the time the Irish think that you've never even asked. Interviewer: To various people in the US government? - In the US government and said "The Irish think that you've never even asked." "No we've asked everyone, they're mistaken." And I said, "Well, if you've asked everyone, you've asked them so secretly that even the people who could help you now don't know that. And maybe you should actually ask again." So it was this combination of events, us being on the ground, the Irish actually being seized of the question, the US being seized with the idea that the Irish might be open that led over the course of a year, to eventually the Irish saying yes, but there are many people responsible for that. I mean, the Irish section of Amnesty International was absolutely critical in helping to affect this, especially in terms of the integration issue. You know, how do you take someone who was, you know kidnapped by mercenaries, handed over the US government, sent to Guantanamo Bay, whose family came from Uzbekistan too and is currently in Iran? How do you bring all those pieces together to a coherent whole where a family can live peacefully and safely in Ireland? And the Irish section of Amnesty International was absolutely brilliant in helping to make that happen. There were advocates in other organizations who helped to make it happen, but I'd say the key person who made it happen was Mike Mone. Interviewer: So, when you called up American officials, can you tell us who you called up? - I can't tell you who I called up. I can tell you that we were able, by a stroke of luck, I mean, it's not often that you just call a cell phone number and you get somebody. That's why I think there was a little bit of serendipity involved in this whole case. We haven't seen anything like this since, where the lawyer actually says, I think this is the best place for my client. And I'm going to really make this happen. There's various reasons why it can't happen that way anymore, but it was just by a stroke of luck that the right person picked up the phone and was able then to take that information to others and started a chain where there was an open communication between the US government and the Irish government. And I will say one other thing. 9/11 was very damaging for the NGO community, for the human rights community, vis-a-vis its relations with the US government. There was so much that was happening that was detrimental to the whole human rights project that was coming from Washington. And I do think to some extent, as the years went by that people realized that, people in DC realize that. And I also think that this gesture of actually taking the information that we gave them and running with it was part of an attempt to repair things, I mean, we were credible, we were engaged, and, I really want to think that they didn't want to sideline us to the extent that we had been sidelined in the first six years after 9/11 happened. Interviewer: Was this still the Bush administration when you said not sidelined? - It still was, because it was 2007, was it 2007? Or Obama had just been elected. But I want to say that it was still while, I did not speak with him and have never spoken with Clint Williamson, who was the ambassador at large for war crimes at the time, but it was during the time that he was in post looking for places for people that we were able to communicate this information to the government. Interviewer: And did you get any sense from the European countries as to why they would accept these detainees, if the US wouldn't accept them themselves, wouldn't allow them to be settled in the US? - Every country had a different reason, right? So some countries, even though the Guantanamo Bay detainees were not nationals of their country, they had some kind of a link. They had lived in the country, they had family in the country, they spoke the language. So I think for France that was an issue when they took a detainee. For others, it was very political, very, very political. When we were doing the advocacy in Ireland, a key point, advocacy point for us, was the fact that Ireland had not cooperated with the US government in the war in Iraq. And they had abstained. And the idea was, how do you now make a gesture to the US government that could renew the relationship in a meaningful way? And of course at that point, we were, you know, we didn't know who was going to be elected, whether it was going to be Obama or McCain, but both of them had called for the closure of Guantanamo. So you could wield that, so to speak, in your advocacy and say, look, you've been somewhat divorced from the US government because of how fraught your relationships have been with them over Iraq all these years. Maybe this is a way to extend your hand, make a gesture to the new administration, no matter who it is. Although at that, you know, at some point we really did feel that Obama was in lead and start things off on the right foot. We don't, we will never know whether this was an appealing argument to the Irish government because the minute we ended our meetings with them, we didn't know much else. We never knew about the meetings that the Irish government had among themselves or with the US administration. All we knew was that at some point there was confirmation that Michael Mone's client, Oybek Jabbarov and his compatriot Sharuk were going to Ireland. And we didn't even know when. And then Mone called me one day. And he said, "I can now confirm that they've landed." Which was stunning, I mean, I knew what's going to happen, I just didn't know when. And so it was just a really, you know, it was a really interesting, gratifying, positive thing that was Guantanamo related, but that, as