Remes, David - Interview master file
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Transcript
Transcripts may contain inaccuracies.
Interviewer | Okay, rolling. | 0:05 |
Johnny | Good. | 0:06 |
Interviewer | Okay, good morning. | 0:07 |
- | Good morning. | 0:08 |
We're very grateful to you | 0:09 | |
for participating in the witness to Guantanamo project. | 0:10 | |
We invite you to speak | 0:15 | |
of your experiences and your involvement | 0:16 | |
with the detainees in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. | 0:18 | |
We are hoping to provide you | 0:22 | |
with an opportunity to tell your story in your own words. | 0:23 | |
We are creating an archive of stories | 0:27 | |
so that people in America and around the world | 0:29 | |
will have a better understanding of what you and others | 0:32 | |
have observed and experienced. | 0:35 | |
Our future generations must know what happened in Guantanamo | 0:38 | |
and by telling the story you're contributing to history. | 0:41 | |
And we appreciate your courage and willingness | 0:45 | |
to speak with us today. | 0:47 | |
And if there's anything you say, David | 0:49 | |
that you wanna retract just let us know | 0:53 | |
and we can remove it | 0:54 | |
and if you wanna take a break at any time, let us know | 0:56 | |
and we can do that. | 0:59 | |
- | Okay. | 1:00 |
Interviewer | So, thanks. | 1:01 |
So I'd like to begin by having you | 1:01 | |
tell us a little about yourself, your name | 1:03 | |
and your age and birthday and background education. | 1:04 | |
- | Okay, well, I was born in 1954. | 1:10 |
I'm 57 in Brooklyn. | 1:13 | |
When I was seven, we moved to Manhattan, Chelsea. | 1:15 | |
I went to Public's Elementary School, | 1:20 | |
then I went to private high school called Horace Mann | 1:23 | |
and then I went to Columbia University for my BA | 1:26 | |
and then Harvard for my JD. | 1:30 | |
My background prepared me for the work that I do now | 1:33 | |
in perhaps a unique way. | 1:39 | |
My father was a member of the communist party | 1:41 | |
who went to jail in the early '60s | 1:44 | |
as part of the witch-hunt | 1:47 | |
of second level communist party officials. | 1:50 | |
He was a party organizer from at least the mid '30s | 1:53 | |
until the party went underground in '49 or '50 | 1:59 | |
then he became the education director | 2:04 | |
and then he was indicted and tried with a group of others | 2:06 | |
in '57 or '58 convicted on the testimony | 2:11 | |
of an army deserter that the government induced to identify | 2:18 | |
and testify against, and then spent 16 months | 2:24 | |
in a federal prison in Milan, Michigan. | 2:27 | |
My mother, oh, and I should say that my father | 2:32 | |
was the youngest of a family of immigrants | 2:36 | |
from Eastern Europe who came over as part of the great wave | 2:42 | |
in the late 19th century. | 2:46 | |
My father was one of five children. | 2:47 | |
I think that my family on their side came from Galicia | 2:50 | |
in the Austria-Hungarian empire, but basically | 2:55 | |
there was an immigrant background, | 2:59 | |
there was a childhood in poverty, orphanages and the like, | 3:01 | |
but he was very intent on education | 3:07 | |
and he went to City College, | 3:10 | |
which he got kicked out of for a tuition strike. | 3:12 | |
And that was sort of his career. | 3:16 | |
And I grew up in a background | 3:19 | |
of a father who had suffered a great injustice | 3:23 | |
and who had been motivated by the purest ideals. | 3:27 | |
My mother grew up in a middle class Jewish family | 3:33 | |
lived in the suburbs first on her block to have a bicycle | 3:39 | |
but her family was progressive too. | 3:45 | |
Her mother was the leader of the local NAACP chapter | 3:47 | |
and was monitored by the FBI. | 3:51 | |
And my mother subscribed to the tenets of my father, | 3:54 | |
they met 1949. | 3:57 | |
So I grew up in that background. | 3:59 | |
I didn't really do anything political as a child, | 4:05 | |
but when I became 14 or 15 or 16, | 4:08 | |
you had the cultural revolution in the United States, | 4:12 | |
the anti-authoritarian movement in the United States. | 4:17 | |
And maybe I would have become involved and passionate | 4:21 | |
in that activity anyway, | 4:24 | |
but it was surely intensified perhaps | 4:27 | |
by my parents' background, | 4:32 | |
I went to the anti war marches. | 4:35 | |
I even went with a good friend | 4:37 | |
to a Black Panther party rally, | 4:39 | |
despite warnings that it was going to be dangerous | 4:42 | |
for two white kids. | 4:45 | |
I was a leader of the anti-Vietnam group at Horace Mann. | 4:47 | |
And when I got to Columbia in 1972, | 4:53 | |
I was disappointed that I had missed most of the action | 4:56 | |
that was over by then. | 4:59 | |
I went then to Harvard Law School | 5:01 | |
where I was apolitical, | 5:03 | |
I worked with Professor Laurence Tribe after I graduated | 5:06 | |
of renowned constitutional law scholar | 5:10 | |
then came down to Washington | 5:13 | |
and worked for 25 years | 5:15 | |
in a very prestigious corporate law firm | 5:18 | |
called Covington & Burling. | 5:22 | |
There was really no political activity | 5:25 | |
that aroused my passion at that time | 5:28 | |
the Reagan revolution occurred, | 5:31 | |
but that wasn't the kind of injustice | 5:33 | |
that really stirred me. | 5:37 | |
Of course I was against everything that they did. | 5:38 | |
I wanted to get into politics and policy | 5:43 | |
which was the reason that I came down to Washington. | 5:46 | |
I'd already married Naomi in 1979. | 5:50 | |
And when you go to a corporate law firm like Covington, | 5:54 | |
you can do policy and politics, but you have to do them | 5:57 | |
on behalf of malefactors of great wealth. | 6:01 | |
And so I was brought in as an appellate lawyer, | 6:06 | |
as a constitutional lawyer | 6:10 | |
and I continued to do that work, but beginning of 1985 | 6:12 | |
I became a key part of the firm's tobacco practice | 6:16 | |
and for the next 15 years or so, | 6:23 | |
I spent my time not in the lawsuits, | 6:26 | |
but on the legislative front dreaming up arguments | 6:29 | |
against regulation of tobacco companies | 6:34 | |
going around the country and testifying writing point papers | 6:37 | |
all the kinds of things that a legislative advocate does. | 6:41 | |
And it really was the best training in the world | 6:45 | |
for what I'm doing now, ironically, | 6:49 | |
the real training and advocacy. | 6:52 | |
And at the time I believe in what I was doing as a cause | 6:56 | |
because it involved constitutional issues, statutory issues | 7:03 | |
and I felt that here was a situation of the state | 7:08 | |
abusing its power. | 7:12 | |
I simply didn't pay any attention to the social equities. | 7:14 | |
It was really the political and legal equities. | 7:20 | |
In 2001 or so, there was a big settlement | 7:24 | |
between the tobacco industry | 7:27 | |
and the attorneys general, | 7:30 | |
actually the settlement was in 1998, | 7:32 | |
but by 2001 or so that work really evaporated at the firm. | 7:35 | |
I continued to do other work within my skillsets. | 7:43 | |
Up until that point, I had filed an Amicus briefs | 7:47 | |
maybe a couple of years, a couple each year | 7:50 | |
for groups like the ACLU, | 7:53 | |
Americans United for Separation of Church and State. | 7:55 | |
I was deeply involved in the new Dow case | 7:59 | |
which was the pledge of allegiance case | 8:03 | |
just deeply involved in it as an Amicus for the ACLU | 8:08 | |
and people of United for Separation of Church and State. | 8:14 | |
And then that was decided in about 2002. | 8:19 | |
Then in the spring of I just to roll back, | 8:23 | |
I got a young lawyer named Neil Katyal at Georgetown | 8:28 | |
to team up with Richard Epstein at Chicago. | 8:35 | |
It was sort of a left to right combination | 8:39 | |
in the new Dow case. | 8:42 | |
And I mentioned this because in the spring of 2004, | 8:44 | |
Neil asked me to represent anarchy, generals and admirals | 8:48 | |
in the district court, in the Hamdan case. | 8:57 | |
That was a great experience | 9:01 | |
and it was really ego gratifying | 9:06 | |
when Judge Robertson singled our brief out | 9:11 | |
and actually ruled on the basis of arguments | 9:16 | |
that we had presented. | 9:20 | |
We locked out basically, but because I was known | 9:22 | |
as having been involved in Hamdan, | 9:27 | |
at the next stage when the Supreme court ruled | 9:29 | |
in the Rasul case, that the detainees | 9:33 | |
were entitled to bring habeas actions, | 9:36 | |
that the courthouse doors were open | 9:39 | |
and that they could have lawyers, a young colleague | 9:41 | |
in our New York office, Mark Falcoff not so young | 9:45 | |
but basically a new associate reached out to CCR | 9:49 | |
and asked if there were any Guantanamo cases | 9:54 | |
we could handle. | 9:56 | |
At the time, CCR was handing out batches of clients | 10:01 | |
to big law firms and they handed out 13 Yemenis to us. | 10:07 | |
Mark called up and asked | 10:14 | |
whether I would be the supervising partner for this work. | 10:16 | |
I was extremely busy at the time. | 10:20 | |
And I said to Mark, yes, I'll supervise | 10:22 | |
as long as I don't have to do any work on this stuff. | 10:26 | |
But as soon became apparent | 10:30 | |
that the firm would have no influence in the litigation | 10:32 | |
unless a senior guy like me got involved, | 10:36 | |
and to make a long story short, the more I got involved, | 10:41 | |
the more deeply I got involved, | 10:47 | |
the more passionately I felt about what was happening here. | 10:49 | |
These were real human beings, individuals | 10:57 | |
who were being treated absolutely outrageously | 11:01 | |
and injustice viably by our own government. | 11:08 | |
And I guess that's what aroused my passion most. | 11:14 | |
I had represented gay men in the '80s before. | 11:18 | |
It was really not, I wouldn't say before it was respectable, | 11:26 | |
I'd say before it was a movement. | 11:30 | |
I was always drawn to cases | 11:35 | |
in which the government was placing its boot | 11:37 | |
on somebody's neck, but representing individuals | 11:41 | |
where this happens is much different | 11:45 | |
from representing corporations | 11:47 | |
even though as Mr. Romney says, corporations are people. | 11:49 | |
So, okay, well anyway, | 11:55 | |
let me just make the long story short. | 11:57 | |
So over the next four years, I was in Yemen several times | 12:00 | |
representing, going to the families, I got to know them, | 12:04 | |
I got to have some feel for the culture, | 12:09 | |
which is just beautiful. | 12:13 | |
I fell in love with the work that I was doing. | 12:17 | |
And by 2008, I had lost all interest in the corporate work. | 12:21 | |
It didn't grab me whether or not IBM won in a pension case | 12:27 | |
against a class of plaintiffs or patents suit. | 12:34 | |
It called upon my legal skillsets | 12:40 | |
but the work had become meaningless to me and empty. | 12:44 | |
And I just couldn't keep my mind on it. | 12:49 | |
I was always doing the Guantanamo stuff. | 12:51 | |
So I left in the summer of 2008. | 12:53 | |
I organized a nonprofit, which I called appeal for justice | 12:56 | |
which has devolved into the name of my practice | 13:01 | |
because I haven't developed it as an organization. | 13:07 | |
And that's what I've been doing | 13:11 | |
for the last four or five years. | 13:12 | |
And I think I'm one of the few habeas lawyers | 13:17 | |
who have been involved in the work since Rasul, | 13:22 | |
and maybe probably the only individual habeas lawyer | 13:27 | |
who represents anything like the number of clients | 13:32 | |
that I represent. | 13:35 | |
I'd say that I represent now more than one in 10 | 13:36 | |
of the detainees | 13:41 | |
and that includes the high value detainees in the account. | 13:42 | |
If you take them out of the equation, | 13:46 | |
the percentage is even higher. | 13:48 | |
I'm very proud of it. | 13:50 | |
It's given my life's work meaning, | 13:52 | |
that's not why I did it but it turns out that way. | 13:59 | |
I'd rather have on my tombstone the epitaph | 14:02 | |
that I represented Guantanamo, | 14:07 | |
David Remes Guantanamo lawyer | 14:10 | |
than David Remes anti trust lawyer. | 14:12 | |
Interviewer | Just to follow up on that. | 14:16 |
And then I wanna go back, | 14:18 | |
how do you support this single operation that you're doing? | 14:22 | |
- | Well up until 2008, | 14:28 |
I was very handsomely paid by Covington. | 14:30 | |
So I could have my cake and eat it too. | 14:33 | |
Since 2008, I've spent all of my time on this work. | 14:37 | |
I haven't had any other source of income | 14:43 | |
except for my minor honoraria. | 14:46 | |
And I've been paying for the work out of own pocket. | 14:49 | |
I received a generous separation payment from Covington | 14:52 | |
and I've sort of spent that down and beyond that | 14:57 | |
I'm just drawing down on a bank account | 15:03 | |
and what that means | 15:08 | |
and I can't keep doing it for much longer, | 15:11 | |
but what that means from a material standpoint | 15:14 | |
is that we can't make the house dance here, | 15:19 | |
we can't go on a big vacations | 15:23 | |
and we'll have a very different retirement | 15:26 | |
than we would have had. | 15:29 | |
And I feel kind of bad about that | 15:31 | |
and sometimes I regret it from that standpoint | 15:33 | |
but my girls were out of school and independent. | 15:38 | |
So I didn't have the tuition burden, | 15:41 | |
we had renovated the house, | 15:43 | |
we don't go on extravagant vacations. | 15:46 | |
So we haven't, we're not part of the 47%. | 15:49 | |
Interviewer | And going back to two questions, one is, | 15:57 |
did you and I don't wanna go into it any more than this | 16:00 | |
but just what you were saying. | 16:02 | |
Did your parents tell you the stories | 16:04 | |
that you started this interview with | 16:05 | |
so that you were they informed your upbringing as well? | 16:09 | |
It isn't that you heard them later on | 16:12 | |
you knew as you were growing up | 16:14 | |
about the hardship your father had suffered? | 16:15 | |
- | Well, it's not really possible for children | 16:19 |
at the age of seven or eight | 16:24 | |
to understand this kind of thing. | 16:26 | |
And I don't think I really began to understand it | 16:29 | |
until I was 11 or 12, but when my father got out of jail, | 16:32 | |
he and my mother sat me and my sister down | 16:37 | |
and the way they presented what had happened to him | 16:40 | |
was in a very romantic light. | 16:44 | |
They compared him to Robin Hood basically. | 16:46 | |
And as the years went on, I got filled | 16:52 | |
in on more and more of the details but I had the basic story | 16:54 | |
and the political aspect of the story | 16:59 | |
by the time I was 10 or 11. | 17:01 | |
It was something still to be not ashamed of | 17:03 | |
but the cause of worry, if people knew about it. | 17:08 | |
So my father and mother kept it to themselves. | 17:14 | |
I kept it to myself. | 17:20 | |
My sister was kind of apolitical, | 17:22 | |
but for many years | 17:25 | |
it was something I just didn't talk about. | 17:27 | |
Interviewer | And so then going into 911, | 17:30 |
when 911 happened when the detainees | 17:34 | |
were first taken to Guantanamo, | 17:36 | |
since, what were you thinking at that time | 17:39 | |
and when you agreed to do, how then were you thinking of it | 17:42 | |
as just another one of your many pro bono projects | 17:45 | |
or did you begin to pay more attention, | 17:50 | |
I just want to know what happened during those four years | 17:53 | |
that kind of led you to do the hominid grief. | 17:56 | |
- | Well, on September 11th, 2001, I was on a conference call | 17:59 |
with one of my partners, with a client arguing about this. | 18:06 | |
And all of a sudden my partner said | 18:10 | |
plane went into one of the world trade centers. | 18:13 | |
Have I thought a little by plane. | 18:17 | |
And then he said, because he had a television, | 18:22 | |
he said another plane has gone into the other one. | 18:25 | |
And with my gift for perspicacity, | 18:27 | |
I said that can't be a coincidence. | 18:30 | |
And then I remember not really thinking about it very much. | 18:34 | |
I thought about 911 because it had happened to my home city | 18:40 | |
where my sister still lived | 18:44 | |
and I really did feel a sense of personal danger | 18:46 | |
because they also bombed the Pentagon | 18:48 | |
and there were rumors they'd bombed Capitol | 18:51 | |
or the White House and so on. | 18:53 | |
But I really didn't think about it. | 18:56 | |
I noticed that the government said | 18:58 | |
that these detainees didn't have rights | 19:00 | |
under the Geneva convention, | 19:02 | |
that they were arriving at Guantanamo, | 19:04 | |
but I really didn't think about it. | 19:07 | |
By in 2004, when I was asked to work on the Hamdan case, | 19:10 | |
it was just another case, it was an interesting case. | 19:16 | |
I had no idea what a military commission was, | 19:20 | |
I had no idea what GTMo meant. | 19:24 | |
And I learned these things as I went along | 19:28 | |
and I was very blessed to have associates | 19:30 | |
who could do a lot of the work with me. | 19:33 | |
And it wasn't really | 19:38 | |
until I began to get into the work after Rasul. | 19:39 | |
And even at that immediate point in July, 2004, | 19:47 | |
it was an abstraction. | 19:52 | |
It wasn't until I went to Guantanamo in December | 19:54 | |
or late November of 2004 | 19:59 | |
and met the detainees that I really got the profound sense | 20:02 | |
of horror that began the rock rolling down the hill. | 20:10 | |
Interviewer | Good, and that's where I want to go. | 20:19 |
So could you have any expectations | 20:20 | |
before you got on the airplane to Guantanamo is to what you? | 20:22 | |
- | I have absolutely no idea. | 20:26 |
Interviewer | And when. | 20:28 |
- | We had to go, we had had to go through fight | 20:29 |
on the legal question of whether | 20:32 | |
we could get the factual returns for the guys | 20:37 | |
which were the accusations. | 20:40 | |
My colleague Mark, when he looked at the returns, | 20:42 | |
said, "David, my God, we're representing four people | 20:48 | |
"who were in the 3030." | 20:52 | |
We had absolutely no idea and no sense of these guys | 20:54 | |
and no personal commitment to them at that point. | 20:59 | |
Interviewer | And so when you arrived in Guantanamo, | 21:03 |
could you tell us what that was like | 21:04 | |
in terms of your level and your meeting the clients? | 21:08 | |
- | Well at that time, the military there, | 21:11 |
the joint task force Guantanamo really regarded these men | 21:16 | |
as dangerous terrorists, really. | 21:21 | |
And when we came off of the plane, it was evening, | 21:28 | |
there were two bright Klieg lights facing us, | 21:33 | |
two armed soldiers with machine guns | 21:37 | |
and we were herded through an inspection line | 21:42 | |
where they went through all our belongings, | 21:45 | |
we were taken to the CBQ, | 21:47 | |
which was the equivalent of a grade B motel six at the time. | 21:50 | |
Then in the morning, | 21:59 | |
