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“We’re working against forces of evil. What they’re doing is just wrong”
LS caught up with human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith
Clive Stafford Smith is a human rights barrister who specialises in the defence of prisoners from the infamous Guantánamo Bay. To date, 50 of his clients have been released from Guantánamo, and his charity Reprieve is currently representing a further 33. In 1999, Stafford Smith returned home to the UK from America to set up this legal aid organisation, having spent the previous two decades helping the most vulnerable inmates on Death Row in the Southern States. In 1987, he was the fresh faced attorney at the centre of the documentary ‘Fourteen Days in May,’ which tracked the last two weeks of his client Edward Earl Johnson’s life before he was taken to the gas chamber for a crime Stafford Smith later proved he did not commit. This is one of only six death row cases he has ever lost.
Post 9/11, Stafford Smith’s focus shifted. Now there was a new breed of vulnerables to defend, the terror suspects, and an epicentre for this hatred and injustice in Guantánamo Bay. Although it was yet to surface in the public consciousness, the prison had been deliberately created by President Bush to separate those accused from the law. All had allegedly, been ‘caught on the battlefield’ in Afghanistan, but in fact were often sold to the US from places like Pakistan, victims of big bounties and little evidence. For Stafford Smith, the switch from Death Row was a natural progression; “everyone in Guantánamo faces the death penalty. Instead of being banged up in some prison God knows where in Mississippi, they are put in Cuba, instead of having a crap lawyer, you get no lawyer at all, instead of giving you an unfair trial, they give you no trial at all.”
In contrast to the impassioned young lawyer I watched in ‘Fourteen days in May,’ who barely hides his disgust at the system, his anger towards authority, when I met Stafford Smith at a local Amnesty meeting in 2004, he was extremely composed in 2004, and witty despite the circumstances. Six years later, I find him to be exactly as I’d remembered; the optimism is still there, although his emphasis has changed. Underneath the mellow exterior is a sense of urgency…despite President Obama’s pledges to close down Guantánamo, little progress has been made, and the problem of Bagram and other ‘black sites’ where prisoners are held without trial, becomes ever more pressing. There are still hundreds of men yet to be reunited with justice, and his work is far from over, “although I suppose it will have to be when I die,” he jokes. There is no let up in his steely determination, and a faith I don’t think many could have retained, “hopefully in the long term we’ll get most of them out, rescue them from their lawless holes. My positivity is never dampened, we win 98% of the cases we take on, and that’s because we’re working against forces of evil, and what they’re trying to do is just wrong.”
This is something his most notable client, Binyam Mohamed, knows all too well. He was one of the many prisoners to experience the extent of America’s ‘evil,’ their divorce from judicial due process. Tortured both in a Moroccan ‘black site’ and Guantánamo by CIA agents, Mohamed was released after requests from the British government. Of course these demands came too late, the UK had known Mohamed was a victim of ‘special rendition’ by the USA, and had done nothing until a court forced them to. I asked Stafford Smith if there is any resentment there, and he tells me none at all, “in fact he is a lot calmer and more rational than the rest of the world. Nobody I have represented is desperate for revenge. However, they do want people to admit what they have done. Binyam will tell you, I have been tortured, nobody can take that back, but what we can do is prevent people from torturing in the future.”
Mohamed was the first prisoner to accuse Britain of being actively involved in the torture of Guantánamo inmates, claiming that MI5 knew what was going on and deliberately suppressed it. In February of this year the Court of Appeal demanded that the document detailing what Washington had told British intelligence about his treatment be released, leading to the infamous excised ‘seven paragraphs,’ something Stafford Smith told the BBC were, ‘mere crumbs of a vast body of other information out there showing Binyam Mohamed was abused.’ Despite the implications of this, Stafford Smith is also not out for revenge and quickly declines my invitation to attribute blame: “I think that is a game for people who like to look backwards. I don’t want to blame people. Instead I want to figure out publically what the truth is and make rules so it doesn’t happen again.”