opposed to hardening you, you know, really gave you some idea that you could really have some kind of an impact. Interviewer: Well, did that inspire you as to think, well, if it worked with one country, maybe it would work with other countries? - It did, it did inspire us in that way. And there were a series of resettlements and the Amnesty sections and the lawyers help to affect a lot of them. There weren't, as many as we had hoped, there are still people in Guantanamo Bay who should have been resettled in the mid 2000s, who remain in Guantanamo Bay. So yes, it gave people hope that there could be further resettlement and there was to an extent, but not to the extent that we had hoped. And that's where we're at right now. Interviewer: Are you saying that both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty, and this is important for history, was somewhat instrumental in getting some of these resettlements to be effective, to happen? - I would say among many other actors, yes. That the NGOs, the international NGOs did have an impact and did help to facilitate, without a doubt, I would say that. I wouldn't say that the NGOs were the key actor but the big NGOs are advocacy machines, there's a lot of resources behind them. They can keep an issue alive. They can keep a government seized of things in ways that one habeas council in Guantanamo Bay cannot. So I think it was a perfect, the perfect storm, council who wanted their guys out, Amnesty and Human Rights Watch were the advocacy machines to kind of go after the governments and court friendly MPs and keep the issue alive. And the European press was very good on this issue. Very, very good on this issue. Interviewer: Couldn't Human Rights Watch and Amnesty go to the US government or the officials they had contact with and encourage them to make agreements with other nations who didn't, and did they have that kind of impact? - I think they did. I mean, that's certainly what happened with Ireland. Interviewer: I know, but beyond Ireland. - I think that what ended up happening was that when we could see a good fit between a detainee who was either cleared for release or who wasn't formally cleared for release but we knew it was not of interest to the US government. We could talk to both governments, the government, you know, government in France, in the Czech Republic, in Germany, wherever it was and say, maybe this is a good link. Amnesty International's formal policy is not to name a particular detainee. But to say, if you have the capacity and are willing you should take someone from Guantanamo. Now, this was very much enhanced by a European Parliament, by a decision in the EU to work together to help resolve the Guantanamo Bay crisis by encouraging EU member states to take detainees. And we were very active in helping to get that language in a text and formalized so that there was a European approach to resettlement. And again, it worked to some effect, but like I said, there are still people at Guantanamo Bay who shouldn't been resettled and haven't been. Interviewer: Because? - Because. Nobody wants them really, you know, nobody wants them. The reports out of Guantanamo aren't necessarily good at the moment, in terms of their, their mental capacity, their health condition, there's the whole narrative about former Guantanamo Bay detainees going back into the fray. So the idea is that the US government requests that any resettlement host country has to do certain things to ensure that that won't happen. I mean, it's very, very complex the reasons why people don't want these detainees. And I don't think that the US government helps by not having taken any detainees itself. I mean, you can see the deep, deep hypocrisy in this situation that the US government goes to all these other governments and says take what we have damaged. Take these damaged people and we'll give you money. We'll give you this kind of support. But in addition to taking them, integrating them, bringing their families, giving them social and psychological care for their wellbeing you need to surveil them so that they don't run off to Syria, or they don't run off to Iraq or they don't go here or there, or go to Yemen, or do whatever it is that is going to put them back in the fray. I mean, who would want that? Interviewer: Well then, I usually save this question for later, but I'm going to ask it now, then, is Guantanamo ever gonna close? - I am certain that at some point in the future the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay will close. Sure, I don't think that there will be any appetite for putting more people in Guantanamo Bay, although we do have certain partisan politicians who call every time another person, suspected terrorist, is apprehended or whatever for them to be in, you know, sent to Guantanamo Bay. I don't think that that will happen. I do fear, have very big fears that there will be people who will die in Guantanamo. That the way Guantanamo will close is when the last detainee from the 9/11 batch dies. And so that could be years and years and years. The US has given itself permission to indefinitely detain people in this unending, infinite war on terror. So they've drummed up a legal rationale for holding these people until the end of hostilities. And when you think about, if you look at the world right now, and the proliferation of terrorism, terrorist groups across the globe, either real or perceived, then you can see that the war on terror,, which is a fiction under international law and humanitarian law could go on forever. Interviewer: And I wanna go back and you're also saying that because these men have been damaged, they become less and less appealing for any country