we were ferried over to the other side of the Bay. | 22:03 | |
The habeas lawyers were kept | 22:06 | |
on the Leeward side of the Bay where the airport was. | 22:08 | |
It was basically devoid of any civilization | 22:13 | |
and that wasn't accidental. | 22:16 | |
They still didn't accept the legitimacy | 22:18 | |
of the habeas lawyers. | 22:22 | |
I overheard one Sergeant say, when other Sergeant | 22:23 | |
that Rasul was simply an advisory opinion. | 22:30 | |
Yeah, wow. | 22:35 | |
So we then were brought to Camp Delta or Camp Echo | 22:37 | |
where they had set up these huts for client meetings. | 22:43 | |
And in that way that the huts were organized, you'd go in, | 22:47 | |
there'd be a cage on one side | 22:53 | |
where the detainees were kept | 22:56 | |
when they weren't meeting with their lawyers | 22:58 | |
and then there was the meeting room where | 23:00 | |
or the meeting area, 'cause the cage was a cage | 23:03 | |
where there'd be a table | 23:07 | |
and facing the back wall would be the detainee. | 23:10 | |
And then the, on the other side | 23:14 | |
with our backs facing the door | 23:15 | |
were the lawyers and the translators. | 23:18 | |
By the way, the interview rooms, the meeting rooms | 23:21 | |
are bigger than this room, deeper than this room. | 23:27 | |
The interview area was probably narrower. | 23:37 | |
No, yeah, basically the same as this room | 23:40 | |
it was not a big area is the point I'm trying to make. | 23:43 | |
And the cage was even a smaller area with a concrete bed | 23:46 | |
against the wall, a metal sink and toilet | 23:52 | |
and more than one client has told me | 23:58 | |
that being there all this time | 24:01 | |
has been like living in a bathroom and I can see why. | 24:03 | |
And so we arrived there | 24:09 | |
and these clients were utterly abject. | 24:12 | |
They had no idea what to expect from us. | 24:21 | |
We had no idea what to expect from them. | 24:24 | |
I'm told that they all thought that the habeas lawyers | 24:29 | |
were another set of interrogators at the very beginning. | 24:34 | |
And they had every reason to think so, | 24:39 | |
but most of them at least, pardon. | 24:42 | |
Interviewer | Why they have every reason to think so? | 24:44 |
- | Because they had been interrogated, | 24:46 |
of course hundreds of times, | 24:50 | |
the authorities used every trick in the book to lie to them, | 24:53 | |
disorient them, | 25:00 | |
get them to tell the real truth of their activities. | 25:02 | |
And this, from their standpoint was just the latest tactic | 25:07 | |
that they were using. | 25:12 | |
And later they tried to discredit the habeas lawyers | 25:14 | |
by sending in interrogators who were sort of dressed | 25:18 | |
like habeas lawyers | 25:23 | |
but were wearing hairpieces that were sort of a skew | 25:24 | |
and by accusing us, as you may have heard from other lawyers | 25:30 | |
of being Jewish or being gay, stuff like that | 25:35 | |
and found many other ways to try to separate us. | 25:39 | |
But that's another story the detainees at first | 25:42 | |
thought that we were government agents | 25:46 | |
and I think that that survived for quite a while, at least. | 25:49 | |
Yeah, for quite a while, for a couple of years. | 25:56 | |
Some of them still felt that we were that way. | 25:58 | |
And when we went and met their families in Yemen, | 26:01 | |
they felt that we were trying to trick the families | 26:06 | |
into getting information | 26:09 | |
that we could then report back to the government. | 26:12 | |
But they put their trust in us over time | 26:16 | |
despite their misgivings. | 26:22 | |
At one point a client said to me | 26:26 | |
this was Hassan bin Attash | 26:29 | |
who was captured when he was about 16, | 26:30 | |
and his brother Walid bin Attash | 26:34 | |
is one of the high value detainees | 26:37 | |
and one of the 5911 defendants. | 26:39 | |
Hassan said, "I trust you, but I don't trust you 100%." | 26:43 | |
(laughs) | 26:50 | |
And another client Abdul-Salam al-Hilam | 26:53 | |
who was quite a prominent businessman in Sanaa | 26:58 | |
and was actually kidnapped in Cairo said, | 27:02 | |
"No matter what I tell you, | 27:09 | |
"no matter how innocuous it is, | 27:11 | |
"the government will find some way | 27:15 | |
"to twist something that I said | 27:18 | |
"even as if it's 1% against me." | 27:21 | |
So they had all these fears. | 27:24 | |
And I must say that over the years, | 27:26 | |
most of them gave us a narrative that didn't really change | 27:30 | |
from the narratives they had provided | 27:39 | |
to their interrogators before. | 27:42 | |
In some cases they did saying that they had been tortured | 27:45 | |
or coerced into confessions | 27:50 | |
or that they were the victims of snitches | 27:53 | |
who were making false accusations | 27:57 | |
but they still gave us the narratives. | 27:59 | |
It wasn't as though we came in and they said, | 28:01 | |
we really did commit terrorist acts. | 28:06 | |
I mean, we haven't been telling anybody | 28:10 | |
but we blew this up, we conspired with bin Laden | 28:11 | |
and we can give you all these secrets | 28:15 | |
because we're your lawyers. | 28:17 | |
The fact is that at least for our clients, | 28:19 | |
their accounts to us were consistent | 28:22 | |
with their previous accounts. | 28:26 | |
And it turns out that we could corroborate their accounts. | 28:27 | |
Interviewer | So David. | 28:32 |
- | But the thing I wanna say about the first meeting, | 28:33 |
Interviewer | Yeah. | 28:36 |
- | is Mark had visited them maybe a little bit earlier | 28:38 |
and when each of us got back, we slept for two days. | 28:44 | |
Absolutely because what we found was a mixture of appalling, | 28:51 | |
interesting, and well, I can use other words. | 29:00 | |
I think appalling covers it best. | 29:09 | |
We were shocked and the emotional, | 29:11 | |
I mean the emotional impact | 29:14 | |
I can't begin to tell you because of the abjectness | 29:19 | |
of these men having been held there at the time | 29:23 | |
it was only two and a half years, | 29:28 | |
now it's over 10 years for most of them. | 29:31 | |
Interviewer | That's what I think would show the audience | 29:33 |
what you're expressing. | 29:37 | |
If you can describe what you saw | 29:38 | |
when you walked into that hut, | 29:40 | |
what did you see before you, and did that surprise you? | 29:43 | |
- | I saw these men, most of whom were not, | 29:46 |
some of whom were very slight physically. | 29:54 | |
None of whom was more than average build. | 30:02 | |
They were sitting behind their chair, | 30:07 | |
behind the desk and a chair | 30:10 | |
with one leg chained to the floor. | 30:12 | |
We had two seats in front of the table | 30:17 | |
for a translator and the lawyer. | 30:21 | |
And if there were more lawyers, | 30:23 | |
there'd be more seats of course. | 30:25 | |
And all I can tell you is we were hit by | 30:27 | |
and they were all wearing yellow jumpsuits. | 30:31 | |
We were just appalled. | 30:36 | |
And remember, none of us had ever been on a military base. | 30:40 | |
So being there under the supervision of escorts | 30:44 | |
which we also had to have and who were at the beginning | 30:53 | |
chief petty officers who get to be chief petty officers | 30:57 | |
by being Royal Schmucks. | 31:01 | |
And I don't think I'm saying anything | 31:04 | |
that the junior men wouldn't say. | 31:05 | |
So we had this very strange feeling | 31:09 | |
of being on a military base and seeing soldiers with guns | 31:14 | |
and code words with one were picked up by our escorts | 31:19 | |
and they were driving us toward the base. | 31:23 | |
They pick up the phone and say charcoal or rubric. | 31:25 | |
And these are actually brevity codes. | 31:31 | |
They call them, instead of saying a long bunch of words, | 31:34 | |
they use the shorthand. | 31:39 | |
It's really not supposed to be secret. | 31:41 | |
I don't think, I don't think secrecy | 31:42 | |
would serve much of a purpose. | 31:46 | |
We had to go through a checkpoint of guards at | 31:47 | |
I think it's called the Roosevelt checkpoint. | 31:53 | |
The guards all had guns and machine guns. | 31:55 | |
There must have been four or five. | 31:59 | |
We had to, of course, where identity badges all the time. | 32:02 | |
We couldn't go around without escorts. | 32:07 | |
There were these Barb wire ringed prison camps. | 32:09 | |
And just to give you a sense, because this is relevant. | 32:20 | |
Once after the habeas work started growing, | 32:23 | |
I was part of group of maybe 15 or 20 habeas lawyers | 32:28 | |
going through Camp Echo, | 32:33 | |
which was a series of interview huts as I mentioned, | 32:36 | |
forming a square with a courtyard in the middle of it, | 32:40 | |
a square courtyard. | 32:43 | |
And there we were, there were these huts, the tarp wall | 32:45 | |
the tarp, the sniper tarp parks on the fences, | 32:53 | |
basically designed to obscure a sniper's vision | 33:03 | |
into the camp, the guard towers, the barbed wires. | 33:06 | |
And there we were sort of a Motley group, | 33:14 | |
all shapes and sizes. | 33:17 | |
Heinz is 57 different varieties. | 33:20 | |
And the young guard turned and said, | 33:23 | |
"This looks like a tour of a concentration camp." | 33:29 | |
Out of the mouth of babes. | 33:37 | |
And I say that because it really helps validate | 33:39 | |
the picture that we present. | 33:47 | |
Then we were brought into the huts | 33:49 | |
and there were these guys, | 33:51 | |
they were unfamiliar to us in every way. | 33:53 | |
They were Arabs and most of them were colored | 33:58 | |
as middle Eastern Arabs are, | 34:15 | |
they all had great big black beards | 34:18 | |
because they're not supposed to shave and mustaches. | 34:21 | |
And most of them had big heads of unruly hair. | 34:24 | |
They spoke a language we had never heard. | 34:30 | |
They worshiped a religion that was totally alien to us. | 34:36 | |
Their culture was entirely unfamiliar. | 34:42 | |
So in a certain way, it was like | 34:47 | |
meeting people from a different, an alternative world. | 34:50 | |
And plus they were people | 34:57 | |
and they were sitting there in orange jumpsuits | 35:01 | |
chained to the floor, telling us stories | 35:03 | |
of horrible treatment and horrible experiences | 35:07 | |
in Afghanistan and Pakistan, stories of torture, | 35:12 | |
stories of what they endured simply | 35:17 | |
as they were going through mountain passes | 35:21 | |
from Afghanistan to Pakistan, | 35:23 | |
walking eight days in nearly naked, not naked | 35:28 | |
but near shoeless without a proper attire | 35:32 | |
through snow bound mountains, little food, | 35:37 | |
almost like, it wasn't a forced march at all | 35:43 | |
but it was the way they had to escape. | 35:46 | |
And just the image of these men fleeing in these conditions. | 35:49 | |
It was all very visual, almost cinematic and very shocking. | 35:57 | |
We had never imagined pictures like that in our minds, | 36:08 | |
appalling, as I mentioned and fascinating at the same time | 36:12 | |
it was that weird combination. | 36:17 | |
And we had never seen people so abject. | 36:21 | |
Wasn't like meeting somebody who had stolen a hubcap, | 36:25 | |
this was entirely new to us. | 36:29 | |
And it didn't really, it took a while for us, | 36:34 | |
I'm making a generalization, but I think that it's true | 36:38 | |
to number one, differentiate among our clients. | 36:41 | |
Interviewer | Interesting. | 36:48 |
- | No, one shoe was the same as another. | 36:50 |
They all have polish noses and that kind of thing | 36:52 | |
but at the beginning, it's difficult to differentiate | 36:57 | |
when everybody shares those same, | 37:02 | |
the same characteristics that I've mentioned. | 37:04 | |
And one of the horrors in the whole Guantanamo narrative | 37:08 | |
is how the Pentagon cast these guys | 37:14 | |
as an undifferentiated mass, | 37:18 | |
each one is the same as another. | 37:21 | |
They're all fungible, the worst of the worst | 37:22 | |
but it's time went on. | 37:25 | |
We had 13 clients, we began to appreciate | 37:27 | |
the individuality of each man, the uniqueness of this story, | 37:33 | |
the uniqueness of this family and family situation. | 37:39 | |
And these detainees became people to us. | 37:43 | |
And I can't tell you what an impact that had | 37:47 | |
because then the spotlight turned | 37:51 | |
on how they were being treated, | 37:54 | |
how they had been treated by the United States. | 37:57 | |
I don't know whether that answers your question. | 38:03 | |
Interviewer | It's actually very amazingly interesting | 38:05 |
because how you evolve. | 38:09 | |
We haven't heard that from many people, | 38:11 | |
just that evolution of the turning coming into the prison | 38:13 | |
and over the years, that's been really interesting. | 38:17 | |
So yeah, it does. | 38:20 | |
- | One more last thing. | 38:22 |
Interviewer | Yeah. | 38:22 |
- | We had a very adversary relationship | 38:24 |
with JTF from the beginning. | 38:29 | |
First of all, as I said, they didn't except our legitimacy. | 38:33 | |
They thought that we were extensions of our clients. | 38:40 | |
And on one occasion, I nearly came to blows | 38:50 | |
with a Lieutenant commander | 38:57 | |
because a client hadn't been brought | 39:00 | |
when he was supposed to be brought out, | 39:03 | |
the wrong client was brought at another time, | 39:05 | |
they made life miserable for the detainees who had lawyers | 39:08 | |
requiring them to spend two or three days in isolation | 39:13 | |
before and afterward. | 39:16 | |
And we were regarded as the enemy | 39:20 | |
and they did everything they could to make life hard for us. | 39:21 | |
And at one point I picked up the phone | 39:26 | |
and I shouted at the Lieutenant commander. | 39:29 | |
I said, one of my clients is missing. | 39:37 | |
And he said, "He's not missing, we know where he is." | 39:40 | |
And the wrong client was brought and on and on. | 39:43 | |
And then he came over | 39:47 | |
and chewed me out for being disrespectful for his guards. | 39:48 | |
And then I denied it and we really had a face-off. | 39:53 | |
We nearly came to blows, | 39:58 | |
at another point Clive Smith was pistol whipped | 39:59 | |
by guards and threatened with arrest, | 40:03 | |
pistol whip maybe a little strong | 40:07 | |
you'd have to ask him again. | 40:08 | |
My understanding was that a pistol was involved. | 40:11 | |
The Lieutenant commander that I almost came to blows with | 40:14 | |
got back at me by opening my legal mail. | 40:18 | |
And then the claim was | 40:24 | |
that the illegal mail was simply jostled | 40:26 | |
in being carried from one place to another. | 40:30 | |
And it really was antagonistic. | 40:34 | |
And over the years it's become routinized | 40:37 | |
and they do their thing, we do our thing. | 40:40 | |
This is all, it's like getting, | 40:42 | |
renewing your license at the DMV. | 40:46 | |
But in the first few years | 40:49 | |
I'd stay through 2006, 2007, maybe even later, | 40:52 | |
it was a relationship of hostility on their part toward us. | 40:57 | |
And as I say, finally, this was going on so long | 41:05 | |
that the two sides and the hysteria of 911 and Iraq | 41:09 | |
started to recede that this became, | 41:15 | |
these visits became routine | 41:19 | |
but at the beginning, when you add that to our encounter | 41:22 | |
with the detainees, our encounter with the military, | 41:26 | |
it was a pretty impactful situation. | 41:33 | |
Interviewer | Well, you mentioned Jewish. | 41:39 |
Johnny | Just a second. | 41:40 |
Would you mind setting the bottle down? | 41:41 | |
You're welcome to first drink wherever you want. | 41:44 | |
I just don't wanna have it in the shot (indistinct) | 41:47 | |
- | Sorry. | 41:49 |
Johnny | It's okay. | 41:50 |
- | I hope you can edit it out or something. | 41:51 |
I hope I haven't ruined this. | 41:54 | |
Johnny | No, no, not at all. | 41:55 |
Interviewer | I actually. | 41:57 |
Johnny | Don't wanna make it (indistinct) | 41:58 |
- | Okay. | 41:59 |
(laughs) | 41:59 | |
Oh, that's what they tell me when I'm on TV, | 42:00 | |
don't have that Coke bottle there. | 42:04 | |
Interviewer | You mentioned Jewish earlier. | 42:08 |
Did the JTF, or did any of the military tell your clients | 42:10 | |
that you were Jewish | 42:14 | |
and that maybe they shouldn't trust you because of that? | 42:15 | |
Do you know? | 42:18 | |
- | Yes, well, the specific example is Tom Wilner. | 42:19 |
I don't know whether you've interviewed him | 42:23 | |
but they would say these guys | 42:25 | |
and we know this because either | 42:31 | |
because somehow the idea was planted in these guys' minds. | 42:34 | |
I mean, they actually heard that | 42:37 | |
and they actually said that, but they would also say, | 42:41 | |
these guys are Jews and Jews will never do anything | 42:47 | |
for you without getting something back. | 42:51 | |
They want fame, they want money, somehow or other, | 42:55 | |
their motives here are materialistic and selfish | 43:01 | |
which of course is the Shylock kind of image. | 43:09 | |
And of course, the men equate Jews with Israelis | 43:14 | |
and Israelis are the evil empire | 43:21 | |
as far as the men are concerned | 43:27 | |
but I never experienced antisemitism. | 43:29 | |
I never experienced it. | 43:32 | |
My clients would go out of their way to say, | 43:34 | |
we embrace all religions | 43:38 | |
whether it's Muslim or Christianity of Judaism, | 43:39 | |
their theory, as I understand it | 43:44 | |
is that Islam is simply the highest stage of a progression | 43:46 | |
and the Jews are somewhere down there | 43:52 | |
and the Christians are somewhere down there. | 43:54 | |
And it's sort of like a Marxian view | 43:56 | |
of evolution toward perfection. | 44:01 | |
Some of them were anti of war. | 44:04 | |
I would have to say anti-semitic, but they're antisemitism. | 44:09 | |
And this is something that's hard for people to understand | 44:13 | |
was not racial, their antisemitism, | 44:16 | |
to the extent you can call it, that was political. | 44:22 | |
It wasn't racial, it wasn't religious, | 44:26 | |
it was political because of the identification Israel. | 44:28 | |
So I know that nobody | 44:32 | |
except my fellow habeas lawyers will understand this | 44:36 | |
because antisemitism is antisemitism. | 44:40 | |
This was political, not religious or racial. | 44:43 | |
Interviewer | And do you believe your clients | 44:47 |
when they first told you what apparently | 44:50 | |
was somewhat shocking stories | 44:52 | |
that you weren't expecting to hear | 44:53 | |
the first time you met them and then subsequently | 44:56 | |
I'm sure you began to believe it, but in those early days. | 44:58 | |
- | I believed it from the very beginning. | 45:02 |
Interviewer | Why? | 45:04 |
- | Why not? | 45:09 |
No, I mean, that's little bit to flip | 45:12 | |
because of the human character of their experiences | 45:15 | |
and the uniqueness of their experiences, | 45:25 | |
the vividness of their accounts, | 45:29 | |
the similarities of their accounts. | 45:32 | |
And I don't believe that over two years, | 45:38 | |
800 people sat down to work out a common story | 45:40 | |
