Interviewer: Okay. Okay. Good morning. - Good morning. Interviewer: We are very grateful to you for participating in a Witness to Guantanamo project. We invite you to speak of your experiences and involvement with the detainees who were held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. We are hoping to provide you with opportunity to tell your story in your own words. We are creating an archive of stories that people in America and around the world will have a better understanding of what you and others have contributed and experienced and a future generations must know what happened at Guantanamo, and by telling your story you are contributing to history. - I don't like to view myself as contributing to history, that makes you sound very old. (both laughs) Interviewer: Well, the sad thing is that this might just be 20 years before people will pay attention to what really happened. If at any time during this interview you would like to take a break, please tell us and you- - You obviously haven't learned the lessons of Guantanamo, you're meant to abuse me, keep the lights on rather bright and don't let me move for hours. You're never gonna get the answers you want if you're nice like that. - Well, it's your show, Clive, so whatever answers you wanna give us. And I think we're ready to go. - Okay. Good. Interviewer: I want to start with just if you could tell us your name and where you're from and where you're living now, and a little bit about your age and nationality. Instructor: And just one thing, the closer to me you are the better. Interviewer: Okay. Got it. Okay. Why don't we start with your education and a little background. - My name's Clive Stafford Smith, I'm the Director of a charity called Reprieve in London. I grew up in Britain, near Cambridge and went to America when I was 18 because I was obsessed with the death penalty and I thought I'd come over to America and sorted all out. I had the naive day of youth and I spent 26 years in the United States representing people on death row and I got American citizenship while I was there which was extraordinarily important for the Guantanamo work that started in 2002. And the very beginning I became very annoyed at the fact that we were doing that and struck me as profoundly hypocritical. So I got involved in that from the early days and then when Emily and I moved back to England in 2004 that became a very large focus of what I was doing for the next few years, so that's it. Interviewer: Could you give us a little background on your schooling? - Oh my goodness, you wanna know about my schooling? I went to a old backronym hall school in Suffolk, I went then to Radley College just outside Oxford for my what we call public school which naturally means it's private. And then I went to America at that point went to UNC at Chapel Hill for three years and then I went to Columbia Law School. Interviewer: And currently what are you doing? - Now, I run a charity called Reprieve. We do two things, one is representing people facing the death penalty around the world and the second is trying to help represent people who are in secret prisons and reunite them with their legal rights. Interviewer: Let's begin, if you could tell us how you got involved in Guantanamo? - Well, I remember vividly in January, 2002 when George Bush announced that we were gonna have this Guantanamo thing, look I've always had a philosophy about the death penalty and it is basically that we pick on a group of people, we instruct the folk of America to hate them and we do that in order to divert their attention from our other feelings. So we have a terrible crime system for example, in your lens I was held up in the U S seven times I think. And so rather than do sensible things about crime we try to blame it all on the people on death row. And then rather than allow the fact the emperor wears no clothes to be seen by people we put death row miles away from anywhere. We have opinions like Jura Tana versus Murray that says that someone on death row has no constitutional right to counsel, we have Herrera versus Colin's that said that if you're innocent of the death penalty that's not relevant under the constitution to whether you should be executed. These insane rules that are designed to make sure that no one shows that this whole death row process is a mockery achieves nothing and just diverts everyone's attention. Now, the moment they opened Guantanamo Bay or announced they were gonna open it it struck me as exactly the same except far worse. Here where we in the name of democracy and the rule of law setting up a prison in Cuba for goodness sake which is where we've said they haven't had any human rights for several decades and we were gonna hold these people in Cuba. They were gonna be a discreet group of people who we were taught to hate, who we were told by the root of all evil, these Muslim people with beards. They weren't allowed lawyers, I mean, far from worse than death row, at least on death row you could have some volunteer lawyer but in Guantanamo you couldn't even have a lawyer, you were gonna be held that intermittently. And I looked at that and I thought, my goodness, it's always hypocrisy that basically is the yeast that fertilizes and ferment hatred and here was the most hypocritical thing that we as a nation could possibly do. What was it gonna do? Is gonna everyone off around the world. So my natural instinct was to sue Georgia Bush, I mean, who would rather do anything else? So that's, I got involved at the very beginning. Interviewer: So you left Louisiana then? - No. I was still doing capital trials. I mean, this suddenly sprung up on us and those in the middle of a lot of capital cases, so I wasn't gonna stop that. But one of my lifetime weaknesses has always been saying no to things. So the fact that I thought I'd probably had 30 capital cases at the time but that wasn't gonna stop me from volunteering to Guan. Interviewer: How did you volunteer? How do you find clients to represent? - Well, there was a bigger issue in the early days than that (clears throat) and that was finding any allies. I mean, I thought that all of my death penalty colleagues would love nothing better than to go sue Bush and I immediately contacted people and I was frankly very surprised and looking back on it I was naive but I thought we would all want to do that. But I underestimated I think how roar America was after 9/11. In growing up in Europe I think we were much more used to these sorts of nightmares and then my parents would talk about World War II and the Blitz and my mum would talk about sitting under a table while the bombs were coming over. And so that was very much more real whereas when you think historically about the U S, how many times is the U S actually ever been invaded? You could talk about 1812 or more technically 1813 when the British came and burned the White House, you could talk about Bill Harper and then you could talk about 9/11. That's basically it really. And so America was just very un-used to this sort of horror and consequently responded even left wing Americans I think responded much more tentatively to this process. So it took a while and that it was only Joe Margulies and then Mike Ratner CCR who responded to the sorts of emails I was sending out about how we needed to go sue people. Interviewer: So you send out emails to a number of people and those two responded? - Well, I got in touch with Joe actually, I got in touch with a whole bunch of death penalty friends of mine and most were actually very uninterested in it. Joe was immediately interested and it was Joe who then put me in touch with CCR and the three of us got together on it. Interviewer: And what was your design? - Well, I think our basic thing was, this is wrong and we went to law school all of us to represent powerless people who were being trampled on by the government. Now I gotta say, I assume that the U S had captured a lot of people in Afghanistan who were up to no good, but I thought they'd make some mistakes and the issue here was simply a matter of a fair trial, it was not whether they were. I wasn't going into this thinking everyone's totally innocent, I turned out that actually was much more cynical than I should have been. But that was the notion, that if we're here for democracy and the rule of law we gotta have the rule of law, we can't just throw it away at the first moment we panic. Interviewer: What did you three do then at the beginning? - We wanted to sue but we had to have a client. And immediately after they opened Guantanamo there was a lawsuit in California actually called Coalition of Clergy brought by various very well-intentioned people but they didn't really have the clients they needed, they were doing it as sort of a bunch of clergy as next friends for the prisoners and predictably they got thrown out on standing grounds. I'd done a lot of this next friend stuff in death penalty cases because when a person becomes mentally ill on death row and gets terribly depressed and wants to drop their appeals, you're inevitably in the situation of litigating through an ex friend. So I was pretty familiar with that as well as Joe, I think. And so we knew we had to get family members and the only place we could immediately find them was Britain because, of course the U S wasn't publishing a list of prisoners in Guantanamo. We didn't get a list of prisoners until May the 16th, 2006, so it wasn't for another four and a half years. So we had to find out who these people were. That was something that offended me, that a democratic government would bang up a bunch of people in prison and keep secret who they were, I mean, how stolen is can you get. So I was annoyed at that but the way you would find out about it was the U S would tell the British government that they had British people, the British government would then tell the families, the families would go to British lawyers, in this case Gareth Pierce and Gareth got involved with us, contacted us and she gave us authorizations. And so those were the first clients and that's why it was Russell versus Bush was Shafiq was the first person whose family gave us an authorization. Interviewer: Didn't you also have a connection with Hicks. - Well, that was the next one was Australia. Typically again, these were the more open societies where you could find it out and typically also there were the people that we had contacts with the British and the Australians. Interviewer: And what do you think in terms of the litigation do you think it was gonna go forward, were you positive? - Oh yeah. I always thought we'd win. I mean, there's one thing about this litigation stuff is that when justice is on your side you actually do win 99% of the time if you do the job right. The only people who get killed are the ones who are badly represented really. I mean, that's not true always, in fact, I'm in the middle of writing something at length about how fluid the justice system is. But if you recognize the floors, you can normally get to the right result. Now, there was a big pressure to do the wrong thing if we'd lost in the Supreme court would have just carried on until we won, that's just the nature of the beast. Interviewer: But you were positive throughout even when you were losing the law court? - Yeah. I mean, I've always thought about Guantanamo, Joe was the one who first said this actually and I think it's a lovely phrase I wish I could take credit for it but it's not mine. Joe said in one of our early meetings that the point of Guantanamo was all about secrecy, that the Bush administration wanted to be seen to be doing something though they couldn't capture bin Laden for goodness sake, here we are years later we still haven't captured bin Laden or Milaroma or the big time guys. So to cover up that huge floor and the process they banged up a bunch of people and said, "Look, these guys in orange with beards." So what Joe said was that their interest is in secrecy because that's the only way it did suits their purpose. If we open it up, they will close it down, this is mantra and that was a very wise thing. So our goal always following the rules legitimately trying to change the rules, not breaking them was to get as much information out about the place as possible, and so from quite early days information was coming out about prisoners being abused and so forth. Interviewer: How did that happen? - Well normally for example, it was people who'd been in Bagram and released without going to Guantanamo were the first sources of information, every now and then there was someone who had been brought into Guantanamo, like I remember there was a doctor who was there in the early days who was just horrified by what he saw. And as we brought the lawsuit we tended to become the fulcrum of the process from when people would contact us when they had issues they wanted to talk about. So that's gradually how the information came out. Ultimately of course it was when we got in there to see the prisoners but until that, which was 2004 up until then it was more getting information from families. Interviewer: Did you apply to visit the prisoners earlier? - Very early on there were two problems. One was the civil litigation, the habeas and the other was the military and Joe and I both decided we were gonna try to represent people in the military commissions. So from the very beginning we were applying for security clearances and so forth. The "military" lost our applications twice, we had to file them three times and it took 15 months. And the people in the military office were telling us this is a fast, they haven't lost them, they've thrown them away they don't want your people involved. But in the end we created it enough of a fast that we did get security clearances and that was just about when the whole process, when we won in the Supreme court. Interviewer: Do you think they would have lost anyone's application, so deliberately yours and Joe's because of who you were? - I don't think they would have lost a member of the Republican party who was sworn to ensure that America look good under all circumstances even if she was torturing