to invest the time and resources in them, which will make it that much more difficult to ever resettle them? - Absolutely, I mean, why do you think, I mean, it makes perfect sense for the host countries to send delegations to interview these guys. Of course, they're considering six people. They're gonna take two. They want to go and they want to see what is the right fit, who is most mentally intact, physically intact. So as not to draw on the resources of the host government, of course there are deals between the US and these governments as well. But as the years go by, getting a completely intact person who can just kind of magically integrate into a very sophisticated Western European or Central American society, it becomes a harder and harder thing to imagine. Interviewer: Could you stay upbeat in spite of all that? - Well, the game isn't over until it's over. I mean, we have six people who potentially could go to Uruguay, you know, as the years pass, it could be that people will perceive some of the detainees as harmless, specifically because of the abuse that they've suffered, and the way that they now have been pacified or neutralized. I don't know. I feel very uncomfortable even using language like that, but I'm not ready to throw the towel in on resettlement because there is a significant enough number of people who have, who need to leave there and need to be resettled and should have been resettled long ago. And that not withstanding my absolute opposition to anyone being in Guantanamo. And the policy, our policies, that the military commission system should be dismantled. The detention facilities should be closed. Anybody who should be tried should be moved onto the mainland and tried in a federal court, but the group that has been cleared for release and has been clear for so many years, clearly, clearly clearly they should be resettled immediately. Interviewer: Do you think the US government is giving, can you tell us again your title with Amnesty? 'Cause you're now working with Amnesty. - I'm Amnesty International's expert on counter terrorism and human rights. Interviewer: So with that position, do you think the US government actually cares enough to try to resettle these people? Do you think they're actively making it try to work even? - Well, I think the Uruguay situation is an example, a current enough example of the way that these, the project of resettlement is continuing, of course Mujica himself is quite unique. You know, he has said, we will take these people because they have been victims of human rights violations. That is not the narrative in Europe. So he's quite unique. We'll really have to see, we'll really have to see as things go on, but I think that there are more possibilities for resettlement. Interviewer: And you were involved in the resettlement of a few other people as Syrian and Uighurs. Do you want to tell us a little bit about those? Are they different narrative in the one - The Uighur case is one of the most interesting cases, I think, you know, one of the first batches of people to be resettled where the Uighurs, they were sent to Albania, there were five of them who were sent to Albania. And when nobody knew this was going to happen, I mean the lawyer knew the night before, all of a sudden they're not in Guantanamo, they're in Albania. Now, really, it doesn't take much to understand that we Uighurs and Albania are not a great mix. Albania is one of the poorest. It is probably the poorest country in Europe. It is nominally Muslim, you know, but not in a way that Muslim Uighurs from, you know, a separatist province in China, would easily be able to adapt to, or you wouldn't think they would be. And so when the Uighurs went to Albania, the idea was, you know, how can we help the Albanian government effectively integrate them? What would they need to do? And so there was a lot of back and forth, you know, with the Albanians and the US, we would say to the US, the guys need this, you need to talk to the Albanians about this, but then it became clear that some of the Albanians or some of the Uighurs who were in Albania had links with other countries. And Adil, the one who you interviewed in Sweden was one of them. So he was in Albania. I knew his lawyer very well, Steven Willic, and we started to think about ways that we could get him to his sister in Sweden, understanding that he was not supposed to ever leave Albania. So we hooked up with a brilliant Swedish lawyer named Sten De Geer who was an asylum and immigration lawyer and full disclosure, old and dear friend of mine. And we started to kind of say, how could, what could we do to get him to his sister? So Stan emailed me one day and he said why don't we invite him to human rights days, which is every other year, the Swedish government funds, and everybody goes to these days of seminars and musical performances all about human rights, typically Scandinavian, right? And he said, well, why don't we invite him to speak as a former Guantanamo Bay detainee? And I said, they'll never let him come. Interviewer: Who's they? - The Swedish government will never let him come. So Sten De Geer, following to the letter of the law, issuing an invitation letter to Adil, talking to the Swedish government about him coming, et cetera. Actually gets the guy invited. And so he gets the invitation. So Say-bin gets on a plane and I get on a plane and we all go to Stockholm and we're waiting for him to come, because the minute he comes, Sten will be at the airport. And he's an asylum lawyer. And Adil ask for asylum, the minute he steps foot on Swedish soil. Interviewer: But he hasn't got an Albanian passport, right? - He doesn't, he doesn't, he has traveled documents