'cause there were also differences that were significant. | 45:45 | |
Some people were apprehended here, | 45:48 | |
some people were apprehended there. | 45:50 | |
The military would say, these guys can't been | 45:55 | |
in Afghanistan to teach Quran | 45:58 | |
because they know Arabic, the Afghanis are | 46:02 | |
or the Afghans are Pashtun and there's no middle language. | 46:06 | |
And I'd make the point that up until the early '60s, | 46:11 | |
the Bible was taught in Latin | 46:14 | |
and nobody knew what that meant either. | 46:17 | |
And of course there were translators | 46:19 | |
but I think that was part of the military view | 46:22 | |
but every guy had his own story. | 46:24 | |
They seemed to be victims when you met them. | 46:28 | |
I think that's probably | 46:34 | |
and then their stories were both believable visually | 46:37 | |
not all that comprehensible factually, | 46:45 | |
not because they were difficult to understand | 46:51 | |
at the literal level, but because it was all | 46:56 | |
against a background that was completely unfamiliar. | 47:00 | |
But I will say just to make a very long story short, | 47:02 | |
it was the humanity of the situation | 47:05 | |
that led us to simply take for granted | 47:09 | |
that what they told us was true. | 47:14 | |
Interviewer | Did they tell you about their treatment | 47:17 |
in Guantanamo and do you believe that too? | 47:20 | |
I mean, other than the history | 47:23 | |
of why they ended up in Guantanamo, | 47:25 | |
did they talk about | 47:27 | |
whether they were mistreated in Guantanamo and? | 47:28 | |
- | Yeah, just to start even earlier, | 47:31 |
they told us about their horrifying treatment | 47:34 | |
in the dark prison which was a CIA prison, bog room prison, | 47:38 | |
and then Guantanamo and they told us | 47:46 | |
about the physical abuse | 47:51 | |
and the psychological abuse they suffered, | 47:53 | |
their relationship with the guards and the military there. | 47:58 | |
One of the things about having been involved in this so long | 48:07 | |
and on such a broad basis | 48:10 | |
is that I have an institutional memory | 48:14 | |
about what has gone on. | 48:16 | |
I can trace it on a timeline what happened this year, | 48:18 | |
what happened that year, this particular event, | 48:21 | |
that particular event, who was the leader of this group, | 48:25 | |
who was in this cell block, | 48:29 | |
whether this cell block was a torture cell block | 48:30 | |
or a punishment cell block, the movement of detainees. | 48:35 | |
I learned this stuff from them | 48:39 | |
and because I represented so many detainees, | 48:42 | |
I've had a panoramic sense of it. | 48:46 | |
And I absolutely believed it. | 48:49 | |
Interviewer | Can you tell us one or two stories | 48:51 |
just for viewers | 48:53 | |
'cause you might not watch this for 50 years | 48:55 | |
and so for them to have an actual story or two | 48:58 | |
that just what you see, | 49:01 | |
what you experienced would be really helpful. | 49:03 | |
- | Yes, and of course, all I can recount | 49:06 |
is what they told me. | 49:08 | |
Interviewer | Sure. | 49:10 |
- | And I also want to draw the distinction. | 49:12 |
There were the interrogators, and then there were the guards | 49:15 | |
and the prison keepers, the administrators. | 49:22 | |
And I make the distinction because people on the outside | 49:26 | |
have really been be, oh sorry, | 49:31 | |
because the narratives that people have been exposed to | 49:36 | |
involve interrogations, | 49:44 | |
enhanced interrogations, what have you. | 49:47 | |
And when Jane Mayer, who I who's one of the best journalists | 49:51 | |
and deepest journalists in the world writes a book | 49:57 | |
that follows the torture policy up the string to Rumsfeld, | 50:01 | |
she's talking about interrogations. | 50:06 | |
I ran into Chris Wallace of Fox of all people. | 50:10 | |
And I said, there's torture going on. | 50:14 | |
I said that in one way or another. | 50:20 | |
And he said, I thought that was just | 50:22 | |
with the interrogations, | 50:24 | |
but the guards and the officers in charge, | 50:26 | |
and the commanders created a situation | 50:32 | |
and implemented a situation that was savage, sadistic, | 50:37 | |
brutal, good with a Saurus and look up the synonyms. | 50:46 | |
It was just, I know you want examples. | 50:53 | |
So I'll give you a couple of examples. | 50:56 | |
Here on the psychological level. | 51:00 | |
This is not physical so much, but psychological. | 51:06 | |
They made it difficult, very difficult | 51:10 | |
for the men to pray by purposely putting them in shorts. | 51:14 | |
And I guess from the standpoint of Islam, | 51:20 | |
you're not supposed to show your behind | 51:25 | |
to somebody behind you wearing shorts. | 51:28 | |
I can only speculate on the reason | 51:30 | |
but it was this serious reason. | 51:33 | |
They would interrupt prayer calls, | 51:35 | |
they would put the arrow to Mecca in the wrong place, | 51:38 | |
they'd give them the wrong time, | 51:43 | |
they were very systematic and careful | 51:45 | |
about hitting these guys where it hurt most their religion | 51:50 | |
because these men, most of them, | 51:55 | |
if not all of them were devoutly religious across the board | 52:01 | |
in a way that Westerners can't understand. | 52:06 | |
I once suggested to a reporter | 52:10 | |
that he think of Manhattan populated by hosteds | 52:13 | |
from the Bowery up to the Bronx. | 52:18 | |
It was sort of like that. | 52:23 | |
And that is the greatest point of sensitivity for them. | 52:28 | |
As you know there are the burning Quran stories | 52:34 | |
and stories like that. | 52:38 | |
And so this is all background | 52:40 | |
to what I thought was the most horrifying of all | 52:42 | |
which was at a certain point, they would punish a detainee | 52:47 | |
by taking him to a special room | 52:53 | |
which I call room 101 after the infamous room | 52:57 | |
in George Orwell's 1984, | 53:02 | |
where they would sit the detainee down in a chair | 53:06 | |
and cut off his beard. | 53:09 | |
And the Quran says, you have to have a beard. | 53:15 | |
And to me, it was a horrifying Echo of what the Germans | 53:19 | |
and the Nazis did with highly religious Jews. | 53:27 | |
We could see on the street, they'd just go up to them. | 53:31 | |
But these morons who were doing this | 53:33 | |
only knew that it was very humiliating, | 53:36 | |
they didn't make the reference. | 53:39 | |
There was the incessant use | 53:41 | |
of what were called earth teams emergency response forces | 53:43 | |
where maybe half a dozen soldiers | 53:49 | |
dressed in these robo cop uniforms would go in | 53:54 | |
and just beat the shit out of these guys | 53:58 | |
on no pretext or the slightest pretext. | 54:00 | |
And when I was in the inspection area, | 54:04 | |
going into Echo for interviews, | 54:07 | |
I once saw these black uniforms | 54:09 | |
and they were very frightening. | 54:16 | |
Okay, then there were things like guards | 54:19 | |
simply shoving the detainees by the head | 54:25 | |
into the toilet hall. | 54:29 | |
And there's a trace of that even now in one of the camps. | 54:33 | |
There was verbal abuse, there was physical abuse, | 54:40 | |
banging heads on walls. | 54:44 | |
One of my clients still has a terribly sore back | 54:46 | |
as a result of this, another client. | 54:52 | |
I mean, some clients bear the physical marks of this. | 54:56 | |
And what I'm saying is verbal | 55:00 | |
but when you began to visualize the abuse | 55:04 | |
that these men suffered, | 55:10 | |
not as individuals who were being interrogated | 55:12 | |
but people who live day to day under these circumstances, | 55:18 | |
men had to urinate in their cells naked | 55:23 | |
or wherever, pulling down their pants | 55:29 | |
in the full view of the guards, they were lied to. | 55:31 | |
I once said to a client, | 55:37 | |
they put you in a situation where you don't know | 55:39 | |
whether anything that's said it's a lie | 55:42 | |
and where you don't know what's up, what's down. | 55:44 | |
I do suspect that that is more | 55:49 | |
along the lines of interrogators | 55:50 | |
but there was just relentless physical brutality. | 55:52 | |
The men responded in their own ways | 55:56 | |
splashing as the most known one. | 56:01 | |
And I just I'd have to go back | 56:06 | |
to my notes to recount all the forms of physical abuse | 56:08 | |
and all the forms of psychological abuse. | 56:12 | |
And they've told me that the forms of psychological abuse | 56:14 | |
and religious abuse were the worst of all | 56:17 | |
and the commander actually had an advisor, | 56:20 | |
a Muslim advisor, seriously. | 56:25 | |
I have his name somewhere, | 56:28 | |
he's well known who basically told the command, | 56:30 | |
this is how you get to them on the religious ground. | 56:35 | |
And he was always portrayed by the command | 56:39 | |
as telling the commanders how to respect the men's religion. | 56:43 | |
But in fact, this is what he was doing. | 56:51 | |
They also denied the men a chaplain | 56:54 | |
after the first chaplain was perceived | 56:57 | |
as getting too close to the men. | 56:59 | |
The idea that a Muslim population | 57:02 | |
hasn't had a Muslim chaplain for eight, nine, 10 years | 57:05 | |
is also amazing. | 57:10 | |
Again, I'd have to go back to my notes | 57:12 | |
which I'm sure will be part of the file | 57:14 | |
were the specific examples, but they were Legion, | 57:17 | |
they were very tough | 57:21 | |
and the worst ones were the psychological religions ones. | 57:23 | |
Interviewer | I just wanna add to that, David | 57:25 |
that many of the detainees we interviewed | 57:27 | |
called it a psychological prison, more than a physical, | 57:31 | |
isn't it? | 57:33 | |
I think that's what you (indistinct) | 57:34 | |
- | That's what I'm describing but from my standpoint, | 57:35 |
because I don't relate to the depth | 57:40 | |
of their religious version or religiosity, | 57:50 | |
I understand that at kind of an abstract level | 57:58 | |
but the physical stuff I really understand. | 58:04 | |
Interviewer | Well, do you know any of your clients | 58:09 |
who were in isolation for long periods of time? | 58:12 | |
- | Yes. | 58:15 |
Interviewer | And can you tell us a little about that | 58:16 |
and why? | 58:18 | |
- | Well, my poor client Adnan Lateef was considered, | 58:19 |
I guess kind of a wild man, not in a physical, | 58:28 | |
I mean not in the sense of being a physical threat | 58:32 | |
but just because he was sort of uncontrollable. | 58:37 | |
He had mental issues, psychological issues | 58:40 | |
plus he was just so obstreperous | 58:45 | |
that the guards used to ask other detainees | 58:51 | |
how to handle him. | 58:53 | |
There were leaders who, | 58:55 | |
I mean detainees were regarded as leaders | 58:59 | |
like my clients, Shockya Amir. | 59:02 | |
He actually negotiated for the detainees at one point | 59:05 | |
with the administration who were kept in isolation | 59:08 | |
he's charismatic, mesmerizing, intelligent, perfect English. | 59:12 | |
He could be anything he wants even when he gets out. | 59:18 | |
I don't know the rhyme or reason | 59:24 | |
for keeping a number of clients in isolation. | 59:26 | |
I really don't. | 59:29 | |
Someone in isolation is punishment | 59:31 | |
but all I can do without going back. | 59:36 | |
I'm sort of embarrassed about this | 59:40 | |
but I've had so many clients that, | 59:43 | |
although I know each as an individual, | 59:45 | |
and I know what experiences they've had. | 59:48 | |
I can't always put the experience with a particular client. | 59:51 | |
Interviewer | I think you've given | 59:57 |
a really good sense of it | 59:58 | |
and other people have given it too, | 1:00:00 | |
so this is the Mosaic. | 1:00:01 | |
And when you put all the videos together, you go get. | 1:00:03 | |
- | And I suspect that you're hearing basically the same story | 1:00:07 |
from us, we all went through this. | 1:00:14 | |
It's so fascinating the detainees had generally | 1:00:19 | |
a consistent set of experiences from the moment | 1:00:25 | |
that they were captured up until through Guantanamo. | 1:00:32 | |
My clients like Abdul Salam, who was captured in Cairo | 1:00:39 | |
went through sort of an arc of prisons | 1:00:46 | |
which I sometimes joke or like stations of the cross. | 1:00:50 | |
And at one point I wanted to go to Afghanistan | 1:00:54 | |
and trace the particular prisons. | 1:00:57 | |
Then there's my client Saifullah Paracha, | 1:01:00 | |
who was picked up in Thailand | 1:01:03 | |
and he went through his own experiences. | 1:01:06 | |
But they'll all tell you what happened | 1:01:08 | |
when they got off the plane. | 1:01:10 | |
The physical examinations | 1:01:12 | |
involving forced rectal examinations, | 1:01:14 | |
being kept in these chicken coops, | 1:01:17 | |
being forced to be naked in front of women guards | 1:01:19 | |
as they were photographed and filmed. | 1:01:24 | |
And then what happened to them in the cells? | 1:01:28 | |
It's a common experience, unbelievably common | 1:01:31 | |
and then we have the common experience. | 1:01:37 | |
Interviewer | And you mentioned the dark prison. | 1:01:40 |
Can you describe that to us if you? | 1:01:42 | |
- | Yes, first of all, when the dark prison was mentioned, | 1:01:46 |
we knew it was a prison and we knew it was a special prison | 1:01:53 | |
but we had no idea about the significance of these prisons | 1:01:57 | |
over time as deliberately designed torture chambers. | 1:02:07 | |
I have about maybe three or four clients | 1:02:14 | |
who went through it, but the most, | 1:02:17 | |
the first and the most vivid description | 1:02:19 | |
was by Abdul-Salam al-Hilam. | 1:02:22 | |
And what he described was being in a room without any light, | 1:02:26 | |
no light in the hallway, except maybe dim lights. | 1:02:32 | |
Having his arm chained to the wall | 1:02:37 | |
maybe about two and a half, three feet up. | 1:02:41 | |
And he would say to us, how do you sleep? | 1:02:44 | |
How do you sleep? | 1:02:48 | |
And they would play the ear, shattering music. | 1:02:49 | |
He'd be completely in the dark. | 1:02:53 | |
And then at some point when he couldn't predict it, | 1:02:56 | |
the guards would come | 1:02:59 | |
and take him to the interrogation room | 1:03:00 | |
which would also be completely dark, | 1:03:02 | |
except for strobe lights that were directed to him. | 1:03:05 | |
Strobe lights. | 1:03:10 | |
What a disorientation out of coming from that kind of a cell | 1:03:12 | |
and then being questioned under those circumstances. | 1:03:16 | |
He and other clients | 1:03:19 | |
recount hearing screams in other cells from other men. | 1:03:22 | |
It's hard to remember more details. | 1:03:29 | |
I had physical descriptions | 1:03:34 | |
of the facility from him and other clients. | 1:03:36 | |
I have very vivid sense of that | 1:03:40 | |
but I think that Abdul-Salam's treatment | 1:03:42 | |
really summarizes the dark prison. | 1:03:45 | |
I've had other clients who were hung | 1:03:49 | |
by chains from their arms | 1:03:52 | |
with their feet off the ground. | 1:03:56 | |
Interviewer | This is an Afghanistan. | 1:03:58 |
- | No, this is, I mean, yeah | 1:03:59 |
this is an Afghanistan at dark prison. | 1:04:01 | |
And so this was more intense | 1:04:05 | |
than what they went through at bog room. | 1:04:08 | |
But what they went through at bog room | 1:04:11 | |
was pretty intense too. | 1:04:13 | |
Interviewer | So you heard about suicides. | 1:04:16 |
Did any of your clients try to commit suicide? | 1:04:22 | |
Is that a story you wanna tell us at all? | 1:04:26 | |
- | What I'll say is that there have been two detainees | 1:04:29 |
out of, there been nine detainees who died. | 1:04:35 | |
I won't call any of them suicide. | 1:04:39 | |
Two of them died of clearly physical causes. | 1:04:45 | |
One died of cancer, one died of a heart attack | 1:04:48 | |
after exercising on a treadmill, that leaves you with seven. | 1:04:53 | |
There were three, the famous three from 2006 I think | 1:04:58 | |
who died under circumstances that render | 1:05:05 | |
the characterization of their deaths as suicides | 1:05:11 | |
completely unbelievable. | 1:05:15 | |
And Scott Horton of Harpers has really torn that account | 1:05:17 | |
to shreds, so has Mark Denbeaux at Seton Hall? | 1:05:23 | |
So they weren't suicides. | 1:05:30 | |
Then there was someone else who died | 1:05:32 | |
exactly a year afterward by the Muslim calendar. | 1:05:35 | |
I don't remember his story in particular. | 1:05:41 | |
There was a guy named Al Hanashi, ISN 78, | 1:05:44 | |
who died in a psych ward. | 1:05:50 | |
And you can imagine the kind of scrutiny these men | 1:05:53 | |
are under in a psych ward. | 1:05:55 | |
All of the cells throughout the camp are wired for sound, | 1:05:57 | |
have moving dome cameras or cameras within domes. | 1:06:03 | |
And the way that the military said that he died | 1:06:08 | |
was by self strangulation. | 1:06:12 | |
It's almost like a Jim Carey. | 1:06:16 | |
Idea, the idea was that he somehow wrapped his underwear | 1:06:18 | |
around his neck and pulled. | 1:06:22 | |
We think that it was a medication issue. | 1:06:25 | |
Then there was my client Adnan | 1:06:29 | |
who died in September this year. | 1:06:32 | |
The military doesn't even claim | 1:06:37 | |
that it was a suicide or even an intended suicide. | 1:06:40 | |
And since this is designed for the future | 1:06:46 | |
and not current consumption, | 1:06:50 | |
we have become aware of the conclusions | 1:06:53 | |
of the autopsy report | 1:06:57 | |
which I think since this is all second or third hand | 1:07:00 | |
from the government did not claim that it was a suicide. | 1:07:04 | |
Of course, it's not claiming that it was physical brutality, | 1:07:08 | |
but was a medical issue. | 1:07:13 | |
As I suspected, he could have been. | 1:07:16 | |
And we'll find this out in time, the wrong medication, | 1:07:21 | |
too much medication, too little medication, | 1:07:24 | |
medication where it was contra indicated | 1:07:27 | |
or medication that had adverse interactions with others. | 1:07:29 | |
There was a high degree of carelessness | 1:07:34 | |
and indifference and neglect on the part of the authorities | 1:07:36 | |
to the physical problems of the men. | 1:07:41 | |
One of the, I know I'm sort of going off on a tangent. | 1:07:47 | |
One of the great complaints of our clients | 1:07:49 | |
was no matter what their complaint | 1:07:52 | |
in the first several years, the answer was mortuary. | 1:07:54 | |
And the men were very distrustful | 1:08:01 | |
of the corpsmen and the doctors and the nurses. | 1:08:03 | |
But that's another story. | 1:08:08 | |
So Adnan didn't commit suicide. | 1:08:10 | |
Al Hanashi didn't commit suicide. | 1:08:15 | |
These three guys didn't commit suicide. | 1:08:18 | |
There's another guy who was found dead in an exercise area | 1:08:22 | |
under extremely suspicious circumstances, | 1:08:32 | |
how he would have been let into the area | 1:08:36 | |
without being searched | 1:08:38 | |
and deprived of anything he could admit some suicide with | 1:08:40 | |
