Crider, Cori - Interview master file
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Interviewer | Okay. | 0:05 |
Good morning. | 0:08 | |
- | Hi there. | |
Interviewer | We are very grateful to you | 0:10 |
for participating in the Witness To Guantanamo Project. | 0:12 | |
We invite you to speak | 0:16 | |
of your experiences representing detainees in Guantanamo | 0:17 | |
and we're hoping to provide you an opportunity | 0:21 | |
to tell your story in your own words and people | 0:24 | |
in America and around the world need to hear these stories. | 0:27 | |
And we appreciate you giving us the opportunity | 0:31 | |
to listen to yours. | 0:34 | |
And if there's any moment that you'd like | 0:35 | |
to take a break let us know. | 0:37 | |
And if there's anything you do say | 0:39 | |
that you'd like us to remove, | 0:40 | |
we can remove it if you let us know as well. | 0:41 | |
- | Okay. | 0:43 |
Interviewer | And I'd like to begin | 0:44 |
by asking you your name and your background a little bit | 0:45 | |
on how you got involved and what title you have now. | 0:47 | |
- | Okay, I'm Cori Crider. | 0:52 |
I'm the strategic director of Reprieve's abuses | 0:53 | |
and counter-terrorism team that includes Guantanamo cases | 0:57 | |
and various other human rights abuses | 0:59 | |
that arise out of the war on terror. | 1:03 | |
I've been here for almost 10 years now. | 1:04 | |
Much longer doing one Guantanamo cases | 1:06 | |
than I ever thought I would be doing | 1:08 | |
when I started, I came to Reprieve in 2006, | 1:10 | |
as an attorney on a fellowship | 1:13 | |
and became a director in 2009. | 1:16 | |
Interviewer | Can you just, I wanna go back to that | 1:18 |
but just so we always ask people their age | 1:20 | |
and the year they were born. | 1:23 | |
- | Oh, of course yeah, I'm 33, I'll be 34 in November. | 1:24 |
I was born in 1981. | 1:28 | |
When September 11th happened | 1:31 | |
and the people first started arriving | 1:33 | |
on gurneys and in orange jumpsuits to Guantanamo Bay, | 1:35 | |
I was still a college student. | 1:38 | |
And so when I sit there across from my clients | 1:40 | |
at Guantanamo now, I think to myself | 1:42 | |
how I had time to live a whole life really | 1:45 | |
to finish university, go to the law school, | 1:48 | |
finish my legal training, find a job, | 1:50 | |
become an attorney | 1:53 | |
and go and represent them for several years now. | 1:55 | |
And in all that time, they've just been there. | 1:57 | |
They've been there. | 1:59 | |
Interviewer | You have a compelling story | 2:01 |
on how you got to work at a Reprieve. | 2:02 | |
Do you mind just telling it briefly to us? | 2:03 | |
- | Sure, so I originally come from a small town in Texas. | 2:05 |
And so when I go and I meet the clients | 2:10 | |
and one of the first things I always say, my cliche is well, | 2:11 | |
"Hello and I'm from Texas | 2:14 | |
and I'm really sorry for George Bush." | 2:15 | |
Just to try to get it to clear the air | 2:17 | |
from the very beginning. | 2:20 | |
But, but I was a law student at Harvard | 2:20 | |
and I was looking around | 2:24 | |
for somebody who represented the detainees in 04, 05. | 2:25 | |
And there were very few groups who did it. | 2:29 | |
There were CCR in New York with Mike Ratner. | 2:30 | |
And one of my then colleagues at law school, | 2:33 | |
a good friend of mine, | 2:35 | |
had interned at the death penalty organization | 2:37 | |
in the US south in Louisiana that was started | 2:40 | |
by Clive Stafford Smith, and said, well, you know, | 2:43 | |
if you're really keen about representing these detainees | 2:46 | |
there's this guy called Clive. | 2:48 | |
And I don't really know what he's up to, | 2:49 | |
but he's there in London. | 2:50 | |
And so you should just give him a call." | 2:51 | |
And I rang Clive up and said, | 2:54 | |
"Listen, I really wanna do this. | 2:56 | |
I really wanna represent these people. | 2:58 | |
I think what's happening is outrageous, you know?" | 2:59 | |
And he says, "Okay well, what's your background?" | 3:01 | |
I said, "I haven't done a lot of relevant stuff. | 3:03 | |
I'm, you know, I'm just a law student. | 3:04 | |
But if I can bring my own money, you know, | 3:06 | |
can I come?, and Clive being Clive he said, | 3:07 | |
"Oh, your own money? Absolutely. | 3:09 | |
You should completely come." | 3:10 | |
So I scrambled together some money. | 3:11 | |
And I started and that was as I said, nearly a decade ago. | 3:14 | |
Interviewer | And you scrambled money | 3:16 |
from what kind of sources? | 3:18 | |
- | Two fellowships from Harvard permitted me to do it. | 3:20 |
So I'm very grateful to them. | 3:22 | |
They are the people who got my toe in the proverbial door. | 3:24 | |
Interviewer | And why do you think it was self complaint | 3:26 |
to you as a law student to represent the detainees? | 3:28 | |
- | I think it was the hypocrisy that I saw | 3:32 |
from people in the Bush administration. | 3:34 | |
After my first year of law school, | 3:38 | |
I interned at some organization | 3:39 | |
that monitored United Nations human rights bodies. | 3:41 | |