though. And he had permission to leave. So we're at the airport waiting for him to come. And of course, there's the Uighur community with their banner. Everyone's waiting and waiting. And the flight comes in and people start to come off and come off and he's not there, and he's not there, and he's not there. So we start calling around, where is he, where is he, where is he? Well, he was stopped in Vienna. I think it was Vienna. And we're like, well, when is he coming? When can he come, can he come? So we're at the airport trying to figure all this out. And the media is there. And it's a little bit of a circus because this expectation had not been met. And I have to tell you, I was absolutely heartbroken. I was heartbroken. I had no hope that he was going to get to Sweden. I really didn't. Then Sten gets information or Say-bin gets information that they are gonna actually put them on the next plan, but the next plane doesn't come in for hours. So we leave the airport and we go, and I don't know, we went and had dinner and did all this stuff. And then they say, yes, he's coming in, but we can't confirm that he's on the plane. So I looked at Sten and I said, I'm not going. I can't go. You know, so... So I didn't go, because I was really afraid that he wouldn't come. But then Sten called me and he said, he's here, he's here. And he said, oh, everyone's hugging and kissing. And everyone's happy. So it was a really lovely thing because he got there and he saw his sister and then he filed for asylum. And, you know, he was denied. And then he was granted. And so there's this very happy ending for him in one way because he was reunited with his family and he's living in Sweden which is really a better place to be than Albania. But there's an downside to all of this. And that is that his first wife and child who were in still in China, they couldn't come and be reunited with him. The Chinese government wouldn't permit that. And so his life was effectively wrecked. And then he was able then to rebuilt it in Sweden, which was a lovely thing. But there is damage in the wake of all of this a lot of damage. Do you mind if I get a Kleenex. Interviewer: No, let's take a break. - Thank you. Interviewer: Okay, rolling. So I just wanted to ask you, you said the detainees in Albania have travel documents. So why couldn't the other four travel to other countries? Because if Albania is such a poor country, not really good for them. - What I meant when I said that he had traveled documents is that he had gotten an official invitation from the Swedish government, and then gotten permission to travel. So the stars were in alignment with respect to him specifically. And like I said, we never really thought that any of this would end up happening and, you know, it did to great effect. Interviewer: And you also helped, you said, a Syrian detainee. Do you have a story that goes with that? - This is something that, I mean, there are Syrians remaining at Guantanamo Bay, that's kind of an ongoing issue. There was a letter that was written recently by a number of habeas council that encourage the US government to follow through with Uruguayan resettlements. That's a public letter and I've been helping, it's Mike Mulligan, my old partner in crime. His client is a Syrian Guantanamo Bay detainee. And we tried to be honest, we tried to do exactly the same thing with him that we did on the Irish front and to no great effect unfortunately, the appetite for that kind of, you know, let's get on a plane, is that time has passed. And so I think from council's point of view it really is now up to the US government to effect the transfers of the people that they can. And so he's in the he's in the Uruguayan bunch, but we looked into several other countries, Denmark, New Zealand, Germany, you know, there were numerous places that we thought might be a good fit for this particular person, Belgium, and nobody was biting. Interviewer: Why has the time passed? - I think that the idea of making a gesture to the United States government is no longer a good advocacy tack. I think there's been a lot of disappointment in Obama over the fact that Guantanamo was not yet closed. And that while he might say, you know, Congress is obstructing my ability to do this or that, that he is not prioritized and effectively advocated himself with the right people to get Guantanamo Bay closed. There was so much hope when Obama came into office that he would be able to close Guantanamo. And in the meantime, what has the administration done? They've expanded the drone program. They've been deeply involved in the NSA scandal. They have vilified, Snowden and other whistleblowers who have sought to reveal the truth about government surveillance and other operations that are allegedly in the name of the American people's safety. So I think there is a little, the shine is off the idea that you want to help, this particular administration may not be so strong anymore. That impulse. There's fatigue in general with all of it. There's just fatigue in general with all of it. And in the meantime the United States government has carved out a niche for itself to indefinitely detain people, which is such a clear violation of international human rights law that, you know, the USs friends on these issues are getting tired, I think. Interviewer: Do you think that also is possibly why the men who should have gone to Uruguay still haven't gone, or that maybe they're fatigued too, they've changed their mind? - No. I mean, I don't have any intelligence. I have an opinion about this and my opinion is that it's very difficult for a government to take in six detainees in the middle of an election season. And there is an election