is kind of a mystery. | 1:08:44 | |
So that's five. | 1:08:45 | |
Then you have the two who died of natural causes | 1:08:46 | |
and then you had one who we don't think committed suicide | 1:08:50 | |
but I can't remember the details of it. | 1:08:57 | |
The suicide story was a cynical attempt | 1:08:59 | |
by the military to absolve themselves | 1:09:05 | |
of responsibility for these deaths. | 1:09:10 | |
And as you may recall, the military went so far | 1:09:12 | |
not only to claim that these men were suicides | 1:09:18 | |
but at the beginning, the military claimed | 1:09:21 | |
that this was part of their war against the United States. | 1:09:24 | |
You may remember that phrase, asymmetric war. | 1:09:29 | |
Well, the idea of committing suicide | 1:09:32 | |
was to bring condemnation to Guantanamo and to America. | 1:09:35 | |
So it wasn't even out of desperation | 1:09:43 | |
or hopelessness or despair. | 1:09:47 | |
This was terrorism. | 1:09:50 | |
The current, I'm sorry, the second most current commander | 1:09:52 | |
or the current commander has said | 1:09:59 | |
that Guantanamo was just another front | 1:10:03 | |
in the war against terrorism. | 1:10:07 | |
And he says this in 2012 or 2011, | 1:10:10 | |
the mindset is unbelievable. | 1:10:14 | |
Interviewer | Why do you think you'll get the information | 1:10:18 |
on Adnan, isn't it? | 1:10:21 | |
I understood government doesn't have | 1:10:22 | |
to release any further information to you, right? | 1:10:24 | |
- | And again, this is totally confidential at this point. | 1:10:28 |
Yemen wouldn't take Adnan's remains back | 1:10:37 | |
unless the US gave them the autopsy report. | 1:10:41 | |
So the US is going to give them the autopsy report | 1:10:45 | |
and the Yemen government will give the autopsy report | 1:10:49 | |
to the families. | 1:10:52 | |
And we will talk to one of Adnan's brothers, | 1:10:56 | |
we'll try to place the first call tomorrow | 1:11:02 | |
and give him a heads up of what's happening | 1:11:05 | |
and what we think the report will conclude. | 1:11:08 | |
And we're going to give the autopsy report | 1:11:14 | |
to some independent pathologists to review as well. | 1:11:17 | |
So that's how we know about it. | 1:11:23 | |
And that's the unusual circumstance | 1:11:25 | |
with the US with releasing it. | 1:11:29 | |
Now true to a public affairs strategy. | 1:11:31 | |
The report will be turned over to the Yemen government | 1:11:38 | |
in the week of the presidential elections | 1:11:41 | |
so it will be unnoticed. | 1:11:45 | |
The Pentagon is not only wish you a press-release, | 1:11:46 | |
Yemen may not even acknowledge it. | 1:11:50 | |
So the US is doing everything possible | 1:11:55 | |
to bury the story if you'll pardon the phrase | 1:11:59 | |
but that's another long way of answering your question. | 1:12:03 | |
Then there is an investigation ongoing | 1:12:06 | |
by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service | 1:12:09 | |
which we can understand why it's taking so long. | 1:12:12 | |
Interviewer | Investigating what?. | 1:12:17 |
- | Investigating the sequence of events. | 1:12:18 |
Who's responsible for what. | 1:12:26 | |
The pathologist determines the cause of death | 1:12:29 | |
with input by the car and or I guess or medical examiner. | 1:12:33 | |
But then the NCIS is exploring whether there was criminal | 1:12:40 | |
or culpable activities and that's routine. | 1:12:45 | |
They do it in the case of every detainee | 1:12:48 | |
but they sometimes take a couple of years to do it. | 1:12:52 | |
They sometimes never finish. | 1:12:56 | |
And all that's released to the public | 1:12:59 | |
turns out to be a heavily redacted version. | 1:13:02 | |
The FBI seems to be investigating it because Shaker told me | 1:13:07 | |
that the FBI wanted to interrogate him about Adnan's death | 1:13:12 | |
'cause they were both in the punishment cell block, | 1:13:17 | |
in the psych cells of the punishment cell blocks. | 1:13:22 | |
But so Shaker said, well, my lawyer | 1:13:28 | |
David Remes is down here. | 1:13:31 | |
I'm not gonna talk to you unless my lawyer's here. | 1:13:33 | |
So take advantage of the opportunity. | 1:13:35 | |
I'll tell you anything you wanna know | 1:13:38 | |
but I have to have the lawyer in my room. | 1:13:39 | |
They never did that. | 1:13:41 | |
They never took advantage of that. | 1:13:42 | |
Another side note, | 1:13:46 | |
I won't go into this | 1:13:48 | |
but there will be outside investigators coming in | 1:13:50 | |
and again, taking information from him. | 1:13:54 | |
But that has nothing to do | 1:13:57 | |
with the suicide point. | 1:13:58 | |
Then SOUTHCOM, which is the unit | 1:14:00 | |
of the military with overall responsibility | 1:14:06 | |
for South America and Latin America. | 1:14:11 | |
And I don't know what else, | 1:14:15 | |
I don't know what else, you can find that out pretty easily | 1:14:19 | |
is conducting its own investigation. | 1:14:23 | |
So right now you have three investigations ongoing | 1:14:26 | |
with no claim that this was suicide, | 1:14:31 | |
with no claim that this was natural causes. | 1:14:34 | |
When he was found dead, I've been told | 1:14:39 | |
that the news went all the way up | 1:14:43 | |
to the joint chiefs of staff | 1:14:46 | |
because it was regarded as such a political hot potato. | 1:14:49 | |
Again, I'm getting in front of the story. | 1:14:56 | |
So yeah, the question or witness privilege. | 1:14:59 | |
Interviewer | Absolutely (indistinct) | 1:15:11 |
- | I'll invoke. | 1:15:12 |
So no, the others, the government | 1:15:13 | |
was able to sort of pass off very easily, | 1:15:16 | |
but it's not able to do that here. | 1:15:20 | |
That's why I think | 1:15:24 | |
there are so many investigations going on. | 1:15:25 | |
And I also think that the Pentagon | 1:15:28 | |
and the government in general | 1:15:30 | |
wanna get their stories straight. | 1:15:31 | |
Interviewer | I mean, why wouldn't they do investigations? | 1:15:34 |
Why wouldn't they just bury the whole thing and just say? | 1:15:35 | |
- | Well, it's I say, it's routine | 1:15:38 |
for the NCIS to do investigations in the case of deaths. | 1:15:39 | |
This is not unique to Adnan. | 1:15:43 | |
I don't know about the FBI. | 1:15:45 | |
And I only say it's the FBI | 1:15:47 | |
because Shaker told me that it was the FBI. | 1:15:49 | |
And we know that it's SOUTHCOM, | 1:15:53 | |
I can't remember how we know, but we know. | 1:15:57 | |
We know based on objective sources. | 1:16:02 | |
Interviewer | Why do you think Shaker is not released | 1:16:05 |
since he's your client? | 1:16:08 | |
Can you tell us 'cause apparently he was destined | 1:16:10 | |
for release and then he hasn't been over these years? | 1:16:15 | |
- | And just to mention, Adnan was approved | 1:16:19 |
for release four times. | 1:16:22 | |
Why he wouldn't be released, he was the prime candidate | 1:16:25 | |
for release on humanitarian grounds. | 1:16:28 | |
We have other clients who have been approved for release | 1:16:30 | |
who are till there. | 1:16:34 | |
They're Yemenis. | 1:16:37 | |
He is the last UK resident at Guantanamo. | 1:16:38 | |
He was one of the detainee leaders, | 1:16:44 | |
he's been in isolation for | 1:16:47 | |
almost since the beginning. | 1:16:51 | |
They do have ways of communicating despite being isolated. | 1:16:53 | |
He has always felt that the US was afraid to release him | 1:16:59 | |
because he would reveal the horrors that he suffered, | 1:17:06 | |
he thinks that the UK doesn't want him | 1:17:14 | |
because he would support and complain about horrors | 1:17:18 | |
that the British were complicit in | 1:17:25 | |
and would go out on his soap box anyway | 1:17:29 | |
and become a big critic. | 1:17:31 | |
That's his theory. | 1:17:33 | |
There are always whispers that there are negotiations | 1:17:34 | |
between the UK and Shaker over his release | 1:17:39 | |
which is also a political hot potato. | 1:17:45 | |
Everybody says they're trying to do the right thing | 1:17:48 | |
but the right thing never happens. | 1:17:51 | |
They sort of toss the ball at each other on this. | 1:17:54 | |
The Brits complain that Congress passed a law | 1:18:00 | |
that makes it, well, we claim | 1:18:05 | |
that Congress passed a law that make us very horrible. | 1:18:07 | |
I mean, not horrible, really | 1:18:11 | |
but hard to approve the release of anybody, | 1:18:12 | |
even those people that the government | 1:18:15 | |
doesn't wanna release. | 1:18:17 | |
He's a very high profile detainee. | 1:18:19 | |
And I know I wander all over the place | 1:18:23 | |
in some of these answers, but for some reason | 1:18:25 | |
he's just a hard nut to crack. | 1:18:29 | |
He's not a nut, but he's hard to crack. | 1:18:31 | |
Interviewer | So, my understanding the US has said | 1:18:33 |
that they will not keep anybody | 1:18:36 | |
in isolation for more than 30 days. | 1:18:38 | |
And you just described Shaker | 1:18:41 | |
as being in isolation for what apparently these years. | 1:18:42 | |
How does the US justify that? | 1:18:46 | |
- | I think that the US is talking | 1:18:48 |
about individuals ordinary rank and file detainees | 1:18:51 | |
say those in Camp Six who commit some violation, | 1:18:57 | |
big or small. | 1:19:02 | |
They're sent to Camp Five and put there as punishment. | 1:19:04 | |
They may stay there for 30 days. | 1:19:09 | |
I think that's the official policy. | 1:19:11 | |
Some of them stay longer, but then there is another class | 1:19:13 | |
of detainee who is kept in isolation for other reasons. | 1:19:17 | |
And I have a few clients who fall into that category. | 1:19:25 | |
So the 30 day maximum | 1:19:30 | |
and they talk about is for situations | 1:19:33 | |
other than those that my clients are involved in, | 1:19:39 | |
who have special cases. | 1:19:42 | |
Interviewer | Could you describe the kind of isolation | 1:19:47 |
that he's in? | 1:19:49 | |
- | Yes, let me have a sip of water first. | 1:19:52 |
Interviewer | Yeah, if you want to get him, | 1:19:55 |
should we get another one of these? | 1:19:57 | |
- | If you got anything I'd love a can of diet Coke | 1:19:58 |
but that maybe room service will barely bring it up. | 1:20:01 | |
Interviewer | We don't have one actually. | 1:20:04 |
Can you turn off the camera for a minute. | 1:20:05 | |
About the isolation that Shaker has experienced | 1:20:07 | |
or is experiencing | 1:20:11 | |
- | Yes, Shaker experienced | 1:20:12 |
and some of my other clients experienced | 1:20:16 | |
particularly horrible isolation in the last couple of years. | 1:20:21 | |
I wouldn't say that I was proud | 1:20:31 | |
to have the number of clients I did | 1:20:36 | |
who were isolated this way | 1:20:39 | |
but it did seem impressive to me. | 1:20:42 | |
(laughs) | 1:20:48 | |
This a reference to Five Echo. | 1:20:51 | |
Echo is the camp that holds the men | 1:20:57 | |
who have been convicted by the military commission. | 1:21:04 | |
It holds a special group, which I'll go into a little later | 1:21:09 | |
of men who are deemed to be extraordinarily influential | 1:21:14 | |
among the detainee population. | 1:21:21 | |
It houses hunger strikers | 1:21:24 | |
of which there aren't a lot anymore. | 1:21:26 | |
And it's the place where the detainees who violate the rules | 1:21:29 | |
or who are said to violate the rules are sent to. | 1:21:38 | |
It's the punishment camp. | 1:21:41 | |
And just to describe the geography of it, | 1:21:44 | |
in the beginning there was Delta. | 1:21:50 | |
Delta was a very large camp, full of converted, | 1:21:54 | |
large converted trailers and divided into cells. | 1:21:59 | |
And each cell was caged and they were mesh wires, | 1:22:03 | |
mesh wiring, or crosshatched iron sides, | 1:22:08 | |
which is why I call it a cage, squat toilets, | 1:22:16 | |
which is what most of the men are customed to anyway, | 1:22:22 | |
but that doesn't excuse it in an American camp. | 1:22:28 | |
I've story of his story to tell about that | 1:22:34 | |
but I'll leave it until later if we have time. | 1:22:37 | |
Then the military built Camp Five, which had four wings, | 1:22:39 | |
Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, and Echo. | 1:22:48 | |
Then the military built Camp Six | 1:22:56 | |
both of them are modeled on maximum security US prisons. | 1:23:02 | |
There are two stories. | 1:23:09 | |
And skipping way ahead to the present. | 1:23:17 | |
Maybe two or three years ago. | 1:23:24 | |
Well, three or four years ago, | 1:23:26 | |
the Bush administration set up, | 1:23:29 | |
I miss camp. | 1:23:34 | |
It it's Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, okay? | 1:23:35 | |
They set up an Echo called Five Echo. | 1:23:40 | |
Echo was sort of attached to the main camp, | 1:23:44 | |
five camp proper, except it too was a converted trailer. | 1:23:50 | |
The Pentagon released photos of this | 1:23:58 | |
after Ben Fox of the AP broke this story | 1:24:00 | |
in December, 2010, I think. | 1:24:04 | |
Probably 2010. | 1:24:11 | |
Maybe 2011, the years sort of merge into each other. | 1:24:14 | |
Interviewer | The story you're gonna tell us? | 1:24:18 |
- | Yeah, very briefly. | 1:24:19 |
And he didn't tell it in the detail that I can tell it in. | 1:24:21 | |
Interviewer | Okay. | 1:24:25 |
- | This is where a number of the influentials were placed, | 1:24:26 |
which is includes Shaker. | 1:24:32 | |
It included Hassan bin Attash, | 1:24:35 | |
It included Abdul-Salam al-Hilam. | 1:24:38 | |
Shaker has been the most vivid | 1:24:44 | |
in describing the circumstances. | 1:24:47 | |
What he hated was the way he had to go to the bathroom. | 1:24:50 | |
You'll understand why when I explain it | 1:25:03 | |
because these men were meant to be punished | 1:25:07 | |
extraordinarily harshly. | 1:25:14 | |
The makeup of the cell would be you had the bed, | 1:25:18 | |
the concrete bed, you didn't have a toilet. | 1:25:24 | |
You had a hole in the ground. | 1:25:28 | |
You didn't have a sink, you have a faucet. | 1:25:31 | |
Let me reverse it so I can explain it better | 1:25:37 | |
because I'm, right-handed, here's the bed, here's the hole, | 1:25:40 | |
here's the faucet | 1:25:47 | |
and here's a drain pipe going from faucet to hole. | 1:25:49 | |
The hole is located | 1:25:56 | |
in a way that makes it impossible for you squat. | 1:26:00 | |
You have to dig your foot at the perpendicular line | 1:26:05 | |
where the bed connects to the floor | 1:26:12 | |
and place your other foot on the diagonal drain pipe | 1:26:16 | |
in order to take a dump, | 1:26:23 | |
in order to take a dump and urinate, | 1:26:27 | |
you have to stuff your penis into the hole. | 1:26:31 | |
The faucet will turn on the water for two minutes | 1:26:42 | |
or something like that, maybe even less. | 1:26:47 | |
Shaker has developed a practice | 1:26:51 | |
of flushing the toilet a few times | 1:26:58 | |
and then using the toilet water, putting his hands in | 1:27:01 | |
and using the toilet water to bathe himself. | 1:27:05 | |
There were blinding lights, mirrors, cameras, | 1:27:14 | |
and Shaker was kept in Five Echo until Ben wrote his story. | 1:27:24 | |
And we got a lot of publicity out of it. | 1:27:30 | |
The military told him that this cell, | 1:27:35 | |
this kind of cell complied | 1:27:42 | |
with the standards of the American Bureau of Prisons, | 1:27:44 | |
not a government organization, | 1:27:51 | |
a standard setting organization. | 1:27:52 | |
I've never heard of that even from Lusaway and the like. | 1:27:57 | |
And there were a few other aspects, | 1:28:03 | |
but that by itself is torture. | 1:28:10 | |
He had to count on guards to wake him up | 1:28:13 | |
at the proper time for prayer. | 1:28:18 | |
And sometimes the guards did it and sometimes they didn't. | 1:28:21 | |
So he ended up staying up all night often | 1:28:23 | |
in order to meet morning prayer. | 1:28:27 | |
The people in Five Echo | 1:28:30 | |
weren't allowed to have any communication | 1:28:33 | |
with other detainees. | 1:28:35 | |
They played in, | 1:28:37 | |
they got physical activity in a rec area | 1:28:38 | |
that was too far away from the other rec areas | 1:28:43 | |
to shout total isolation inside and outside. | 1:28:46 | |
And the authorities finally closed this down. | 1:28:51 | |
One detail about this that I forgot to mention | 1:28:56 | |
but it was important. | 1:28:59 | |
This Five Echo block was set up | 1:29:01 | |
under the Bush administration. | 1:29:06 | |
The Bush people used it for a very short period of time | 1:29:08 | |
and then abandoned it because they thought it was so cruel. | 1:29:11 | |
It was the Obama administration that reinstated its use | 1:29:18 | |
under the commanders that the Obama administration | 1:29:23 | |
put there, I'm not saying president Obama | 1:29:27 | |
checked it off on a box. | 1:29:30 | |
I think it was the command decision down there | 1:29:32 | |
but it's a very, very great irony. | 1:29:34 | |
Now, Shaker is in a blocking Camp Five | 1:29:37 | |
that is a punishment block. | 1:29:44 | |
It only has a few detainees. | 1:29:47 | |
It has Shaker, it had Adnan | 1:29:50 | |
and maybe one or two others there, maybe one other. | 1:29:56 | |
Shaker and Adnan were in a joining cells. | 1:30:01 | |
Shaker, and I have to be careful at this point | 1:30:09 | |
because the military tries to treat as classified | 1:30:12 | |
everything surrounding Adnan's death | 1:30:17 | |
but everything I'm telling you is unclassified | 1:30:21 | |
and the US will probably declassify it in 75 years | 1:30:24 | |
you realize coats from World War I are still classified, | 1:30:28 | |
I think or only declassified lately. | 1:30:35 | |
So there are, so Shaker is in a cell | 1:30:38 | |
that has floor to ceiling glass, plexiglass doors | 1:30:47 | |
with a guard monitoring him all the time | 1:30:57 | |
plus there are guards who go by every three minutes | 1:31:03 | |
or every one minute. | 1:31:07 | |
And as a matter of routine, I would suspect | 1:31:08 | |
which is all I can say at this point | 1:31:15 | |
that Adnan was in the same kind of cell. | 1:31:17 | |
So Shaker was an eye witness to Adnan's death | 1:31:24 | |
as was another detainee I presume who was also there | 1:31:29 | |
in a cell practically opposite to Adnan's. | 1:31:40 | |
I can't say that he was eye witness. | 1:31:44 | |
So all this cell block is, is a series of iron | 1:31:49 | |
or concrete cells with the little key hole. | 1:32:00 | |
There's no communal living. | 1:32:06 | |
The US calls these the equivalent of single residence cells. | 1:32:09 | |
That's how they put it. | 1:32:19 | |
It may not be technical isolation by some definitions | 1:32:22 | |
but as far as these men are concerned | 1:32:31 | |
because they're confined 22 hours a day, | 1:32:34 | |
they have this very limited ability to communicate, | 1:32:38 | |
they're cut off from the general population, | 1:32:43 | |
I can't really go further than that, | 1:32:49 | |
but I think it's the fact that there's no communal life. | 1:32:54 | |
The fact that there are so few of them, according to Shaker, | 1:32:59 | |
blinding lights are shined into his cell. | 1:33:05 | |
There are generators going right behind the walls. | 1:33:12 | |
Interviewer | Can you state, | 1:33:17 |