There is a level of sympathy there, not for those in power but for the painfully bored US soldiers on the base. He does not believe there should be war crime tribunals, “I don’t have to give anyone the Nuremberg defence, because I do not think they need to be prosecuted. However, what we cannot do is just sweep this under the carpet, because in order to learn from history you have to know what history is.” Although he does concede that there are some true believers, “you can see a strange light in their eyes sometimes.” I ask him if he would have done the same, had his life worked out differently and he’d ended up in the military. How deep does his moral fibre go? He laughs at this suggestion, “it’s an interesting question. If you look at the 1970s experiments where they took people off the streets and told them to torture or else, I think 85% of people cranked up the electricity to the point where it would kill someone, people do tend to do that. And that’s one of the many reasons I think prosecuting people is so fundamentally flawed. Whether I’d do it or not I don’t know, I’d like to think at this stage I wouldn’t, but when I was 18 I did all sorts of stupid things…”
So no prosecution for the perpetrators…but how do we move forward? Many Americans would say that completely abandoning Guantánamo is impractical, it would be near impossible to give all these men trials in a domestic criminal court. Investigations would have to begin afresh – all evidence previously gathered would have to abandoned, that’s the trouble with torture… For Stafford Smith these claims are a diversionary tactic, “the notion that there isn’t any evidence out there that can be used to prosecute them fairly is not true. The reason they won’t do it is because they don’t want to be embarrassed by a real court exploring how much people were tortured. You can’t say ‘we tortured them therefore we can’t give them a fair trial.’ They haven’t forfeited their rights because we behaved so badly, so that’s a flawed argument anyway. It’s not true either. If you look at the case of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, he’s the best example. He actually went on television and bragged about being behind 9/11. Nobody was water boarding him then.”
He is understandably scathing about those who would claim that in ‘war time circumstances,’ military tribunals with military attorneys are the only way to deal with the prisoners. “We call everything a war, the ‘war on drugs,’ ‘the war on poverty,’ and it is not a good idea when you are fighting a ‘war,’ supposedly in the name of democracy and the rule of law – to jettison the rule of law as the first casualty. The world is now a massively more dangerous place, whereas if we had stuck up for these principals we are supposedly trying to protect, it would be a lot easier. This hypocrisy is the yeast that ferments hatred.”
And what about after their release? These men would effectively be refugees, persecuted in their own countries, but with nowhere else to go, other nations inevitably seeing them as a security threat. We can’t send the Palestinian prisoners back to Gaza for example, but Europe is yet to step up to the plate. Should Britain be leading by example? These questions are constantly fired at Stafford Smith and he is well practised, the media has long been his battleground when the legally he could do nothing, and he refuses to talk in terms of responsibility, “but if they had any sense they’d do it. The issue here isn’t who must, legally or morally, do something; it’s just a general principal. If you want the world to be a safer place, you behave in a decent and moral way. If you want to convince Muslim people that we’re not out to get them, you do take in refugees who are innocent of any offence and need a place to live. By doing so you make Europe safer.”
I ask him about Moazzam Begg, another former client who is currently on an Amnesty endorsed tour to persuade Europe that this is the right thing to do. He recently found himself at the centre of a media storm when Amnesty suspended their gender officer, Gita Sahgal, for criticising the charity’s involvement with Begg and his organisation Cageprisoners, branding him ‘a known Taliban sympathiser.’ Stafford Smith’s support is unwavering. Despite a familiar insistence that there should be no punishment for Sahgal, he asserts that “she behaved incredibly badly. I know Moazzam very well and what she said is just not him. He wrote to Amnesty immediately telling them not to sack her, I don’t want her penalised for free speech. But she didn’t even bother to talk to Moazzam before her sad rush to pre-judgement. She would have realised that he is not the person she made him out, very publically, to be. What she tried to do to Moazzam was rather sad, rather anti-human rights.” Cageprisoners’ image has suffered immeasurably, with much of the media taking Sahgal’s side. Stafford Smith stands by them too, but not without reservation: “Cageprisoners does very good work. But it’s like everything, the fact that you work with people and like them and respect them, doesn’t mean you agree on everything. On the other hand, I bet I agree with Moazzam a damn sight more than I agree with David Cameron.’’
Of course, Britain should be permitting asylum to prisoners, it is the least we can do, and it would be a positive signal in support of what Stafford Smith seeks, not blame and punishment, but ‘truth and reconciliation.’ “Britain needs to admit what they did and say sorry. …but I don’t think we need to have an international war crimes trial. If the police show up and say they want to talk to you about whether you tortured people, you get a lawyer and you don’t answer their questions. Instead everyone should get together and admit that there were some really bad mistakes made in the panic of post 9/11, let’s figure out what they were and make sure they don’t happen again. Truth and reconciliation commissions are much more effective at getting the truth then police investigations.”