season. There's a whole campaigning season going on in Uruguay. Uruguay is a very poor country. There are forces that have absolutely nothing to do with those particular guys and their profiles that are putting pressure on the project to resettle them there. That's my current take on it. I don't know whether that's true or not. I don't know whether they've become gun shy about taking them. My feeling is, is that we've seen this happen before. We've had government officials say to us wait until the elections are over. This is not a popular issue. It's not the right time. And that is my feeling about what's going on in Uruguay at the moment. Interviewer: And when elections were over in other situations did the governments then take the, in? - Yeah. - They did? - We've seen delays. Nobody's gotten sent overnight to a country. You know, even in Ireland took well over a year for all the pieces to be in place. And I do think that public opinion about Guantanamo is up and down. People want to see it closed, but people still by and large, believe that the people who are there are there for a reason. So governments need to take their publics into consideration, poor governments or governments where their are economic issues at play don't want to be seen as accepting more asylum seekers what they would call, you know, people who will come in and drain resources that should otherwise in the public mind be used on nationals of that country. As the hope of Obama has faded over these years, the love of the United States has faded, the idea that you'll cooperate with the US government in the midst of, you know, drone assassinations and NSA surveillance, and no closure of Guantanamo Bay. I mean, you can see how any politician in any country is going to say how am I going to make this work? How am I really going to make this work? And the time has to be right. The time really has to be right. Interviewer: So do you still try to go to countries to, like somebody comes to South America and asks them if they would take someone or do you feel that is now hitting a brick wall in that what you did in Ireland is just not replicated these days - To the extent that lawyers come to us anymore and ask us for help, because Amnesty is such a global movement and we have offices in so many places, we absolutely will put them in touch with the section in that country. Our section offices know the political landscape very, very well, often have, are able to easily communicate with government actors to see what the temperature of the room is with respect to this issue. So we'll link them up. But the days of this kind of, where there was more openness about it, I think they are over unfortunately. And I think the rest of these resettlements will be brokered at a very high political level. The lawyers will know, to a greater extent, what's going on, but I don't see a huge role for us anymore. Except on, as I said, at field level, on ground level with our sections, helping with integration, communication and things like that. I mean, really, to some extent, it's a formula now, right? It's a formula. The US government will send somebody out. It's not even an ambassador anymore. It's a special representative to see if there's any appetite by any government to take somebody in. And now after all these years, there's a formula. There needs to be an integration plan. There needs to be a family reunification plan. There needs to be a security protocol. It's all, it's a little boiler plate at this point to some extent. And so there's not as much of a need for us to be in there, fighting that fight anymore. I mean, we have a whole document that says here is how you integrate a former Guantanamo detainee, which didn't exist at all when we were first setting out and doing this. Interviewer: Just going back to 2008, when Obama was elected, were you one of the people who had hope? - Oh, fact, yeah, of course, absolutely. Within a stroke of a pen executive orders ordering the closure of Guantanamo Bay, tempering, but not ending the whole issue of rendition, I'm talking about, the United States is not torture from this point on the United States is not torture. Whether that has been born out in the last eight years is another matter. But on January 21st, 2009, it felt like it was a whole new world. I think that was incredibly naive. If there was any naivety, it was there, there were so many considerations. So many things to think about with Obama as president you know, the first African-American president, switched from a Republican administration to a democratic administration, eight years of woeful severe egregious human rights violations for which there needed to be accountability, how to broker that with the parties. I mean, there was a lot to consider. So on the one hand I'm deeply forever disappointed. On the other hand, I'm also, I also really understand that there were pressures brought to bear. On the other hand, I do think Obama have done so much more to bring the Guantanamo issue to a close. I think he could have, absolutely. And we may still see this before his administration is over, release the Senate select committee on intelligence report on the rendition and secret detention operations overseas, post 9/11. That is now stuck because, you know Diane Feinstein has sent it back because she's unhappy with redactions, which is exactly what we want to see but we were a little uncomfortable with more delay. A key disappointment with Obama is an implicit understanding that there will be no prosecutions. You know, it doesn't matter what that report says. We were very disappointed that there be no criminal liability for what were crimes under both domestic and international law by