was Adnan and Shaker able to talk | 1:33:19 | |
because they're so close | 1:33:22 | |
through the plexiglass or through some? | 1:33:24 | |
- | Well, I don't know that | 1:33:27 |
I have heard Shaker say that he talked to Adnan. | 1:33:29 | |
Interviewer | Or to the other person who was there? | 1:33:40 |
- | But based on the physical situations in other blocks | 1:33:43 |
that I'm aware of, it would have been possible | 1:33:51 | |
for them to shout to each other. | 1:33:54 | |
And there is information that is still classified | 1:33:56 | |
that corroborates that Shaker | 1:34:02 | |
could hear Adnan very, very well. | 1:34:08 | |
So I don't doubt that they can communicate, | 1:34:16 | |
but I and my colleagues still regard it as isolation. | 1:34:20 | |
They factor isolation | 1:34:26 | |
and that's the way it used to be throughout the camp | 1:34:28 | |
until the camp began to allow communal living. | 1:34:31 | |
No common rec. | 1:34:39 | |
When you took rec, you took it by yourself. | 1:34:41 | |
Interviewer | That's true for these men | 1:34:44 |
that you're describing. | 1:34:46 | |
- | That's right. | 1:34:47 |
Interviewer | Right, so. | 1:34:49 |
- | And rec maybe a two o'clock in the morning. | 1:34:50 |
Interviewer | Right, so he had very little | 1:34:52 |
of any communication with another. | 1:34:54 | |
- | Right, or the general population though I have to say | 1:34:58 |
despite all, these men find ways | 1:35:04 | |
to communicate with each other, | 1:35:12 | |
not necessarily | 1:35:14 | |
somebody like Shaker's not gonna get much information. | 1:35:15 | |
At one point, my clients Saifullah Paracha told me | 1:35:25 | |
that in the camp where he was, | 1:35:29 | |
they used to talk to each other through air vents | 1:35:31 | |
and through drainpipes. | 1:35:33 | |
Interviewer | Right. | 1:35:36 |
- | And I'm kind of, I've always been kind of surprised | 1:35:38 |
because you think that the camp was listening to the man | 1:35:40 | |
although it listens anyway, | 1:35:46 | |
and that the men would say something | 1:35:48 | |
that would upset the authorities | 1:35:51 | |
but this is just normal. | 1:35:54 | |
Interviewer | Well, it could be the authorities | 1:35:59 |
were not hearing what is being said just you know. | 1:36:01 | |
You had mentioned when we took a break | 1:36:05 | |
about having a gay client, which I hadn't heard before. | 1:36:07 | |
Can you describe what it's like | 1:36:13 | |
to be gay men in that community? | 1:36:17 | |
- | I don't know of a single openly gay detainee. | 1:36:28 |
I think that an open detainee would be ostracized, | 1:36:33 | |
totally ostracized. | 1:36:40 | |
One of my clients is ostracized | 1:36:44 | |
for far less in quotes than being gay. | 1:36:46 | |
Interviewer | Well, the government know though. | 1:36:56 |
I mean, people must know | 1:36:58 | |
'cause everything's on camera. | 1:37:00 | |
- | But they don't engage in sex in the camp | 1:37:03 |
between themselves. | 1:37:08 | |
But hilariously there's a warning sign | 1:37:10 | |
at the exit into the rec area that says no sex | 1:37:18 | |
in the rec area, yeah, so. | 1:37:25 | |
Interviewer | You've been told that, are you serious? | 1:37:29 |
- | I've been told that. | 1:37:30 |
Anyway, it began to emerge. | 1:37:34 | |
I think the first time I and my translators | 1:37:39 | |
noticed anything that was a little bit | 1:37:44 | |
out of the ordinary was when my client and I | 1:37:47 | |
were sitting at a where he was at the head | 1:37:53 | |
with his back to the wall. | 1:37:57 | |
And instead of being here with my back to the door, | 1:37:59 | |
I was perpendicular facing the cage. | 1:38:02 | |
He put his foot, his ankle, his shin on mine. | 1:38:06 | |
I think he was wondering what my reaction would be. | 1:38:14 | |
I didn't react at all. | 1:38:19 | |
Other things, he'd say to me, you're my lawyer | 1:38:23 | |
but you're so much more to me than your lawyer, | 1:38:28 | |
than my lawyer. | 1:38:32 | |
At some point I wrote a note to him that I had translated | 1:38:36 | |
because I didn't want to embarrass him by saying it. | 1:38:41 | |
I said, look, one way out of here | 1:38:48 | |
is if you acknowledge you're gay. | 1:38:52 | |
Interviewer | Really? | 1:38:54 |
- | I mean, no, that's a guess on my part because of the risk | 1:38:55 |
the authorities would assume he'd be subject to. | 1:39:00 | |
Just we're always looking for ways to get our clients out. | 1:39:04 | |
So the long and the short of the note was if you're gay, | 1:39:11 | |
we'll use that to try to get you out. | 1:39:16 | |
And his response after he spent about two minutes | 1:39:19 | |
looking at this and thinking was a lie that I am, | 1:39:23 | |
if you want me to. | 1:39:28 | |
Interviewer | And you don't think the other detainees | 1:39:31 |
would pick up this? | 1:39:33 | |
- | Who knows? | 1:39:38 |
I think, he said it it's a secret. | 1:39:41 | |
I assume it's a secret. | 1:39:44 | |
Interviewer | And the authorities, | 1:39:47 |
you don't think pick it up or they don't wanna pick it up. | 1:39:48 | |
- | I don't know. | 1:39:55 |
Ask them. | 1:39:57 | |
Interviewer | Yeah, interesting. | 1:39:58 |
Can you tell us why that (indistinct) was ostracized? | 1:40:01 | |
- | That was another detainer that I mentioned. | 1:40:05 |
My clients Saifullah Paracha, | 1:40:08 | |
He's a Pakistani. | 1:40:11 | |
He speaks perfect English | 1:40:13 | |
because he came to the US in 1971. | 1:40:14 | |
He's a green card holder. | 1:40:18 | |
His wife is a green card holder. | 1:40:19 | |
He has family in the US. | 1:40:22 | |
He's the one who was kidnapped in Thailand. | 1:40:24 | |
And the government's accusation | 1:40:29 | |
is that he was a financier for Al-Qaeda. | 1:40:30 | |
He doesn't speak Arabic. | 1:40:37 | |
He only speaks Urdu. | 1:40:39 | |
The authorities have stuck him in a cell block | 1:40:43 | |
of detainees who only speak Arabic. | 1:40:47 | |
There are other detainees. | 1:40:53 | |
I think the brothers Ramah Rabbani | 1:40:55 | |
the Rabbani brothers who speak Urdu | 1:40:59 | |
but they've put Saifullah in this block | 1:41:02 | |
where nobody speaks Urdu. | 1:41:05 | |
And this has gone on for many, many years. | 1:41:07 | |
Interviewer | Well, how does project communicate | 1:41:11 |
or does he not communicate with anybody else? | 1:41:12 | |
He isolated by language then. | 1:41:15 | |
- | Within the block, although there may be, | 1:41:18 |
I think there may be detainees who speak English and Arabic. | 1:41:21 | |
Interviewer | Oh, but other than that, | 1:41:30 |
he would be isolated. | 1:41:34 | |
- | He wouldn't have no way of communicating | 1:41:35 |
except with the guards. | 1:41:38 | |
And that is probably his salvation. | 1:41:40 | |
He knows a lot. | 1:41:45 | |
I mean, he knows, and this gets | 1:41:46 | |
into another area that I'll cover very briefly. | 1:41:49 | |
He and other detainees | 1:41:53 | |
now know everything that goes on in the world. | 1:41:55 | |
In fact, sometimes I go there | 1:42:00 | |
and they tell me things that I don't know with the access | 1:42:03 | |
to all the media I have access to because a few years ago | 1:42:07 | |
after keeping the men totally incommunicado, | 1:42:12 | |
the authorities put television sets up | 1:42:16 | |
which included state televisions | 1:42:23 | |
but that's better than nothing and Al Jazeera English. | 1:42:29 | |
It made it very hard for the Arabic only speakers. | 1:42:36 | |
And in fact, some of the friction | 1:42:43 | |
among the detainees involved, what channel to watch | 1:42:45 | |
which must be familiar to all of us, | 1:42:50 | |
children and adults alike, but Saifullah listens to CNN, | 1:42:52 | |
listens to al Jazeera English. | 1:43:01 | |
I've been on Al Jazeera English many times. | 1:43:05 | |
And when I go down there | 1:43:08 | |
all of the men say, I saw you there. | 1:43:11 | |
Some men say, I didn't see your picture | 1:43:14 | |
but I heard your voice. | 1:43:15 | |
Others say, I heard your voice. | 1:43:18 | |
And I saw you in your suit and everything. | 1:43:20 | |
And one thing that got all of their attention, | 1:43:23 | |
impressed them was something I said | 1:43:28 | |
right after Adnan died, which was, | 1:43:32 | |
they may not know the specific cause of death | 1:43:36 | |
but it was Guantanamo that killed him. | 1:43:40 | |
So anyway, that is a long way | 1:43:45 | |
of going back to this Southern separatists. | 1:43:50 | |
And that is to explain that another client | 1:43:54 | |
has been put in a similar situation. | 1:43:56 | |
Interviewer | I think you kind of sit there. | 1:44:00 |
I just want to confirm that, | 1:44:01 | |
do you think Paracha was put there | 1:44:02 | |
for a reason that he knew too much? | 1:44:06 | |
Why do you think they put him with only Arabic speakers? | 1:44:09 | |
- | Well, there are hardly any Urdu speakers. | 1:44:13 |
So the question is why is he being kept | 1:44:17 | |
from the only other detainees who speak Urdu? | 1:44:21 | |
And I think that the two others, I'm pretty sure | 1:44:24 | |
the two others are these two brothers whose last names | 1:44:29 | |
in our terms are Rabbani. | 1:44:35 | |
I can't remember who, they are the Pakistanis, | 1:44:39 | |
the Pakistan government considers them | 1:44:47 | |
the only true Pakistanis. | 1:44:50 | |
They think that KSM, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed | 1:44:52 | |
is not a real Pakistani, but he's from another country | 1:44:57 | |
and there's another 911 defendant. | 1:45:01 | |
I think it's Mashi Con who's KSM's nephew if I recall. | 1:45:04 | |
And when I've been over to the Pakistani embassy, | 1:45:19 | |
those are the only real Pakistanis, | 1:45:22 | |
the others come from somewhere else. | 1:45:25 | |
So anyway, that's another anecdote on the side. | 1:45:27 | |
So the mystery is why they don't put him with with Rabbanis. | 1:45:31 | |
Interviewer | Okay, and Rabbanis, | 1:45:38 |
have they been dedicated for release too, are they? | 1:45:41 | |
- | I can't recall. | 1:45:46 |
Interviewer | Okay I haven't touched on yet | 1:45:47 |
your trip to Yemen, you've gone several times. | 1:45:51 | |
- | Eight times. | 1:45:54 |
Interviewer | Eight times. | 1:45:55 |
Is there something you can tell us | 1:45:56 | |
about those trips that might be interesting for the viewers? | 1:45:58 | |
- | Yes, both a personal and the political levels. | 1:46:02 |
First of course, when I went to Yemen | 1:46:10 | |
I was completely disoriented because it's nothing. | 1:46:13 | |
I mean, it has no virtually no Western culture. | 1:46:17 | |
You go to Saudi Arabia or Dubai, | 1:46:23 | |
you might as well be or Hong Kong I mean, | 1:46:27 | |
but Yemen in particular, because it's so poor | 1:46:31 | |
and so backward, | 1:46:36 | |
there has been hardly any American investment there. | 1:46:39 | |
I may have seen one or two billboard signs | 1:46:44 | |
for Kentucky Fried Chicken or something | 1:46:51 | |
but there's virtually no Western cultural presence. | 1:46:55 | |
So that's one thing. | 1:47:03 | |
You can buy consumer goods. | 1:47:06 | |
So that's one thing. | 1:47:09 | |
The second was, it was all strange | 1:47:11 | |
because the dress is strange for example. | 1:47:15 | |
The men may wear these white robes, have their cathedral. | 1:47:19 | |
That's how Arabic head covering on their heads, | 1:47:25 | |
wearing Western style jackets. | 1:47:28 | |
And it's a big point of pride | 1:47:32 | |
if you have the label on the outside | 1:47:34 | |
so everybody knows that you have Briani suit. | 1:47:37 | |
And then they wear jambia which are curved knives | 1:47:41 | |
in curved sheets, the kind that you associate with a Latin | 1:47:47 | |
and the 40 knights, the women are virtually all attired | 1:47:56 | |
in abayas that go from the top of their heads | 1:48:02 | |
where their hijabs are to their ankles | 1:48:06 | |
and they also wear knee cobs | 1:48:12 | |
so that all you can see is the eyes. | 1:48:18 | |
And the more conservative ones wear screens | 1:48:21 | |
that go across so you don't even see their eyes. | 1:48:26 | |
All you really see is these they're almost trouts | 1:48:31 | |
because they're also designed | 1:48:36 | |
not to indicate the body contours. | 1:48:38 | |
And then you look down in there wearing Reebok's sneakers. | 1:48:41 | |
It's the most paradoxical thing. | 1:48:45 | |
We arrived there, | 1:48:48 | |
we had this guy who was supposed to tail us around. | 1:48:52 | |
We tried to get rid of him. | 1:48:56 | |
It was very hard because we didn't wanna be | 1:48:58 | |
followed by the KGB minder. | 1:49:01 | |
It turned out that he was just this Porsche nook journalist, | 1:49:06 | |
who was making a little money | 1:49:11 | |
and he'd report back to headquarters, | 1:49:13 | |
but he wasn't a spy or anything. | 1:49:16 | |
And we sort of managed to push him away. | 1:49:20 | |
We went to, we first met the publisher | 1:49:25 | |
of one of the English language papers who snuckered us. | 1:49:27 | |
I use snuck her and she snuck out of $100 | 1:49:31 | |
saying that this was the price of this | 1:49:36 | |
or this was the price of that. | 1:49:38 | |
And you have to bear in mind | 1:49:40 | |
that $1 is two rials and rials are their version of $1. | 1:49:42 | |
So think of what $100 means. | 1:49:54 | |
If once I paid three rials for a cab drive, | 1:49:58 | |
a cab, like being transported by cab | 1:50:09 | |
which even though there was only two rials | 1:50:13 | |
I think I may have the counting wrong, | 1:50:17 | |
300 rials or 200 rials. | 1:50:19 | |
Don't take my word for it. | 1:50:22 | |
I'm just giving you an idea. | 1:50:24 | |
And the cab driver was so grateful | 1:50:26 | |
for the 100 rials tip. | 1:50:28 | |
That's how poor they are. | 1:50:31 | |
Anyway, we found a guide named Nasser Arabi | 1:50:33 | |
who was a life saver and became a very good friend. | 1:50:39 | |
He is an international translator. | 1:50:42 | |
He is a human rights activist and he's a journalist. | 1:50:47 | |
He's played down the activist part of it over the years. | 1:50:55 | |
He's respected by everyone, has no enemies, | 1:50:59 | |
has unbelievable contacts and he became our guide. | 1:51:04 | |
We met thanks to him, the almost all of the ministers. | 1:51:10 | |
It's like meeting cabinet members here. | 1:51:17 | |
The attorney general, | 1:51:20 | |
the minister of the Ministry Human Rights, | 1:51:21 | |
the minister of human rights, | 1:51:26 | |
the minister of foreign affairs, | 1:51:28 | |
the minister of this, | 1:51:32 | |
this ministry that's very hard for us to comprehend, | 1:51:37 | |
which is in charge of providing groups with medic | 1:51:41 | |
with the religious charity. | 1:51:46 | |
I mean, if there was never a combination | 1:51:48 | |
of church and state, and most amazingly, | 1:51:49 | |
he got us a meeting | 1:51:53 | |
with the head of the political security office | 1:51:54 | |
which is responsible for the political persecution | 1:52:03 | |
so to speak and really captures political enemies | 1:52:10 | |
of the regime, or at least accused ones. | 1:52:17 | |
And we sat in a great room | 1:52:20 | |
and he sat in one easy chair with the thick arms. | 1:52:22 | |
I sat in another one, parallel to him. | 1:52:34 | |
There was a table between us with water or tea. | 1:52:38 | |
Then there was a circle of everybody else. | 1:52:41 | |
And one of my young colleagues said | 1:52:45 | |
it looked like a meeting between a heads of state. | 1:52:47 | |
So it was an extraordinary. | 1:52:52 | |
And then we had. | 1:52:54 | |
Interviewer | What was the reason to meet there? | 1:52:56 |
- | I wanted to say one other thing. | 1:53:01 |
Interviewer | Sorry. | 1:53:03 |
- | We met with the media. | 1:53:04 |
We met with Arabic language press. | 1:53:06 | |
We met with English language press, BBC, Germans, Japanese. | 1:53:09 | |
Media from all over the world. | 1:53:20 | |
My purpose in going there was twofold. | 1:53:23 | |
First, I wanted to bring the families up to date | 1:53:27 | |
and meet the families and try to give them some hope | 1:53:31 | |
that people were really working for their sons, brothers, | 1:53:34 | |
cousins, et cetera, in Guantanamo, | 1:53:39 | |
and give them some comfort or sense of what was going on. | 1:53:44 | |
The second reason was, that actually was threefold. | 1:53:48 | |
The second reason was that I wanted to do what I could | 1:53:51 | |
to build pressure on the Yemen government | 1:53:57 | |
to place more pressure on the United States | 1:54:01 | |
because president Abdullah Sallah, | 1:54:05 | |
Abdullah Ali Sallah would say all the right things, | 1:54:09 | |
but nothing would happen. | 1:54:12 | |
And the third reason was purely a media reason | 1:54:15 | |
to bring attention to the Yemeni detainees. | 1:54:23 | |
So it was the, all three of these purposes | 1:54:29 | |
came together in meeting with all these government people. | 1:54:38 | |
And, but we had the great experience because of our guide | 1:54:44 | |
of being driven from Sanaa which is the capital city | 1:54:51 | |
and the edge of the states influence | 1:54:56 | |
down to Ogden the old English colonial port | 1:55:00 | |
whose biggest claim to fame is the Queen Elizabeth | 1:55:06 | |
stayed in a hotel there in 1958. | 1:55:09 | |
As you go, you go through another city | 1:55:15 | |
but then you go through fields where women, | 1:55:19 | |
till the fields or harvest the fields, | 1:55:25 | |
wearing the abaya and sand pants. | 1:55:28 | |
You remember those conical, | 1:55:32 | |
there are blue thin blue plastic bags all over the place, | 1:55:35 | |
the type you would get in a supermarket | 1:55:41 | |
or what the newspapers are wrapped up in. | 1:55:44 | |
They're all empty but they were all used to carry cot, | 1:55:47 | |
which is a narcotic not a heavy narcotic, | 1:55:53 | |
but I think first stimulates you | 1:55:59 | |
and then it puts you in a hallucinogenic state. | 1:56:01 | |
To be honest, I've tried it a few times | 1:56:05 | |
and it didn't do anything for me | 1:56:08 | |
but you give you a little bit of a caffeine buzz. | 1:56:10 | |
And we met people who were totally uneducated and illiterate | 1:56:15 | |
whose lives consisted mainly of cot consumption | 1:56:22 | |
and sitting around not exactly playing cards with other men | 1:56:27 | |
but the equivalent of playing cards. | 1:56:32 | |
We saw herds of camels as we went to the South. | 1:56:37 | |
We went to, when I brought my wife and daughter, | 1:56:45 | |
we went to a hot bath in a defunct volcano, | 1:56:47 | |
but naturally there was one bath for men | 1:56:55 | |
and another bath for women. | 1:56:58 | |
I just can't be. | 1:57:02 | |
And there's so much natural beauty in Sanaa, | 1:57:04 | |
around Sanaa and starting to go down, | 1:57:09 | |
you have these geographical formations | 1:57:12 | |
that are sort of like what you'd find in Death Valley, | 1:57:16 | |
I think with the road runner. | 1:57:19 | |
But then as you go through toward the South to Tayis, | 1:57:23 | |
you have these mountains where there that are terrorist | 1:57:29 | |
for planting fertile area. | 1:57:35 | |
And then as you go further to the South, | 1:57:44 | |
it gets sandier and dryer again. | 1:57:45 | |