people. No, I think they would have allowed that one to come through but I don't think it was simply because Joe and I were death penalty lawyers, we were out there very publicly trying to illustrate the floors of Guantanamo and they didn't want that. Interviewer: And what were you thinking during these two years before you went to Guantanamo? Did your thoughts change as to what America was like or? - Well, no. Not a lot. I do remember the day we filed the lawsuit February 19th, 2002 because I was very stupid and naive. I never used to talk to the media really and death penalty cases in the old days, it was very rare because it normally didn't suit your client's purposes, and I never watched television. So when we filed the lawsuit in Washington, DC there was some media interest and (clears throat) so I forget whether it's Fox television or if someone like that wanted to interview someone and Joe and Mike I think both watch television and knew better than they did, so they said, "Why don't you do it?" "So fine I'll go and do it." So I went along to the studio in Washington and whoever this chat was, who was interrogating me asked me 13 times if I wasn't a traitor to the United States and 13 times I gave him the same answer which was the people who are traitors to the United States are the ones who are abandoning their principles and now I think I'm actually standing up for what this country is about. But it was very hostile and I had an unlisted number in your lens because death penalty work wasn't terribly popular but somehow people found that number and I got some fantastic messages that night when I got back to Louisiana that night. It was in the middle of the night, it was like three and four in the morning these people calling up saying that I should be strung up and have various parts of my body ripped off. So it was quite hostile and that was, I had encountered a certain amount of hostility in some of the higher profile capital cases but probably nothing quite like that. Interviewer: Right. How did you handle that? Were you afraid? - No. It's good for fundraising quite frankly. I don't really think these nutters are gonna do anything, I hope I'm never proven wrong. Interviewer: And your spirits were always upbeat throughout these two years until you- - Well, I had the better part of the deal actually because the way we divided it up was basically this, that Joe particularly and CCR were doing the litigation. And I've never been that interested in the legal part of all of this, arguing about the number of angels who can dance on a head of a pin strikes me as the dangerous part of the law. My role was more going around trying to find clients and so back then, let's say you're Yemeni and you've got some child or brother or husband in Guantanamo, what are you gonna do about it? You're probably semi-literate, you live in Yemen, the per capita income in Yemen is $330 a year. If you wanted to hire an American law firm you could pay for one lawyer for 40 minutes and you'd have to get in touch with them in the first place and then you couldn't eat for the rest of the year. So these people were obviously in a position where they couldn't possibly find legal representation. So because I traveled to Europe a lot and that was at least halfway to Yemen and other places the way we divided it up was I would go and try to find these folk and get authorizations, so I would fly for, but the first time I went to Paris, that wasn't so bad. That was like Christmas of '02, I think and then I started going to other countries. So I went to Yemen on an Amnesty International program and what we did was I'd show up there and hold a press conference, say, "Hi, I'm American, I'm here to help you, come to the hotel and we'll represent your family member for free." And then a whole bunch of people would show up and it was great and that was the way, before we got into Guantanamo it was the only way to get authorizations to represent people. Interviewer: And can you give us a sense of how many people you had? - Yeah, I mean, I think overall by the time the Supreme court ruled in June, 2004 I think I'd rounded up about 80 authorizations from different places. And there were some stories there too, I went to Jordan and I was trying, I did the same thing, held a press conference said the Americans got all these people, we're here to help, start getting hostile calls from the secret police. And the secret police called up and said, "You will report to our headquarters immediately," and I told them to piss off because I was busy. And so they called up again started saying all these really scandalous things which I'm not gonna repeat about me, not surprisingly none of which were true. So in the end I went to the secret police headquarters and I got a taxi and I said, "Take me to the secret police headquarters" and the guy went pale. And it was only then I started thinking, "Oh, this was not such a good thing," and I hadn't done anything about it. I hadn't called my office to tell him I was about to go to the secret police headquarters or anything like that. So on the way I thought I started getting a bit worried, and I go in there and there's this long corridor or long like corridor with black doors leading off. And so I go to them, led into this office and there these two guys and one's the short guy with red hair and the other's this other chap. And I say, "Oh, hi, I'm Clive Stafford Smith," and I show him my passport, "Who are you?" And they say, "We do not use names in this room," (laughs) and I was really quite worried. So at that point I fibbed, I'm afraid and I said, "Look, I've told the British embassy that if I'm not out in an hour they'd come and get me and you got to help me. Your job is to help me represent your nationals." So it all was a bit hostile for a bit but then I was being pumped some colonialists and they backed down and actually in the end they did promise to help and I told them, "I'm gonna identify you, I'm gonna take down your description," and sure enough I did actually. The guy I was talking to, it a guy called Colonel Ali Bujak. I found out from a lawyer there in Amman who was head of their secret police. So those sorts of things happened which was a bit worrying. Interviewer: Did the CIA or FBI ever contact you during those early days? - No. When I had to get my security clearance and be interviewed by the FBI, I did of course tell them that they asked me, "Have you been in touch with any foreign security service?" And I said, "A few guys in Jordan but then you probably know that better than I do." So but no, that was the only contact I had. Interviewer: Did they acknowledge that they didn't know that? - No. Interviewer: Could you tell a story, how'd you get Saudi clients? - I went off to Yemen, actually I went to Bahrain and Bahrain was easy, there were only six Bahraini clients and they were very friendly, the whole Bahraini folk. But the only way to get, I tried to go to Saudi but it was impossible to get in there. The Bahrain Human Rights Committee who were helping me there were just really great and they, we did a thing in the media, Alarabiya or whatever, telling people we're here and if you want help come here. And so a lot of Saudis families crossed the border and came to meet us in Bahrain and then lots of people called up from Libya and all sorts of places when they saw that on Arabic television. Interviewer: And you had the funding to be able to help all these? - No, I wasn't. We didn't have any funding. It was just on my own time. Interviewer: Who did fund you, there was the CCS funding? - No. Like when I went to Yemen Amnesty I went on an Amnesty thing and they paid for the flight but basically we weren't funded to do it. And I kept it very separate from my charity in New Orleans because I didn't want them getting in trouble. Interviewer: And you continued to represent people in New Orleans at the same time. - Yeah. Interviewer: So could you describe the first time you finally got to Guantanamo, what that was like? - Well, that was November, 2004, Joe and I went down together and I was representing Moazzam Begg and Richard Belmar, another Brit and Joe was representing David Hicks, and it was just bizarre, I'll never forget. I mean, don't get me wrong there's some very nice people down there, right and I would never want to tar all the military with the same brush. There was some of them were just very decent and we got great conversations in early days, they were very open, particularly the escorts and the junior people that talk about anything which was fun. Later on it became much more adversarial, but it was totally an irony free zone Guantanamo Bay was. As you get there, of course the slogan that they had the motto 'Honor Bound to Defend Freedom' well, that's a joke. You couldn't really say, it's a bit like (mumbles) those people could take offense to that if they knew what you're talking about. But it was rather similar, I mean, the idea that this was to defend freedom and the first thing we did was bang everyone up without any freedom was rather rich. But I remember going into McDonald's, is very nice Colonel who was our escort that day and we're going into McDonald's and they saluted each other. And so as we go on the junior guy salutes the Colonel, it says "Honor bounds Sir" and the Colonel salutes back and says "To defend freedom soldier," and I laughed as one word, I thought it was a joke put on for my benefit, but everyone on the base did that back then. I mean, they learned that it was just so stupid, they stopped doing it after a while, but to begin with there all these very odd things like that and it was just this goldfish bowl that for two years had existed totally outside contact with the real world. And so people did things that were just extraordinary and it was fascinating. I mean, early days the nice guys who showed us around would take us on little tours to go see the original camp which is now overgrown with vines and things and look very airy, but then of course you got to go down to the real camps and there was, oh, there was a sign on the way down there I'll never forget which was, it wasn't principal but it's something like principal of the week or whatever of the week and it was compassion (laughs) God! Here are these guiding and I spent days talking to these guys about being beaten up. Anyway, and I went in and I saw Moazzam and I had thought Joe and I had talked about this, we'd done a lot of work with people in prison. And some of the guys later were civil lawyers and didn't really have the same experience but the one thing you never do when you go in to see a client who's charged with a crime is you come in and say, "Hi, did you do it?" And that's the way to lose immediate credibility because then you just become another, you become part of the process and fulfill everyone's stereotype that you are indeed just another interrogator. And indeed when lawyers were gonna come down to Guantanamo, the interrogators had posed as lawyers and pretended they were lawyers, so that was another problem. But the other thing you don't do is you don't come in and do what so many lawyers did, which was say, "Oh, this is an attorney client meeting, everything you say to me is confidential." I mean, come on. What year were you born. The idea they weren't listening in was silly and of course they were listening and in fact we caught them at it because after that first visit they interrogated Joe's client about exactly the things that he had just been talking to them about, I mean, they weren't very good at it. And so it was clear that they were listening in and the only way to maintain any sense of credibility with your client was to start off with that, I always start off with them saying first, "I'm American and I'm British," so I get to apologize for everybody. And I'm really sorry that not withstanding what you may or may not have done that we have thrown away all up principles and treated you this way. And second, that I would always tell them that, let's assume everything we're talking about as being tape-recorded and I think we were naive not to think so. And third, "I'm not in the least bit interested in what they say you've done. What we're gonna talk about is what they've done to you, not what you've done according to them." And so I spent the first three days talking to Moazzam Begg about how he'd been abused and I gotta say, I had no concept really. I mean, we had pled, we'd had an argument back in February, 2002 about what we should plead when we originally sue them, should we say they're innocent? We don't know. Should we say they've been tortured? There were rumors coming out already even at that early date that the Americans were abusing prisoners. And my strong view actually was that given we were hearing this we should say that's what happened on information and belief to our clients and let the government disprove it if they wanted to, they're the ones with control over the information. So we did in the end. We pled both of the clients were innocent and that we thought and that they were being abused. And I thought that might be true and we'd see it a proper hearing and a proper court but I never really understood how true it was until much, much later when, three days I spent with Moazzam talking about how he'd been tortured, writing it all down on my notes. And you couldn't take your notes out with you, so classified. And this is really what Joe was talking about when he said, "We've got to open it up," that they would classify everything that was embarrassing to them. And it was so frustrating, you're giving notes to the authorities, the authorities would then mail your notes to Washington, take like three weeks to get there, then you had to go to Washington to this secure facility and somewhere in Washington and review the notes and then type them up and then get them to declassify stuff, ridiculous process. And there was nothing in those notes that should have been classified, it was all a conflation of national security with political embarrassment. And what happened was I typed up a 30 page memorandum about Moazzam Begg's abuse, they classified every