agents and officials in the United States government. So we'll see. I mean, if he can pull a couple of rabbits out of the hat before the end of his administration he can shore up his reputation a little, but to date, from the national security side of things, I'm deeply disappointed. Interviewer: Do you think there were too many pressures from other interests that stopped them? - I think it's a function of both his style, his having to navigate a terrain. When's the last time there has been a political terrain where accountability is an issue, that has been as fraught? So you have to, you do have to be pragmatic in a way about what he walked into, but I also feel that as savvy as they were in getting elected, they weren't not nearly as savvy as brokering the types of relationships with the Republicans and with the CIA, or just taking a stand as the executive to reveal the truth about those eight years of operations, I think there was, it was a pity and a great lost opportunity. And there are victims of these practices. People who've been tortured. People who've been disappeared. People who've been subject to unfair trials, separated from their families. I mean, there's a lot of damage in the wake of these operations and Obama has not succeeded yet in revealing the truth about them, holding people accountable for them, or providing victims with redress. And that's the package we need. Interviewer: Is Hillary Clinton the person who can provide that package? - Everything that I've said about Obama, we have expressed publicly as Amnesty in all of our public documents. So I have no compunction about repeating, you know, our disappointment with him, with the lack of accountability, et cetera. I can't speculate about Hillary Clinton. Interviewer: Did you have interactions with her when she was secretary of state? - I did not, not directly with her. Of course there were staff underneath her, always liaising with, with various levels of the state department. And there were people within the state department who were desperately trying to correct. There were people who came from the NGO community or from universities, who Obama brought into his administration, I think as a show of goodwill. And as a affirmation that he believed in the rule of law and that his administration would not torture them. But they swam against the tide. It was really, you know, they did not have the impact that we had hoped that they would have had. And that was under her, under her administration in state. Interviewer: Is there something I didn't ask you that you thought of before you came, with, like, you're thinking now that maybe like to share with us, going forward or looking back? - I think one final point that most Americans don't realize, and I realized that your archive, your documentary will go beyond the US, but it's important for an American audience is the fact that while there's been very little, if any accountability in the US, there's been some in Europe. I mentioned the Swedish cases, the Italian prosecutions, in Poland, the European Court case that found Poland complicit with the CIA in disappearing and torturing two men who are now in Guantanamo Bay. But there are other places where there is accountability at hand, so to speak, you know, there was a secret detention center in Lithuania. There is an active criminal investigation there into the case of a man by the name of Mustapha AL-Hawsawi. He is currently at Guantanamo Bay. There's also a European court case against Lithuania. There was a secret detention center where suspects were held and interrogated and tortured by the CIA in Romania, in Bucharest. There is a case at the European Court of Human Rights in Romania at the moment. the United Kingdom government, which was the United States' closest ally in these post 9/11 operations. There's a lot of pressure in the UK for an inquiry into UK complicity in this, not least the use of Diego Garcia as a launching pad for rendition operations and possibly the holding of people off shore. So I think what's a missing element of the Guantanamo story, because so many of the people who were subjected to these operations are currently in Guantanamo, are the other places in the world where there are efforts toward accountability where people clearly see the need to hold people accountable, to have redress for victims, et cetera. And that is happening in Europe. And the European Parliament has issued resolutions in September, 2012, September, 2013, calling on all the EU member states to engage in these processes to reveal the truth about their own complicity. So I can't help but feel that while it feels very dire on the US side, I'm happy enough to say that in other parts of the world there is a real desire to have the truth revealed about these operations. And hopefully over the course of the years we'll get the full picture about what happened in spite of US stonewalling. Interviewer: You've been instrumental in these European movements, my understanding is, did you initiate it? Did Amnesty initiate it or did human rights initiate? Can you give us a little background on that? - Actually, Amnesty's research, I told you began in December, 2001 and it continues to date. And so in all of the cases in Europe I'm happy enough to say that both Amnesty's research and Human Rights Watch's research on rendition, secret detention has been used to bring cases in domestic jurisdictions overseas and to bring cases in Europe, at Strasbourg, at the European Court of Human Rights, for all of the rendition cases at the European Court of Human Rights, we have written amicus briefs. What people would commonly understand is amicus briefs, they're called third-party interventions