So, and we went out to pure local Arabic restaurants. | 1:57:51 | |
I mean, Yemeni restaurants, | 1:57:59 | |
which is a whole other story in itself. | 1:58:00 | |
We stayed away from anything that catered to Westerners | 1:58:02 | |
or businessmen. | 1:58:07 | |
And this is the kind of thing we wanted to eat | 1:58:08 | |
where the common Yemeni ate and how the common Yemeni ate | 1:58:10 | |
which meant sitting on the floor, usually on plastic, | 1:58:15 | |
having maybe a dozen dishes in front of you | 1:58:19 | |
and eating with your hands. | 1:58:23 | |
And this is in a country that also has practically | 1:58:25 | |
no paper products. | 1:58:29 | |
So you don't get napkins. | 1:58:31 | |
There's an area where you can wash your hands | 1:58:35 | |
and the soap is like laundry detergent. | 1:58:38 | |
And there's a box of tissues at the cash register. | 1:58:42 | |
I love those places. | 1:58:46 | |
There's a kind of place that has two big stoves. | 1:58:48 | |
And all they do is prepare boiled lentils. | 1:58:51 | |
I love boiled lentils. | 1:58:55 | |
So I've told my friends that it's, I love the food | 1:58:57 | |
that it's one of the best cuisines in the world | 1:59:00 | |
but this is all to say that we were introduced | 1:59:04 | |
to just the most fantastic. | 1:59:08 | |
And I mean that in the old fashioned sense, | 1:59:13 | |
the most fantastic civilization. | 1:59:16 | |
Is the way I'd put it. | 1:59:20 | |
Everything was strange. | 1:59:21 | |
Everything foreign, our friend Nassar Arabi | 1:59:23 | |
was just a treasure in being able to guide us around | 1:59:28 | |
in his contacts, in his reputation. | 1:59:35 | |
And he's been my guy ever since. | 1:59:42 | |
Interviewer | How did the families talk to you? | 1:59:48 |
- | Most of the families met with us. | 1:59:52 |
There was one that I can remember | 1:59:55 | |
that definitely didn't meet with us. | 1:59:57 | |
There might've been more than one | 2:00:00 | |
but everyone was so desperate for news because these were | 2:00:04 | |
and this was in the days before the camp | 2:00:08 | |
allowed any kind of real communication | 2:00:13 | |
between the families and the detainees. | 2:00:16 | |
So the families were desperate for information. | 2:00:20 | |
We wanted to learn what was going on with the families. | 2:00:23 | |
Perhaps over the years, | 2:00:29 | |
one or two families stopped meeting with us | 2:00:31 | |
because we never had anything to say | 2:00:35 | |
that meant anything to them | 2:00:39 | |
in terms of your son's getting out of there. | 2:00:41 | |
And they didn't care about all the political mumbo-jumbo. | 2:00:44 | |
Mark Falcoff and another, a couple of other associates | 2:00:49 | |
accompanied me and Mark took videos of our meetings | 2:00:53 | |
with the families. | 2:00:59 | |
And I have almost all, I have almost all the videos | 2:01:01 | |
from those meetings, and they're kind of personal | 2:01:05 | |
in the sense that I would say to the mothers | 2:01:09 | |
or grandmothers, | 2:01:14 | |
for your son's sake, take your knee cab off. | 2:01:16 | |
That is what covers the face. | 2:01:22 | |
So they'd still have their hijab on | 2:01:24 | |
and the wives and the mothers, the grandmothers did, | 2:01:28 | |
which was a totally amazing things for them to do | 2:01:32 | |
because men are not supposed to see that kind of skin | 2:01:43 | |
except their wives | 2:01:48 | |
and maybe other women in the immediate family. | 2:01:53 | |
So this was the equivalent | 2:01:56 | |
of asking these women to take off their clothes | 2:01:59 | |
but they did it because they wanted their sons to see them. | 2:02:03 | |
And the women always cried, always ended up crying. | 2:02:07 | |
Some of the fathers expressed gratitude and thanks | 2:02:11 | |
which simply made us feel ashamed | 2:02:19 | |
because we hadn't gotten our guys out. | 2:02:20 | |
Others were kind of neutral. | 2:02:24 | |
Maybe one or two were angry | 2:02:25 | |
but almost all of them were very appreciative of us. | 2:02:28 | |
One family down there in Adnan the father was there | 2:02:35 | |
and three or four daughters were there | 2:02:41 | |
and they addressed in their Sunday best to see us. | 2:02:44 | |
And we had a room in the local Sheraton | 2:02:48 | |
and we explained things to them. | 2:02:52 | |
Once we talked to the detainees | 2:02:56 | |
and told them what we'd found, | 2:02:59 | |
some of them were violently angry, not violently. | 2:03:00 | |
Some of them were terribly angry | 2:03:08 | |
that we had met the families. | 2:03:11 | |
They thought it was a violation of their privacy, | 2:03:12 | |
of the family's privacy. | 2:03:16 | |
And that we were just agents trying to get information | 2:03:18 | |
from them. | 2:03:22 | |
And some of our clients prohibited us | 2:03:24 | |
from seeing their families. | 2:03:27 | |
These families, I mean, these detainees | 2:03:31 | |
not only missed the births of their own children. | 2:03:35 | |
Let's say your wife was pregnant when you were picked up | 2:03:40 | |
and the growing up of their own children. | 2:03:44 | |
But naturally that also applied to of the children | 2:03:49 | |
not just their own children, members of the extended family, | 2:03:58 | |
mothers and fathers died while these men were in Guantanamo. | 2:04:03 | |
Abdul-Salam has one of the worst stories. | 2:04:12 | |
His mother died. | 2:04:17 | |
He says a part break about the detention | 2:04:18 | |
but his two sons died horrible deaths. | 2:04:23 | |
They were playing with a hand grenade | 2:04:27 | |
that exploded, a live hand grenade. | 2:04:28 | |
Interviewer | How do you hear about it? | 2:04:36 |
- | I don't know. | 2:04:40 |
I think maybe the ICRC informed him | 2:04:42 | |
but such as the setup in the camps, even now | 2:04:46 | |
that one of my clients learned that his father had died | 2:04:52 | |
only because the family of another detainee | 2:04:56 | |
found out about it. | 2:05:00 | |
So he didn't even get a direct communication. | 2:05:02 | |
And one dimension of this is that most of these guys | 2:05:07 | |
were picked up when they were 19, 20, 21. | 2:05:10 | |
These were their golden years | 2:05:13 | |
not just physically in the narrow sense | 2:05:16 | |
but these are the years when you sow your wild seeds. | 2:05:23 | |
Is that the right expression? | 2:05:28 | |
Oh, you sell your oats. | 2:05:32 | |
And these men are, have lost that. | 2:05:34 | |
If they go back, they'll go back in their 30s, | 2:05:37 | |
long after they would've set up families. | 2:05:41 | |
Their most productive active years | 2:05:46 | |
have been taken away from them. | 2:05:48 | |
In some cases, our clients have spent | 2:05:50 | |
a third of their lives in Guantanamo | 2:05:53 | |
away from their families away from their homes. | 2:05:59 | |
And for them, our world is a strange to them | 2:06:03 | |
as theirs is to us. | 2:06:08 | |
Back to Yemen briefly, | 2:06:11 | |
I met with former Al-Qaeda members. | 2:06:14 | |
former Taliban ministers, | 2:06:23 | |
others who I suspected were Al Qaeda | 2:06:28 | |
because one of them gleaned over at lunch and said | 2:06:32 | |
what's your view on martyrdom operation? | 2:06:40 | |
And I said, well, look, I'm just against innocence civilians | 2:06:46 | |
being killed. | 2:06:51 | |
And that was part of an experience. | 2:06:52 | |
That's another story if you ever do follow ups, | 2:06:55 | |
because I have a billion of these stories. | 2:06:58 | |
Another one was, I don't remember his name at the moment | 2:07:01 | |
but he's a former Al-Qaeda guy. | 2:07:06 | |
He was Osama bin Laden chief body guard. | 2:07:09 | |
He's the man with no country | 2:07:16 | |
because he ratted out the Al-Qaeda people, | 2:07:20 | |
his buddies and the government tolerates him. | 2:07:24 | |
But isn't in love with him either. | 2:07:28 | |
And I must tell you about one conversation I had with him. | 2:07:31 | |
It was maybe the first time I met with him | 2:07:35 | |
or the second time, | 2:07:37 | |
we met in the dining room at the hotel Sheba, | 2:07:38 | |
which is where we stayed all the time | 2:07:43 | |
run by Indians and pretty Western | 2:07:47 | |
in the sense that it had Western toilets | 2:07:51 | |
and a business center, had spoke English. | 2:07:54 | |
So we met in the dining room there | 2:07:58 | |
in one of the non-smoking tables | 2:08:02 | |
There are smoking restrictions, | 2:08:07 | |
consistent smoking tables, non-smoking tables. | 2:08:08 | |
And we were talking politics | 2:08:11 | |
and we were talking about 911. | 2:08:15 | |
And I said, look how many civilians were killed? | 2:08:19 | |
And he said, "That was collateral damage." | 2:08:27 | |
I said, and besides think about how an Afghan mother | 2:08:33 | |
or wife feels when they hear American bomber jets | 2:08:43 | |
fly overhead. | 2:08:49 | |
And somehow or other we came to the subject. | 2:08:54 | |
I know what I said. | 2:08:57 | |
I said, I find this situation kind of ironic | 2:08:58 | |
that here you have Pakistan with thousands | 2:09:03 | |
of nuclear weapons and Afghanistan, | 2:09:06 | |
this poor primitive country. | 2:09:10 | |
And he said, "Well, all I'd need is one nuclear weapon." | 2:09:14 | |
And I said, for what? | 2:09:22 | |
And he said to drop on the United States. | 2:09:24 | |
And my palms get sweaty. | 2:09:28 | |
I said, you're scaring the shit out of me. | 2:09:30 | |
My palms got sweaty. | 2:09:32 | |
I don't think many Americans have broken bread | 2:09:37 | |
without Al-Qaeda members or former Al-Qaeda members | 2:09:42 | |
or Taliban ministers, people who were in charge | 2:09:46 | |
of getting the Taliban safe passage out of Afghanistan | 2:09:52 | |
or out of Pakistan or wherever they were after 911, | 2:10:00 | |
who could describe sort of organization. | 2:10:05 | |
I don't mean like an organization chart, | 2:10:11 | |
but where they fit in, | 2:10:13 | |
what kind of position for work and so on. | 2:10:15 | |
It was an extraordinary experience I have, | 2:10:19 | |
stories within this story. | 2:10:26 | |
We could go on for 10 hours that I could discuss. | 2:10:28 | |
I had to get a security clearance to do this work | 2:10:34 | |
because well, you can speculate | 2:10:43 | |
on the government's reasons for acquiring it. | 2:10:47 | |
And every other lawyer has to get a security clearance. | 2:10:55 | |
I think that wherever my father is up there, | 2:10:59 | |
he must have been totally amazed, but also kind of mused | 2:11:05 | |
that I would get a security clearance | 2:11:12 | |
because remember what security clearance has meant | 2:11:13 | |
in the '50s or '60s, | 2:11:16 | |
then I want to represent a high value detainee | 2:11:18 | |
and to get a security clearance | 2:11:24 | |
means getting a top secret clearance | 2:11:27 | |
SCI, TSSCI and the TSSCI stands for, | 2:11:32 | |
the SCI stands for secret compartmented information | 2:11:39 | |
which means here's secret, here's top secret | 2:11:44 | |
and then here's SCI. | 2:11:48 | |
You just get a sliver what you're working on. | 2:11:50 | |
After three years of struggle, I got my approval. | 2:11:54 | |
Think of what my father would have thought. | 2:11:58 | |
And at the moment, I have a pretty good shot | 2:12:03 | |
of joining the defense team for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. | 2:12:08 | |
Interviewer | And you'd like to do that? | 2:12:14 |
- | I think that I want to do that more than any thing next | 2:12:15 |
in my legal career. | 2:12:22 | |
Why? | 2:12:24 | |
Do I think he's innocent? | 2:12:26 | |
Well, for reasons of privilege, | 2:12:28 | |
I'm not going to answer the question. | 2:12:31 | |
Should he serve a very harsh sentence? | 2:12:34 | |
Well, because of privilege issues, | 2:12:37 | |
I'm not going to answer the question, | 2:12:39 | |
but to me, this is a political trial. | 2:12:42 | |
It's a show trial, although it was one of his lawyers | 2:12:46 | |
pointed out it's the first secret show trial. | 2:12:49 | |
And I really want to use the trial | 2:12:53 | |
to put our system of justice on trial | 2:12:57 | |
to expose the proceedings | 2:13:02 | |
as the political proceedings show trials that they are. | 2:13:06 | |
I suppose, one of the motivations | 2:13:11 | |
of this relate back to my father | 2:13:15 | |
but also when I was in the late '60s, | 2:13:18 | |
I was a great admirer of the defendants | 2:13:22 | |
in the Chicago wait trial. | 2:13:30 | |
I thought that some Black Panthers, | 2:13:33 | |
I sort of glorified in my mind | 2:13:38 | |
certain Black Panthers and what they went through. | 2:13:41 | |
I think it was a guy named George Jackson | 2:13:45 | |
but he was one of my, | 2:13:47 | |
I was angry about the injustices visited on him. | 2:13:49 | |
So I think that that political education | 2:13:53 | |
was a big part of it. | 2:13:57 | |
So I wanna get in the middle of this | 2:13:59 | |
not the criminal law aspects | 2:14:02 | |
but for the political aspects of it. | 2:14:04 | |
Interviewer | I have a few more questions | 2:14:08 |
but do you have jotted down some notes? | 2:14:09 | |
Are there some things you want to address now | 2:14:11 | |
and then I can kind of go into more questions? | 2:14:14 | |
- | Okay, this is just a detail. | 2:14:19 |
This is just a detail. | 2:14:26 | |
The first is that I want to acknowledge | 2:14:29 | |
the incredible support that my law firm, | 2:14:32 | |
Covington & Burling has provided since I left. | 2:14:38 | |
While I was at the firm | 2:14:42 | |
during the Rasul period | 2:14:44 | |
up until the Boumediene period, | 2:14:46 | |
the issues that we faced legally were not client specific. | 2:14:49 | |
They were all broad issues. | 2:14:56 | |
Like what should the protective border look like? | 2:14:57 | |
Should the government be able to dismiss the cases? | 2:15:00 | |
Because there was a stay of Rasul | 2:15:05 | |
and we weren't allowed to actually move forward in court. | 2:15:08 | |
When Boumediene was decided, | 2:15:12 | |
all of a sudden we had 13 separate court proceedings. | 2:15:15 | |
So I couldn't have done it alone | 2:15:19 | |
but I'm not just expressing appreciation to them | 2:15:24 | |
because they enabled me to continue to do what I was doing | 2:15:28 | |
but they put so much resources into this | 2:15:34 | |
because these detainees continued to be their clients | 2:15:40 | |
and Covington was just unstinting | 2:15:47 | |
and not only were they indispensable | 2:15:50 | |
but they stepped up to the cases. | 2:15:53 | |
I ended up still doing a lot of the common issues. | 2:15:58 | |
I have been working very intensively with the media | 2:16:04 | |
while Covington has handled | 2:16:11 | |
the sort of day-to-day nuts and bolts matters | 2:16:13 | |
like discovery and motions. | 2:16:18 | |
Very important motions, I have to say, | 2:16:21 | |
but they have eight associates, | 2:16:23 | |
nine associates, and two partners. | 2:16:25 | |
Sometimes I joke that I'm getting more support now | 2:16:27 | |
that I've left the firm than I had when I was there. | 2:16:29 | |
Although I don't call all the shots now. | 2:16:34 | |
The other is that I've received threats | 2:16:37 | |
including a death threat, | 2:16:44 | |
as well as your ordinary abusive email. | 2:16:47 | |
The guy who sent the death threat didn't reach me | 2:16:56 | |
so he left the message on my phone mail. | 2:17:03 | |
(laughs) | 2:17:06 | |
And he swore he used every crude word | 2:17:10 | |
in the English language | 2:17:17 | |
and his last sentence was, watch the back of your head | 2:17:19 | |
or watch your back. | 2:17:25 | |
But it was clearly you better count on being an object | 2:17:27 | |
of a threat here. | 2:17:36 | |
And then over the years | 2:17:41 | |
I've just received several emails about, | 2:17:43 | |
again calling me all sorts of names. | 2:17:47 | |
Interviewer | Who are these people? | 2:17:49 |
Do you know who, | 2:17:51 | |
I mean you don't have to give us the names | 2:17:51 | |
but what kind of person left you this? | 2:17:53 | |
Interviewer | This particular guy, | 2:17:56 |
we don't know who he was. | 2:17:59 | |
The firm went to great lengths to track it down. | 2:18:01 | |
And the very, very vigilant security people | 2:18:07 | |
at Covington had me keep the shades down | 2:18:10 | |
and the blinds closed and be very careful when I walk home, | 2:18:13 | |
they took it very seriously | 2:18:19 | |
and they did a lot of investigation, | 2:18:20 | |
but they could never find. | 2:18:21 | |
The others, I suppose some were really hostile | 2:18:24 | |
at a serious political level. | 2:18:31 | |
But there was one woman who sent me an email | 2:18:33 | |
with how could you do this, et cetera, and so forth. | 2:18:39 | |
And I picked up the phone and I called her and I said, well | 2:18:42 | |
this is a question of basic fairness, | 2:18:47 | |
would you wanna be held without charge, | 2:18:51 | |
without knowing how long it would be | 2:18:55 | |
with no evidence against you? | 2:18:58 | |
Would you want, how would you feel if that happened to you? | 2:19:01 | |
And she said, "Look, I'm just scared. | 2:19:05 | |
"I don't know what to do. | 2:19:09 | |
"I've gone a long way by trying to speak to these people. | 2:19:12 | |
"I don't mean that derisively people who have threatened me | 2:19:22 | |
"and very often, that's what it is, it's fear." | 2:19:27 | |
And they'll admit that it's fear. | 2:19:31 | |
Sometimes they'll just say, well | 2:19:33 | |
you're representing killers, but then you have these people | 2:19:34 | |
and they are so appreciative of having someone like me | 2:19:38 | |
talk to them, acknowledge the reality, but the fears. | 2:19:44 | |
So those are the two things I wanted to mention. | 2:19:48 | |
Interviewer | Well, a couple of things. | 2:19:51 |
Did you ever go to Camp Seven | 2:19:54 | |
or did you see Camp Seven or Camp No, either one? | 2:19:58 | |
- | I have never seen Camp Seven. | 2:20:02 |
I don't believe I ever, I won't ever | 2:20:05 | |
and I don't even think the lawyers | 2:20:08 | |
for these men have seen Camp Seven. | 2:20:09 | |
I think that there is a separate interview site | 2:20:11 | |
for these men. | 2:20:16 | |
I mean, you can see Camp Seven aerially through Google. | 2:20:17 | |
And one of the lawyers for an HVD told me | 2:20:24 | |
that I can find it simply | 2:20:30 | |
by comparing the image before it was built | 2:20:32 | |
with the image after it was built. | 2:20:36 | |
As for Camp No, I never saw it. | 2:20:39 | |
I think it might've been taken apart | 2:20:44 | |
and I wouldn't have seen it. | 2:20:52 | |
Interviewer | And why do you think | 2:20:56 |
it has been taken apart? | 2:20:57 | |
- | Probably because it was revealed. | 2:21:00 |
It became camp yes. | 2:21:03 | |
Interviewer | You mentioned you had an incident | 2:21:10 |
about the toilet that you wanted to tell us. | 2:21:13 | |
You might have a shocker but it was a separate one. | 2:21:17 | |
- | There was a separate one, which is sad, very sad | 2:21:21 |
and also humorous. | 2:21:33 | |
One day I was having a meeting | 2:21:38 | |
with Adnan Lateef and my translator was sitting on my left | 2:21:41 | |
and I was sitting there and he was sitting across | 2:21:49 | |
and toward the end of the meeting, | 2:21:53 | |