A whole environment that you can imagine | 3:44 | |
the Bush administration took terribly seriously. | 3:47 | |
And so, I was sitting there in these sessions of the UN | 3:49 | |
I think what was then the UN Human Rights Sub-Commission. | 3:54 | |
And they put up an expert, | 3:57 | |
what they called an independent human rights expert. | 3:58 | |
Supposed to be somebody totally distinct | 4:01 | |
from the administration. | 4:03 | |
And this person was gonna field questions | 4:04 | |
about things like Guantanamo. | 4:06 | |
He was a guy called David Rivkin, | 4:08 | |
he's still kicking around you can find him somewhere. | 4:10 | |
But anyway, he got up there and he was just a shill | 4:12 | |
for the administration. | 4:15 | |
He defended having Guantanamo. | 4:15 | |
He defended military commissions. | 4:17 | |
He defended having children there | 4:19 | |
because of course it's a little remark fact | 4:22 | |
that we had several dozen children | 4:24 | |
in Guantanamo over the years. | 4:25 | |
And I just remember feeling upset and embarrassed, | 4:27 | |
and I thought, "Duh if I could just find somebody to pay me | 4:30 | |
to do something about this, this hypocrisy, | 4:32 | |
then I'll be set." | 4:35 | |
I didn't think at that time, | 4:36 | |
because that was now about 10 years ago | 4:38 | |
that I would still be doing it now. | 4:40 | |
Interviewer | And so when you came | 4:41 |
to London to start working on it, | 4:43 | |
what were the reality compared to your idealism? | 4:45 | |
- | I think, I think the greatest struggles facing people | 4:48 |
who are trying to represent these guys is | 4:56 | |
to convey their essential humanity. | 4:58 | |
Because of the censorship regime at Guantanamo | 5:01 | |
and because the space has become so politicized. | 5:04 | |
Because you can't go to Guantanamo and interview somebody | 5:07 | |
who's still inside, the military will tell you | 5:09 | |
that violates his privacy rights | 5:12 | |
under the Geneva Conventions, where you think, | 5:13 | |
"Well, what about the rest of the conventions?" | 5:14 | |
But anyway, because of that, | 5:16 | |
their humanity has really rarely been conveyed I think. | 5:19 | |
There are incredibly powerful projects | 5:23 | |
with released prisoners, such as Witness to Guantanamo. | 5:25 | |
But while they're inside, | 5:28 | |
there are kind of orange jumpsuit it's scarecrow | 5:31 | |
into which everybody pours their pre-existing fears | 5:33 | |
and prejudices. | 5:36 | |
And so, I don't think I had anticipated | 5:38 | |
what a struggle it would be to convey to my fellow Americans | 5:40 | |
that these people's suffering is something | 5:45 | |
that we should empathize with. | 5:48 | |
That these people aren't scarecrows and boogeyman. | 5:51 | |
They're just human beings. | 5:53 | |
They're men, you know, that's it. | 5:54 | |
Interviewer | When you first, | 5:56 |
the first time you arrived in Guantanamo, | 5:57 | |
what was your take on that experience? | 5:58 | |
- | There were parts of it that were eerily familiar | 6:01 |
and the layout that I hadn't expected because it had, | 6:04 | |
it was like iconic it wasn't remains iconic | 6:06 | |
and you've seen all the photos of the razor wire. | 6:09 | |
But what is bizarre about it, especially at that time is, | 6:11 | |
you go through an almost suburban | 6:14 | |
feeling setting before you get | 6:17 | |
to the prison camps with a McDonald's and a supermarket. | 6:19 | |
I mean, it could have been the small town | 6:22 | |
in Texas where I grew up and there was almost | 6:23 | |
an environment of collective denial in some parts | 6:26 | |
of the base where everybody just kind | 6:31 | |
of behaves as if it isn't the location | 6:32 | |
of the world's most famous prison camp. | 6:34 | |
Then when you go in, when you sit with the men of course, | 6:36 | |
some of the early meetings were difficult. | 6:40 | |
I remember the first guy I sat with | 6:42 | |
by myself reduced me to tears. | 6:46 | |
Not because he was unkind, | 6:48 | |
but because he was so depressed | 6:51 | |
and hopeless himself and let's face it, | 6:54 | |
there's this kid attorney showing up who's saying | 6:58 | |
she's gonna help him. | 6:59 | |
That he didn't really feel the point of engaging at that. | 7:01 | |
But you know, he said, "Hello, thanks. Nice to see you." | 7:03 | |
And he just wouldn't engage at all. | 7:05 | |
And I felt so frustrated and so helpless. | 7:06 | |
And I guess I hadn't really expected that. | 7:08 | |
I hadn't expected, | 7:10 | |
not rejection exactly, | 7:13 | |
but just a total flatness of affect, an absence of hope. | 7:15 | |
And I found that quite difficult. | 7:19 | |
Over the years, of course you build up relationships | 7:21 | |
with people and you learn how to kind of enroll them | 7:23 | |
in their own defense and in the project of humanizing them. | 7:27 | |
But at least at first that was | 7:30 | |
to kind of enclose yourself in a box with someone | 7:33 | |
who feels that he has no future is a difficult thing. | 7:37 | |
Interviewer | But wasn't that common? | 7:41 |