single word and they said that, I had this argument nice, nice chap, he was just following orders, it's not like he was evil or anything but I had this argument with the guy saying, "How can this be classified?" And he said that these things, but what I would classify as torture reflect the methods and means of interrogation. But I said, "Look, there's a whole page on here about how you murdered two people, that Moazzam witnessed two homicides in Bagram, how's that methods and means of interrogation?" He said, "Well, yes it is. You frighten people into talking but some people get killed." So then there was a section about the mental illness, the mental problems that Moazzam had suffered from all this abuse. I said, "How has that methods and means of interrogation?" He said, "No, no, no, no, that's not, that's your client privacy rights." But I tell you what we waived the privacy rights. No you can't. So the 30 pages of this stuff and not one word was allowed to come out public. The only reason I can talk about it today was, I was sitting there very frustrated and annoyed and so I thought what can I do? And I thought, I'd tell you what. So I wrote a letter to Tony Blair, "Dear Tony, in re torture and abuse of your British citizens by your American allies." And then I detailed it for a couple of pages attached to that 30 page stuff and at the end I said, "Anything that you can't read in this letter has been censored by your friends, the Americans because they don't want you to see it. Yours, sincerely Clive." So they censored everything except for the first line and the last line. So all it said was in re torture, British people and then everything taken out of this has been censored by your friends, the Americans. And that was lovely exhibit that was then unclassified, black, black, black, black, black and it just made them look really stupid. So at that point they revised the rules a bit, I mean, it wasn't just what I was doing, other lawyers had similar stuff. And so finally they started beginning to let some of that stuff out but there's still an awful lot that gets censored. Interviewer: What did Tony Blair do in response to- - Oh, he didn't do anything. Tony Blair was so far up, George Bush thought that he wouldn't do anything. Interviewer: And what situation was Moazzam at the time you interviewed him? We see in isolation? - He was in isolation in Camp Echo and all by himself. And this thing, I mean the room we're in right now is probably eight feet by 14 feet, Moazzam cell was a bit wider than this, about the same length but it was divided down the middle with a metal divider. And so he would sleep in the bed over there and a guard, this was before they had cameras, a guard would sit over here watching him 24 hours a day. (clears throat) this was as boring and awful for the guards as it was for the prisoners in some ways. And back then the guards would talk to us and they would tell us all how horrible it was and along with a bunch of other things. Interviewer: Did Moazzam talk to the guard? - Well, he told me this story which there was sort of really illustrative and rather sweet. One day there was a woman who came in who was from Alabama and she was small woman and she was sitting there and she's trembling, and Moazzam who's just incredibly well-spoken polite guy, says to her, "What's wrong? Are you okay?" And she does not answer for a bit and then finally she says, "Well, is it true?" And he says, "Is what true?" And she says, "Is it true that you are Hannibal the cannibal Lecter and if I get too close to the fence here you'll bite my face." And when he stopped laughing, he gave a therapy for three weeks and they became friends. But what's most important about that story apart from its absurdity is that the guards would be given this propaganda exercise all the time and first they'd go to a place often in Nevada or someplace, whether it'd be trained about Guantanamo about how dangerous people were, how wicked they were and so forth. And then when they were dealing with an individual they'd get a special little story about how wicked they were but what that did was first it was meant to divide the guards, avoid the Stockholm syndrome and all that sort of stuff and divide the guards from the prisoners but it created this hostility. So the guards would behave badly to the prisoners because they were afraid, the prisoners would then respond in kind and so this hostility would escalate, and an awful lot of that happened in Guantanamo. On the other hand some of the guards soar through it and I would spend a lot of time in the early days telling the guards about these guys because I wanted to try to reconcile them a bit which of course was not the government program. Interviewer: So in the early days you were allowed to communicate with the guards. - In the early days when we were waiting for our next prisoner to come the guard would sit there and we'd just chat. And I remember so many things, it was actually like one guard had a cap and he'd written inside, the rim of the cap, "Al-Qaeda are pussies" (chuckles) and there's just all these little vignettes that you'd come across, but actually you'd talk to him. And (clears throat) with a lot of the guards they were as misery, they were treated very badly. They would be down there for six months or a year, they couldn't leave, they had to pay for their own flights if they wanted to leave and there's nothing to do in Guantanamo. And so their life was pretty miserable too. And in the early days the guards would open up about this, tell us what was going on and there was nothing that they said to me that I couldn't talk about, so I would publish it because I wanted the truth out there. I wrote a whole book about it in the end. And I think this is why, this sort of thing was why they instituted near rules. One of the guards told me that they were told that the lawyers are the enemy and that was because we were going around saying things. I was very flattered when one of the guards years later I met afterwards and he'd read my book and he said, "You know that's really how it was." And I thought it was rather flattered by that, I can't believe I have an insight into the reality of everything, but that was interesting that we were viewed as the enemy because I think we were telling it as it was and everyone else was forbidden from doing that. Interviewer: Were you treated as the enemy? - Yeah. Interviewer: How were you treated? - Well, I mean, look, I will say that not withstanding the fact that I was taken in by the Jordanian secret police, Guantanamo was far more intimidating than that, far more. I had a deal with my wife that when I was down there if I didn't communicate with her every night with either an email or a telephone call where I mentioned the name of our dog in it, that she was to get Joe and get me out of there because that meant that I'd been taken in and they threatened to arrest me five times for total frivolous nonsense. I mean, one time they accused me, you remember when there was the three suicides in Guantanamo, they came up with this theory that I had provoked those, me and Shaker had provoked them and they were trying to coerce one of my other clients, Mohammed el Gharani into giving them a statement saying that I was behind the suicides, the perverse lawyer that I was I wanted people to die in Guantanamo to make a point. I mean the better one, the one that was actually rather more fun was the case of the contraband underpants. I got this letter from the military accusing me and another guy in my office of smuggling under armor underpants into Shaker Aamer and Speedo swimming trunks. Now let me be quite clear on the record here today that anyone who shares Speedo swimming trunks with anyone should be locked up, I mean, they are the most tasteless Australian things but when I got this letter I read it and I thought, is it April fool's day? Can this really be serious? I mean, first, so what if someone gives Shaker underpants? Interviewer: Could you describe what Shaker is? - Shaker is a British resident, he lived in Britain, he's married to a British woman, Saudi origin in Guantanamo Bay and he was a big spokesman because he's very eloquent in English and he would speak a lot. Shaker is quite hard to shut up in fact and so he became the spokesman for the very brief time in 2006, when they had a prisoner committee, he was the spokesman for that committee. So anyway, Shaker, they accused me of this thing with the underpants and my wife Emily has a very, very wise thing which is when she knows I'm very angry at night about something like that she unplugs the internet so I can't send a letter out that I might later regret. So I wrote this scathing letter back to the government saying, number one, I don't see what's the problem with this but number two, I most certainly didn't do this. I do legal briefs, not the other sort of briefs. And let's go through this one thing at a time. First, the swimming trunks, the only place that Shaker Aamer could swim would be his toilet. So my legal advice to you and this is all free is that if you wanna stop it you just put a sign above the toilet saying, "We don't piss in your swimming pool, so please don't swim in our toilet." And that should take care of that problem. Under Aamer underpants, I have no idea what they are but I Googled them and discovered you can't spell them, but beyond that they're apparently on sale in the next and it seems to me that the Sherlock Holmes would realize that it was one of your soldiers who gave these things to Shaker. So I write this long letter and I sent a copy to the New York Times and the Washington Post both of whom published it the next day and the military was furious. And so I thought we were onto a good thing here, whenever you piss him off at times it is normally good. So then I was telling that story at Anita Roddick's funeral and this Anita was a supporter of our charity. And so then Joe Koray who's Vivian Westwood son who runs Azure on provocateur came out with a slinky set of orange underwear with the women that said 'fair trial my ass' across the back and that was the next stage and then lush cosmetics did the same and it was all fun. But the bottom line of that letter was it was threatening me with 40 years in prison for espionage, for smuggling something in and violation of their rules. Now, this is an illustration of how out of touch with the real world these people were because obviously I didn't do it, obviously someone in the team did it. So what if they did it? It was no threat to anybody and how dare they suggest that I had anything to do with it. Anyway and that was one of the more amusing ones, the other ones were not so amusing, it was really quite threatening. Interviewer: You think they selected you more than other? - Well, in the early days they thought I was a troublemaker which I wasn't, I was merely doing my job. Fortunately along later came David Reams and a few other people who were really rude to him 'cause some of these big gum time lawyers were used to being treated much better, I was used to being mistreated. You don't get treated terribly well in death penalty cases and so I was in I always got along quite well with the people but I would stand up for the prisoner's rights and sometimes that annoyed the more senior people among them. But then some of these corporate lawyers really angered the guards, so I think at that point I became less of a target. Interviewer: I had heard stories that sometimes you get more trouble detainees that their lives were Jewish in that (indistinct) - Well, there was, one of the very difficult things was establishing trust with the clients. These were people who had been horribly mistreated and for years we didn't see them to lead them mistreated for almost three years. And then all of us doing the cases had to be American, you couldn't go if you weren't American. So imagine walking in saying, "Hi, I'm an American, I'm here to help you," after three years of abuse. So it was very, very hard to establish trust and some of the lawyers would undercut that trust themselves by the things, such things as saying, "Did you do it? What did you do? This is all privilege, no one's listening," and so forth. But far more to the point, there was a very concerted effort on the part of the interrogators to undermine the trust and confidence in the lawyers and some of that began with them the interrogators going in and posing as lawyers. The interrogators would say, "If you have a lawyer you're never gonna get out of here. If you've just talked to us we're your ticket out of here." And they would point to people who had already gone home who hadn't had lawyers, which there were quite a lot. I mean, by the time we got in there there had been 200 people released already, but then they did far more insidious things. And the Jewish bit happened to a number of us that happened to me and I should say I had no idea that my dad was Jewish until I was 37 because Britain is sort of pretty antisemitic and no one had thought to tell me. And so no one knew that except from me and the people I'd tell because I was rather proud of the fact, but then I go into see, it was again Shaker for some reason. And Shaker says to me, "You're Jewish, aren't you?" And I said, "Shaker, technically I'm not, this is matrilineal but so what?" And we had a long conversation and we agreed that actually it was good if we were all Semites because it was the non Semites we had to worry about. But then the next time I went to visit, I was visiting a guy from Jordan, nice chap who's quite conservative. And he's saying, "Oh, Clive, do you know what they're saying about you?" And I say, "No," by now I was quite excited because when they say this stuff, the first person they said it to I think it was Tom Wilner and you can imagine how Tom was furious that the people down there were saying that Jewish lawyers were somehow wicked. So Tom had immediately come out and gone to the Washington Post and embarrassed them a lot for saying that. But so now I was kind of excited, if they said something rude about me I want you to know what it was because then I'd spread