No fairytales allowed

Lawyer Clive Stafford Smith has 36 clients in Guantánamo and has
visited many times. In this powerful extract from a new book he argues
that secrecy in the camp is a disease

Saturday April 21, 2007
The Guardian

I had visited several times and there was something nagging at me. I
could not work out what left me uniquely unsettled about the place. It
was not the depressing environment; few prisons are inspirational. It
was not the occasional intimidation. Eventually it came to me: I could
not remember being lied to so often and so consistently. In
Guantánamo, lying was a disease that had reached pandemic proportions.

Former "detainee" Binyam Mohamed [British resident arrested in
Pakistan] viewed the whole military commission process as a con, a lie
that was meant to deceive the world. In June 2006 the supreme court
said the same, in more temperate terms, and struck down the
commissions as illegal. It rejected Donald Rumsfeld's assurance that
the trials would be fair, accusing the administration of "jettisoning"
legal rights.

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In Guantánamo, the military began with smaller lies and worked
upwards. I was visiting Camp Echo one day and they had messed up the
visitation schedule. The client I was meant to see was not there,
although I had sent the schedule for my visits several weeks before. I
thought I might as well go ahead and see Shaker Aamer [British
resident captured in Afghanistan], whom I was not meant to meet until
later in the week. So I asked the SOG (the sergeant of the guard, in
charge of the camp) whether Shaker was in his normal cell. "No, he's
not here," the SOG replied. I settled down for another wasted hour,
waiting for the military to bring over someone I could see. It was hot
even under the umbrella at the "picnic table" - the area behind one of
the cells in Camp Echo where they made lawyers wait. I watched a
lizard crawling up the green mesh on the wire fence. I thought about
the spider in Robert the Bruce's cave, continually battling to spin
its web and teaching patience to the early Scottish nationalists.

The next day I saw Shaker. "Were you here yesterday?" I asked. "Yeah,
of course. I've been here for weeks," he replied. So why did the SOG
lie to me? He could have said, "Sorry, sir. I am not permitted to
speak about that," or "Yes, sir, he is here, but I am afraid we cannot
deviate from the schedule." Instead he looked me in the eye and lied.
It was unsettling. He had seemed a clean-cut, well-mannered sort of
person.

The dissembling disease got worse as time passed. First there was the
effort to suppress the truth, with censorship or silence rather than
any overt falsehood. Then there was the lie by semantics, where the US
military redefined the language to provide plausible deniability.
Finally, there was the bare-faced lie. This kind of culture does not
germinate in a vacuum. Rumsfeld is responsible for a reconstitution of
the English language. I set about compiling a glossary of the
Gitmo-speak. The language was so deceptive that I found it appalling
and amusing in equal measure.

In a December 2004 press conference, the US navy secretary Gordon
England tried to defend conditions in Guantánamo by producing the
novel argument that the camp was rehabilitative: "People have learned
to read and have learned to write, and so it's not just being
incarcerated. We do try to get people prepared for a better life."
Prisoners had some difficulty exercising their new-found abilities.
Indeed, contrary to England's statement, prisoners in Guantánamo were
certainly not considered "people" and the guards were not even allowed
to call them "prisoners". One of the escorts told me that, on pain of
punishment, soldiers are required to call them "detainees". He
wouldn't even say the word "prisoner" out loud. The Pentagon had come
to the conclusion that it sounds better for us to "detain" someone for
several years, given that he has not been offered a trial. Naturally I
set about avoiding the word "detainee".

Meanwhile the authorities exercised rigid control over any information
that the prisoners received. Each time I went to visit, I would take a
suitcase full of reading materials. I maintained a log reflecting the
fate of each publication. Magazines awarded the stamp DENIED included
National Geographic, Scientific American and Runner's World. On one
occasion it seemed justified, since that month's National Geographic
had a story about building an atomic bomb, but the editions about
whales and African tribes hardly seemed a threat to national security.
One soldier explained the censorship of Scientific American to me: the
prisoner might learn about some hi-tech weapons system. Banning
Runner's World was less obvious, given the naval base was surrounded
on one side by a Cuban minefield and on the other three by ocean.