This lack of resentment is at once objective and admirable. Even at the prospect of a custodial sentence Stafford Smith remains calm and detached. The US Department of Defence is suing him for Contempt of Court after he detailed Binyam Mohamed’s torture in a letter to Obama, all of which was censored apart from the title. “It’s all intimidation I think. I thought it was an April fool’s joke, I can’t say it bothers me… when people feel they are losing, they feel the need to lash out, they have a lot of power and they abuse it, which it too bad.”
His prevailing optimism seems rooted in his ability to rationalise everything, not to get bitter and fired up in the face of gross injustice, as he once did in ‘Fourteen Days in May.’ He gets things into proportion, and he recognises that the Superpowers have been abusing human rights forever, “it’s just that nobody talked about the fact they were covering it up before. For example, when the Americans incarcerated every Japanese American in the country in 1942, nobody even knew about until 30 years later, it takes a while for things to reach the public consciousness. However, that doesn’t mean one should be complacent and say that the last few years were business as usual. But it is worth putting things into perspective for anyone who thinks today is a more dangerous place to live than 30 years ago, when we had mutually assured destruction with nuclear weapons. So, even though we have made some terrible mistakes, we’re living in a society that is nowhere near as threatening. That’s something to be optimistic about, but of course these situations will happen again because the world is not perfect.”
He seems resigned to the inevitability of corruption, yet steadily working against it. He is not wasting his time on ranting and revenge seeking; instead he saves his drive and determination for the victims rather than the perpetrators. There is certainly much to admire here.
Find out more about Reprieve and Guantánamo Bay by reading Stafford Smith’s books, ‘Bad Men’ and ‘Eight O’Clock Ferry to the Windward Side,’ which detail his experiences of the prison, and those of his clients.
www.reprieve.org.uk www.cageprisoners.com
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“We’re working against forces of evil. What they’re doing is just wrong”
By Lucy Snow on 5/08/10 • Categorized as Comment
LS caught up with human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith
Clive Stafford Smith is a human rights barrister who specialises in the defence of prisoners from the infamous Guantánamo Bay. To date, 50 of his clients have been released from Guantánamo, and his charity Reprieve is currently representing a further 33. In 1999, Stafford Smith returned home to the UK from America to set up this legal aid organisation, having spent the previous two decades helping the most vulnerable inmates on Death Row in the Southern States. In 1987, he was the fresh faced attorney at the centre of the documentary ‘Fourteen Days in May,’ which tracked the last two weeks of his client Edward Earl Johnson’s life before he was taken to the gas chamber for a crime Stafford Smith later proved he did not commit. This is one of only six death row cases he has ever lost.
Post 9/11, Stafford Smith’s focus shifted. Now there was a new breed of vulnerables to defend, the terror suspects, and an epicentre for this hatred and injustice in Guantánamo Bay. Although it was yet to surface in the public consciousness, the prison had been deliberately created by President Bush to separate those accused from the law. All had allegedly, been ‘caught on the battlefield’ in Afghanistan, but in fact were often sold to the US from places like Pakistan, victims of big bounties and little evidence. For Stafford Smith, the switch from Death Row was a natural progression; “everyone in Guantánamo faces the death penalty. Instead of being banged up in some prison God knows where in Mississippi, they are put in Cuba, instead of having a crap lawyer, you get no lawyer at all, instead of giving you an unfair trial, they give you no trial at all.”
In contrast to the impassioned young lawyer I watched in ‘Fourteen days in May,’ who barely hides his disgust at the system, his anger towards authority, when I met Stafford Smith at a local Amnesty meeting in 2004, he was extremely composed in 2004, and witty despite the circumstances. Six years later, I find him to be exactly as I’d remembered; the optimism is still there, although his emphasis has changed. Underneath the mellow exterior is a sense of urgency…despite President Obama’s pledges to close down Guantánamo, little progress has been made, and the problem of Bagram and other ‘black sites’ where prisoners are held without trial, becomes ever more pressing. There are still hundreds of men yet to be reunited with justice, and his work is far from over, “although I suppose it will have to be when I die,” he jokes. There is no let up in his steely determination, and a faith I don’t think many could have retained, “hopefully in the long term we’ll get most of them out, rescue them from their lawless holes. My positivity is never dampened, we win 98% of the cases we take on, and that’s because we’re working against forces of evil, and what they’re trying to do is just wrong.”
