Smith, Clive Stafford - short clip - CensoredbyAmericans

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-	They would classify everything	0:00
	that was embarrassing to them.	0:02
	And it was so frustrating.	0:04
	You give your notes to the authorities.	0:06
	The authorities would then	0:09
	mail your notes to Washington,	0:10
	take like three weeks to get there.	0:12
	Then you had to go to Washington	0:14
	to this secure facility somewhere near Washington	0:16
	and review the notes and then type them up	0:20
	and then get them to declassify stuff.	0:23
	Ridiculous process.	0:27
	And there was nothing in those notes	0:28
	that should have been classified.	0:30
	It was all a conflation of national security	0:31
	with political embarrassment.	0:34
	And what happened was, I typed up a 30-page memorandum	0:37
	about Moazzam Begg's abuse.	0:40
	They classified every single word.	0:43
	And they said that,	0:45
	I had had this argument nice, nice chap,	0:47
	he was just following orders,	0:49
	it's not like he was evil or anything,	0:50
	but I had this argument with the guy saying,	0:52
	"How can this be classified?"	0:54
	And he said, "That these things,"	0:56
	what I would classify as torture,	0:59
	"reflect the methods and means of interrogation."	1:01
	Well I said, "Look, there's a whole page on here	1:04
	"about how you murdered two people,	1:06
	"that Moazzam witnessed two homicides in Bagram.	1:08
	"How's that methods and means of interrogation?"	1:12
	He said, "Well, yes it is.	1:14
	"You frightened people into talking.	1:15
	"Some people get killed."	1:18
	So then there was a section about the mental illness,	1:19
	the mental problems that Moazzam	1:23
	had suffered from all this abuse.	1:25
	I said, "How's that methods and means of interrogation?"	1:27
	He said, "No, no, no, no, that's not.	1:29
	"That's your client privacy rights."	1:31
	"I tell you what, we waive the privacy rights."	1:33
	"No, you can't."	1:35
	So, there are 30 pages of this stuff,	1:36
	and not one word was allowed to come out in public.	1:39
	The only reason I can talk about it today was,	1:41
	I was sitting there very frustrated and annoyed,	1:45
	and so I thought, what can I do?	1:48
	So and I thought, I tell you what.	1:49
	So I wrote a letter to Tony Blair.	1:51
	Dear Tony, in re torture and abuse	1:53
	of your British citizens by your American allies.	1:57
	And then I detailed it for a couple	2:00
	of pages, attached the 30-page stuff.	2:02
	And at the end, I said,	2:04
	"Anything that you can't read in this letter	2:05
	"has been censored by your friends, the Americans,	2:07
	"because they don't want you to see it."	2:09
	Yours sincerely, Clive.	2:11
	So they censored everything	2:12
	except for the first line and the last line.	2:14
	So all it said was in re torture of British people.	2:17
	And then everything taken out of this	2:20
	has been censored by your friends, the Americans.	2:22
	And that was lovely exhibit that was then unclassified,	2:24
	black, black, black, black, black,	2:27
	and it just made them look really stupid.	2:29
	So at that point they revised the rules a bit.	2:31
	I mean, it wasn't just what I was doing.	2:34
	Other lawyers had similar stuff.	2:36
	And so finally they started beginning	2:38
	to let some of that stuff out,	2:41
	but there's still an awful lot that gets censored.	2:42

Item Info

Title:

Smith, Clive Stafford - short clip - CensoredbyAmericans

Date:

August 3, 2010

Interviewer:

Honigsberg, Peter Jan

Interviewee:

Smith, Clive Stafford

Role:

Human Rights Advocate

Description:

This interview may include descriptions of violence.
Founder, Reprieve
Clive Stafford Smith, male, age 51, is the founder of Reprieve and has spent 25 years working on civil rights issues, including achieving due process for prisoners detained in Guantanamo.
Description was provided by Witness to Guantanamo.

Subject:

United Kingdom

Format:

oral histories

Language:

English

Extent:

2:02:16

Digital Collection:

Witness to Guantanamo

Source Collection:

Witness to Guantanamo Video Collection, 2009-2017

Rights:

Limited Re-Use

CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Rights Note:

Unless otherwise noted, copyright is held by Peter Hongisberg. Under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license, you are free to use and share these materials subject to the following conditions: You must attribute Peter Hongisberg as the rights holder. You may not use the material for commercial purposes. You may not distribute any modifications to the materials. For other uses, including commercial uses, please contact Rubenstein Library at http://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/ask.

Identifier:

064f44554f4bda97808f6e071c19da96
witnesstoguantanamo
ark:/87924/r4nv9hw4s
1b41d911-18fd-4804-9ab4-833d29995860

Permalink:

https://idn.duke.edu/ark:/87924/r4nv9hw4s

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Smith, Clive Stafford - short clip - CensoredbyAmericans

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