I mean, didn't the men, by the time you came down there, | 7:42 | |
feel that lawyers just couldn't help them in that, | 7:46 | |
why even waste their time with lawyers? | 7:48 | |
- | Yeah, I think by and large, | 7:50 |
they correctly believed the judicial process | 7:52 | |
to be a shell game. | 7:56 | |
One that was not in a resulting the release of many people. | 7:58 | |
And in that they were entirely correct. | 8:02 | |
I tend to do grieve with them actually. | 8:03 | |
I said, "Listen, I'm actually not here to talk | 8:05 | |
to you about filing motions. | 8:07 | |
I'm here to talk to you about, | 8:08 | |
I'm here to talk to you about humanizing you | 8:09 | |
and how we can do that together." | 8:12 | |
But they still, if you've been forgotten | 8:14 | |
and closed off from the world for many, many years, | 8:16 | |
then it takes time to convince somebody | 8:19 | |
of course that's right. | 8:21 | |
With, but I always do, I do remember. | 8:22 | |
And when I have new whippersnapper attorneys here | 8:27 | |
who are really excited and they've got the law | 8:29 | |
and they're gonna lawyer something | 8:31 | |
and they're gonna get people out by lawyering, | 8:32 | |
and I ask them to guess how many of reprieves clients, | 8:34 | |
cause we've had probably over 60 now released from one time | 8:38 | |
over the years, I ask them to guess how many were freed | 8:41 | |
because of the final order of a judge. | 8:44 | |
And they go, "I don't know." | 8:47 | |
Because they know, | 8:49 | |
they clearly know the answer is gonna be low. | 8:50 | |
And so they say, "Huh 20?" | 8:51 | |
And then they go, "10? | 8:53 | |
5?" I'm like, "No, it is one." | 8:57 | |
So one of our clients was ordered release | 9:00 | |
by Judge Richard Leon at the beginning of 2009. | 9:01 | |
Mohammed El Gharani who was taken | 9:05 | |
to Guantanamo at the age of 14. | 9:07 | |
Everybody else, I'm not saying the court had no role. | 9:09 | |
The court is the reason that lawyers can go | 9:11 | |
in the first place, but everybody else was released | 9:13 | |
as a result of political imperatives. | 9:15 | |
Interviewer | And you did you know that? | 9:19 |
Did you see that from the beginning? | 9:21 | |
How long did it take you to figure that out? | 9:22 | |
- | I think that was pretty clear from the get-go. | 9:24 |
Yeah, absolutely. | 9:26 | |
I still spent quite a lot of time | 9:27 | |
after Boumediene and after the 2008 Supreme court decision | 9:29 | |
that said that the guys had the right to a full hearing, | 9:33 | |
there was about a year to 18 month window | 9:36 | |
when it looked like some people would be ordered released | 9:38 | |
and that the courts would look at the pile of | 9:43 | |
rubbish that was used to justify these people's detention. | 9:45 | |
And just go, "I'm sorry, this is just not enough." | 9:48 | |
And that did happen. | 9:51 | |
If you remember, there was a period where that did happen. | 9:52 | |
But the government was taking appeals. | 9:54 | |
The Obama Justice Department, | 9:57 | |
the justice department of the man | 9:59 | |
who campaigned on the closure of Guantanamo | 10:01 | |
sort of taking a bunch of appeals to the historically | 10:03 | |
very hostile Washington DC Court of Appeals. | 10:06 | |
And that court of appeals started to reverse a whole bunch | 10:10 | |
of decisions basically redoing the assessment of the facts | 10:13 | |
which is not really the job of the court of appeals. | 10:17 | |
Such that the chance of a detainee to win got narrower | 10:20 | |
and narrower and narrower | 10:24 | |
until you get to today in 2015. | 10:26 | |
The reason that you don't hear | 10:28 | |
about those habeus hearings anymore is | 10:29 | |
that the process is effectively a rubber stamp | 10:31 | |
for the government's detention authority. | 10:33 | |
And the guys don't wanna play by a rigged game. | 10:35 | |
Why would they? | 10:37 | |
What attorney would advise them to do that? | 10:38 | |
So now, I think it's been clear | 10:40 | |
that it's been political. | 10:42 | |
Again, the court does have a role. | 10:43 | |
We had a surprisingly successful round | 10:45 | |
of litigation in 2013 and 2014, not about release | 10:48 | |
but about mistreatment of hunger strikers in Guantanamo bay. | 10:52 | |
So, after Obama had basically thrown in the towel | 10:56 | |
on his plan to close Guantanamo in January 2013 | 11:01 | |
he closed the state department office that was supposed | 11:04 | |
to resettle cleared people, didn't say anything about it. | 11:06 | |
A number of prisoners concluded that they had no, | 11:10 | |
they had no choice left and they en masse | 11:12 | |
and they stopped eating and they went on a hunger strike. | 11:16 | |
A lot of people have talked about the hunger strike | 11:19 | |
but just a comment about the courts. | 11:22 | |
We had a man Abu Wa'el Dhiab, who said basically, | 11:24 | |
"I'm gonna go on hunger strike. | 11:29 | |
I don't object to receiving the nutrients. | 11:30 | |
I'm not here to die, I'm here to protest | 11:33 | |
but the way that they force-feed me is utterly degrading." | 11:34 | |