he started engaging me in a heated argument | 2:21:59 | |
about whether a particular detainee who was still in a camp. | 2:22:05 | |
I knew that he wasn't hot and was insisting that he was. | 2:22:09 | |
And then at a certain point, | 2:22:13 | |
Adnan picked up a little container of his blood | 2:22:15 | |
and threw it at me. | 2:22:18 | |
And I was drenched from head to my knees. | 2:22:20 | |
And even though it was a little cup, | 2:22:23 | |
it's bladders and goes a long way. | 2:22:27 | |
If you think of it in terms of drops | 2:22:32 | |
and what Adnan had done, | 2:22:35 | |
and he's known for this kind of ingeniousness | 2:22:38 | |
was slice away probably with his fingers | 2:22:41 | |
a chip of Formica from under the table | 2:22:49 | |
and use another cup that I had brought | 2:22:52 | |
that he took off the table without my seeing it. | 2:22:56 | |
And he used the sliver of Formica to cut his wrists | 2:23:01 | |
and drip his blood into the cup. | 2:23:07 | |
So the blood hit me. | 2:23:13 | |
I was shocked, I wasn't angry | 2:23:16 | |
as I would have been with my other clients, I think. | 2:23:19 | |
And I was in sort of a shock days. | 2:23:22 | |
I kept saying, why are you doing this? | 2:23:27 | |
Why did you do this? | 2:23:30 | |
And at a certain point, he just said, | 2:23:32 | |
"This wasn't against you." | 2:23:35 | |
I have to go back and say that | 2:23:38 | |
when he threw it at me, he said, | 2:23:41 | |
"This is so you'll remember me." | 2:23:43 | |
My translator says that when he did this, | 2:23:46 | |
he had some look in his eyes that indicated | 2:23:50 | |
that he didn't know what he was doing. | 2:23:58 | |
He was being guided by a Jinney or Jin | 2:24:03 | |
which is what Jinney is derived from | 2:24:09 | |
but in this case | 2:24:12 | |
it's the little devil sitting on your shoulder | 2:24:14 | |
making you do things that you wouldn't do otherwise. | 2:24:16 | |
And I was taken out of the cell quickly by, | 2:24:21 | |
I had occasion to look up Jin the other day. | 2:24:26 | |
It's J-I-N-N-E-Y. | 2:24:29 | |
I think so, if you wanna look it up | 2:24:33 | |
and he had always claimed, by the way | 2:24:36 | |
my footnotes are like a law review law review footnotes. | 2:24:41 | |
He at the beginning claimed that he had attempted suicide | 2:24:45 | |
under the influence of a Jin | 2:24:49 | |
because it was contrary to Islam to try to kill himself. | 2:24:51 | |
So I wasn't responsible for it. | 2:24:55 | |
Anyhow, the glaze look in his eyes, | 2:24:57 | |
the guards immediately rushed him | 2:25:00 | |
and all of a sudden it wasn't guards and lawyer. | 2:25:03 | |
It was person to person and American to American. | 2:25:08 | |
It was so amazing. | 2:25:12 | |
A complete change in personas. | 2:25:14 | |
I washed my eyes out in one of those, I washed things. | 2:25:16 | |
And then I went back to the next at lunchtime | 2:25:21 | |
which is the department store supermarket, | 2:25:24 | |
a place that people buy the basics at. | 2:25:32 | |
And I bought a new shirt and I bought a new pair of pants. | 2:25:38 | |
I didn't buy a new pair of sneakers. | 2:25:44 | |
And for a year afterward, I walked around with sneakers | 2:25:46 | |
with Adnan's blood on them. | 2:25:49 | |
Now that's just the beginning. | 2:25:53 | |
The next visit I think this was May and June. | 2:25:57 | |
The next visit, they would only let me see Adnan | 2:26:03 | |
under the most restrictive conditions | 2:26:10 | |
as though he was Hannibal Lecter, | 2:26:14 | |
but in a certain way, he controlled them in the way | 2:26:18 | |
that the joke goes one rat says to the other, | 2:26:24 | |
every time I press the lever, he gives me food. | 2:26:28 | |
So anyway, he came to the hut | 2:26:30 | |
with about three soldiers on each side with hard handcuffs. | 2:26:36 | |
And of course they were chained to his waist chain | 2:26:45 | |
and they were connected to his ankle chains. | 2:26:53 | |
But in addition, | 2:26:57 | |
he had a second set of what amounted to handcuffs | 2:26:58 | |
that amounted to a straight jacket. | 2:27:07 | |
They pinned his elbows to his side | 2:27:11 | |
and they pinned his hands to his shoulders | 2:27:15 | |
so that he was essentially immobile except for walking. | 2:27:18 | |
And I didn't see him approach, | 2:27:23 | |
but with these guards on each side and him in his chains, | 2:27:25 | |
I again thought of Christ and the Romans | 2:27:30 | |
going up the Hill or of a Royal procession. | 2:27:34 | |
And it's the Royal precession aspect. | 2:27:38 | |
I mean, it's sort of horrible from the outside | 2:27:40 | |
but he must have said, hey, look what I've accomplished. | 2:27:42 | |
Nothing could be done out of the protocol | 2:27:47 | |
without the commanders specific instructions. | 2:27:48 | |
When he was brought into the cell, | 2:27:55 | |
they don't let him sit behind a camera. | 2:27:58 | |
I mean, behind a table or anything, | 2:28:00 | |
they don't know what this wizard will do next. | 2:28:03 | |
I said, how is he supposed to eat | 2:28:06 | |
if both arms are like this? | 2:28:09 | |
So they followed it up the chain. | 2:28:12 | |
And finally the top guy said, okay, | 2:28:15 | |
you can loosen his right hand so that he would be like this. | 2:28:18 | |
There were two guards inside this hut | 2:28:25 | |
which is obviously a violation | 2:28:33 | |
of the attorney-client privilege | 2:28:34 | |
about six guards outside, looking in | 2:28:36 | |
or looking at what was going on through a camera. | 2:28:39 | |
My translator took off for lunch at about 12:00 | 2:28:45 | |
but I wanted to continue to sit with Adnan. | 2:28:51 | |
At about 12:20 he said that he had to go to the bathroom | 2:28:55 | |
which meant moving him from his chair to the cage. | 2:29:04 | |
I convey that to the poor young guard who said, well, | 2:29:09 | |
we can't move him, we have to keep him in that chair | 2:29:15 | |
with those restraints, I'm sorry. | 2:29:20 | |
And I said, well, please try to get permission. | 2:29:23 | |
So she left and nobody ever came back. | 2:29:26 | |
Then as it approached one o'clock, he said, | 2:29:31 | |
"It's time for afternoon prayer." | 2:29:35 | |
So I again, notified the people on the outside | 2:29:39 | |
and maybe it went up the chain, but the answer was, | 2:29:42 | |
he cannot be moved to the cage. | 2:29:46 | |
we'll put a prayer mat in front of the chair | 2:29:52 | |
and he can pray on the prayer mat. | 2:29:56 | |
Well, obviously that was unacceptable to him. | 2:29:58 | |
So they said, all right, we'll bring you into the cage. | 2:30:01 | |
And there were several guards in the room at the time. | 2:30:04 | |
And I said, would you please | 2:30:10 | |
remove his upper body restraints so he can use the toilet? | 2:30:14 | |
And they said, no, he can't. | 2:30:19 | |
He has to keep them on while he goes to the toilet. | 2:30:24 | |
And I said, well, you have to remove | 2:30:28 | |
his upper body restraints for him to pray. | 2:30:31 | |
And they said, no, we'll just lay a mat out. | 2:30:37 | |
Once I went berserk, but I complained very vigorously | 2:30:44 | |
but had no success. | 2:30:51 | |
So he didn't go to the toilet and he didn't pray | 2:30:54 | |
and demanded that he be taken back to his cell. | 2:31:00 | |
But here's the thing that makes it even more interesting. | 2:31:05 | |
When they said that they would not remove | 2:31:10 | |
his upper body restraints, I went immediately to the next, | 2:31:13 | |
which had only telephones I could use. | 2:31:18 | |
I called up my counterpart at the justice department | 2:31:21 | |
explained the situation | 2:31:24 | |
said that I wanted to talk to the judge. | 2:31:25 | |
This is judge Henry Kennedy, on very short notice. | 2:31:28 | |
And at one point I said there, well, | 2:31:32 | |
at one point, I said they're treating him like KSM. | 2:31:36 | |
And judge Kennedy said, what's KSM? | 2:31:39 | |
So not everybody is quite as intensely involved. | 2:31:46 | |
So we went through, I filed an emergency declaration | 2:31:50 | |
explaining what was going on, an emergency motion. | 2:31:55 | |
And you just go back | 2:31:59 | |
and these are public documents on the file. | 2:32:00 | |
Motion to allow client to go to the toilet and pray | 2:32:04 | |
without restraints, 'cause we like to tell the story | 2:32:09 | |
through the name of the brief. | 2:32:13 | |
And here is what is amazing about the call. | 2:32:17 | |
From now on he said to the government never bring him | 2:32:24 | |
to his lawyer at a time when he'll have to pray | 2:32:29 | |
because under no circumstances | 2:32:33 | |
am I going to allow you to make him pray in chains? | 2:32:37 | |
That's just out of it. | 2:32:42 | |
The government lawyer said with respect to using the toilet | 2:32:45 | |
that they wanted him held in chains | 2:32:49 | |
for force protection reasons. | 2:32:52 | |
It's a book response, but they were basically saying | 2:32:59 | |
that it was a security threat. | 2:33:02 | |
He's in this cage, a locked cage, no contact, | 2:33:05 | |
no physical contact with me, | 2:33:09 | |
two guards watching him from two different directions. | 2:33:11 | |
They wouldn't let him out of the chains | 2:33:14 | |
saying that they feared he would act up. | 2:33:17 | |
So one got past the prayer point | 2:33:22 | |
and got to the toilet point, | 2:33:29 | |
the government lawyer said, there's a security issue here. | 2:33:31 | |
And Judge Kennedy, and this could go either way. | 2:33:35 | |
Said, well Mr. Remes, | 2:33:41 | |
I'm not going to second guess the military's determination | 2:33:42 | |
that there's a security issue here | 2:33:48 | |
but the man and then the lawyer said, | 2:33:55 | |
the government lawyer said | 2:34:06 | |
and I'll have two things out of order. | 2:34:07 | |
We know how to manage the situation. | 2:34:11 | |
And I said but one thing you can't do is tell a man | 2:34:16 | |
how to go to the toilet. | 2:34:21 | |
And here's the worst part of it. | 2:34:30 | |
You have this federal judge, | 2:34:35 | |
this August figure with such power | 2:34:37 | |
and such dignity saying to the government lawyer, | 2:34:42 | |
well, he has to be able to clean himself. | 2:34:47 | |
And I have the transcript | 2:34:52 | |
of our conversation based on my notes, but it was surreal. | 2:34:54 | |
So when we went back | 2:34:59 | |
and he heard that he'd have to stay in chains | 2:35:01 | |
that's when he broke up the meeting. | 2:35:03 | |
And he's the one who died last month. | 2:35:06 | |
I managed to have some of the most colorful clients | 2:35:16 | |
at Guantanamo. | 2:35:22 | |
Interviewer | And pregnant stories. | 2:35:24 |
- | Yes. | 2:35:26 |
Interviewer | Since your clients | 2:35:34 |
are the ones most impacted in numbers | 2:35:37 | |
by the fact that there are a lot, | 2:35:40 | |
almost half of them left in Guantanamo | 2:35:44 | |
and they're not gonna be released | 2:35:47 | |
because apparently you haven't is too unstable, | 2:35:48 | |
Can you, I guess (indistinct) | 2:35:53 | |
- | That's assertively why. | 2:35:54 |
Interviewer | It's assertively why. | 2:35:57 |
Maybe you can just that | 2:35:57 | |
but in the same context, could you address | 2:35:59 | |
how you see the Obama administration | 2:36:02 | |
since you have a good sense of it? | 2:36:04 | |
Many lawyers we interviewed were there early | 2:36:08 | |
in the early days, but you're here | 2:36:10 | |
in the present and you could just address. | 2:36:13 | |
- | Let me, I'll do that. | 2:36:17 |
Let me also say, as a matter of process | 2:36:18 | |
that if you need to break this up, I'd would be very happy | 2:36:22 | |
and very eager to come back for another session | 2:36:27 | |
so I can fill in some of the details. | 2:36:30 | |
Interviewer | Let's take a break for a minute Johnny? | 2:36:34 |
Johnny | Yeah. | 2:36:36 |
Interviewer | Okay, so we're back on is to your thoughts | 2:36:38 |
about the Obama administration, | 2:36:41 | |
given that you have so many clients who are impacted | 2:36:44 | |
by his actions for you could best explain what you think | 2:36:47 | |
about what the Obama ministration has done compared to Bush. | 2:36:52 | |
- | Obama was naive coming into office. | 2:36:58 |
He didn't anticipate that the Republicans | 2:37:03 | |
would turn it against him and make it a terrorism issue. | 2:37:08 | |
He thought there was universal support for it, | 2:37:14 | |
which in fact there was. | 2:37:16 | |
Bush said he wanted to close it, | 2:37:18 | |
McCain said he wanted to close it. | 2:37:19 | |
But Obama came into office. | 2:37:24 | |
He signed the executive order with great flourish | 2:37:27 | |
and fanfare and made it a signature issue. | 2:37:31 | |
He then set up a task force to review each man's file | 2:37:37 | |
and make a determination of whether | 2:37:43 | |
that individual should be kept or released. | 2:37:47 | |
It's my sense that people | 2:37:51 | |
within our habeas community pressed for this task force | 2:37:57 | |
on the theory that, | 2:38:02 | |
oh, well once you look at the files, | 2:38:04 | |
it'll be clear that nobody should be here | 2:38:06 | |
and then let everybody go. | 2:38:09 | |
I think that this was, | 2:38:10 | |
it turned out to be a huge mistake in retrospect. | 2:38:14 | |
I opposed a lot of other people opposed it. | 2:38:19 | |
We said, what do we need a task force | 2:38:22 | |
to get them to get rid of people from Guantanamo? | 2:38:24 | |
After all 779 men passed through, Bush released 532 of them. | 2:38:28 | |
So I think in the first couple of weeks, | 2:38:38 | |
Obama could have released a large number of men | 2:38:41 | |
but he didn't. | 2:38:46 | |
Instead he made Guantanamo a signature issue | 2:38:48 | |
and opposing his plans for Guantanamo | 2:38:53 | |
became a big political sledgehammer for the Republicans. | 2:38:56 | |
And because he had set up this task force | 2:39:00 | |
which didn't come into existence | 2:39:04 | |
or functioning until mid spring or late spring. | 2:39:06 | |
And then which took a year to complete, | 2:39:09 | |
the Republicans filled the vacuum, | 2:39:12 | |
made Guantanamo a litmus test | 2:39:15 | |
for whether you're for terrorism or against terrorism. | 2:39:17 | |
And at that point Guantanamo | 2:39:21 | |
became a big political issue for Obama. | 2:39:23 | |
If he hadn't made it up a signature issue, | 2:39:26 | |
if he hadn't put the target on his back | 2:39:29 | |
and he had just done it, | 2:39:31 | |
I think a lot of men who are there now would be gone. | 2:39:35 | |
But instead as I say, they thought they were smarter | 2:39:39 | |
than the Bush people, better educated, fair, | 2:39:43 | |
jester, rationaler | 2:39:48 | |
and they just at smarter themselves with the task force. | 2:39:51 | |
Interviewer | And the same thing goes | 2:39:56 |
with the a week is that could have been brought to America. | 2:39:58 | |
That's part of the same time. | 2:40:02 | |
- | If you'll let me, I'm gonna answer the question | 2:40:06 |
but let me go back just a little bit. | 2:40:08 | |
Interviewer | Okay. | 2:40:10 |
- | There was something I was going to say, | 2:40:18 |
but I got distracted, so I'll go on. | 2:40:19 | |
Oh, I know what I was going to say. | 2:40:22 | |
At the point that it became a political hot potato, | 2:40:24 | |
President Obama retreated every single time. | 2:40:34 | |
He thought Guantanamo, I guess, | 2:40:40 | |
would be this isn't easy dramatic break with Bush, | 2:40:44 | |
everybody will love me | 2:40:50 | |
and now I can go on and do what I wanna do. | 2:40:51 | |
And his biggest program of course, | 2:40:53 | |
was the healthcare reform legislation. | 2:40:55 | |
Rahm Emanuel as his chief of staff | 2:40:59 | |
is widely believed to have sold Obama on the idea | 2:41:03 | |
that Obama should expend | 2:41:10 | |
absolutely zero political capital on Guantanamo | 2:41:17 | |
because what was more important | 2:41:22 | |
passing healthcare legislation that would affect millions, | 2:41:25 | |
tens of millions of people. | 2:41:28 | |
We're getting a few guys out of Guantanamo | 2:41:30 | |
where there's absolutely no political upside, | 2:41:33 | |
only down side. | 2:41:36 | |
And we're just not gonna lose a boat over that. | 2:41:38 | |
So I think that continued, | 2:41:41 | |
there were very ardent supporters of closing Guantanamo | 2:41:44 | |
such as Greg Craig, | 2:41:49 | |
who I think was in charge of that issue in the White House | 2:41:52 | |
but he got kicked out, partly over this issue. | 2:41:57 | |
I was in Guantanamo when president Obama | 2:42:03 | |
issued his press release, his executive order. | 2:42:08 | |
When I heard the advance news that it was coming, | 2:42:13 | |
I was almost elated. | 2:42:21 | |
And my clients said to me, | 2:42:24 | |
"David, you always see the glass as half empty or more." | 2:42:26 | |
And that is my policy | 2:42:31 | |
because I don't wanna oversell anything | 2:42:32 | |
for the sake of my own credibility | 2:42:35 | |
and my pessimism has never failed me. | 2:42:37 | |
So they had that advance notice | 2:42:40 | |
but then when I saw the actual executive order the next day, | 2:42:43 | |
I saw the loopholes that were built into it. | 2:42:48 | |
When I got to a point | 2:42:53 | |
which says any detainees who aren't sent home | 2:42:55 | |
by the end of the one-year period shall be transferred | 2:43:00 | |
to detention facilities elsewhere. | 2:43:03 | |
That was the loophole. | 2:43:08 | |
Now of course, it all became moved later on. | 2:43:09 | |
But when I looked at the loophole, | 2:43:12 | |
when I looked at how carefully lawyered the document was | 2:43:13 | |
to really leave Obama a very free hand, | 2:43:19 | |
I realized that it was more sizzle than steak, | 2:43:23 | |
as we said in 2012. | 2:43:30 | |
Anyhow Obama, and I use him as a shorthand | 2:43:35 | |
for his administration. | 2:43:41 | |
Finally set up this cumbersome Guantanamo review task force | 2:43:43 | |
naturally as a government bureaucracy | 2:43:49 | |
it took a long time to set up | 2:43:50 | |
and it had to establish protocols and methods of review | 2:43:53 | |
and on and on. | 2:43:57 | |
In the spring maybe April, | 2:44:00 | |
the administration found in North Virginia | 2:44:05 | |
a community of Uyghurs who would welcome | 2:44:10 | |
the 22 Uyghurs at Guantanamo. | 2:44:14 | |
I think it was 22 at the time with open arms, | 2:44:16 | |
take them in, make sure that they succeeded | 2:44:21 | |
and would just generally support them. | 2:44:27 | |
So the administration decided to send the Uyghurs | 2:44:30 | |
to Northern Virginia. | 2:44:36 | |
By the way, I may be misstating the number. | 2:44:39 | |
It may only have been four Uyghurs | 2:44:41 | |
that were 22 all in all at Guantanamo. | 2:44:43 | |
So they were going to do that. | 2:44:48 | |
They were about to do that then somehow or other | 2:44:50 | |
news got out that they were going to do it. | 2:44:54 | |
Frank Wolf, a representative from Northern Virginia | 2:44:58 | |
raised a stink about it. | 2:45:02 | |
God everybody's scared and concerned. | 2:45:04 | |
The administration just backed off, no attempt to defend it. | 2:45:07 | |
They're just okay. | 2:45:11 | |
They just backed off. | 2:45:12 | |
And that had very serious ramifications | 2:45:14 | |