it around the world after it had gone through the classification process, of course 'cause it's classified that they're telling people I'm Jewish. Anyway, the second one was this guy from Jordan and he says, "Do you know what they're saying?" "I don't know. No, no, what is it, please tell me." He say, "No, it's too embarrassing," and he's going all red. And I said, "Please, please tell me what it is." And finally he says, "They are saying that Jew Clive like to have sex with men." (laughs) Now, the problem is they're just playing off on people's prejudices or perceived prejudices and I don't have time and a discussion with the client to have a long discussion about how we shouldn't care about people's sexuality and so forth. So I would have to point to my wedding ring and say it's not true which was a shame but it was that sort of stuff that they did all the time and they had one particular technique that really did undermine trust and that was this, fairly early on in the process I think they must have figured out that I was talking to people about how they were being abused and that was my interest was then to get through the classification process, all this evidence of abuse, use that to embarrass them and finally get the people set free, which was good, it was working very well and it worked for me and it worked for Joe and a number of people. So the interrogators then- Interviewer: One second, do you have your eye cell phone? Instructor: Yes, I think we just kill that. (indistinct) Interviewer: Clive, we don't have one, do you? - No. Interviewer: Sorry. I didn't realize. I'm sorry Clive. - That's all right. (indistinct chattering) Woman: I was wondering if I should close the window. Interviewer: I think it's okay. - Yeah. Please don't close the window I'm being interrogated under the hot lights. So I can just carry on from where I was. What they did with the prisoners was they then told the prisoners that actually this is all a big scam, that when I would ask you as a prisoner how it was that you were abused and how terrible it was, that then allowed them to work out what the things were that you most hated and just do it to you again. So one of the prisoners explained this to me at great length that we now know this is all, maybe you're not a CIA agent, maybe you are but you're certainly being used by them because they're listening in and they're working out what we've most dislike and then they're doing it to us more. So there's this perverse thing, it was just, it really was so difficult to think of the right word because they are so overused like CAFCA esque and all the rest of it. Those words were horribly of used in Guantanamo because they were so appropriate, but it was just horrendous the way that everything was twisted around as a big line. Interviewer: My understanding is that maybe this was even a successful tactic, what they were doing when you were portrayed as a CIA agent or possibly or that at least they were listening in and therefore anything that the detainees said could be used against them, if you will maybe was even that the government was actually smarter than perhaps some people. - Well, I think the government wasn't very smart overall because there were so many things they did that was so intensely counter productive. And what you have to think about ultimately is this, what did it all achieve? If you looked back on September the 12th, 2001 and you looked at all the people in the entire world who could possibly be considered sympathizes with "Al-Qaeda" whatever that may have been, that would have been, you could have written their names on one sheet of paper. Whereas by the time the government had done Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, there were thousands of people out there who hated America and there was a CIA agent who said in 2004 that for every prisoner we hold in Guantanamo there's 10 people who now want to do us harm. Now, I think he underestimated that and if you revisit that today, for every prisoner we held in Guantanamo there's sadly a hundred or a thousand people who want to do as harm. So when you look at the machinations of the people in Guantanamo you can think, "Oh, well that was a clever trick and that was a fantastic ploy," but actually all of this was catastrophic for the United States. And if you had to put a balance, I'd love someone to do an effective sociological study one day, and to the benefit that came out of Guantanamo Bay against the negative impact of it, it's quite hard to test the benefit because all the evidence's classified. I mean, I can't discuss it but I can tell you my impression is that virtually nothing of any relevance or any benefit ever came out of Guantanamo but what you can measure is the negative impact you can look at newspaper articles, you can look at sociological surveys and attitudinal surveys about America and what you can see quite clearly and what could be shown by someone who took the time which I never have is the enormous negative impact of Guantanamo, the catastrophic impact it had on America's reputation which it will take generations to repair. And so in the balance, it doesn't matter what came out that was positive, I doubt that was much at all but it doesn't matter what the negative is so vastly outweighs the positive that all of these little ploys by the people that was just bad news. Interviewer: I wanna go back to two things you said earlier. One is you said that you were sitting they were listening in which a lot of lawyers believed and you said there was some confirmation of that because of the questions that were asked afterwards. Were you videotaped in the very beginning or did that come later to kind of say lawyers were videotaped even if they weren't videotaped? - When we first went there were cameras and they gave you this little tour and it was just, it was a fast, I mean they're very sweet about it, I don't mean that they were nasty or anything but they were so naive to think that I cared or we believed them. They take you into the cell where they had a show cell and on the bed of the show cell they had the orange uniform, a little towel, a bar soap, a game of checkers and couple of other toothbrush, one of the little mini toothbrush and whatever. And they show you, "Oh, these are the comfort items," and then naturally I asked the first question came to mind which is, "Who the hell does he play checkers with, he's by himself, in the solitary cell? Do you play with him?" Oh, no, I wouldn't do that." So that was a ridiculous thing, but then they would show you the camera up in the corner of the room and they would say, "That camera is just watching, it doesn't listen in and on the wall is this buzzer you can press if you need help." And when you press the buzzer, you can talk into it and then while you're pressing they can hear but of course they can't listen into you. Well, the very first time that I used the buzzer, I press the buzzer, I say, "Hi, I need a bottle of water for my client," they talk back. I try talking without pressing the buzzer and sure enough they hear and they talk back. So it's obvious, how stupid do you have to be to figure that one out. Now, whether they were sitting there listening to every word who knows but if I were them I would be because their paranoid view of the world was that these men were full of intelligence they wanted to know. And actually the lawyers were quite good at extracting it out of them because at least they were somewhat more trusted than the interrogators and the lawyers didn't beat the hell out of the prisoners so the prisoners talked a bit more. So one would expect them to tape record it. On that first occasion Joe was talking about very specific things, we have some experience in this, right? I mean, I caught a sheriff in Georgia during this one time where my client thought that he was tape recording us. So what we did was we tell him this long story about where the bodies buried, which we just make up and then we go out and film trying to dig it up. It's quite easy to set people up on that stuff just to check it out, I mean, you hope they're not doing it, but if you give them an enticing enough stuff to follow up that's false then they always follow it up. So it's not hard to check and with Joe that very first time there were things that he and Mandu Habib talked Oh, David Hicks, I forget who it was talked about that immediately the interrogators came in and asked questions that could only be a fruit of that attorney-client visit. That's not surprising, isn't it? And I suspect that they're tape recording this right now. (laughs) I mean, one of the military lawyers told me that they hack into my email and everything. So I'm not surprised my wife and I had a deal where we would periodically send an apologetic message to the CIA saying, "We're really sorry for being so boring, I hate that you have to read all this drivel." Interviewer: How long ago when you told them? - It's about a year ago, two years ago. Interviewer: And nothing you'd mentioned the suicides and I wanted a little bit more about why they felt you participated, but also on those lines recently in perhaps six months ago it came at that perhaps they were homicides and that suicides, is that the same situation? - It's the same three. I mean, look, and again, I don't know why we keep talking about Shaker because I've had like 80 clients down there and there's so many different stories but this was related to Shaker again. When that happened, it was hugely embarrassing to the U S, the three guys had died. And because of the paranoid that's on all sides in this inevitably people didn't believe the U S, you have the U S saying it was suicides and it had all this. (chuckles) There was all this stuff that would go around about the dream of the three cows, I don't know if you've ever heard that one. There was some strange thing and I heard this come full circle, I'd discuss it with the client and then ages later I'd hear it from the authorities about a dream that it would take, that three people had to die before Guantanamo would be closed down. I don't know where that came from but I think someone in the authorities thought that somehow I'd had something to do with it. And I know that they thought that I had put these guys up to do committing suicide because the interrogators start trying to pressure Mohammed el Gharani who was 14 year old kid who they banged up who had been taken under the wing of Shaker. They tried to pressure him into telling him that I had talked about this with Shaker and shaker then instructed Mohammed el Gharani to take the message to the other people to kill himself. I mean, look, first I would never ever do that to any human being, but second if I would ever do that under that setting, but that just showed how desperate they were to point the finger of blame at someone else. It's patently obvious why people were suicidal if indeed they were suicidal in Guantanamo Bay and that's because of the treatment they got but instead they always had to blame the lawyers or somebody. Now, the question about whether it's suicide or not, I don't know the ultimate conclusion but I'll tell you this. There was a theory out there that it had to be homicide because I am Zachary Katz Nelson in our office had taken a statement from Shaker about his abuse and his abuse were detailed very much in an affidavit about exactly what he'd told us. And the autopsy reports on the three men showed injuries to those three men that matched the abuse that Shaker had suffered. So someone put two and two together and made probably five by saying, therefore the abuse that they were all undergoing resulted in the deaths of those three people. My own opinion, I don't think they were murdered and not directly at least because it just seems so unlikely to me that three people died simultaneously even if they were being abused. But what seems patently clear to me is that those three guys committed suicide because they'd so given up the will to live as a result of the suffering they were going through at the same time Shaker was going through, that if they did commit suicide they did it because of the abuse they were going through and perhaps because of some of these wacko things like the dream that everyone was talking about. So that's my uneducated opinion that I didn't really believe in conspiracy theories by and large, much as there were a few conspiracies going on. Interviewer: And do you think they were selectively picking on you if you were five times accused of various? - Well, they picked on me more than those people, more than anyone probably, but that's I think because I was there, I spent nine months in Guantanamo. I went there 23 times, I spent more time than anyone else there and I had many more clients. Look, law firms with 10 lawyers might have half a dozen clients, Reprieve with two lawyers going there had 80. I should say we did a bad job, we didn't have the resources to do that properly and thank goodness the law firms had more resources, but there was just a desperation where we didn't have enough lawyers. So we just were involved much more deeply and I think that's why I and some other, maybe Joe in the early days were viewed as problems. But as I mentioned, I'm glad to say that some of the other lawyers took the heat office when started behaving very aggressively. Interviewer: One of the things that we found in interviewing former detainees is that the people who were more resistant sometimes benefited from that psychologically at the end, perhaps they didn't physically. And when did, if you had any thoughts about people you saw existed and the impact that it had on their lives? - Well, it's difficult because there are many sides to this. I mean, you may be thinking for example about some prisoners where it's true, someone like Omar Diguys who was so angry all the time in Guantanamo and he was so confrontational and I would see him all the time. And Omar was tremendously helpful to me because he had trained in the Lore and Britain and he had a much better concept of the law, but nonetheless Omar was very paranoid. And at one point he wouldn't meet with me because