And I'm sure that other people have described the process. | 11:37 | |
But when a man is forced fed | 11:40 | |
a team of soldiers and full ride gear come | 11:42 | |
and pick him up, you know, | 11:45 | |
he'll weigh a hundred, 110 pounds, | 11:46 | |
haul this guy, this skeleton, | 11:48 | |
over to a multi-point restraint chair, | 11:51 | |
wrists, shoulders, sometimes head, legs, | 11:54 | |
and 110 centimeter tube is snaked up his nose | 11:58 | |
down into his stomach. | 12:00 | |
So we brought a court case challenging the degrading way | 12:01 | |
in which they force-feed these guys. | 12:06 | |
And in that process, we didn't stop it, | 12:08 | |
but what we did was we forced a conversation | 12:11 | |
I think in the United States | 12:13 | |
about the way that these guys are treated | 12:14 | |
during their protest. | 12:17 | |
And for a minute, for a few months maybe, | 12:18 | |
I think the attention of the world really did swing back | 12:21 | |
to Guantanamo in a way that it hadn't been in a long time. | 12:25 | |
Now part of that is about the court. | 12:29 | |
And part of it's actually just about the guys in Guantanamo | 12:31 | |
being so desperate that they're willing to put themselves | 12:33 | |
through unbelievable suffering, | 12:36 | |
just to remind the world that they still exist | 12:38 | |
and that they're still human. | 12:40 | |
But because of his resilience | 12:41 | |
and because of our judge doing things | 12:43 | |
like ordering the government to give us 11 hours | 12:45 | |
of videotapes of the whole thing, | 12:47 | |
then we were ultimately able | 12:49 | |
to create a few already that got them out | 12:51 | |
and got him to Uruguay in December of 2014. | 12:52 | |
Interviewer | But those tapes are not public. | 12:56 |
So will they, you know, | 12:57 | |
will they be buried now because he's out | 13:02 | |
and there's no noise again about these hunger strikes? | 13:05 | |
- | You're absolutely right. | 13:08 |
The videotapes at the moment are not public. | 13:09 | |
When we saw them, we saw them in the secure facility, | 13:12 | |
where they put all classified evidence. | 13:15 | |
And if I told you what was | 13:17 | |
in them not withstanding that you've seen all kinds | 13:18 | |
of propaganda footage of Guantanamo, you know, | 13:20 | |
they would all put me in my, | 13:22 | |
where the cell that my client used to occupy. | 13:24 | |
But the media have actually tried to get them out | 13:25 | |
under the First Amendment. | 13:30 | |
So last year, 16 US organizations, the New York Times, | 13:32 | |
the Washington Post, Associated Press, | 13:36 | |
everybody but Fox News basically intervened | 13:38 | |
in the case and said, | 13:40 | |
"We have a right under the First Amendment | 13:42 | |
to trial records in general. | 13:44 | |
And these videotapes are a pretty important part | 13:46 | |
of your trial record when you're talking | 13:49 | |
about what force feeding is like. | 13:50 | |
So please give us the records." | 13:51 | |
The government said, "Absolutely no. | 13:54 | |
Not even a single freeze frame. | 13:56 | |
The sky will fall. | 13:57 | |
It will be propaganda for the terrorists, | 13:58 | |
all of the rest of it. | 14:00 | |
You can't let anything out." | 14:01 | |
But they didn't give any really solid reasons | 14:02 | |
other than that it's gonna upset people. | 14:04 | |
And the judge said, "That's just not good enough." | 14:06 | |
And so she ordered the government to produce | 14:09 | |
publicly releasable versions of some of this footage. | 14:12 | |
There was a chance, only a chance, | 14:15 | |
but there was a chance that at some point you and the rest | 14:17 | |
of my fellow Americans will actually sit there | 14:21 | |
and see some of the footage that I sat there | 14:23 | |
and watched as part of the case. | 14:26 | |
And I hope that people do | 14:28 | |
because I think that if people could see the footage, | 14:29 | |
the conversation about Guantanamo would be different | 14:32 | |
I think. | 14:35 | |
Interviewer | Why? | 14:37 |
- | Because I'm not allowed | 14:38 |
of course to talk about what's in the tapes. | 14:39 | |
What's publicly known is that it's the riot squad | 14:41 | |
taking my client and strapping him into the chair | 14:43 | |
and that it includes force feeding. | 14:45 | |
But, it doesn't matter what political perspective | 14:47 | |
that you come from left, right, or center. | 14:50 | |
No one can deny that the person in the tapes is suffering | 14:51 | |
and you can see it. | 14:55 | |
For me in a way that was the | 14:58 | |
one of the most important parts of the, | 15:00 | |
most gratifying parts of the judicial process | 15:04 | |
of our trial against force-feeding, | 15:07 | |
was the moment when actually the judge closed the courtroom, | 15:09 | |
and we sat there Mister Dhiab's lawyers | 15:15 | |
and the government lawyers sat on the other side | 15:19 | |
and the judge and her clerk and the court reporter. | 15:21 | |
And we played some of the tapes in a collective setting. | 15:24 | |
Which is very different from just being a lone attorney | 15:29 | |