because later on down the road when ambassador Dan Fried | 2:45:18 | |
was trying to resettle | 2:45:22 | |
many detainees in Western Europe, Eastern Europe, | 2:45:25 | |
these countries would say, well, | 2:45:30 | |
why should we take these guys when you won't even take them? | 2:45:31 | |
And I think he said at one point, | 2:45:36 | |
this has recently been quoted somewhere | 2:45:37 | |
that it would reduce his success by 50% or 60%. | 2:45:40 | |
Again, the historical record should be checked | 2:45:48 | |
but it was sort of that kind of a statement. | 2:45:51 | |
If the other countries say to us, | 2:45:54 | |
why should we import your headache? | 2:45:56 | |
So that made it very difficult to resettle people. | 2:46:03 | |
The next event, if I recall correctly was November, 2009 | 2:46:09 | |
when Attorney General Holder announced | 2:46:17 | |
that the 5911 defendants | 2:46:20 | |
would be tried in federal court in New York. | 2:46:23 | |
Actually it wasn't the next event. | 2:46:28 | |
There was a speech that Obama gave in the National Archives | 2:46:29 | |
in May of 2009, in which he laid out the various principles. | 2:46:33 | |
He was going to follow | 2:46:38 | |
in deciding who to keep and who to release. | 2:46:39 | |
And it winded up bringing him all the positive publicity | 2:46:42 | |
of his first debate in the presidential elections. | 2:46:46 | |
I mean, it didn't do him any harm | 2:46:50 | |
but it sort of sank like a stone | 2:46:51 | |
but he laid that out and he was pretty faithful to it. | 2:46:53 | |
It contemplated indefinite detention by the way, | 2:46:56 | |
which dismayed us. | 2:46:59 | |
So Obama took the position | 2:47:01 | |
that he should have the flexibility | 2:47:07 | |
that some people should be tried in federal court, | 2:47:10 | |
other people should be tried in the military commissions | 2:47:12 | |
and he decided to, | 2:47:16 | |
and I'm not just saying this on my own authority. | 2:47:18 | |
It's stuff that I've read and studied educated recounting. | 2:47:21 | |
Okay, he wanted the first trial to be a trial | 2:47:27 | |
in federal court of the 5911 defendants | 2:47:38 | |
because he thought that this would be the ultimate proof | 2:47:41 | |
that the civilian system could work and deliver justice. | 2:47:46 | |
There might be other people. | 2:47:51 | |
And he actually named about five other people as I recall | 2:47:52 | |
who would go to the military commissions. | 2:47:56 | |
I don't remember who they all are | 2:47:58 | |
but initially Mayor Bloomberg, | 2:48:02 | |
he, by the way Obama chose the Southern District of New York | 2:48:07 | |
which is in Manhattan, Mayor Bloomberg endorsed this. | 2:48:11 | |
There may have been a couple of other prominent politicians | 2:48:16 | |
who endorsed it. | 2:48:18 | |
But once again, as soon as it became known, | 2:48:20 | |
there was an explosion | 2:48:24 | |
and within a month or two, Eric Holder had withdrawn | 2:48:27 | |
or dismissed the indictment | 2:48:35 | |
and it became evident | 2:48:37 | |
that if they were going to be tried anywhere, | 2:48:39 | |
they'd be tried in Guantanamo. | 2:48:41 | |
The scare was, it wasn't Frank Wolf this time. | 2:48:43 | |
It was representative Peter King | 2:48:49 | |
who I think is from Staten Island | 2:48:52 | |
but he may be from one of the other outer boroughs. | 2:48:54 | |
That's how people broke up in New York talk. | 2:49:00 | |
The city means Manhattan. | 2:49:04 | |
So all of a sudden, oh my God, | 2:49:08 | |
instead of being a symbol of our strength | 2:49:12 | |
to try these guys two blocks away | 2:49:16 | |
from the ruins of the world trade center, | 2:49:19 | |
it became a full hearty invitation to terrorist attacks. | 2:49:22 | |
They contemplated having hundreds of police. | 2:49:29 | |
Everybody from the tri-state area | 2:49:35 | |
would have to come in figuratively speaking. | 2:49:38 | |
Then, and as I said, | 2:49:43 | |
they feared that there would be terrorist attempts | 2:49:45 | |
that would cost hundreds of millions of dollars. | 2:49:50 | |
Okay, so he backs off from that in December, 2009, | 2:49:52 | |
then the task force report comes out in, | 2:49:57 | |
and I use that to illustrate his unwillingness | 2:50:02 | |
to expend any political capital to promote his own policy. | 2:50:07 | |
Now, in the Uyghurs case, their explanation, | 2:50:15 | |
the administration's explanation is, | 2:50:18 | |
well, we didn't work it out in advance | 2:50:20 | |
because if we thought, if we did, | 2:50:22 | |
we knew we'd get an explosion, | 2:50:25 | |
but the problem is having not made the foundation for this, | 2:50:27 | |
they suffered the consequences politically. | 2:50:32 | |
So then in 2009, you get the joint task force report. | 2:50:34 | |
People slowly start being released. | 2:50:38 | |
Only 67 have been released from Guantanamo alive | 2:50:42 | |
of those who have left Guantanamo, | 2:50:52 | |
all of whom would have been approved | 2:51:01 | |
for transfer by the task force. | 2:51:03 | |
So, and ambassador Fried had a very hard time | 2:51:08 | |
because we wouldn't take anybody. | 2:51:11 | |
The other aspect of this that was really ironic | 2:51:14 | |
is that at the very time, | 2:51:19 | |
the US was trying to convince other countries | 2:51:21 | |
to take these guys. | 2:51:24 | |
He put aside the question of whether we take them or not. | 2:51:26 | |
It was arguing in court that these were Al-Qaeda members. | 2:51:29 | |
These were Taliban members. | 2:51:34 | |
The US had a lawful right to hold them | 2:51:36 | |
because they were dangerous. | 2:51:39 | |
The justice department and the state department | 2:51:43 | |
were working completely across purposes. | 2:51:46 | |
Why should we take a terrorist? | 2:51:50 | |
Why should we take anybody? | 2:51:52 | |
So that's what was happening | 2:51:55 | |
with respect to the effort to release people. | 2:51:58 | |
Then the next thing that happened of significance | 2:52:02 | |
is December, 2009, | 2:52:05 | |
I guess this was shortly after Holder folded. | 2:52:08 | |
There was the Christmas day airliner bombing attempt | 2:52:12 | |
by I won't even try to remember his name, | 2:52:17 | |
but he was colloquially known as the underwear bomber. | 2:52:23 | |
In weeks before that, there had been a shooting | 2:52:31 | |
in Fort Hood in American base. | 2:52:36 | |
I can't remember what state, by a Muslim. | 2:52:39 | |
And it was believed that the Muslim had been in contact | 2:52:44 | |
with this American cleric in Yemen named Al-Awlaki. | 2:52:49 | |
And so Al-Awlaki was considered | 2:52:54 | |
to be a spider in the center of the web. | 2:52:58 | |
Then you have the Christmas day bombing | 2:53:01 | |
and it immediately becomes a matter of belief | 2:53:03 | |
that the Nigerian who tried the bombing | 2:53:07 | |
had also been in touch with Al-Awlaki. | 2:53:11 | |
That built Al-Awlaki up even more. | 2:53:15 | |
Although in fact, he was a pretty minor figure | 2:53:19 | |
as I understand it. | 2:53:21 | |
So within a day or two, senior political members of Congress | 2:53:22 | |
from both parties were demanding | 2:53:30 | |
that Obama stop transferring Guantanamo detainees to Yemen. | 2:53:33 | |
They said that, | 2:53:42 | |
the administration said when they announced it | 2:53:43 | |
that this was because of unsettled conditions | 2:53:46 | |
or the unsettled situation, but it wasn't, | 2:53:50 | |
it was a purely political move | 2:53:55 | |
to quell this political uproar. | 2:53:58 | |
Now since Yemenis account for over half | 2:54:04 | |
of the detainee population right away there, | 2:54:07 | |
you've said, these guys are off the table. | 2:54:12 | |
Not only are they half of the population | 2:54:15 | |
but they're two thirds | 2:54:18 | |
of the men who have been approved for transfer. | 2:54:20 | |
And I don't have to spin out the implications. | 2:54:27 | |
Then Congress got into the act | 2:54:30 | |
and began passing legislation | 2:54:32 | |
that really tied the presence hands | 2:54:35 | |
by requiring him to make certifications | 2:54:38 | |
or his secretary of defense | 2:54:41 | |
that no secretary of defense would make. | 2:54:43 | |
And meanwhile, the courts | 2:54:47 | |
particularly a reactionary DC circuit | 2:54:49 | |
kept ruling for the government. | 2:54:55 | |
And the worst ruling of all was | 2:54:56 | |
that even if a detainee one is habeas corpus case, | 2:54:58 | |
the court couldn't enforce an order | 2:55:02 | |
against the United States to release him. | 2:55:06 | |
So that eliminated habeas | 2:55:08 | |
as a remedy for all intents and purposes. | 2:55:10 | |
So look where we are. | 2:55:14 | |
Congress has tied the president's hands. | 2:55:17 | |
The president has taken half the detainees | 2:55:22 | |
off the table or two thirds of the approved ones. | 2:55:26 | |
And the court has said that | 2:55:29 | |
he doesn't have to release even people | 2:55:34 | |
who were in habeas cases. | 2:55:37 | |
So we had all three branches | 2:55:39 | |
of raid against us and we still do, we still do. | 2:55:41 | |
And we probably always will. | 2:55:45 | |
I don't know what will break this issue | 2:55:47 | |
and then achieve the results that we're fighting for. | 2:55:51 | |
That's pretty much been the situation so far | 2:55:54 | |
from a legal standpoint. | 2:55:58 | |
Congress has passed the Guantanamo, | 2:56:00 | |
the defense, sorry | 2:56:05 | |
the National Defense Authorization Act | 2:56:06 | |
a couple of times for 2011, 2012, | 2:56:09 | |
that had these restrictions in them. | 2:56:12 | |
And it's now considering the act for 2013 | 2:56:15 | |
and there's no reason to believe | 2:56:20 | |
that the restrictions won't be there actually 2012 | 2:56:21 | |
was more restrictive than 2011. | 2:56:25 | |
Obama is not going to drop his policy. | 2:56:29 | |
Then Romney certainly won't drop his policy | 2:56:31 | |
of keeping people from being transferred from Yemen. | 2:56:36 | |
And I don't think an American president | 2:56:39 | |
will transfer more than a trickle of detainees | 2:56:41 | |
as long as it will be hardly noticed | 2:56:46 | |
and not controversial at all. | 2:56:52 | |
One of our clients Hodson Odine one is habeas case | 2:56:56 | |
and the government did transfer him to Yemen | 2:57:01 | |
after he had won the case and didn't appeal | 2:57:07 | |
because his story aroused so much outrage. | 2:57:10 | |
He had been a university student who visited a friend | 2:57:15 | |
the evening that the Pakistani police raided the house, | 2:57:19 | |
seized everybody in it. | 2:57:24 | |
And then he wound up in Guantanamo for eight years. | 2:57:25 | |
And the district court Judge Kennedy | 2:57:29 | |
wrote a scathing opinion. | 2:57:32 | |
So the US made an exception to the no Yemeni policy | 2:57:34 | |
and sent him back, which was great. | 2:57:37 | |
Interviewer | When was it? | 2:57:40 |
- | This was in the summer of 2010. | 2:57:41 |
They released two other of our clients in December, 2009 | 2:57:44 | |
before the airliner bombing attempt | 2:57:51 | |
together with three or four other Yemenis | 2:57:54 | |
and their plan as I understand it | 2:57:58 | |
was to ship about half a dozen Yemenis every month | 2:58:00 | |
back to Yemen. | 2:58:03 | |
But these two guys sort of caught the last train | 2:58:05 | |
out of Paris. | 2:58:08 | |
It just became pure luck | 2:58:11 | |
because the Yemenis were then stuck. | 2:58:14 | |
The Guantanamo has not been even a gleam in anybody's eye | 2:58:19 | |
in the presidential campaign. | 2:58:26 | |
The war against terrorism so-called, | 2:58:29 | |
hasn't really been an issue | 2:58:31 | |
in the presidential campaign. | 2:58:35 | |
I don't think any president | 2:58:37 | |
is going to release more than a handful of detainees | 2:58:39 | |
because there's no political upside, it's all downside. | 2:58:45 | |
And so I think my final judgment is | 2:58:51 | |
that Obama was naive coming into office, | 2:58:58 | |
thinking that it would be easy | 2:59:05 | |
and applauded and popular, | 2:59:07 | |
and he thereafter exercised no leadership | 2:59:13 | |
in promoting his own policy. | 2:59:20 | |
Didn't give support to members of Congress, | 2:59:22 | |
kept litigating the habeas cases as fiercely | 2:59:25 | |
as beverly has ever before. | 2:59:29 | |
Wouldn't spend a simple grain of sand | 2:59:31 | |
of political capital on it | 2:59:35 | |
with the result that the men continued there | 2:59:37 | |
except those that Dan Fried | 2:59:40 | |
was able to get out, which actually isn't unimpressive. | 2:59:43 | |
When Obama came in, there were 242 detainees | 2:59:48 | |
and the US has released 67 by now. | 2:59:53 | |
So that's really a quarter of the population, | 2:59:59 | |
over a quarter of the population | 3:00:01 | |
but there are still almost 90 men | 3:00:03 | |
who have been approved for transfer, | 3:00:05 | |
who haven't been transferred. | 3:00:07 | |
There's still the regime of indefinite detention | 3:00:09 | |
and there's still the regime of military commission trials | 3:00:12 | |
which were invented to make it easier to convict defendants. | 3:00:15 | |
It's like I say to my friends, | 3:00:22 | |
the situation is hopeless, but I'm not discouraged. | 3:00:28 | |
Interviewer | Well, I was gonna say | 3:00:34 |
if there's anything that I didn't ask you | 3:00:36 | |
but I just wanted to say, 'cause you kind of said, | 3:00:37 | |
I just wanna confirm going forward. | 3:00:38 | |
You don't see change. | 3:00:40 | |
I mean, it's not, it could be inevitable | 3:00:42 | |
at some men are gonna die in Guantanamo. | 3:00:45 | |
They're just gonna live their rest of lives there. | 3:00:48 | |
- | When my, yes, I do. | 3:00:51 |
When one died of a heart attack, one died of cancer, | 3:00:53 | |
I have the dubious distinction | 3:01:00 | |
of representing the oldest detainees at Guantanamo. | 3:01:04 | |
Saifullah Paracha who's in his 60s | 3:01:08 | |
and I have another one who's in his 60s | 3:01:12 | |
but looks like he's in his 80s | 3:01:14 | |
and Saifullah has serious heart condition, serious diabetes. | 3:01:16 | |
He wanted to be operated on in the states. | 3:01:22 | |
They wouldn't do it. | 3:01:27 | |
And he didn't wanna be operated | 3:01:28 | |
spread eagle than having his arms and legs | 3:01:30 | |
chained to the operating table. | 3:01:32 | |
So the result was that he lives off his medication | 3:01:34 | |
but that's just a digression from the fact | 3:01:37 | |
that I can see no end to this. | 3:01:39 | |
And even though the men are mainly | 3:01:42 | |
in their 30s and 40s now, | 3:01:44 | |
I see no light at the end of the tunnel, | 3:01:49 | |
except for a few unusual detainees Shaker on is an example. | 3:01:52 | |
Maybe the two remaining Uyghurs will be examples | 3:01:59 | |
but they will be the exceptions | 3:02:03 | |
that prove the rules the rule. | 3:02:05 | |
And like I say, I don't see an end to this at this point. | 3:02:08 | |
Interviewer | Well, and that kind of depressing. | 3:02:16 |
- | May I say one other thing? | 3:02:18 |
Interviewer | Yeah, please. | 3:02:19 |
- | Which I wanted to say. | 3:02:20 |
Interviewer | I was gonna ask you (indistinct) | 3:02:25 |
- | Yeah, well, this is the other thing I wanted to say. | 3:02:26 |
This is an oral history with the expectation | 3:02:33 | |
that in a decade, two decades, three decades, | 3:02:39 | |
people are still going to be interested in this, | 3:02:43 | |
are going to be writing about it, | 3:02:45 | |
are going to be researching it. | 3:02:48 | |
The books will be written | 3:02:50 | |
that this will be like the Japanese internment situation. | 3:02:51 | |
And that it really is a matter of historical importance. | 3:03:01 | |
I think that some of the habeas lawyers | 3:03:11 | |
who came in to the case, | 3:03:13 | |
there were probably about 200 at one time, | 3:03:16 | |
came in because this guy's being unjustly detained. | 3:03:19 | |
We wanna get him out. | 3:03:24 | |
Others came in saying, looking at it like, | 3:03:27 | |
we're a law firm, this is a case, | 3:03:32 | |
we'll pursue the case and we win, we win, we lose, we lose. | 3:03:34 | |
But then there were others of us | 3:03:39 | |
who viewed Guantanamo as a cause | 3:03:42 | |
and have devoted a large chunk of our lives to this. | 3:03:46 | |
Or in my case, it appears a never ending commitment to this | 3:03:52 | |
unless I get on a defense team and one of the trials | 3:03:58 | |
of the 911 defendants. | 3:04:05 | |
And I am conscious of the historical character | 3:04:09 | |
of the work that we're doing. | 3:04:18 | |
And it's kind | 3:04:22 | |
of an amazing thought of becoming part of history. | 3:04:25 | |
Maybe a footnote, maybe only one mentioned in the index | 3:04:32 | |
but really a part of history. | 3:04:38 | |
I'm conscious of that. | 3:04:40 | |
I think the people at the center for constitutional rights | 3:04:41 | |
and the other human rights organizations recognize it | 3:04:44 | |
but now the number of lawyers | 3:04:47 | |
working on the cases who regard it as a cause or calling | 3:04:53 | |
have dwindled maybe to a handful, | 3:04:59 | |
the CCR people, the reprieve people | 3:05:03 | |
and so on that I mentioned, | 3:05:06 | |
once the cases were allowed to move forward individually | 3:05:10 | |
in the Boumediene case, | 3:05:12 | |
people paid attention to their individual cases | 3:05:14 | |
and didn't pay attention to Guantanamo. | 3:05:16 | |
So you immediately lost that among the habeas lawyers | 3:05:18 | |
plus Obama was able to diffuse the issue to a large extent. | 3:05:24 | |
But so we're faced with a problem | 3:05:28 | |
that Guantanamo really isn't viewed broadly | 3:05:32 | |
as an issue anymore. | 3:05:37 | |
There are very few of us in the habeas council community | 3:05:38 | |
who present it as a cause. | 3:05:43 | |
And that's very sad | 3:05:46 | |
'cause we're not taking advantage of the resources we have | 3:05:50 | |
but I think that we're conscious | 3:05:55 | |
of the historical dimension of the matter. | 3:05:58 | |
Interviewer | Well to just add, I think, | 3:06:03 |
I mean 50 years, | 3:06:05 | |
it took six years for the Japanese to determine it. | 3:06:06 | |
It could take that long, a generation for before people | 3:06:08 | |
really do look back at what happened in Guantanamo. | 3:06:11 | |
So what you're telling us, it would be | 3:06:14 | |
I think more worthwhile 30 years from now than it is today. | 3:06:17 | |
People will finally be willing | 3:06:22 | |
to look back at what happened? | 3:06:23 | |
- | There should be a record. | 3:06:25 |
Interviewer | And I really appreciate | 3:06:28 |
what you've given us. | 3:06:29 | |
You've given us the longest interview you've done up to now | 3:06:30 | |
and we really appreciate it. | 3:06:33 | |
And before we. | 3:06:36 | |
- | And if you had come back, I'm glad to give you more time. | 3:06:37 |
Interviewer | And I welcome that and it might happen. | 3:06:40 |
Before we close, Johnny needs 20 seconds of room tone | 3:06:44 | |
where we just exit quietly, | 3:06:47 | |
so before we can turn off the mic, so. | 3:06:49 | |
- | Right. | 3:06:52 |
Johnny | Begin room tone. | 3:06:55 |
End room tone. | 3:07:10 |
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