he was convinced I was part of the enemy or part of the problem. But Omar came out in some ways better off perhaps because he had loosed a lot of his anger while he was in there, so when he came out he didn't feel the need to but you've got to see what the cost was. I mean, he was blinded in one eye when he was beaten up by the ERF team down there, so there was a cost to him and there was a cost to everybody. Samuel Lithy ended up being paralyzed but he was taken to hospital for something he didn't wanna go to hospital and none of the prisoners thought that they were gonna be properly treated there, they were terrified of going to hospital because so many people had amputations and so forth against their will and they didn't want it. So Sammy didn't want to go to the hospital, they took him to hospital for some relatively minor thing, beat the hell out of him there and paralyzed him and he was in a wheelchair. Far more severe I think are the psychological injuries that people suffered in some ways from that confrontation sometimes. There's one person I'm thinking of who is just psychotic because he's been put through so much. So it may be that with some people, if they were confrontational to a certain degree perhaps that helped them deal with it in much the same way as resisting any indoctrination process can help. But overall, I think those prisoners suffered more in other ways and then there were people who tried very hard to be non-confrontational and a classic example of that would be Samuel Hodge who was my client who is an Al Jazeera journalist. Sammy's just the nicest guy in the world and the guards loved him, he was always nice to him. He referred to them as the fifth column because they would tell him everything and indeed when I would go see him far from taking them news of the outside world he'd tell me about the stock markets and all these things I'm totally uninterested in, that he'd got out of the guards and he told me, he gave me a complete list of every single prisoner in Guantanamo Bay with their names, their ISN numbers that he had made up from, he's a journalist and that was his job was collecting information and that was the first time I had a complete list of the prisoners which was hugely helpful. That again was classified, I had to take it through the classification process but at least we had it so we could figure out in the secure facility who was who. But Sammy eventually after all that time went on hunger strike and he became totally paranoid about things because they were abusing him so bad. The hunger strike was a really awful aspect of the prison because, the first issue was whether they're gonna force feed folk. Now, that's unethical if a competent hunger strike, it goes on hunger strike, the Tokyo Declaration says you can't do that but the U S just ignored that and force fed them. But to begin with, they force fed them as best they could by putting a tube up their nose and leaving the tube there and just force feeding them twice a day and so forth and it was no more painful and it had to be. But then they started making it gratuitously painful and I will never forget General Cratique went in the New York Times and said publicly boasted effectively that we're gonna make it "Inconvenient" for these prisoners to go on hunger strike and what they did to make it inconvenient was they pulled the tube out every time they fed them. So there's this 110 centimeter tube had force up your nose, forced the food into you, and then pull it out again, excruciatingly painful and they'd do that twice a day every day and they did this to try to coerce people to stop the hunger strikes. Well, Sammy went through that for a year and it was excruciating and well, he was never confrontational, he was abused in a way that can only be considered a gratuitous torture and that's had a major, major impact on him in the long term. I mean, he does better than some prisoners coming out of Guantanamo because he has a job, we works with Al Jazeera, but it's been very hard on him. (coughs) Interviewer: Being compliant didn't necessarily protect you or make your life a little easier in Guantanamo (indistinct) - Being compliant didn't necessarily help and there was another big problem and this is a problem I've encountered in death penalty cases which is if you're totally innocent. Now, when I first went down there in '04 I thought I was gonna have a lot of explaining to do for some of these prisoners that, Rumsfeld had said they were all captured on the battlefield and who was I to know differently, I'd never been to Afghanistan. So I assumed that the U S would get it wrong sometimes because we all get things wrong but I assumed totally wrongly that the vast majority of them would indeed have been on the battlefield captured during the fighting and so forth. Actually, when you go down there it's just not true. And I had a devil of a time finding anyone who'd been on the battlefield. More than half of the prisoners and this is now corroborated by President Musharraf of all people who wrote a book which I do advise you not to read, it's a very boring book called "In the line of far." And in that book he boasts about how 369, I believe the number of the prisoners in Guantanamo had been sold to the Americans by the Pakistanis. And he then goes on to say, and they paid us bounties of millions of dollars to us in the government. Now the Americans didn't contest that they paid the bounties, they were very angry that he'd said it went to the government because it was meant to go to private individuals and this showed government corruption. So Musharraf changed his tune a little bit but the bottom line was at least 50% of the prisoners in Guantanamo had been sold to the Americans from Pakistan, not from Afghanistan and a number of the people I represented a significant number never been to Afghanistan. Mohammed el Gharani, this 14 year old kid was a good example, and this is how it worked basically and it's actually very similar in some ways, again to death penalty work except it's catastrophically worse. In a capital case you're a very unpopular person in a high profile crime just like this whole process, always their informants and the informant's snitching on you because they can get a benefit from themselves. Then you have police who believe you're guilty and may apply a little bit of pressure to get in and make a statement or make one up and then you have a not terribly effective judicial system but it's rubbish lawyers who go to sleep during your capital trial and so forth. And this is far worse, the Americans admitted and in fact they publicly stated in the end that they were offering $5,000 for any foreign Taliban who was turned over to them in Pakistan, Afghanistan. $5,000 in that part of the world would translate to us as Americans or Europeans is about a quarter of a million in terms of our income. So if I ask you to tell me that your two colleagues in this room were in Tora Bora in October, 2001 and I'm gonna pay you half a million dollars to snitch on these two, you'd do it, right? That you'd do it for $50 probably. The problem there was this, that once someone turned you in as an informant in Pakistan and said you were doing this and that in Afghanistan, then you're in my detention, I start abusing you. To begin with you say, "I'm innocent," it doesn't take long if this abuse for you to say, "All right, I was in Tora Bora." That gets you a one-way ticket to Guantanamo where you don't have a lawyer and there's no way to prove you're innocent. The number of innocent people in Guantanamo, and Guantanamo interestingly as a sociological experiment because what we've seen is this, if I can bore you with the figures for a minute, roughly 780 people there altogether, right over the years. Of those before we ever got into a court of law effectively 500 had been freed because the U S said they weren't any threat to anybody. So 500 are gone, we're now down to about 280, those 280 and not the worst of the worst because that's everybody in Guantanamo, these are now distillation and according to Rumsfeld they are now the worst of the worst of the worst. Of those 280 we begin to get into court with them and we begin to have hearings in front of a federal judge starting after Remedian and the other cases and 2008 to 2009. Of those cases so far as we sit here today in August, 2010 we've got about, I think most of the exact numbers probably 44, I think have gone through the complete process. There have been a burden of proof on the government that's very light, it's not beyond a reasonable doubt, it's just a preponderance of the evidence, they're allowed to use secret evidence that our clients can't even know about, they're allowed to use hearsay evidence, our clients aren't allowed to know who the informants are against them. All of those rules that make our lives very, very difficult in front of judges who are not liberal by any means, we have won 74% of those cases where our clients have been acquitted of any wrongdoing. So if the worst of the worst of the worst they've still got it wrong three times out of four. If you toss a coin you'll more likely to get the right answer than you are if you're Donald Rumsfeld and you put someone in Guantanamo Bay and that's pretty shocking, isn't it really? So the problem for us with these prisoners was not just that they'd been abused and everything, but so many of them were utterly unalterably innocent of anything and yet they'd been held for six, seven, eight years without charges and without being able to see their families and is far worse, the conditions of prison in Guantanamo Bay were far worse than any death row I've ever visited and I've been to many, many death rows around the country, and what do you expect? It just meant that so many people crumbled really. Interviewer: I wanna go back to what you just said but before I do, you said earlier back going to the medical facilities in the clinic, do you know any stories of the doctors interacting with the clients then? - There are so many stories about the doctors. Look again there were some doctors who tried to do the best they could and in fact, I had very early contact with some who I never quite understood how they could speak so freely but they did go around speaking very freely about their experiences and they were not happy with the way things were going on in Guantanamo. So by no means all the doctors, where Dr. Mengele or whatever like that, but there were one or two of them who were real problems. And one guy who was still going after their license at the moment, particularly these doctors who supervise the force feeding. I mean, with the treatment of prisoners in the hospital and I wasn't there I can't tell you exactly who's right and who's wrong, all I can tell you is an awful lot of prisoners lost thems and this, that, and the other, and the prisoners hated it and didn't trust them for a second. But what I can tell you with absolute certainty is that there was one particular doctor who was the architect of this force-feeding process and who defended it publicly and was the one who wanted to do it. And there were two doctors at the time that this began and one of them refused to do it saying it's unethical and the other one did it saying there's nothing wrong with it. Now, that doctor and the people they called the biscuit, the behavioral sciences, something or other who were part of the interrogation process and were there to help the interrogators break the prisoners down by identifying their weaknesses and so forth. What those people were doing was just criminal and there's no two words for it and I'm not one who believes in prosecuting these people, I don't but I think the truth needs to come out to make sure no one does this again. Interviewer: Do you think the psychologists would particularly the way you're describing it, particularly at fault here? - Well, I think there's this bizarre human thing and let's face it. Anyone who says that you weren't do what you're told when instructed by a higher authority and that somehow we would resist that, it was just delusional. You remember all the Milgram experiments and so forth where people were taken off the streets and 80% of them would crank the electricity up until it killed people just because they were being told by gun and white coat. The problem in the military is you have something much stronger, you have a hierarchical system where you have to follow orders and if you don't you get that's a criminal offense. In fact, I had an experience of that in Binyam Mohamed's case I'll tell you about. So these people are actually in a far worse position than all those folk and the experiments because they're being instructed to do things. So I'm loath to say that they're all wicked and evil really not withstanding the fact that I throw around names like Dr. Mengele, but that's just to be provocative. And truth, they get into this gold fish ball of Guantanamo Bay and they didn't see the rest of the world, they lose sight of the morals and the whole process. And I think it must have been fascinating for them to basically experiment on these human beings and to try to work out what it was that was gonna break them, doing it all with the presumption that these are guilty people who wanted to destroy America. I mean, one of the intriguing things about this process is this presumption of guilt where everyone thought that the prisoners were all wicked. So they're doing it from the motive that must've seemed to them quite pure, whether they were totally delusional by and large and doing things that actually in the cold light of day when you look at them outside the little world of Guantanamo Bay, just terrific. Interviewer: When you had conversations with him did you ever try to bring a larger picture? - Well, I never had conversations with the psychologists or the doctors 'cause they wouldn't talk to us. Interviewer: Only the guards? - Only the guards and they were always, I tried for example to set up a way of acting as intermediary between some of the prisoners and the hierarchy of the prison, so I would constantly write to the general or Admiral in charge