watching them at a computer. | 15:31 | |
I knew how I felt about it because he was my client. | 15:33 | |
And of course I identify with him to some extent. | 15:36 | |
And so I knew that I found them upsetting | 15:38 | |
but I didn't know what it would be like to watch them | 15:40 | |
with my litigation opponents, | 15:44 | |
with the guys who've been trying to keep people | 15:46 | |
in Guantanamo sometimes for as long as I've been trying | 15:47 | |
to get people out, right? | 15:49 | |
People I've been litigating against | 15:50 | |
for years and years and years. | 15:52 | |
And I had seen all the tapes so in fact I was watching them | 15:53 | |
at least as closely as I was watching the video. | 15:58 | |
And they didn't all react in the same way | 16:02 | |
but I saw the blood drain from some of their faces. | 16:03 | |
I think you look at them and you cannot but see suffering. | 16:12 | |
I think you also said that it's not just a cost | 16:17 | |
on the hunger striking prisoner | 16:19 | |
but that actually what we're asking our service people | 16:22 | |
to participate in, | 16:25 | |
the medical people and the kids frankly, | 16:27 | |
who are MPs, is damaging to them too. | 16:31 | |
I think you see all those things. | 16:35 | |
Interviewer | And do you think Americans care? | 16:37 |
- | I think it depends on, I think it depends on the American. | 16:40 |
I don't, you know, we're a large nation | 16:44 | |
with a whole bunch of diverse views. | 16:46 | |
But yes, I think sometimes you do. | 16:48 | |
We forget this now, but in 2008, | 16:50 | |
both the Republican and the Democratic | 16:52 | |
presidential candidates campaigned on closing Guantanamo. | 16:54 | |
Everybody at that time said it ought to be closed. | 16:57 | |
There was an apparent consensus | 16:58 | |
and then a Democratic president wins | 17:00 | |
and suddenly it goes back to being ultra partisan. | 17:02 | |
But again, that's what I think is, | 17:07 | |
that's what I think is so powerful | 17:10 | |
about the force-feeding types. | 17:12 | |
I think that, | 17:14 | |
I think that there's an instinctive reaction | 17:15 | |
in all of us when we see somebody suffering. | 17:20 | |
And I think that that's the kind of thing that, | 17:22 | |
that people do feel. | 17:24 | |
Not everyone I'm not saying | 17:26 | |
that there aren't people who are careless | 17:26 | |
but I think most people would be really, really troubled. | 17:28 | |
Interviewer | The way I'm listening to you, | 17:31 |
would you liken it to be the reaction to Abu Ghraib? | 17:33 | |
Do you think it's that strong Americans would be that. | 17:35 | |
- | We live in a world after Abu Ghraib. | 17:39 |
So in a way I think that nothing can possibly shock us | 17:42 | |
in that way again. | 17:48 | |
And there's so much violence on television in any event. | 17:49 | |
It's hard to explain what's so disturbing | 17:53 | |
about them when you can't describe their contents. | 17:56 | |
It doesn't have the same kind of visceral force | 17:59 | |
of some of those Abu Ghraib images, | 18:05 | |
but there is a cold desperation | 18:07 | |
in them I think that really is, | 18:11 | |
that's really very troubling indeed. | 18:16 | |
And you know, the other thing is I think a lot | 18:18 | |
of people now in America, to the extent that they think | 18:20 | |
about Guantanamo kinda think, well, | 18:23 | |
I mean Obama either closed it. | 18:25 | |
Some of them think that he closed it | 18:27 | |
or that he tried to close it and Congress won't let them | 18:28 | |
or, you know, anyway he cleaned it up a lot. | 18:30 | |
And I think, I think that if they could see the reality | 18:33 | |
of what it is, | 18:37 | |
not just in the bad old days of Camp X-Ray, | 18:38 | |
but of what Guantanamo is for a lot of people today. | 18:40 | |
They would be really, they would be really shocked. | 18:43 | |
Interviewer | If you tell them that though, | 18:49 |
do they listen? | 18:50 | |
I mean, do you really believe they'll be shocked? | 18:51 | |
Do you think people, | 18:52 | |
and I'm sorry to say this but it's the reactions I get. | 18:53 | |
Do people really care anymore? | 18:56 | |
I mean, they think it's closed like you said | 18:58 | |
or they just feel that Obama's doing a good job. | 19:00 | |
You know, he's doing the best he can. | 19:03 | |
- | We haven't reached the moment, | 19:05 |
which I'm certain that we will reach in the future | 19:06 | |
where people view this as a terrible mistake, | 19:08 | |
just as we did with the internment of Japanese Americans. | 19:10 | |
We're not at that historical moment of course, | 19:13 | |
but there are some people now who think that this is wrong. | 19:15 | |
And there are some people who do respond. | 19:19 | |
There was another, before we ever got these videotapes, | 19:21 | |
we had been thinking about this question about the problem | 19:24 | |
of empathy and how you convey just how horrific | 19:27 | |
this force-feeding is to Americans. | 19:30 | |
And so we did a sort of a markup. | 19:32 | |
We, there was a popular rapper in America | 19:33 | |