This is something his most notable client, Binyam Mohamed, knows all too well. He was one of the many prisoners to experience the extent of America’s ‘evil,’ their divorce from judicial due process. Tortured both in a Moroccan ‘black site’ and Guantánamo by CIA agents, Mohamed was released after requests from the British government. Of course these demands came too late, the UK had known Mohamed was a victim of ‘special rendition’ by the USA, and had done nothing until a court forced them to. I asked Stafford Smith if there is any resentment there, and he tells me none at all, “in fact he is a lot calmer and more rational than the rest of the world. Nobody I have represented is desperate for revenge. However, they do want people to admit what they have done. Binyam will tell you, I have been tortured, nobody can take that back, but what we can do is prevent people from torturing in the future.”
Mohamed was the first prisoner to accuse Britain of being actively involved in the torture of Guantánamo inmates, claiming that MI5 knew what was going on and deliberately suppressed it. In February of this year the Court of Appeal demanded that the document detailing what Washington had told British intelligence about his treatment be released, leading to the infamous excised ‘seven paragraphs,’ something Stafford Smith told the BBC were, ‘mere crumbs of a vast body of other information out there showing Binyam Mohamed was abused.’ Despite the implications of this, Stafford Smith is also not out for revenge and quickly declines my invitation to attribute blame: “I think that is a game for people who like to look backwards. I don’t want to blame people. Instead I want to figure out publically what the truth is and make rules so it doesn’t happen again.”
There is a level of sympathy there, not for those in power but for the painfully bored US soldiers on the base. He does not believe there should be war crime tribunals, “I don’t have to give anyone the Nuremberg defence, because I do not think they need to be prosecuted. However, what we cannot do is just sweep this under the carpet, because in order to learn from history you have to know what history is.” Although he does concede that there are some true believers, “you can see a strange light in their eyes sometimes.” I ask him if he would have done the same, had his life worked out differently and he’d ended up in the military. How deep does his moral fibre go? He laughs at this suggestion, “it’s an interesting question. If you look at the 1970s experiments where they took people off the streets and told them to torture or else, I think 85% of people cranked up the electricity to the point where it would kill someone, people do tend to do that. And that’s one of the many reasons I think prosecuting people is so fundamentally flawed. Whether I’d do it or not I don’t know, I’d like to think at this stage I wouldn’t, but when I was 18 I did all sorts of stupid things…”
So no prosecution for the perpetrators…but how do we move forward? Many Americans would say that completely abandoning Guantánamo is impractical, it would be near impossible to give all these men trials in a domestic criminal court. Investigations would have to begin afresh – all evidence previously gathered would have to abandoned, that’s the trouble with torture… For Stafford Smith these claims are a diversionary tactic, “the notion that there isn’t any evidence out there that can be used to prosecute them fairly is not true. The reason they won’t do it is because they don’t want to be embarrassed by a real court exploring how much people were tortured. You can’t say ‘we tortured them therefore we can’t give them a fair trial.’ They haven’t forfeited their rights because we behaved so badly, so that’s a flawed argument anyway. It’s not true either. If you look at the case of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, he’s the best example. He actually went on television and bragged about being behind 9/11. Nobody was water boarding him then.”
He is understandably scathing about those who would claim that in ‘war time circumstances,’ military tribunals with military attorneys are the only way to deal with the prisoners. “We call everything a war, the ‘war on drugs,’ ‘the war on poverty,’ and it is not a good idea when you are fighting a ‘war,’ supposedly in the name of democracy and the rule of law – to jettison the rule of law as the first casualty. The world is now a massively more dangerous place, whereas if we had stuck up for these principals we are supposedly trying to protect, it would be a lot easier. This hypocrisy is the yeast that ferments hatred.”