offering to help them 'cause it didn't serve anyone's purposes to be going through this abuse, but they never even replied. I mean there was no way they viewed us so much as the enemy, there was no way they were going to engage. Interviewer: Could you tell the story about Binyam that you've wanted to tell. - It was Binyam's case. Interviewer: You can tell us who Binyam is. - Binyam Mohamed was a British resident who I met for the first time in April, '05. He had only got to Guantanamo in September, '04 and he had been seized in Pakistan like so many people, he had been rendered, the U S got it into the tiny little mines that he was behind some nuclear bomb plot for New York. I mean, that's a long, long story fascinating and actually reconstructing, it was so interesting over the years, it took me a long time as to where they could possibly have come up with this. But they rendered him from Pakistan to Morocco where he was tortured for 18 months, they then rendered him to Afghanistan, to the dark prison for five more months, spent a little time in background, then September, '04 went to Guantanamo. I met him in April '05 I think for the first time. I spent three days talking to him, I never ever occurred to me when I went to law school at Columbia and the sort of nice little hallowed halls of Columbia Law School in New York, never ever occurred to me that one day I would sit across the table from a guy for three days and talk about how he'd been tortured by the Americans. I mean, absolutely beyond my credence and the things that have been done to him partly by the proxies in Morocco or the two razorblades to his penis and so forth and partly by the Americans themselves particularly in the dark prison, just beyond belief. But the story I was gonna tell was he was out for a military commission and I was representing him along with Yvonne Bradley and Joe Margulies, Joe was helping us too and Yvonne Bradley was an air force major and she's a Republican African-American Christian who had got into this because she'd got into it. She told me the first time she met Binyam she was terrified of him and that she really thought he was a wicked evil terrorist. And within about an hour totally been disabused of that, she came to really like Binyam. Interviewer: Was she a JAG or was she a reservist? - No, she was JAG but I mean, she was a reservist. She had, it totally changed her life and her outlook on the world and it came to where I had to hold it back. I mean, there was times when she was so gung to charge forward on the case that I had to hold it back and the story I wanna tell you is about that because it illustrates the process. We were in court, the kangaroo court of Guantanamo Bay, Binyam and I had a slogan 'better a kangaroo court the no court at all,' but it was definitely a kangaroo court and there was fun. I mean, what I really enjoyed about that was this the whole legal system was set up on April the 30th, 2003 by Cheney and all his mates. And what they did was they took the U S system and they took all the things that it always irritated them a bit about it, like a few of those legal rights for prisoners and then you just got rid of them. And then they created the law, they created all the crimes ex post facto on that day, every single crime was a death penalty offense. So "aiding the enemy" was the death penalty offense. Well, you think about it, that means you shoot everyone in the German army in World War II and everyone who worked in Germany in World War II aided the enemy. So you kill them all. Anyway, the whole thing was a false but what Br'er Rabbit teaches you if you remember your Br'er Rabbit stories is that that's a Br'er patch you really wanna be thrown in because it's so much fun. I mean, look, the U S setup its legal system 1789 effectively with a bill of rights and we've debated for the last 221 years how to get it right and we still get them or invest 50% of the time and that's after 221 years. And the notion that they can create out of whole cloth this ridiculous military commission process and not just make this as fulfilled day for me to entertain myself is just silly. So anyway, I was enjoying the military commissions because there was not one aspect of them that you couldn't challenge and have a lot of fun doing. But this didn't go down very well with Colonel Coleman who was the judge and the first thing that we decided we'd have a go it was him because it seemed very clear to me that he'd been handpicked and he should be disqualified for various statements. He had actually given a little seminar for his daughter's school where they'd talk about about Binyam's case as to whether it was okay to torture people. So he was history under any sensible process and what's more, there was a real conflict in Yvonne's situation because the boss in her office was military superior and he was the boss and every case, every conflict case. So it was all conflicted, huge problems so we were just challenging these things and this didn't make Colonel Coleman happy. So we'd got 20 law professors to say that ethically she couldn't proceed because our strategy was always to find a different forum. I mean, if you're in a kangaroo court you've got to find a real court. So you've gotta try to take it away from Guantanamo Bay and put it in an article three court or a court of some sort and our first plan was to put it in the ethics committee of the Pennsylvania bar which was Yvonne's bar who told her she couldn't proceed under these circumstances because it was unethical. So you had pitted judge Coleman on one side and the Pennsylvania bar on the other side and Yvonne was not to go forward because it was gonna be unethical. Well, this didn't sit well with Colonel Coleman. So he tried bullying me and Joe but he couldn't because we're not military and we just politely tell him to buzz off. So he turns to Yvonne and he starts lecturing her about how he's a Colonel, she's a Major, he's gonna give her an order and the penalty for disobeying an order is criminal offense. You get cashiered, you get put in prison, you lose your, you're kicked out of the military and so forth. Now, that's a heavy, heavy burden and heavy, heavy threat on a lawyer to personally try to force them to do the wrong thing. So he was threatening her and he then gets to the end of his little tirade and says, "Are you gonna follow the order that I'm about to give you?" And so Yvonne was about to say no (laughs) and I folded down, I said, "No, no, no Major Bradley, is not gonna answer that question, judge. She's asserting right under the fifth amendment not to incriminate herself. Then he got really angry and told me to sit down. So then he asked her again and she says, "I'm taking the fifth amendment," and that got really ugly. And at that point there was a soldier came into the courtroom and passes a little yellow sticky tab to judge Coleman, and he looks at it and he says, "We're gonna take a 10 minute recess." And so of course I was really curious about what that sticky tab was, we were just at the moment where Yvonne was gonna get thrown in jail and that was gonna make them look hard and you could throw all of us in jail too and it would be great. And so anyway, I'm talking to the guards in there were always very friendly, but then limits and so one of them told me that the Pentagon was monitoring the trial in real time, they were watching it and they had sent a message to Coleman to back off because he was in front of all the media and he was about to look really bad when he banged up the defense lawyers for following their ethical rules. So it was an hour later when he'd calmed down, he came back in all then, peace and harmony and said, "We're fine, we're gonna have a hearing on this, don't worry or whatever." And that was the sort of way these worked but I mean, what it illustrated Yvonne was tremendously courageous under those circumstances, there was much more on the line for her than there ever was for me. And she stood up for her principles far more than so many people did. So yes, don't worry. So anyway, that was just one of many examples. Interviewer: Well, it sounds to me like the brave lawyers you could be really proud of them, like are you saying that overall the lawyers who represented detainees were people who were unique to our culture perhaps? - I don't think unique, I think that the best tradition of our culture and of course there were very different lawyers involved. You look at the military lawyers there were some of them who were wonderful, I mean they were everything that the military should be proud of about America that even though Yvonne, for example was sworn to be a military officer, her commander in chief was George Bush, she'd been told by her commander in chief that these guys were the enemy. She was still willing to put her entire career on the line to seek justice. Now that was fantastic and that was true of various other people, Charlie Swift and Maury, there was some very, very good lawyers involved on that side. And I will say in all honesty, both Joe and I but I can speak most for myself had real prejudices about those guys in the beginning, we didn't think for one second these guys were gonna be real defense lawyers and we were proven absolutely wrong and I owe them an apology for my prejudice. Now, the problem of this was that that worked for a while and gradually the hierarchy saw that they'd made a big mistake having all of these very enlightened and courageous lawyers and so all of those lawyers got boot over the years. And I'm not gonna say that the military lawyers today are all useless, they're not, but it's a very different culture now because there's been a lot of pressure from on high to not rock the boat the way those things happen and that's difficult. I mean, there are still people who try to do the right thing but it's not nearly the same as it was three years ago. Interviewer: So the way you're describing it sounds like Guantanamo at the very beginning early on is you said it was pretty much just a patch, quilt a seat by your pants operation and then became someone was sophisticated and organized over time. - Well, it became more organized. I think it became worse in some ways and this was all coming from the people on the high who didn't know what was going on really. Interviewer: What was going on in Guantanamo? - In Guantanamo and on the ground. I mean, even the senior offices, this is classic of major corporations, major everything. Major law firms very often is the more senior people are the less they are really in touch with what's going on and they lose perspective. They think they have a grand strategy but actually their strategy is catastrophic. So when people were decent, even though there were some embarrassing truths that came out about Guantanamo, overall we were never gonna do something to embarrass the individuals who were behaving well because they were doing the right thing. But as the powers that be insisted on greater confrontation then naturally we end up being more confrontational and I think in a way that's worse for everybody. It certainly means, I mean you take Colonel Bumgarner for example, who was the head of the prison aspect of Guantanamo for a while and I never got to meet him in person although I did correspond to them some and I've had a lot of indirect contact with them. Now, he was very much military officer but he'd run a prison before and he recognized that in order to run a prison you can't just mistreat people, you've got to treat them as human beings and the more you give them the more you can take away from them if they misbehave, whereas if you give them nothing they got nothing to lose. And so he tried to institute new rules but the problem was from the very beginning at Guantanamo the White House had made it clear that the people in charge for the interrogators, not the people running the prison and the interrogators hated Bumgarner with a passion. I heard this in Guantanamo because he had undercut their ability to offer benefits and take away benefits from prisoners because he was doing it as part of his job to run the prison. And this is what sets Guantanamo apart from every other prison I've ever dealt with is that instead of the being one hierarchy and it just being a matter of how do we make this prison run well, there were two hierarchies and it's a matter of how do we make the prison run well from Colonel Bumgarner's perspective and how do we abuse and extract information from prisoners from the interrogator's perspective, the interrogator is actually being superior to Bumgarner. They hated each other for a while and Bumgarner was the one who lost out and got the boot. And I'm not saying he was a saint in any ways, I disagreed with them on a lot of things but I think he was honestly trying to do the job of running a prison whereas the others weren't and it was doomed to failure under those circumstances. Interviewer: Did you interact with interrogators ever? - On a very, very limited basis. I ran into one or two of them, but no, not really. Interviewer: What circumstances? - I'm trying to think, I mean, I had lots of indirect stuff where I would talk to the clients and they would talk to the interrogators and the interrogators would tell them stuff and the clients would tell me stuff, that really the only very limited contact I had with interrogators was when we were both walking into the compound at the same time and that was very limited. Interviewer: Did any of the interrogators treat the men well from your perspective? - Well, I think smart interrogators always treat people well. If you know the classic stories of Shaker Libby for example, you know that the FBI was treating him well and getting a lot of good information out of him. CIA bus sentenced starts abusing him and takes him for torture in Egypt and they get out of him that Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda and league on weapons of mass destruction and then they go to war in Iraq. So that's what you get when you abuse prisoners, so a sensible interrogator will always treat the prisoner well. So there were some sensible interrogators, I feel sure, I