who was previously called Mos Def now called Yasiin Bey, | 19:37 | |
who agreed to go through the procedure | 19:40 | |
just as it is in the rule books. | 19:45 | |
We did our best to kind of recreate the whole setting. | 19:47 | |
And we tried twice to intubate him, | 19:49 | |
doctors put the tube up his nose and down into his throat. | 19:53 | |
And he was nervous and it's a very uncomfortable process. | 19:57 | |
And so he kind of, he seizes up in the video | 19:59 | |
and he kind of chokes and he strains, | 20:01 | |
and ultimately he cried. | 20:03 | |
You see it all in the video and it's real. | 20:05 | |
It's all real. | 20:07 | |
He's not acting it's, that's actually just, | 20:08 | |
he found that upsetting and the footage, | 20:10 | |
I've had tons of people come in and say to me | 20:13 | |
that that footage was really, really hard to watch. | 20:16 | |
And that was, you know, that's not a, | 20:18 | |
that's not a real setting. | 20:20 | |
That video in terms of whether people care, | 20:22 | |
you ask whether people care? | 20:24 | |
10 million people watch the force-feeding video that we made | 20:26 | |
in the first 24 hours that it went online. | 20:31 | |
So somebody shared it. | 20:33 | |
You know, somebody thought that this was something | 20:34 | |
to be concerned about. | 20:36 | |
Interviewer | And, this might surprise you, | 20:38 |
but how after 10 years do you not become jaded | 20:41 | |
by all that you've seen and experienced | 20:45 | |
in Guantanamo and what the detainees, | 20:48 | |
I know the answer, but I'd like hear what you say. | 20:52 | |
- | I think that you don't forget the first moments | 20:53 |
of somebody breathing free air. | 20:59 | |
I think that, you know, | 21:01 | |
watching somebody hug his family for the first time, | 21:04 | |
that stays with you. | 21:06 | |
Watching somebody speak on the phone | 21:08 | |
to his loved ones for the first time stays with you. | 21:10 | |
Nobody can ever take those moments away from you. | 21:13 | |
The flip side of that is of course that there are moments | 21:17 | |
where you feel that you're not gonna win | 21:19 | |
and that you should never have had to have this conversation | 21:21 | |
with Americans for as long as you have, but you know, | 21:26 | |
rest, hope, it's not, you know, | 21:30 | |
it's not always easy, I wouldn't pretend that it is. | 21:33 | |
But at the same time it is a privilege | 21:36 | |
to be able to do something | 21:39 | |
that you so strongly believe in I think for so long. | 21:42 | |
Interviewer | And so many of the people | 21:48 |
that I've interviewed have burned out on this | 21:49 | |
as Lloyd as I burnt out on this process. | 21:52 | |
And you don't seem that to me. | 21:54 | |
I mean, I think the fact that you said humanity | 21:55 | |
in your first words in this interview, say a lot to me. | 21:58 | |
And I think that probably is what is in your spirit | 22:02 | |
is what keeps you going. | 22:06 | |
- | I think that it comes and it goes for people | 22:08 |
and that we all have moments when we feel stronger | 22:10 | |
and when we feel weaker or just like the clients, | 22:13 | |
you know, and there is an, | 22:15 | |
sometimes you do absorb trauma for them, but you know, | 22:17 | |
we do a whole range of things here at Reprieve. | 22:21 | |
We do the Guantanamo work. | 22:24 | |
We do torture accountability work. | 22:25 | |
We do work with people who have been hit | 22:27 | |
by drones and lost loved ones in drones. | 22:30 | |
All of who, you know, all of who have suffered immensely. | 22:33 | |
But I don't know, | 22:37 | |
maybe there's a sense that there's no time to pause. | 22:39 | |
Interviewer | To reflect. | 22:44 |
- | Yeah, we do that. | 22:45 |
You try, you try to create that space but yeah anyway. | 22:46 | |
Interviewer | Did Obama disappoint you? | 22:50 |
- | Yes, is the short answer. | 22:53 |
I know I never really thought | 22:54 | |
that he was gonna be the, you know, | 22:55 | |
the kind of messianic savior that the campaign sometimes | 22:57 | |
presented him to be. | 23:01 | |
But at the same time yes, I was disappointed. | 23:02 | |
And I do think that things could have been different. | 23:05 | |
There was a moment in January, | 23:07 | |
we all got around the office | 23:09 | |
and we're there kind of streaming it online | 23:11 | |
on the computer when he announces that he's gonna close it | 23:13 | |
and then of course that's not what happened. | 23:15 | |
I think that things could have been different. | 23:21 | |
It's important not to assume | 23:23 | |
that history had to go the way that it did. | 23:24 | |
And there was a time early in his administration | 23:27 | |
when he had the political wind in his sails, | 23:29 | |
that I think he could have done it differently. | 23:32 | |
There was a plan, | 23:34 | |
if you remember to settle several Uighurs | 23:35 | |
who were Chinese muslims, | 23:38 | |
who even the Bush administration had said | 23:41 | |
they picked up by mistake, | 23:42 | |
in communities in the United States, | 23:44 | |
there were Uighur families | 23:47 | |