where we have submitted additional information, legal analysis, research to bolster the cases of the people who are bringing their cases in these fora. And so I'm happy to say that we have our fingers a little bit in, in all of it in Europe, but we are not the prime movers. The prime movers are the lawyers for the men who actually bring the cases on their behalf. So the Polish cases, for example, were brought by the Open Society Justice Initiative and by a London-based organization called Inter Rights, with whom we work very, very closely. And then we submitted an amicus brief in those cases. So we own a little piece of it, but there's a lot of people agitating for accountability. I mean, there are people looking for any forum they can to reveal the truth about these practices. And that will continue, I think that will continue. Interviewer: Have any of the nations publicly apologized for their participation? - Yes, Sweden issued an apology to Giza and Al-Zari, the Canadian government, in a separate case that we haven't discussed, the case of Maher Arar. He was a Syrian-Canadian binational who was coming home from vacation, landed at JFK and wanted to go onto his home in Canada. And he was apprehended, accused of being a suspected terrorist. He was held in Brooklyn for, I think, five days, maybe a week. And then he was subjected to something called an expedited removal. And he was sent via Jordan to Syria, where he was tortured for a year, with Canadian officials visiting him frequently when he was in Syria, he was eventually brought back to Canada where he had a full public inquiry. I was a expert on a panel for that inquiry, talking about the issue of the torture convention and what the United States government was obliged to do with him, what the Canadian government was obliged to do. So again, a tiny little piece of it, at the end of the day, the inquiry found that Canada was complicit with the United States government in effecting his transfer to torture. They apologized to him and they gave him 10 million Canadian dollars in compensation. And then there was a very big campaign, an Amnesty International campaign to get the United States government to apologize to Maher Arar. So you can see in a lot of these cases, it's not just going for the jugular, and saying we want you to prosecute every last person who had a finger in this rendition. What Maher Arar wanted was an apology. That's all he wanted and he's never gotten it. At one point, he was video linked to a Senate hearing, I believe, it was some sort of congressional, either Senate or House, where individual senators or congressmen apologized to him via the video link and said we're very sorry for what happened to you, but he's not permitted into the United States, even though he's been completely exonerated, he's not been admitted into the United States and the US government refuses to apologize to him to date. Interviewer: I'm guessing you're probably more positive about European countries and possibly other countries in the world looking into their own matters than the US, do you see this going forward in the next decade, we're going to have more and more countries looking at it from their own behavior? - You know, it depends. I mean, in some ways it's very, very good that the Polish judgments came out when they did, because with what's happening in Ukraine, between Ukraine and Russia, the Poles feel very vulnerable, and they've put their marbles with the US, right? So, as I said before, the geopolitics often fuel what any government is willing to do on any of these issues. So Poland has had a criminal investigation into these renditions and secret detentions that started in 2008. So it was six years old. And they've delayed, and delayed, and delayed, and delayed, and delayed thinking, we want to do the right thing. I believe that there is a certain element within the Polish government that wants to do the right thing, but it is constantly beholden to the United States government for its security. It feels like it is, and what the events in Ukraine and with Crimea and with Russia just brings all of that up again. You know, in whose orb do we wanna be? Poland clearly has said we wanna be in the US orb. Does it in the midst of all of that then have a criminal investigation that honestly and truthfully reveals that the CIA set up a secret detention center and tortured people in it during the Bush years? You know, how do you, I hate when people say it's complicated, but it's really complicated. And the politics completely override, I'm sorry to say, any desire to safeguard human rights. And I think it's always been that way. You know, I guess we're not naive, but in the current environment, it is really difficult to see how a government would ever, you know, do the right thing, take the principled stand. And I think if any government has tried to do it I'm going to toss Poland a bone here and say that the Polish government has tried. I still think they should do it. I think they're obliged under the law to have the criminal investigation. They know a lot, they know people were held on their territory, but I also see the political landscape and we'll just have to wait and see whether Poland can withstand the pressure. Interviewer: Well, I guess I'll ask you one more time, is there, you've pretty much brought it up to date, but is there something else that maybe you're thinking you want to share otherwise? - No, I don't think so. Thank you very much for the opportunity. Interviewer: It was really eloquent, it was a really wonderful presentation. I need to wait 20 seconds. Johnny has to do 20 seconds of room tone. - We don't say anything? - No. - Okay. Johnny: Begin room tone. Okay.