didn't think much of them got anything out of anyone just because it was like squeezing a rock. Interviewer: And when you said you had interactions with officials, was it ever with the civilian officials? Was it always military? Did you ever- - I went on civilian officials. Interviewer: So in Washington D C, did you ever meet with any? - No. I don't think I ever met with, I met with military people in Washington but never with civilians. Interviewer: Did they ever try to pressure you in any way? - I mean, look, no, not really. I mean, they had their views they would tell me what they thought when they were trying to get Binyam to take a plea. They really wanted him to plead guilty and it was funny to begin with, they wanted him to serve life, then they wanted him to sit 15 years, and then we finally got down to eight days. He was gonna serve if he pled guilty and at that point we knew he was going home. Interviewer: So over time, what has your opinion about the American legal system or America change and just watching these last eight years you've been there at the very ground floor and you've inherited. - Yeah. My opinion's changed hugely actually and that's because it's very different from capital work and one perspective on doing death penalty cases in the deep South at least very rarely is the media offering. It is sometimes, I mean I've represented Sharif Cruzan who is this totally innocent 16 year old and there the media was our ally because it was gonna be, Geraldo Rivera did a thing on it and when Geraldo does it you know it's gonna be incredibly superficial. And so if the superficial story is innocent teenager on death row you know he's gonna come out your way, but by and large that's not the name of the game in death penalty cases. In Guantanamo because we were robbed of any court for many, many years and we always have been robbed of any real court because even in federal court the rules are so stacked against us. The court of public opinion became vastly more important and I guess on one level statistics don't tell the whole truth but there is nothing as emphatic as zero. And there was a time when 500 prisoners had been released from Guantanamo Bay and the courts of law had released zero and 500 had been released as a result of public pressure and whatever. And that taught me a huge amount that our role as lawyers, I always knew this on some level because even in capital cases you settle 90% of cases pre-trial and you do that by looking around at the different people you've gotta persuade who are not the jury. When you get in front of the jury you've lost most of it but you've gotta persuade the judge, you've gotta persuade the sheriff, you've gotta persuade the prosecutor and so on and so forth. But with Guantanamo cases you've gotta persuade the people, and it wasn't even the American people very much our strategy was not the American people, I mean, it was remarkable quite frankly, excuse me I'm gonna have to (sneezes) sneeze, excuse me, I don't know what that was. And it was very much not the American people. I think we recognize from the very early days that it was gonna take a long time for America to see what a disaster this was, actually we've come much further, much quicker than I would ever expect but I always used to think about the Japanese Americans being interned in World War II, it took 40 years for that to be truly recognized as a mistake. But when you think about how do you bring power to the powerless people in Guantanamo Bay, the most obvious way was a strategy I used to use for foreign nationals on death row in America which was to go get their government and get them to help because there's a very simple process here that on a death case the European national sport is not football, it is bashing America, the Europeans love to be sanctimonious and say we don't have the death penalty so we're gonna teach you a lot. So it's actually very easy to get the Europeans to come and help a prisoner on death row if that prisoner's a European and suddenly you've got millions of people on your side. Now, in the context of Guantanamo is even easier, not easy to begin with, I mean, for all the European sanctimony in the early days, 2002, 2003, no one was on our side, the Europeans were against us too. It was only in June, 2003 when they charged two British people which was a big mistake on the part of the American government that suddenly the Europeans started getting upset because there's one thing banging up Muslims but not arm Islam. And so suddenly the Europeans became much more sympathetic, and then if we went to an Arab country, for example if I went to an Arab country and said, "Look, I apologize, we shouldn't be doing this," 99% of that country was on our side. In Britain 85% was on our side, so you suddenly have this hugely powerful mass of people on the side of our prisoners and so clearly our strategy was to get as much information out of Guantanamo legitimately and then use it in the European and other media and use that pressure on the U S to get the person in a fair shake, and that worked very effectively. So in one way, that was the lesson of the whole process is that the legal system is pretty ineffectual by and large. It's important as we'd never have got into getting no without a Supreme court decision but it's only one of the bows on our string. Interviewer: And so how has that changed your life in terms of how you viewed the world, how you matured and grown from all this? - Well, it is about power, isn't it? I mean, I've always thought the reason I did death penalty cases as my career is because they're the most hated people. There's nothing like I'd watched six of my clients die in the gas chamber, the electric chair and the fuel injection and there was no moment that I can imagine in life when the distillation of human hatred is quite so profound is when the entire state has decided to ritualistically put someone to death as some sort of sacrifice on a bizarre alter to a God that I didn't understand. So given that that was why I got involved in Guantanamo because it seemed very parallel and I don't think it's a novel notion and Guantanamo doesn't add a lot to that except perhaps take it a bit more extreme. But what it taught me in a huge way was to look much more laterally at the power that we can bring to get in between those people doing the hating and the person being hated and that's much more than standing up in court. It's much more than, they used to accuse us of sort of slash and burn tactics in court in Louisiana. And yeah, we behaved much more aggressively perhaps than a corporate lawyer in a polite discussion of money, but on the other hand I've learned way more than that now and even in capital cases across the world that we now do we take a much more proactive approach to public opinion than I used to in the old days. And I'll tell you one thing, when the history books are written about Guantanamo and this whole era torture will win that battle. It was an aberration, it'll take a while but we'll win the battle, it's been a tragedy that torture is even in the debate of the 21st century but we'll win that battle. We'll win the battle about detention without trial probably, that's a slightly tricky one but we'll probably win that one by far the most dangerous and insidious remnant of the last several years has been secrecy and that's the battle that we're not gonna win unless we're very, very careful. I can't talk about classified evidence and I won't, I'll never violate the rules because I know I've got a big target and even though I think their rules are silly I have obeyed their rules just as I did in death penalty cases, I think killing people is a horrendous offense but I'm not gonna violate the rules to prevent an execution any more than I'm gonna violate the rules now but I'm gonna change them if I possibly can. And I want to make that clear, I'm not gonna the rules, but of the materials I've seen that have been deemed classified by the United States, 99% should not be classified. There are one or two things perhaps should be, I mean, in the names of agents, I don't care what they are and I don't want to know, I don't really care, but the overwhelming majority of that which is deemed classified is simply embarrassing, it's embarrassing on the level that it's evidence of torture, it's embarrassing because it's evidence of a homicide by Americans, it's embarrassing because we made these catastrophic mistakes and we kept getting the wrong person, it's embarrassing because we believe some informant too is just a lunatic and so forth. It's all embarrassment and what we've done over the last few years is conflate national security with political embarrassment and we've said that we have the power as a government to make things secret when they should just be embarrassing. Now, that was the argument Richard Nixon made. He said that as president he should have the power to say what's legal and what's not legal and just because it's embarrassing to him Watergate should be kept secret. This is by far the biggest challenge and the reason it's a challenge is this, that it's very hard to get people to pay attention to the dangers of the secrecy, because if I come to you as a journalist and I say, "Hey, I know the stuff that's really, really embarrassing to the U S and that really should be public and there's a massive story." And you as a journalist say to me, "Oh, wow, what's that, tell me the story." And I say, "Well, I can't tell you what it is, all I can tell you is that it's really embarrassing and I'm not allowed to talk about it," but that's not much of a story and you don't publish that story. And so trying to get people's attention on these embarrassing issues and the overuse, the massive overuse of secrecy is the great challenge that faces us, whether it be- Interviewer: Okay. Is that your goal to work on it? - Well, I feel very, very passionately that we need to change that process to make a society more open. As I think the Florida Supreme Court once said, "Sunshine is the greatest disinfectant." And I'm not in the least bit interested in sending people to prison for the wrongs that have happened over the last several years, I really don't believe in that but I think it's desperately important that we should expose the truth of what happened because if you don't know what history was you can't learn from history and you are doomed to repeat it and repeat all of its mistakes. So I do feel very strongly about the secrecy stuff now. A good example is the torture inquiry that Britain is launching now. There's huge pressure from the security services to maintain embarrassing material a secret. I'm gonna fight that tooth and nail and that we'll do one of two things, we will either get that material public so we can create rules to make sure it doesn't happen in the future or we'll make them look so awful that we'll diligence most of the whole process that they're going through. They can't win that battle because one of the great lessons I find, I find this great, very entertaining is I don't care what they think of me, I just don't care, whereas they really do care what the public thinks about them. Politicians are such wimps and so we can just keep on bashing them until finally they give up and if they don't give up they'll look horrible. So it's fine. It's a shame, I think it would be far better if we approached this in a more truth and reconciliation process but then I've suggested it I've begged them to do that, if they don't do that we'll do it the other way. Interviewer: A few more questions but I wanna go back to something you said 'cause not everyone, including people we interviewed agree with you when you said torture will come to pass. There's some people who feel that a little torture isn't such a bad thing especially if there was another 9/11 and that Americans actually might not be offended by that if that's what could save us America. - I think there is a huge temptation to think that torture works, and one of the tragedies of the Bush era has been that the debate about torture has been re-introduced. Look, in September the 10th, 2001, nobody in the Western world was saying torture was a good idea, maybe one or two lunatic academics just because they wanted to provoke their students but no one really was. And now it has reentered the debate but we will win that, and the reason we'll win it ultimately is because they're so totally wrong. I was fascinated by, I made this rather second rate documentary called typically for television torture, is it a good idea? And I got to interview all sorts of quite high powered people, including like Richard Pell and various conservative Americans. Every single one came up with the ticking time bomb scenario. There's a time bomb ticking in New York and the guy who set it could stop it that he doesn't want to and he, whatever he wants to die and would you torture him? And everyone comes up with that. The legal term for that is bullshit. And what you do is you say to him, "Look, I'm gonna give you 50 years, a hundred years, 500 years, a thousand years, you name me one instance, just one historical instance ever when torture stopped a ticking time bomb." And I bet you can't do it and I bet no one can do it. Now, even if they could, one instance versus all the damage that's done to our moral reputation and it's really this simple, it's very simple and it's a huge floor in our political world. When a politician takes an action such as Guantanamo Bay or Belmarsh in Britain or whatever, what they're doing is they're responding to a terrible tragedy like 9/11 or 7/7 in England. And the way they respond is they respond by saying, I'm going to hypothesize that some terrible crime will happen in the future and try to stop that crime, and by doing that I'm making the world safer by preventing that crime, but actually what they're doing is making the world much more dangerous because by banging up 12 people in Belmarsh or 780 people in Guantanamo they're pissing off so many people around the world, that then making your life as an American far more dangerous. And what politicians need to see and what we need to