in Alexandria and other places ready to take these people | 23:49 | |
into their homes. | 23:51 | |
And that was the Obama administration's plan very early | 23:52 | |
in the administration. | 23:55 | |
And then some Republicans got wind | 23:57 | |
of it and all hell broke loose. | 23:58 | |
They complained and they said, | 24:00 | |
"You're bringing terrorists to our backyard!" | 24:02 | |
And all of the rest of it. | 24:03 | |
And the administration blinked. | 24:04 | |
They lost their nerves. | 24:08 | |
They didn't resettle those guys, | 24:09 | |
total innocence with American families. | 24:11 | |
And instead they sent them | 24:14 | |
to Bermuda where they went on to do such terrorist things | 24:15 | |
as mow the lawn at a golf course | 24:18 | |
and swim in the sea for the first time. | 24:20 | |
And I think that was an incredible tragedy | 24:22 | |
and a missed opportunity because if the Uighurs had gone | 24:25 | |
to American families in Alexandria, | 24:29 | |
then we wouldn't be talking about boogeyman anymore. | 24:31 | |
We would be talking about people's neighbors. | 24:35 | |
You know, we would be talking about actual human beings | 24:37 | |
and people would have been much more reflective | 24:40 | |
about the human beings in Guantanamo and the human costs | 24:42 | |
of just holding people like this with no charge, no trial. | 24:45 | |
It could have been different. | 24:48 | |
At that moment though, Obama had shown some weakness. | 24:49 | |
He had shown that he wasn't gonna spend | 24:52 | |
very much political capital on closing Guantanamo, | 24:54 | |
and for his opponents in Congress, | 24:57 | |
there was blood in the water. | 25:00 | |
And after that, he made very little progress. | 25:01 | |
Interviewer | So is Guantanamo gonna close ever? | 25:05 |
- | Yes, absolutely it will close. | 25:08 |
It will close in the way | 25:10 | |
that the Japanese American Internment Camps closed. | 25:11 | |
It will close the way, | 25:13 | |
we will move beyond this moment in our history, | 25:14 | |
in exactly the way that we have moved | 25:17 | |
beyond other dark moments in our history | 25:18 | |
but it is gonna be a fight. | 25:20 | |
It is absolutely gonna be a fight | 25:22 | |
and it will not close I don't think, | 25:23 | |
I'd love to be wrong, | 25:27 | |
but I don't think it will close by the end | 25:27 | |
of the Obama administration. | 25:29 | |
I just don't think that's gonna happen. | 25:30 | |
Interviewer | Fight between whom? | 25:31 |
- | Well, between people I think who don't believe | 25:32 |
in holding people, no charge, no trial, | 25:36 | |
for years and years and years and years on end. | 25:38 | |
And people like US Senator Tom Cotton, | 25:41 | |
who says that they can burn in hell | 25:44 | |
and he doesn't care if every last man dies there. | 25:46 | |
Of course there are people who genuinely believe | 25:48 | |
that it's absolutely no problem just to hold people | 25:51 | |
until they shrivel up and die from lack of hope or old age. | 25:54 | |
Interviewer | I mean, someone told us | 25:59 |
that the Guantanamo will not close | 26:01 | |
until the last person dies there. | 26:02 | |
Is that possible? | 26:05 | |
Is that how you see it? | 26:06 | |
- | No, I don't see that. | 26:07 |
We've lost people already. | 26:09 | |
And of course as you know, | 26:11 | |
several people have died in Guantanamo | 26:12 | |
and it's possible that others will. | 26:14 | |
I hope not, but of course it's possible. | 26:16 | |
There are people who are ailing and in old, you know, | 26:18 | |
and really failing health and they're aging. | 26:20 | |
You know, I've been going to Guantanamo long enough | 26:22 | |
that my clients look older to me and I look older to them. | 26:24 | |
But, but it will, | 26:27 | |
I don't believe that I believe it will close. | 26:28 | |
It won't, I don't think it will close | 26:32 | |
in a kind of with a bang and with a ceremony. | 26:33 | |
It's just gonna be the same kind of trickle | 26:36 | |
of prisoners that we've seen for the past several years. | 26:39 | |
Interviewer | And the ones | 26:42 |
that they can't prosecute and don't wanna release, | 26:45 | |
will they be released anyway? | 26:47 | |
- | You know everybody says that they can't prosecute. | 26:48 |
I think there are a category | 26:51 | |
of people who may be prosecutable actually, | 26:53 | |
a small category. | 26:57 | |
Now, as a defense attorney | 26:58 | |
if I were defending those people | 27:00 | |
of course I would be doing a lot about the fact | 27:01 | |
that they were tortured for years and years | 27:03 | |
and years and about the moral authority | 27:04 | |
of the United States to sentence people | 27:07 | |
depending on what had happened. | 27:09 | |
But these other guys, | 27:11 | |
the guys that they don't wanna release, | 27:15 | |
I think there is a lot of hogwash about there about, | 27:16 | |
about suppose of dangerousness and that, you know, | 27:20 | |
I'm glad that there are parole hearings, | 27:22 | |
although they seem to be kind of three a year, | 27:25 | |
where they really assess | 27:27 | |