I was surprised - and Shaker Aamer was incensed - that they would not
let in The African-American Slave by Frederick Douglass. Uncle Tom's
Cabin was also barred. I dropped off an anthology of first world war
poetry for Omar Deghayes that included Wilfred Owen's poem Futility,
about the ghastly violence of war. It was returned DENIED.

Omar was born in 1969 and was a British refugee from Libya. His father
was tortured and killed by Muammar Gadafy in 1980, and as a teenager
Omar moved with his family to Brighton and studied law. He had not
completed his law exams, so I brought his books so he could study,
ready for his release. Law books, though, were not permitted, least of
all a subversive tome about the legal rights of prisoners.

The Save Omar campaign auctioned off an autographed copy of John
Pilger's book Hidden Agendas to raise funds. The highest bidder
donated it back, so I could try to get it in to Omar. It was written
in 1998 and the index had no references to Islamic extremism. The most
controversial statement I could see in the book was Pilger's comment
that most of the victims of terrorism were Muslims. It never got through.

At this point British political authors began to vie for the status of
having a book banned. The New Statesman editor John Kampfner gave me a
signed copy of his book Blair's Wars for Omar. Clare Short signed a
copy of An Honourable Deception? New Labour, Iraq and the Misuse of
Power with a dedication: "Hope you will be back with us soon, Omar.".
An inverted snobbery began to develop: if your book slipped through
the censors, perhaps that would cast doubt on the credibility of your
opinions. I worried that Jeremy Paxman would be disappointed that his
book The English was allowed in.

The only Australian left in Guantánamo, David Hicks, was facing a
military con-mission, like Binyam, and his lawyer was banned from
giving him Scott Turow's legal thriller Presumed Innocent. The basis
for censoring The New Dinkum Aussie Dictionary was less clear. Perhaps
the strangest decision involved four books returned with the notation:
"These Items were not Cleared for Delivery to the Detainee(s)." They
were Puss in Boots, Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk, and Beauty and
the Beast - all in Arabic translation. As one FBI agent admonished me:
"You know that Arabic script is full of squiggles, and it can easily
hide messages to the prisoners." Could it be, I wondered, that
Cinderella was secretly an enemy combatant? Eventually the military
barred us from bringing books for our clients altogether. So much for
education.

Next there was the senseless secrecy. Every word that my Guantánamo
clients said to me was deemed classified and I had to get permission
from censors to reveal it. To violate them would be a criminal offence
and I could end up in jail. Whenever I met with a client I would take
notes, but I could not take them with me when I left. I was obliged to
put them into an envelope, seal them with SECRET stickers and give
them to the military escort to mail to Washington. The notes went by
normal mail, which seemed far from secure. Indeed, the first time I
visited the military lost my notes for weeks.

This procedure prevented the lawyers from revealing the truth about
Guantánamo for a long time after any visit. This meant that I would
visit Guantánamo, fly back to England, then return to Washington three
weeks later to review my own notes. Meanwhile I was forbidden from
saying anything to anyone about what my clients had said. Once the
notes arrived in Washington, I would get notice that I could come to
the "secure facility" to review them and submit facts for
classification review. Even today I cannot repeat some of what my
clients told me, but nothing I learned in Guantánamo would be
classified in a sane world. I never saw anything that was relevant to
US national security, unless it would make the US less secure to admit
the truth about torture committed by American personnel.

All this was to control the flow of bad news out of Guantánamo. From
the beginning Joe Margulies, the other civilian lawyer working for
Binyam Mohamed, encapsulated the proper response to this: if we could
open up the prison to public inspection, the government would close it
down. The awkward truth about what was happening there would outweigh
any perceived benefit of keeping the prison open. Meanwhile, the
government wrote the rules. The military censor was dogged in defence.
It was not his fault; he was merely applying the rules and trying to
do it as politely as possible when we met in the secret Washington
facility.