hold them to is their job is not to prevent a hypothetical crime in the future much like Tom Cruise in that movie, rather it's to make the world a safer place. Now, if you want America to be safe or Britain to be safer there's a simple solution, and the solution is to behave decently. It really is true that the effective enforcement of human rights is the greatest anti-terrorism weapon in our arsenal because if you behave well fewer people wanna kill you, more people wanna help you, and the few nutters who are always gonna be out there are gonna find themselves very isolated. If you behave badly you're going to achieve exactly the opposite goal. So and that's just true, that's just the way the world is but it's not the way the politicians see it. So we do have a battle, I don't pretend to be done but we will win that battle. Interviewer: Well, I don't think this is the place for me to go on and discussing that but I will tell you that other people think it make sense that they're willing to do some torture. - Well, as Winston Churchill said, "The fact that 50 million idiots think something doesn't mean they're right." I'm sorry, I don't mean to tar everyone with a brush but as long as I quote Shakespeare it's not quite as patronizing. Interviewer: Could you describe a little bit about the detainees that they're former detainees you see today, how their lives are if, because some of the men we've spoke to feel they have no future that the lives aren't much better. I mean, of course they're better being out of Guantanamo but often their lives are very restricted. - Well, it's very difficult. I mean, when you exonerate someone off death row for example, life suddenly doesn't suddenly become all nice and indeed over the years and I've had a lot of prisoners who've got off death row and they spend all this time in prison. And then unlike someone who's paroled at the end of a sentence, suddenly the doors are open and they're kicked out and that's that. And the vast majority of people exonerated off death row never get any compensation, indeed I have somewhere a cheque that was written to Dan Bright, one of my clients which was all the compensation he got for nine years on death row and it was $10 which wasn't even enough for a bus ride and you sue like the old days. And so suddenly they're tossed out in the world with no support, no nothing. And they probably had a tough life before they went there and they've now been treated horribly in prison for a decade or more and now they're thrown out and left to get on with it. It's not surprising that so many of them find life so very difficult. With Guantanamo again, it's the same but worse and because they were probably mistreated far worse, they were probably in a worse situation in the first place. So many of our clients were actually in Pakistan, some in Afghanistan as refugees because they were from Syria or Morocco or Tunisia or Algeria and they fled those countries because they're so unpleasant. And now what are we gonna do? We're gonna send all these prisoners back to Algeria but they never wanted to be in the first place and they're going to be treated horribly when they get back there. And even if they're luckier than that and they come back to a place like Britain, at least in Britain they're gonna have a national health service, they'll get some support but they still have to deal with what they had to deal with before they got locked up and on top of that all the abuse they'd been through. So it's very, very hard and even some of the people, like Samuel Hush who come out to a good job at Al-Jazeera, I've watched Sammy struggle and he's a fundamentally decent human being and yet he has to deal with the fact that for seven years were taken away from him for no good reason, he was horribly mistreated. How do you deal with that? And that's very hard thing for any human being to deal with. (coughs) Interviewer: Did the U S provide reparations too. - Yeah. There are two sides to this, one is I've tried to tell European governments that if you want to make your country safer, then what you do is you take a bunch of refugees from Guantanamo because if you do that won't cost you very much but what it'll do is show the Arab world, the world of Islam that you mean what you say when you talk about human rights and it will immediately take the target off your back and that would just be common sense if common sense was so common. But quite hard to persuade people that, and the second thing we should do is obviously give people compensation. I mean, look, we have a problem with Yemen, we're worried about sending people back to Yemen. If the per capita national income of Yemen is $300 and there were a hundred Yemenis that means it costs $30,000 per year to give all 100 of them as an income for a year. So if you took a tiny proportion of what we're spending in Guantanamo Bay and say you gave $300,000, that'd be 10 years income for those people and they would like you for it, they'd appreciate it, they wouldn't hate America for it, with that $300,000 would be the best spent money we ever spent. Now, you and I both know what the Republicans would say about that, what the right-wing press would say about that. Now, if I was president, which incidentally is not likely to happen, both because of the relevant provision in the U S constitution and because I doubt I get elected, but if I was president of course I'd do it and I don't care about the consequences because it's the right and sensible thing to do but sadly I'm not sure we'll have that attitude. Interviewer: Along those lines that you've disappointed with the changes in administration, could you think Guantanamo would have been closed down? - Look, I've voted for a Obama, I thought his book "Dreams From my Father" was probably the real person and that he's a decent human being. If anything I'm gonna say let me preface by saying this, if I was president of the U S which not gonna happen I would screw it up worse than anyone else, I'd have a lot of fun doing it but I would not. I'd probably not go down as America's greatest president. So with that as a preface, he's made a lot of mistakes. I mean, I remember watching Mario Cuomo years ago give a speech about his opposition to the death penalty. He stood up for his principle which was very unpopular at the time, this was 20 years ago and he passionately said and did what he believed in. People respected that and he got elected time after time as governor of New York. The problem for Obama is he doesn't do that enough and he has this sort of notion of building consensus, building consensus with some people who are not on the same planet as him. I mean, Ms. Pailin with all due respect is not on the same planet that I'm on. Anyone who goes around saying we shouldn't have a national health service but look at Britain they have an NHS and they kill old people, I don't know which planet they're on. And I don't care to build a consensus with folk like that, they can go off do whatever they want, they got the right to free speech like anyone else but I don't have to agree with them and they're not gonna agree with me. And unfortunately in the early days, Obama piddled around too much trying to establish agreement with that, so by the time he came up with his Guantanamo plan the Republicans had seen this as such a dynamite opportunity to sow discord that he's now lost his opportunity of doing it. And I think he would love to trace it, I think he sees as any sane person sees that Guantanamo is hugely damaging to America both internally and externally, but I just don't think he now can get away with doing what he wanted to do because he's not willing to invest the political capital. That's too bad. Interviewer: So Guantanamo will be open for another? - I don't think it would be closed in his administration. I hope I'm proven wrong, but I doubt it. Interviewer: Two more questions? One is, you said there might've been- - Two more questions, when the lawyers say that they're always lying, there's normally six. Interviewer: Two more from me. I'm gonna ask my friend or my wife if she wants one. But one is you mentioned there might be something good that came out of Guantanamo, some people might've seen something good. Did I hear that correct? - I don't think I said that, but I probably would say that. I mean, there is a silver lining to most clouds and one of the, I mean, there are several positive aspects. I mean, speaking personally I had no idea about his and all that stuff. I had new concept, I had no interest and instead it's created in me a great interest in standing between Muslims and the people who hate them and I'm really glad to do that and I know a little more than I did know about Islamic culture and so forth. And you don't have to agree with everything to see the good parts of it and there are some very good parts. So that's one thing. And I think that for all the hatred that's been engendered by the war of terror as Burette calls it, that has at least we've been forced in the West to think about certain things that we ignored before. I mean, I was in Pakistan in February, fascinating, fascinating place, I had no idea that it's called the biggest death row the world, 7,500 people and the degree of corruption in that country is epidemic. And if we don't know that and if we don't see it how can we possibly hope to do anything about it? And if we don't know, for example how we're mistreating Aafia Siddiqu, the woman we prosecuted and again to give life imprisonment, probably in New York how badly that's gonna play in Pakistan, we're gonna carry on making the mistakes we've made in the past. So I think there's been an educational process. Overall Guantanamo has the negatives of vastly overbalanced the positives but I've made a few personal friends that said for that I'm grateful. Interviewer: And so is there something that I didn't ask you about yourself or about- - That's a ridiculous question. We'll be here for days, I'm certainly not gonna answer that. Interviewer: Okay. Do you a question, Emma. Woman: I just have one question back to the issue of torture. Do you see torture as having a clear definition or is it subjective? Does someone decide that they have been tortured or is there some objectivity to this term that keeps getting- - There are two words that begin with T that are utterly unhelpful in this whole debate. One is torture and one is terrorism, and they're both exploited by other sides in a way that's quite pointless. Let's take the word torture first. I don't care if it's torture and the convention against torture for example, you have torture and cruel degrading and inhuman treatment, I don't care which it is. When Donald Rumsfeld said that the purpose of these methods that come up with for interrogating people was to "Break the will" of the prisoners in Guantanamo, it doesn't matter what it is. I've seen so many people in death penalty cases giving false confessions when they weren't abused at all, for example, mentally disabled, mentally retarded people as one says in America. It's so easy, I got a client of mine to confess to assassinating President Lincoln, President Kennedy, and even President Reagan who at the time was any brain dead and that was when he was president. It's just not difficult to do with some people, so what we're focusing on here is whether we're getting anything useful out of it and whether we're doing something that's moral and acceptable. So whether it's torture, whether it's cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, whether it's coercion, whether it's trying to break somebody by abusing them in other ways, they're all wrong and it doesn't matter which they are, they're all wrong. So let's get away from the whole discussion of torture. Torture is very unhelpful, it's useful to us in a manipulative way to make the other side look bad because if I use the word torture to you. Let's say I used to do this, this was something I talked to Alan Deschutes about when I interviewed him for TV and he was very thoughtful, I thought he was very interesting. (coughs) here we go. There is, you are driving a lorry, right? A truck down the road and the brakes go and if you go straight on you're gonna kill 15 people whereas if you turn off you're only gonna kill two, which do you do? Woman: Two. - Two, right. Now, second question, same thing, scenario. You're going down the hill and you lost your brakes, you go straight on you gonna kill 15 people, if you turn off you're going to kill 14 people. What do you do? Woman: 14. - Okay. Now you're driving down the road, if you carry straight on you're gonna kill 15 people, if you turn off you're gonna torture three people. What do you do? Woman: Probably torture three. - See but you paused, didn't you? Of course you do that. You're not even gonna kill anyone but why did you pause? You pause because the word torture suddenly sets long bells off in your head. That's what the theory, the study demonstrates and I think that's probably true and what that tells you is that torture tends to just be an emotional word that obscures every sensible debate, but so is terrorism and the other T word is equally fatuous, and that is to say terrorism. I mean, you call someone a terrorist and suddenly everyone says we should torture them and throw their rights out and this, that, and the other. And you give me a definition of terrorism if you can. Woman: Me? - Hmm. Woman: Willfully destroying another person. - You mean like the British army or the American army in Afghanistan right now? Woman: Correct. - So they're terrorists? Woman: To the people they're terrorizing, yeah. - Yeah. So it seems a slightly futile word, isn't it? Woman: Yes. - Well, I agree with that. And those are two totally useless words that we should expunge from the lexicon would be my response to your question. Woman: Okay (laughs) Philosophical response. Thank you. (laughs) Interviewer: Well, I'm done, there's no more, that was great. - Great. Thanks. Interviewer: Thanks so much for the response. - My pleasure. What's your plan? Are you rushing off back to London? Interviewer: We're recording now. (indistinct background chatter)