people's so-called future dangerousness. | 27:28 | |
I just think there's also a, | 27:32 | |
I think it's what kind of a people are we? | 27:33 | |
This idea that we gotta hold people until the end | 27:37 | |
of time out of a fear of what they might do, | 27:40 | |
have a sense of future crime. | 27:42 | |
You know, I'd like to think our spirit ought | 27:44 | |
to be a bit stronger than that. | 27:46 | |
Interviewer | How have you changed in the last ten years? | 27:49 |
- | God, I don't know. | 27:52 |
I don't know. | 27:54 | |
What would I say? | 27:56 | |
How have I changed? (sighs) | 27:57 | |
I suppose I, | 28:05 | |
ah, here's, okay, I've got it. | 28:08 | |
When I started the work, | 28:11 | |
the motive was very oppositional. | 28:14 | |
I'm not sure I'd ever, | 28:17 | |
had I met a Muslim before I went to Guantanamo? | 28:19 | |
Maybe once or twice. | 28:21 | |
So I didn't enroll in the work out of a connection | 28:24 | |
to the plight of the community as such if I'm honest, | 28:26 | |
it was more kind of down with this sort of thing. | 28:30 | |
This is not consistent with what I believe | 28:32 | |
our principals ought to be and I'm gonna go and oppose it. | 28:35 | |
It was very, very oppositional in its point of view. | 28:37 | |
But the more that you spend time with the guys | 28:43 | |
then it's not just so much about being against Bush | 28:47 | |
or Cheney or Obama or the justice department | 28:50 | |
or anybody else. | 28:53 | |
It's more about what you're doing for them. | 28:54 | |
I think that's probably the biggest change | 28:58 | |
is a sense of connection to them and to their families. | 28:59 | |
Interviewer | Well, like you use the word humanity, | 29:03 |
I keep going back to that because that's really what, | 29:06 | |
I don't know if that's how you get vulnerable | 29:09 | |
at the beginning or that's where you are now. | 29:11 | |
- | I think it's, I really think it's the great challenge | 29:13 |
of our time of the entire war on terror, | 29:16 | |
not just with Guantanamo, but with everything, | 29:18 | |
right up into current political issues | 29:21 | |
Is to try to explain to Americans | 29:23 | |
that the people at the sharp end of their foreign policies | 29:26 | |
are human beings just like them. | 29:29 | |
And to create that empathy, | 29:32 | |
that's the challenge that we as advocates face. | 29:33 | |
I think I, how are we doing? | 29:39 | |
I feel like its been about 20 minutes. | 29:40 | |
Interviewer | Can I just ask you is there anything | 29:42 |
that you want to share | 29:44 | |
'cause assuming that people are watching | 29:45 | |
50 years from now | 29:47 | |
something that people should know about you | 29:48 | |
and about Reprieve and about just the way you see the world. | 29:51 | |
- | I think that these, yeah. | 29:55 |
I think that these kinds of stark moments | 29:59 | |
in history often then get described | 30:02 | |
in terms of black and white. | 30:05 | |
And one of the things that I was always surprised by | 30:06 | |
and moved by in my time at Guantanamo, | 30:08 | |
are the spaces in between, the gray. | 30:10 | |
I had more guards than I can kind of remember now, | 30:14 | |
people come up to me privately and say, | 30:17 | |
"Oh, you know, you're the lawyer for such and such." | 30:21 | |
Usually using a number but occasionally even using a name | 30:24 | |
for one of my clients and say, "Oh, he's a good guy. | 30:26 | |
You know, this guy's a really, | 30:30 | |
have you ever seen his drawings? | 30:31 | |
He's actually a really good artist | 30:33 | |
or this other guy's amazing with the football." | 30:34 | |
And I would then have a conversation with, you know, | 30:36 | |
the military person about the humanity | 30:39 | |
of my client and say, "Well, you know, | 30:41 | |
actually somebody like you telling Americans | 30:44 | |
that these guys are human beings might help." | 30:46 | |
And at that point you know, | 30:48 | |
because of the fear of retaliation, | 30:49 | |
only a very, very small number of them ever go on | 30:51 | |
to feel like they can say anything. | 30:54 | |
And I really commend those who do, | 30:56 | |
but you don't, you can't blame those who don't do, do you? | 30:57 | |
If you think about, for example last year, | 31:00 | |
the nurse who refused to force-feed, | 31:02 | |
they really cracked down on him. | 31:04 | |
The defense department still really punishes dissent. | 31:07 | |
But I think one of the untold stories, I hope it comes out | 31:10 | |
in future will be how many people actually did see | 31:14 | |
that these people were human beings. | 31:17 | |
And there were even military personnel | 31:20 | |
assigned to guard them | 31:22 | |
who managed to make some real human connections | 31:23 | |
from time to time. | 31:26 | |
Interviewer | Well, Johnny needs 20 seconds | 31:28 |
of room tone. | 31:31 | |
- | Real, | |
yeah, okay. | 31:32 | |
(overlapping chatter) | ||
Yeah, absolutely. | 31:34 | |
- | Okay. | |
Johnny | We got room tone. | 31:35 |
End room tone. | 31:48 |
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