In November 2004, I met Moazzam Begg in Camp Echo. Moazzam was from
Birmingham, and we talked for hours and he poured out his desperate
experiences. He impressed me from the beginning with his understated
eloquence. He had been with his family in Afghanistan, working on a
charitable project that involved schools and water wells. When he and
his family fled the war to Pakistan, he became one of hundreds sold
for bounties to the Americans. Later, he ended up in Guantánamo,
tarred as a major terrorist.

When my notes got back to Washington, in January 2005, I wrote a
40-page memo about how Moazzam had been abused by the US military in
Afghanistan. Every word was censored. The way the military had
pretended to torture his wife in the next room, even information about
American soldiers murdering two prisoners in front of Moazzam, was
considered a "method of interrogation" that could not be revealed. I
was not allowed to reveal how my clients' mental health was crumbling
either. Moazzam had been tortured, then held in solitary confinement
for 18 months; he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder; he had
nightmares, flashbacks, all the symptoms. But this, the military said,
was a privacy issue.

The effort to suppress this backfired. Had they come out immediately,
the facts of Moazzam's abuse would have soon have slipped into
obscurity. The cover-up ran and ran. I wrote one letter to Tony Blair
which began with a title, Re: Torture and Abuse of British Citizens in
Guantánamo Bay. The next two pages were the highlights of the torture
committed against Moazzam and other British citizens. I put in a
paragraph saying, "Anything that has been censored or blacked out in
this letter, your close allies in the United States don't think you
should be allowed to hear." I then attached the 40-page memo detailing
Moazzam's abuse. What I got back from the censor was extraordinary.
Every word about torture was declared to be classified, except the
title, but the last sentence made it past the hovering black marker.

By now there were perhaps a dozen on our team of volunteer lawyers and
each one was running into similar problems with the censorship
regulations. We tried to press the issues systematically, and
eventually the government was persuaded to relax the rules. At last we
could get information out to prove how the clients had been
mistreated, and the memos about Moazzam's mistreatment were cleared.
Indeed, with the threat of this evidence of torture making it into the
public eye, the pressure on the Bush administration increased, and at
the end of January, Moazzam and the three British prisoners who
remained in the prison (Feroz Abbasi, Richard Belmar and Martin
Mubanga) were set free.

Moazzam and Feroz had been among the six prisoners originally charged
in the military commissions, supposedly the very worst terrorists on
the base. Their release, and the fact that the British government
found no charges to bring against them, illustrated the extent of the
US military's delusion.

Gaining trust

Gaining trust is not easy. When we won the right to visit the
prisoners the military tried to outflank us. They began by sending in
interrogators pretending to be lawyers. They said all the lawyers were
Jewish, relying on perceived Muslim prejudices to drive a wedge.

The next gambit was arguably even sillier. "They have been saying ..."
Usama Abu Kabir hesitates, not wanting to go on. "They say ... " By
this time Usama is scarlet. He is a courteous man. "Well ... that you
like having sex with men!" I want to say that it should make no
difference to him. I can't afford to, as so many of my clients here
have been brought up in conservative Islamic countries, and we don't
have time for a debate. I have to wave my wedding ring about and issue
a denial.

There are valid reasons for mistrust. What is to distinguish the
lawyer from an interrogator after years of deception? To represent a
prisoner here you must be an American citizen. "Hi! I'm from America
and I'm here to help you." When a prisoner has a legal visit it is
called a "reservation", the euphemism used for interrogation.

Some lawyers say the meetings are confidential. The prisoners laugh.
Everyone knows that there are cameras in the cell and microphones by
the door.

There are other problems. One saw a client for the first time with a
translator whom the prisoner had previously seen working with US
military intelligence.

· Extracted from Bad Men by Clive Stafford Smith, published by
Weidenfeld and Nicolson on April 26th priced £16.99.

· In tomorrow's Observer: read about the journalist interned at
Guantánamo in another extract from Bad Men