And what about after their release? These men would effectively be refugees, persecuted in their own countries, but with nowhere else to go, other nations inevitably seeing them as a security threat. We can’t send the Palestinian prisoners back to Gaza for example, but Europe is yet to step up to the plate. Should Britain be leading by example? These questions are constantly fired at Stafford Smith and he is well practised, the media has long been his battleground when the legally he could do nothing, and he refuses to talk in terms of responsibility, “but if they had any sense they’d do it. The issue here isn’t who must, legally or morally, do something; it’s just a general principal. If you want the world to be a safer place, you behave in a decent and moral way. If you want to convince Muslim people that we’re not out to get them, you do take in refugees who are innocent of any offence and need a place to live. By doing so you make Europe safer.”
I ask him about Moazzam Begg, another former client who is currently on an Amnesty endorsed tour to persuade Europe that this is the right thing to do. He recently found himself at the centre of a media storm when Amnesty suspended their gender officer, Gita Sahgal, for criticising the charity’s involvement with Begg and his organisation Cageprisoners, branding him ‘a known Taliban sympathiser.’ Stafford Smith’s support is unwavering. Despite a familiar insistence that there should be no punishment for Sahgal, he asserts that “she behaved incredibly badly. I know Moazzam very well and what she said is just not him. He wrote to Amnesty immediately telling them not to sack her, I don’t want her penalised for free speech. But she didn’t even bother to talk to Moazzam before her sad rush to pre-judgement. She would have realised that he is not the person she made him out, very publically, to be. What she tried to do to Moazzam was rather sad, rather anti-human rights.” Cageprisoners’ image has suffered immeasurably, with much of the media taking Sahgal’s side. Stafford Smith stands by them too, but not without reservation: “Cageprisoners does very good work. But it’s like everything, the fact that you work with people and like them and respect them, doesn’t mean you agree on everything. On the other hand, I bet I agree with Moazzam a damn sight more than I agree with David Cameron.’’
Of course, Britain should be permitting asylum to prisoners, it is the least we can do, and it would be a positive signal in support of what Stafford Smith seeks, not blame and punishment, but ‘truth and reconciliation.’ “Britain needs to admit what they did and say sorry. …but I don’t think we need to have an international war crimes trial. If the police show up and say they want to talk to you about whether you tortured people, you get a lawyer and you don’t answer their questions. Instead everyone should get together and admit that there were some really bad mistakes made in the panic of post 9/11, let’s figure out what they were and make sure they don’t happen again. Truth and reconciliation commissions are much more effective at getting the truth then police investigations.”
This lack of resentment is at once objective and admirable. Even at the prospect of a custodial sentence Stafford Smith remains calm and detached. The US Department of Defence is suing him for Contempt of Court after he detailed Binyam Mohamed’s torture in a letter to Obama, all of which was censored apart from the title. “It’s all intimidation I think. I thought it was an April fool’s joke, I can’t say it bothers me… when people feel they are losing, they feel the need to lash out, they have a lot of power and they abuse it, which it too bad.”
His prevailing optimism seems rooted in his ability to rationalise everything, not to get bitter and fired up in the face of gross injustice, as he once did in ‘Fourteen Days in May.’ He gets things into proportion, and he recognises that the Superpowers have been abusing human rights forever, “it’s just that nobody talked about the fact they were covering it up before. For example, when the Americans incarcerated every Japanese American in the country in 1942, nobody even knew about until 30 years later, it takes a while for things to reach the public consciousness. However, that doesn’t mean one should be complacent and say that the last few years were business as usual. But it is worth putting things into perspective for anyone who thinks today is a more dangerous place to live than 30 years ago, when we had mutually assured destruction with nuclear weapons. So, even though we have made some terrible mistakes, we’re living in a society that is nowhere near as threatening. That’s something to be optimistic about, but of course these situations will happen again because the world is not perfect.”
He seems resigned to the inevitability of corruption, yet steadily working against it. He is not wasting his time on ranting and revenge seeking; instead he saves his drive and determination for the victims rather than the perpetrators. There is certainly much to admire here.
Find out more about Reprieve and Guantánamo Bay by reading Stafford Smith’s books, ‘Bad Men’ and ‘Eight O’Clock Ferry to the Windward Side,’ which detail his experiences of the prison, and those of his clients.
www.reprieve.org.uk www.cageprisoners.com
Related posts: