Pradhan, Alka - Interview master file
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Male | We're rolling. | 0:05 |
Interviewer | Okay. Good afternoon. | 0:06 |
- | Good afternoon. | 0:07 |
Interviewer | We are very grateful to you | 0:08 |
for participating in a witness to Guantanamo project. | 0:10 | |
We invite you to speak of your experiences | 0:14 | |
and your involvement with detainees and others | 0:16 | |
at the Guantanamo Bay Detention Center, Cuba. | 0:19 | |
We are hoping to provide you with an opportunity | 0:23 | |
to tell your story in your own words. | 0:25 | |
We are creating an archive of stories | 0:28 | |
so that people in America and around the world | 0:30 | |
will have a better understanding | 0:33 | |
of what Guantanamo was all about. | 0:34 | |
And future generations will also know | 0:37 | |
what happened with Guantanamo. | 0:39 | |
And by telling the story, you contributing to history. | 0:41 | |
And we're very grateful you're here today. | 0:44 | |
And if you wanna take a break at any moment, | 0:46 | |
please let us know. | 0:48 | |
And if there's something that you say | 0:49 | |
that you realize maybe you shouldn't have said it, | 0:50 | |
if you let us know (indistinct) we can remove it before. | 0:54 | |
- | Thank you. | 0:57 |
Interviewer | And we'd like to begin | 0:58 |
by having you tell us your name | 0:59 | |
and a little bit about your background, | 1:00 | |
and where you were born and age. | 1:04 | |
- | Of course. My name is Alka Pradhan. | 1:06 |
I am currently an attorney | 1:09 | |
at the Guantanamo Bay Military Commissions | 1:12 | |
Defense Organization. | 1:13 | |
I was born in Canada actually. | 1:18 | |
And very soon after that, moved to the United States | 1:21 | |
with my family. | 1:24 | |
I grew up kind of all over the place. | 1:26 | |
My father was a professor | 1:28 | |
and so we lived in Colorado for a while. | 1:30 | |
We lived in England, we moved to Ohio. | 1:32 | |
And so, I grew up partially in Ohio | 1:34 | |
and then ended up in college in law school | 1:39 | |
on the east coast, | 1:44 | |
went to England for a couple of years | 1:45 | |
and did an LL.M. in human rights | 1:47 | |
and found myself after a series of positions | 1:49 | |
in Washington D.C. working for the government. | 1:56 | |
(Alka laughs) | 1:57 | |
Interviewer | Well, let's back up a little bit. | 1:59 |
When were you born? | 2:00 | |
- | I was born in 1981. | 2:01 |
Interviewer | And that makes you how old? | 2:03 |
- | 35 years old. | 2:05 |
Interviewer | And where did you go to college | 2:07 |
and law school | 2:09 | |
and how did that lead into the current work you're doing? | 2:10 | |
- | I went to college at Johns Hopkins University | 2:14 |
in Baltimore. | 2:17 | |
I then actually did a joint degree BIMA program. | 2:18 | |
And I did my master's at the Johns Hopkins School | 2:22 | |
of Advanced International Studies in Washington | 2:25 | |
where my concentration was international law | 2:28 | |
in south Asia studies. | 2:30 | |
And then after that, I went straight to law school. | 2:32 | |
I went to Columbia Law School in New York | 2:35 | |
and actually ended up doing another joint degree program | 2:37 | |
there. | 2:39 | |
I did a J.D. LL.M. with the London School of Economics, | 2:41 | |
which is where I did my LL.M. degree in human rights. | 2:45 | |
I chose human rights really, actually long before that. | 2:51 | |
When I was 16 years, I attended a summer program | 2:56 | |
at which one of the major speakers was a prosecutor | 3:02 | |
from the then newly formed International Criminal Tribunal | 3:07 | |
for the former Yugoslavia. | 3:11 | |
And she was just absolutely magnificent. | 3:12 | |
She spoke to us for about a half an hour about the tribunal | 3:15 | |
that the new legal issues that they were dealing with, | 3:20 | |
this new field of international criminal law | 3:22 | |
and her particular specialty, | 3:25 | |
which was gender issues and gender crimes at the tribunal. | 3:27 | |
And so at that point, | 3:31 | |
I knew that I had always had an interest | 3:34 | |
in international law and at that point, | 3:36 | |
I knew that I wanted to focus on human rights. | 3:38 | |
Interviewer | And after Columbia, what did you do? | 3:40 |
- | After I graduated from Columbia, | 3:43 |
I actually went to White & Case in New York, | 3:46 | |
a big international law firm for almost four years. | 3:48 | |
And I always, again, | 3:53 | |
I had my interest in international law | 3:56 | |
and I had a background in it. | 3:58 | |
And so, I was the squeaky wheel | 3:59 | |
who always wanted the cases on foreign sovereign immunities | 4:00 | |
and alien tort statute | 4:05 | |
and all of those, and the partners were very indulgent | 4:07 | |
and actually encouraged me to go after those cases. | 4:13 | |
So, whenever I'd see a new matter come into the firm | 4:16 | |
that had touched upon any of those issues, | 4:20 | |
I would go and knock on their doors and say, | 4:22 | |
"Can I do the research? | 4:25 | |
"Can I do the discovery, whatever it is, I'll do it." | 4:25 | |
I also was lucky enough | 4:28 | |
to be encouraged to do a lot of pro bono work. | 4:31 | |
And at that time, | 4:34 | |
I started working with several organizations | 4:35 | |
including human rights first | 4:38 | |
and the open society justice initiative | 4:39 | |
on areas that were starting to touch upon national security | 4:42 | |
such as looking into the legality | 4:49 | |
of certain provisions of the Patriot Act | 4:53 | |
and looking into the CIA's rendition program | 4:56 | |
which at the time, | 5:00 | |
in about 2008 2009 was just starting to be reported | 5:01 | |
in the public. | 5:06 | |
So, I sort of became interested | 5:07 | |
in the juxtaposition of human rights and national security | 5:10 | |
at that time while I was still in private practice. | 5:13 | |
Interviewer | And which led you to work? | 5:17 |
- | So, I moved to Washington D.C. in 2010 | 5:19 |
actually after I got married | 5:23 | |
and decided that would be as good a time as any | 5:25 | |
to switch paths. | 5:28 | |
And at that time, I ended up moving to an organization | 5:32 | |
in Washington called the Constitution Project, | 5:35 | |
which is a small bi-partisan organization. | 5:38 | |
And they were just starting a two-year project | 5:40 | |
called the Task Force on Detainee Treatment. | 5:45 | |
And they had put together a task force | 5:47 | |
of 11 experts in their various fields, | 5:50 | |
former politicians, former judges, former diplomats, | 5:53 | |
Ambassador Tom Pickering was on the task force, | 5:59 | |
Judge Patricia Wald, now Governor Asa Hutchinson. | 6:02 | |
So, it was really across the board. | 6:06 | |
We had liberals and conservatives and everyone in between. | 6:08 | |
And the purpose of the task force | 6:12 | |
was to examine U.S. detention operations since 2001, | 6:15 | |
and really make it the most comprehensive examination | 6:20 | |
of detention operations since 2001. | 6:25 | |
And that made it sort of double important | 6:28 | |
that the study be done by a bipartisan organization | 6:32 | |
so that whatever we found | 6:35 | |
would have that stamp of authenticity | 6:37 | |
that this is not coming from the Democrats | 6:39 | |
or the Republicans. | 6:42 | |
This is coming from people who know their field | 6:43 | |
who have looked at the evidence, | 6:46 | |
whatever evidence we could get our hands on | 6:47 | |
and have come to these particular conclusions. | 6:52 | |
So, my position was as counsel to the task force, | 6:55 | |
evolved over time. | 7:00 | |
I started out for the first year | 7:01 | |
doing a lot of original investigation. | 7:03 | |
I went abroad. I interviewed foreign government officials, | 7:06 | |
former detainees, | 7:10 | |
attorneys for current and former detainees. | 7:13 | |
And here at home, | 7:17 | |
interviewed current and former foreign government officials | 7:18 | |
and tried with a couple of other counsel | 7:22 | |
and a couple of other investigators, | 7:29 | |
tried to put together as full a picture as we could. | 7:30 | |
And it ended up being, | 7:33 | |
I think we ended up with about 13 chapters, | 7:34 | |
one chapter on Guantanamo, | 7:38 | |
one chapter on the CIA rendition program, | 7:39 | |
a chapter on operations in Afghanistan, | 7:41 | |
a chapter on recidivism, | 7:45 | |
a chapter on the use of medical professionals | 7:46 | |
in the torture. | 7:51 | |
So, really trying to get every aspect of it covered. | 7:52 | |
And my particular specializations were Guantanamo | 7:57 | |
and rendition, in CIA rendition. | 8:00 | |
So, we spent two years on this project | 8:02 | |
and the result was, I think fairly lengthy report | 8:05 | |
that was published in 2013 | 8:10 | |
that I think still holds up pretty well. | 8:12 | |
I still refer to it in my current work. | 8:14 | |
It was pretty detailed. | 8:18 | |
And from there, | 8:19 | |
I had worked with so many Guantanamo adjacent organizations | 8:21 | |
to gather up this information. | 8:27 | |
I'd worked with organizations | 8:29 | |
ranging from the Center for Constitutional Rights | 8:32 | |
to people at the state department, people in Congress, | 8:35 | |
people in Reprieve | 8:38 | |
that when it came time to figure out | 8:40 | |
what I was gonna do next, | 8:43 | |
I thought I now have a pretty good knowledge | 8:44 | |
of what has happened and I'm a litigator at heart. | 8:48 | |
That's the one thing I miss from private practice. | 8:54 | |
I'd like to go back to litigation. | 8:55 | |
And luckily, | 8:57 | |
I had met so many people that Reprieve asked if I would, | 8:59 | |
Reprieve is a UK-based organization. | 9:04 | |
They asked if I would do a little bit of work for them | 9:07 | |
representing some of their clients at Guantanamo | 9:11 | |
from Washington and kind of help to open their U.S. office. | 9:15 | |
And so, it was very exciting. | 9:19 | |
And I took on some of the clients that they already had | 9:22 | |
at Guantanamo | 9:27 | |
and also worked a little bit on their drone work, | 9:28 | |
representing civilian drone strike victims | 9:32 | |
from Pakistan and from Yemen, | 9:34 | |
and had some really interesting experiences, | 9:36 | |
in that regard, bringing over civilian drone strike victims, | 9:40 | |
a family from Pakistan | 9:45 | |
whose mother and grandmother had been killed | 9:47 | |
in a drone strike. | 9:52 | |
The village midwife who is 60 something years old, | 9:53 | |
clearly not a militant, | 9:57 | |
wasn't close to any militants, | 9:59 | |
was standing in a field by herself | 10:01 | |
when she was hit by a drone | 10:02 | |
and her grandchildren ranging in age from seven | 10:05 | |
to, I think, 14 or 15, all hit by shrapnel. | 10:08 | |
None of them died. Thank goodness. | 10:12 | |
But two of those children | 10:13 | |
and their father whose mother had been killed, | 10:16 | |
we brought over and had a briefing for them in Congress | 10:19 | |
which was really very moving | 10:23 | |
because the children spoke about how they're afraid now | 10:25 | |
to go to school, which is exactly the opposite | 10:28 | |
of what we should want in a counter-terrorism program. | 10:31 | |
They're afraid to go outside. | 10:34 | |
They don't like sunny days | 10:36 | |
because those are the drones days when drones fly. | 10:38 | |
They prefer cloudy days and rainy days. | 10:41 | |
So, that was very moving. | 10:44 | |
And the second really interesting drone-related experience | 10:46 | |
I had was a gentleman named Faisal Bin Ali Jaber | 10:50 | |
from Yemen, came over, was given a visa | 10:53 | |
and came over to speak with members of Congress | 10:58 | |
and really anyone he could | 11:02 | |
about the fact that his brother-in-law, | 11:03 | |
who was a well-known anti-Al-Qaeda Imam in Yemen | 11:06 | |
who had a bully pulpit and used it to speak against Al-Qaeda | 11:12 | |
was killed in a drone strike. | 11:17 | |
And immediately when that happens in rural Yemen, | 11:19 | |
the suspicion is that, "Oh. you must have been a militant | 11:22 | |
"or you must have had something to do with it." | 11:24 | |
And really all this gentlemen wanted, still wants, | 11:26 | |
is an acknowledgement from them the U.S. government | 11:30 | |
that this happened and it was a mistake. | 11:32 | |
And so, he's a lovely gentleman. | 11:36 | |
He's in his 50s, he came over | 11:38 | |
and we put him through a really exhausting routine. | 11:40 | |
We met something like 11 members of Congress | 11:42 | |
including Senator Durbin, | 11:45 | |
members of the judiciary committee. | 11:49 | |
And he met with members of the national council as well | 11:51 | |
and told them his story. | 11:54 | |
And interestingly, shortly after his visit to Washington, | 11:56 | |
he works for the government | 12:01 | |
or used to work for the former government of Yemen. | 12:02 | |
Someone showed up on his doorstep with a bag of money | 12:06 | |
in U.S. dollars and said, "Here you go." | 12:09 | |
And he said, "Okay, look," | 12:13 | |
obviously in Yemen, his brother-in-law has a wife. | 12:18 | |
He has children. He was the breadwinner. | 12:22 | |
Obviously, money is helpful. | 12:25 | |
But he had said from the beginning | 12:27 | |
that's not what they were looking for. | 12:29 | |
They were looking for just an apology, | 12:30 | |
just an acknowledgement that he wasn't the intended target. | 12:33 | |
And he still has not received that to this day. | 12:39 | |
We actually filed suit on his behalf for declaratory relief | 12:44 | |
in Washington just for an apology, | 12:48 | |
just for an acknowledgement. | 12:52 | |
And that case, I think is still pending. | 12:53 | |
Reprieve is still taking that forward. | 12:55 | |
But it's just such a tragic story because then, | 12:58 | |
sometime after his visit, | 13:03 | |
there was an acknowledgement from the White House. | 13:05 | |
And President Obama, I think gave a very public speech | 13:08 | |
from the White House when there were two Western casualties | 13:11 | |
of drone strikes in Pakistan, | 13:15 | |
two gentlemen who were very tragically killed | 13:17 | |
and deserved every moment of recognition that they got, | 13:19 | |
but it sent a very strange, confusing, | 13:23 | |
and ultimately really negative message | 13:29 | |
to people like Mr. Bin Ali Jaber | 13:34 | |
and the (indistinct) family in Pakistan | 13:37 | |
about who deserves apologies and who doesn't miss mistakes. | 13:40 | |
Interviewer | Do you know who was the American | 13:44 |
who brought the money? Do you know that? | 13:45 | |
- | I don't. | 13:49 |
We don't know exactly what the chain of custody was | 13:49 | |
of that money. | 13:52 | |
I believe it was in U.S. dollars. | 13:54 | |
Interviewer | And do you know why, | 13:57 |
did the administration never explained to you | 13:59 | |
why they wouldn't apologize? | 14:01 | |
You never got any responses? | 14:03 | |
- | No, we did receive, | 14:04 |
when Mr. Bin Ali Jaber met with Senator Durbin for example, | 14:08 | |
he did receive sympathies. | 14:12 | |
And I don't wanna put words in the senator's mouth | 14:17 | |
but almost tacit acknowledgement | 14:22 | |
that this shouldn't have happened to you | 14:24 | |
but it was never overt. | 14:26 | |
And certainly in the meeting | 14:29 | |
with members of the national security council, | 14:31 | |
it was very much, we are happy to meet with you. | 14:33 | |
We are happy to listen to what you have to say | 14:36 | |
but we can't say very much | 14:38 | |
about anything because this is all classified. | 14:40 | |
Interviewer | And so, | 14:43 |
how do you address this with yourself | 14:44 | |
watching this over time | 14:47 | |
as you seem to get more and more involved in these issues? | 14:49 | |
What was your own personal experience back then? | 14:53 | |
- | I have never wanted to see race | 14:57 |
as the primary motivating factor | 15:02 | |
in something that the U.S. government does | 15:05 | |
because I'm an American, patriotic, I'm a lawyer. | 15:09 | |
I believe in the rule of law. | 15:13 | |
I believe that this country has done a lot of great things | 15:15 | |
and stands for a lot of great things. | 15:17 | |
And I have always up until maybe the past few years | 15:20 | |
really shied away | 15:24 | |
from attributing decisions like that to race. | 15:26 | |
I have always tried to look for the security rationale, | 15:29 | |
right? | 15:34 | |
There must be a security rationale. | 15:35 | |
But after seeing that | 15:37 | |
and now having been really in the nuts and bolts | 15:40 | |
of Guantanamo representation for a number of years | 15:45 | |
and having seen the way in which the United States | 15:48 | |
has built a separate legal system | 15:52 | |
for non-citizen, Muslim men, there is no other rationale. | 15:54 | |
I can't talk myself out of that. | 16:00 | |
It is simply the fact that, I'm sorry to say this, | 16:02 | |
but it is simply the fact that most Americans | 16:07 | |
don't really care that brown people across the seas | 16:11 | |
somewhere far away are being killed | 16:18 | |
or that brown men who maybe don't have a lot in common, | 16:20 | |
who don't look like them, who don't share their religion, | 16:25 | |
don't speak the same language | 16:28 | |
are for all intents and purposes foreign to them | 16:30 | |
are subjected to a separate set of laws. | 16:33 | |
It doesn't matter. | 16:35 | |
And that is... | 16:37 | |
It's deeply hurtful and it's just makes me angry | 16:39 | |
and it makes me very, very sad. | 16:43 | |
But I can't come to a different conclusion. | 16:45 | |
Interviewer | How did you come to that conclusion? | 16:49 |
Was it over time or was it momentous? | 16:52 | |
- | It was slowly over time, really. | 16:55 |
Particularly because of the previous president. | 17:00 | |
There's a certain cognitive dissonance | 17:03 | |
in watching a president like President Obama | 17:06 | |
who came in on such a tide of anti-racism | 17:10 | |
and promotion of civil rights and promotion of human rights | 17:15 | |
and promotion of international law, | 17:20 | |
that it is just internally still. | 17:22 | |
So dissonant to think of this president | 17:26 | |
who stood for these values, | 17:30 | |
putting into practice or continuing a practice | 17:32 | |
of overt racism. | 17:35 | |
And so, for a very long time, | 17:38 | |
it's not that I wanted to rationalize what was happening | 17:42 | |
but I wanted to understand how this could happen. | 17:44 | |
How he could continue policies of force-feeding | 17:48 | |
at Guantanamo that were clearly punitive, | 17:53 | |
that were clearly torture, | 17:55 | |
how he could continue to oppose habeas petitions | 17:57 | |
from Guantanamo prisoners who had been cleared for release | 18:01 | |
for years. | 18:04 | |
How he could continue a discriminatory drone program. | 18:05 | |
And at the end of the day, there is no rationale. | 18:11 | |
And that became really stark | 18:15 | |
when he gave that press conference | 18:18 | |
about those two drone victims, | 18:19 | |
the American and the Italian gentlemen | 18:22 | |
who died because Faisal had been asking for it, | 18:24 | |
I think years at that point and all he... | 18:28 | |
We knew, everyone knew, the U.S. government knew, | 18:31 | |
members of Congress with security clearances knew | 18:34 | |
that Salim Bin Ali Jaber was not supposed to die | 18:37 | |
in a drone strike. | 18:40 | |
But the fact that a gentleman from Maryland | 18:42 | |
got a press conference from the White House | 18:46 | |
and it was reported a very large settlement | 18:48 | |
and Faisal got a bag of money in the mail and nothing else, | 18:52 | |
which was frankly very insulting to them | 18:58 | |
was just impossible to ignore. | 19:02 | |
Interviewer | Well, go on that. | 19:06 |
Maybe we'll go back to that. | 19:07 | |
So, where did that take you next and (indistinct)? | 19:07 | |
- | So, once you start representing detainees | 19:11 |
at Guantanamo as I did with Reprieve, | 19:17 | |
you become part of a magical in good and bad ways | 19:19 | |
organization called the Guantanamo Bar. | 19:25 | |
(Alka laughs) | 19:27 | |
And it is a real thing. | 19:29 | |
No, not officially, but we think of it as a real thing. | 19:32 | |
It is sort of this shared experience | 19:36 | |
of having to practice law | 19:39 | |
in the most lawless place on earth in many ways. | 19:41 | |
And we do call ourselves the Guantanamo Bar Association. | 19:45 | |
There are list serves that we're on. | 19:49 | |
We often consult with each other across organizations. | 19:53 | |
And these are people at law firms | 19:57 | |
that compete against each other. | 20:01 | |
These are people that non-governmental organizations | 20:03 | |
that would normally compete for funds and things like that. | 20:06 | |
But the Guantanamo experience is something | 20:09 | |
that really puts everyone on the same level. | 20:15 | |
And so, we try to help each other as much as we can. | 20:16 | |
When policies change at Guantanamo, | 20:20 | |
when somebody's down there, | 20:23 | |
we come back and report it to everybody else | 20:24 | |
And take note, | 20:26 | |
these particular group of guards is doing this this week. | 20:27 | |
And so, you really do grow a sense of comradery | 20:31 | |
through that. | 20:34 | |
And we have little hats as well | 20:35 | |
that say Guantanamo Bay Bar Association | 20:36 | |
Interviewer | You should have brought one. | 20:39 |
- | I should have brought one, | 20:40 |
(Alka laughs) | 20:41 | |
But we do. | 20:43 | |
We have hats and a couple of us have sweatshirts. | 20:44 | |
But as part of that, | 20:46 | |
you get to know people from different organizations | 20:49 | |
including the military commissions lawyers. | 20:52 | |
Now, the military commissions lawyers | 20:55 | |
are in a slightly different, | 20:57 | |
well, a very different situation | 20:59 | |
than the so-called habeas lawyers. | 21:02 | |
The habeas lawyers, when I was a habeas lawyer, | 21:04 | |
my job was to get my clients cleared for release | 21:07 | |
and then figure out where they should be released to. | 21:11 | |
I came into it late enough | 21:17 | |
that the majority of the detainees who were being cleared | 21:19 | |
for release were from Yemen or from Syria. | 21:22 | |
And so, they could not be released to Yemen or Syria. | 21:24 | |
So, that posed a problem. | 21:26 | |
And I had to work with the state department | 21:28 | |
and with frankly, numerous delegations in Washington | 21:30 | |
to kind of promote my clients and say, | 21:35 | |
"Look, the state department only gave you | 21:38 | |
"this much information about him. | 21:41 | |
"I know, | 21:43 | |
"don't ask me how that you're considering taking him. | 21:44 | |
"Here's his background. Here's where he's from. | 21:46 | |
"Here's members of his family, | 21:49 | |
"here's the support he would have | 21:50 | |
"if he came to your country, | 21:52 | |
"here's what he wants to do with his life. | 21:53 | |
"Here are the skills he has. | 21:55 | |
"Here's a little statement from him. | 21:57 | |
"If we've had something declassified from him, | 21:59 | |
"that we can give you." | 22:01 | |
It is sort of this constant almost press tour. | 22:03 | |
And you go around hat in hand | 22:09 | |
with dossiers of your clients saying, | 22:11 | |
"Please take my client." | 22:15 | |
Interviewer | The state department didn't have | 22:18 |
that information, they didn't ask you for it? | 22:20 | |
Or if they asked you for it, they didn't ask you for it? | 22:22 | |
- | So, we had a very strange relationship | 22:24 |
with the state department. | 22:28 | |
The office of Guantanamo Closure was a group of people, | 22:29 | |
a group of government employees | 22:35 | |
who I think were working very, very hard | 22:37 | |
to do the right thing in difficult circumstances. | 22:39 | |
It has always been made clear and is now clear to me | 22:43 | |
as a DOD employee now myself, | 22:45 | |
that the department of defense holds all of the strings | 22:47 | |
with regards to Guantanamo at this point. | 22:51 | |
They make all the decisions regarding detention. | 22:54 | |
They make all the decisions regarding what the public knows | 22:56 | |
about Guantanamo, | 23:01 | |
and that extends to the state department. | 23:03 | |
And so you have this office in the state department | 23:05 | |
trying to find, essentially find homes for these men | 23:07 | |
and the department of defense telling the state department | 23:12 | |
what they can and cannot say about the detainees. | 23:15 | |
And so, we would find out, usually on our own | 23:18 | |
just from sniffing around | 23:22 | |
and sometimes reporters would tell us | 23:23 | |
what they were hearing. | 23:26 | |
And sometimes members of the Guantanamo Closure office | 23:27 | |
would tell us quietly which countries they were talking to | 23:31 | |
and say, "Look, we can really," | 23:35 | |
all they were allowed to tell these delegations | 23:38 | |
were the names of the detainees, where they were from | 23:41 | |
and a short kind of two-line blurb | 23:46 | |
about maybe how long they'd been there | 23:48 | |
and where they were picked up. | 23:50 | |
Now, the problem with that is that | 23:52 | |
when WikiLeaks came around, | 23:55 | |
WikiLeaks, one of the things that they released | 23:59 | |
were the very early 2002, 2003 assessments | 24:02 | |
of Guantanamo detainees. | 24:08 | |
And those are now all over the internet. | 24:10 | |
Those assessments by and large, right? | 24:12 | |
A great deal of the information in those assessments | 24:15 | |
can be traced to a couple of informants at Guantanamo. | 24:18 | |
Really just a handful of men who were given everything | 24:22 | |
from McDonald's Happy Meals to pornography at Guantanamo | 24:26 | |
to give up information about these other detainees. | 24:31 | |
And they made up so many things. | 24:36 | |
If you go to those assessments, | 24:39 | |
you'll notice that I think half of them | 24:43 | |
say that they're, either a Osama bin Laden's brother-in-law | 24:45 | |
or fought with him at Tora Bora. | 24:49 | |
I really didn't know we had 800 people in Tora Bora | 24:51 | |
with Osama bin Laden, | 24:55 | |
but really you start to see the similarities | 24:58 | |
among these assessments. | 25:00 | |
And that's because it can all be traced to a few people. | 25:02 | |
And so, these assessments were released by WikiLeaks. | 25:05 | |
And so, you fast forward a few years to 2013, '14, '15 | 25:08 | |
and you're telling delegations, "Go search for Emad Hassan. | 25:14 | |
"We'd like to give you Emad Hassan." | 25:18 | |
Emad Hassan was a client of mine. | 25:20 | |
And you look up Emad Hassan | 25:22 | |
and I think his assessment says something like, | 25:23 | |
fought at Tora Bora or something like that, | 25:27 | |
or went to an Al-Qaeda training camps, something like that. | 25:29 | |
And so, you'd give... | 25:32 | |
When the state department just gives you just a name, | 25:35 | |
what are you gonna do? You're gonna Google it. | 25:38 | |
Like how else are you gonna find anything? | 25:41 | |
And the first thing that comes up | 25:42 | |
is this man is a terrorist. | 25:44 | |
He slept next to Osama bin Laden. | 25:47 | |
and drove him around and was instrumental. | 25:49 | |
I mean, at the end of the day, | 25:53 | |
he was instrumental in September 11th, right? | 25:54 | |
That's what it all comes back to. | 25:55 | |
And every single one of these guys was tarred with that. | 25:56 | |
And so, then delegations came back to the state department | 26:01 | |
and said, "No, thank you. We don't want them." | 26:04 | |
And the state department would say, | 26:08 | |
"Look, they've been cleared for release." | 26:09 | |
And I don't know the state department really fully explained | 26:13 | |
what clearance meant. | 26:16 | |
But clearance meant, under President Obama, | 26:17 | |
meant that these men, | 26:20 | |
each of the men had to be unanimously cleared | 26:22 | |
by six government agencies. | 26:25 | |
Now, I think everybody now knows how difficult it is | 26:28 | |
to get six government agencies to agree on anything, | 26:31 | |
but it is impossible. | 26:35 | |
It really is. It's an impossible task. | 26:37 | |
So, if someone has been cleared for release | 26:39 | |
in the Obama administration, it means they really are clear. | 26:41 | |
It means everyone has looked at them, | 26:46 | |
the intelligence community, DOD, DOJ, state department, | 26:47 | |
joint chiefs, everyone has looked at these men. | 26:51 | |
And so, the state department would say, | 26:54 | |
"Look, they've been cleared. That's all we can tell you. | 26:55 | |
"We can't tell you how they were cleared, | 26:59 | |
"why they were cleared, | 27:01 | |
"what evidence was given to show they were cleared, | 27:01 | |
"but they were cleared." | 27:04 | |
And the delegations would say, "Prove it." | 27:06 | |
And that all of that information was considered classified. | 27:10 | |
So, they couldn't. | 27:15 | |
So really, it was just the state board and saying, | 27:17 | |
"Please take them. We promise they're not a threat." | 27:18 | |
And these delegations saying, "It's a risk. | 27:22 | |
"It is. It's a risk." | 27:25 | |
So, that's where we came in. | 27:28 | |
And we would try to go to delegations and say, | 27:29 | |
"Look, like you know what has been happening at Guantanamo. | 27:33 | |
"You know these men have been tortured. | 27:37 | |
"You know that a lot of this information is fake. | 27:39 | |
"We can't obviously give you classified information | 27:41 | |
"but what we can do is give you a bit more background | 27:44 | |
"about where they come from, | 27:47 | |
"we can give you contacts for their families. | 27:48 | |
"We can show that they never were, | 27:51 | |
"for majority of them, never involved in anything, right?" | 27:55 | |
So, that's where we came in. | 28:00 | |
And that's what we did. | 28:02 | |
And sometimes that was with the blessing of individuals | 28:03 | |
at the state department. | 28:07 | |
And sometimes it was just behind their backs, | 28:09 | |
and I make no apology for that. | 28:11 | |
Interviewer | And you never went | 28:14 |
to the department of defense and asked them if you could? | 28:14 | |
- | No. We mentioned it sometimes. | 28:19 |
They have the universal periodic reviews | 28:23 | |
where the United States is reviewed by the United nations, | 28:27 | |
really. | 28:30 | |
And they have to answer questions every time | 28:31 | |
about Guantanamo. | 28:32 | |
And as part of that process, | 28:33 | |
they hold civil society briefings. | 28:36 | |
And by they, | 28:38 | |
I mean literally all agencies of the U.S. government. | 28:39 | |
And so, there are always representatives from the DOD, | 28:41 | |
their representatives, the state department, DOJ, etc. | 28:44 | |
And so, I've been to a few of those | 28:47 | |
and have asked the representatives | 28:50 | |
from the department of defense, | 28:52 | |
usually the office of detainee policy, | 28:53 | |
why is it that you don't give more complete information | 28:56 | |
about the men who've been cleared for release? | 28:59 | |
And their answer is usually something very simple | 29:01 | |
like, we give what we can and everything's classified | 29:05 | |
and it's a national security risk. | 29:09 | |
And if there's national security assessment, | 29:11 | |
you wouldn't understand. | 29:12 | |
And so, that's where the conversation begins and ends. | 29:17 | |
Interviewer | So, you were at Reprieve for two years? | 29:21 |
- | I was, yeah. I was at Reprieve for two years. | 29:24 |
Interviewer | And then why did you move on to Guantanamo? | 29:25 |
- | So, as I said, being a member of the Guantanamo Bar, | 29:28 |
you get to know everybody. | 29:32 | |
You get to know all of the attorneys | 29:34 | |
working on all these very different cases. | 29:35 | |
So, I was a habeas lawyer | 29:37 | |
but I knew lawyers at the military commissions | 29:39 | |
and on the defense side, | 29:43 | |
I had either been with them at Guantanamo at the same time | 29:44 | |
or had talked to them about some of my clients | 29:47 | |
on the habeas side, | 29:51 | |
maybe knew some of the the guys who are now, | 29:52 | |
before the military commissions. | 29:57 | |
So, we'd cross paths. | 29:59 | |
And somebody from the military commissions | 30:01 | |
defense organization who had known for a few years | 30:04 | |
came to me all of a sudden in 2015 and said, | 30:06 | |
"We are suddenly being given funding | 30:10 | |
"for civilian attorneys." | 30:13 | |
Up until that point, | 30:15 | |
it had been pretty much only military attorneys. | 30:17 | |
And the only civilians were the so-called learned counsel | 30:20 | |
who are the death penalty experts, | 30:25 | |
death penalty qualified lawyers who lead each team | 30:27 | |
because the 911 case particularly is a death penalty case. | 30:31 | |
And so they said, "We're suddenly hiring civilian lawyers, | 30:35 | |
"are you interested?" | 30:39 | |
And I said, | 30:41 | |
"Well, there's no way to get any deeper into Guantanamo | 30:42 | |
"than by joining the military commission." | 30:48 | |
(Alka laughs) | 30:51 | |
that's the oblique. That is it. | 30:52 | |
And I'd studied and litigated | 30:57 | |
and heard so much that point | 31:04 | |
about this particular group of detainees | 31:08 | |
who these, of course, are the CIA detainees, right? | 31:11 | |
These are the guys who were in the rendition program. | 31:16 | |
And I had studied the rendition program. | 31:18 | |
I'll close in personally in the constitution project. | 31:20 | |
I knew what they had been through. | 31:24 | |
I knew what kind of torture they'd faced. | 31:26 | |
I knew that they'd been flown all over the world, | 31:27 | |
that they'd been kept in secret prisons. | 31:30 | |
And it was the kind of thing... | 31:32 | |
It was sort of the kind of challenge | 31:35 | |
that I really, as a lawyer, I couldn't pass up. | 31:38 | |
And it was also just the opportunity to, | 31:43 | |
several of my clients at Reprieve were tortured, | 31:46 | |
were brutally tortured. | 31:49 | |
And so this was the opportunity | 31:53 | |
to kind of really just further my work with torture victims. | 31:54 | |
When you joined the military commissions, | 32:03 | |
you join one person's team. | 32:04 | |
You really don't work for more than one client, | 32:06 | |
particularly with regards to the 911 case | 32:09 | |
which is the biggest criminal case in U.S. history. | 32:12 | |
And so, I joined the team of Ammar Al-Baluchi. | 32:16 | |
And so, I represent just Ammar. | 32:21 | |
And in the course of sort of prepping for this job, | 32:25 | |
read up on everything that he had been through, who he was, | 32:32 | |
where he'd come from, | 32:37 | |
what the allegations were, all of that. | 32:38 | |
But I will say, nothing really prepares you | 32:41 | |
for meeting your client face to face | 32:45 | |
and getting that information from him. | 32:49 | |
Interviewer | Well, I'd like to know | 32:53 |
first time you met him what that was like, | 32:54 | |
but just for the audience, | 32:56 | |
can you give us a brief background | 32:57 | |
and who he is or what you first (indistinct) | 32:58 | |
before you met him? | 33:00 | |
- | Of course. Ammar is a Pakistani citizen. | 33:01 |
He grew up in Kuwait. | 33:06 | |
He was born in Kuwait and lived in Kuwait and Iran | 33:09 | |
and then Dubai. | 33:13 | |
He worked as a computer, | 33:14 | |
basically a computer specialist, computer engineer in Dubai, | 33:16 | |
he's educated. | 33:22 | |
He's very good at computers, | 33:26 | |
and he's kind of very interested in technology | 33:28 | |
and all of that. | 33:31 | |
But he was living in Dubai for several years | 33:33 | |
prior to 2001. | 33:36 | |
His computer company wrapped up operations in 2001. | 33:39 | |
And then he moved back to Pakistan or he had family. | 33:43 | |
Now... | 33:48 | |
Interviewer | (indistinct). | 33:48 |
- | At that time in 2001, he was 20... | 33:49 |
This is, goodness now. It's 16 years ago. | 33:53 | |
He was 23. | 33:56 | |
Now, Ammar's uncle is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed | 33:59 | |
who a name that many people know as the alleged mastermind | 34:03 | |
of September 11th. | 34:08 | |
And so, he moved back to Pakistan, | 34:10 | |
and he has a large family | 34:14 | |
and they're spread out all over the place. | 34:16 | |
But he was in Pakistan on September 11th. | 34:19 | |
He watched September 11th with the rest of the world | 34:22 | |
really when it happened on TV. | 34:25 | |
And then in 2003, he was arrested in Pakistan. | 34:29 | |
He was shortly after his arrest in April, 2003. | 34:39 | |
He was transferred to CIA custody where he disappeared, | 34:43 | |
and he disappeared until September 6th, 2006, | 34:49 | |
when he and several other so-called high-value detainees | 34:54 | |
were transferred to Guantanamo Bay. | 34:58 | |
During the time that he was in CIA custody, | 35:00 | |
it was three and a half years, | 35:03 | |
he was held incommunicado. | 35:05 | |
His family had no idea where he was. | 35:08 | |
He very early in his custody, | 35:11 | |
he suffered a traumatic brain injury | 35:13 | |
from the CIA essentially bashing his head against the wall | 35:15 | |
repeatedly. | 35:21 | |
And he talks about this. | 35:22 | |
I actually have a couple of visuals. | 35:24 | |
So, this is Ammar prior to his arrest and disappearance | 35:27 | |
by the CIA. | 35:33 | |
He's clearly very young, 22 in this picture. | 35:34 | |
And then early, as I said, | 35:40 | |
early during his time in CIA custody, | 35:42 | |
he has this header injury. | 35:47 | |
And he's written a little bit about this | 35:50 | |
because this has continued to impact him even now, | 35:52 | |
16 years later. | 35:57 | |
And so, he wrote this a couple of years ago, | 35:58 | |
and this is a recollection from, as you can see, | 36:02 | |
the end of May early June, 2003. | 36:04 | |
And he calls this The Head Trauma Incident. | 36:06 | |
Interviewer | Do you know when he wrote that? | 36:10 |
- | Yeah. He wrote this in August, 2015. | 36:12 |
And it says, he signed it here, | 36:16 | |
Ammar Al-Baluchi Guantanamo Bay, 6th August, 2015. | 36:18 | |
Interviewer | And did he write it for your purposes | 36:22 |
or for defense purposes or for himself? | 36:24 | |
- | It's not for specific defense purposes. | 36:26 |
One of the things that we are trying to do for Ammar | 36:29 | |
is of course, we need to get evidence of his torture. | 36:34 | |
And so, this is part of that. | 36:37 | |
But it's also really to try and find ways to alleviate | 36:39 | |
the impact of torture on him | 36:46 | |
because he does continue to suffer from physical | 36:49 | |
and mental effects of torture. | 36:52 | |
And I'm happy to go into detail about all of that. | 36:53 | |
But he does not receive medical rehabilitation | 36:57 | |
for the torture that he underwent | 37:00 | |
at the hands of the United States. | 37:03 | |
And so, as his defense team, | 37:05 | |
one of the things that is a very high priority for us | 37:10 | |
is finding ways in which we can however unofficially, | 37:14 | |
try to alleviate those symptoms. | 37:20 | |
And one of the ways in which we do that | 37:21 | |
is to try and get him to talk about it, | 37:23 | |
to recollect things | 37:26 | |
so that we can then take whatever we can that's unclassified | 37:29 | |
and talk to doctors and talk to specialists | 37:33 | |
in these kinds of tortures | 37:36 | |
and see what kind of therapies, | 37:38 | |
little things he can do for himself in his cell | 37:40 | |
or that we can find for him, | 37:44 | |
what medications we might be able to find | 37:46 | |
that we can then ask to be administered to him | 37:48 | |
at Guantanamo. | 37:51 | |
Interviewer | I would talked about that | 37:53 |
but maybe you can read that to us (indistinct). | 37:55 | |
- | Of course. Of course. | 37:55 |
And so, one of the things I wanna say | 37:58 | |
is that this particular incident was a result | 38:01 | |
of the technique called walling. | 38:06 | |
And a lot of people familiar with the CIA techniques | 38:08 | |
and the legal memoranda | 38:12 | |
that governed the CIA torture program, | 38:14 | |
understand walling to be, as described in the memo, | 38:16 | |
where you just lightly tap somebody | 38:19 | |
and knock them off balance a little bit | 38:22 | |
against, maybe a fake wall or something, | 38:24 | |
just to knock them off balance, very gentle. | 38:27 | |
It's supposed to be very gentle. | 38:30 | |
It's supposed to be a, | 38:31 | |
I think a first tier interrogation technique. | 38:32 | |
Ammar describes walling as what actually happened. | 38:36 | |
What actually happened is, often they would take a towel | 38:39 | |
and I'll read to you what he said. | 38:44 | |
But basically, what they'll do first is they'd take a towel | 38:46 | |
and they'd roll it up and they'd wrap it around his neck | 38:49 | |
and use that as leverage to knock him against, | 38:53 | |
usually a cement wall, | 38:58 | |
just knock him against the wall to get answers. | 39:00 | |
And so, that's what he says here. | 39:04 | |
He says, "In the very first days, | 39:05 | |
"U.S. government agents shaved my head | 39:07 | |
"and they smashed my head against the wall repeatedly. | 39:10 | |
"It continued until I lost count. | 39:12 | |
"As my head was being hit each time, | 39:15 | |
"I would see sparks of light in my eyes. | 39:17 | |
"As the intensity of these sparks was increasing | 39:20 | |
"as a result of repeated hitting. | 39:23 | |
"Then all of a sudden I felt a strong jolt of electricity | 39:25 | |
"in my head. I couldn't see anything. | 39:29 | |
"Everything went dark and I passed out." | 39:31 | |
The next thing, he wakes up. | 39:35 | |
He finds themselves in a different place | 39:37 | |
suspended into the ceiling in a dark cold cell. | 39:39 | |
He doesn't know how long he was unconscious. | 39:42 | |
He doesn't know what happened to him in the interim. | 39:43 | |
And his legs were swollen as a result of extended standing. | 39:48 | |
Talks about how the handcuffs were cutting his wrists | 39:53 | |
which were pulled over his head. | 39:57 | |
He also talks about extremely loud and disturbing music | 40:00 | |
with a mixture of grading, screeching shrill sounds | 40:05 | |
cutting into my ears. | 40:09 | |
One of the things that he emphasizes at every point | 40:12 | |
in these statements that we have from him | 40:17 | |
is how many of these techniques were used at the same time. | 40:20 | |
And I think he actually states in one of these | 40:24 | |
that when you read, he says here, | 40:27 | |
"When you read the list of EIT," | 40:33 | |
which refers to enhanced interrogation techniques, | 40:36 | |
which is the term that I never use, | 40:39 | |
(Alka laughs) | 40:42 | |
because it's a really terrible euphemism. | 40:43 | |
And I don't think anybody should use it. | 40:45 | |
But when you read the list of EIT, | 40:47 | |
you would find prolonged standing or even suspension. | 40:51 | |
And it misleads to think that the U.S. government agents | 40:54 | |
were using one torture method at a time. | 40:57 | |
He says, "I wasn't just being suspended to the ceiling. | 41:02 | |
"I was naked, starved, dehydrated, cold, hooded, | 41:04 | |
"verbally threatened, in pain from the beating | 41:08 | |
"and water drowning as my head was smashed | 41:11 | |
"by hitting against a wall dozens of times. | 41:14 | |
This particular one, he says, | 41:18 | |
"I was sleep-deprived for weeks. | 41:20 | |
"I was shaking, trembling. | 41:21 | |
"My legs barely supported my weight." | 41:23 | |
Then he says, he started screaming. | 41:27 | |
The doctor came with a tape measure, | 41:29 | |
wrapped it around my leg and to my shock, | 41:33 | |
the doctor told the interrogators, | 41:36 | |
"That wasn't enough. That his legs should be more swollen." | 41:38 | |
And he says, "A doctor would check me | 41:46 | |
"before I walk into each torture chamber | 41:51 | |
"and tell the interrogators what methods to use for torture. | 41:54 | |
"And then as I was brought out, | 41:58 | |
"the doctor would check me again | 42:00 | |
"and tell the interrogators what more to do | 42:01 | |
"in the next room." | 42:04 | |
And these are doctors. | 42:05 | |
Interviewer | I assume you do this before he wrote it? | 42:11 |
I assume he told you this verbally before, or... | 42:13 | |
- | A lot of these, we're still learning. | 42:18 |
A lot of this, | 42:21 | |
we're still finding out what exactly happened to him. | 42:22 | |
Partially because there were so many things | 42:24 | |
happening to him at once | 42:28 | |
that he wasn't necessarily conscious for all of them, | 42:30 | |
fully conscious for all of them. | 42:34 | |
And because he had an injury, a head injury so early on | 42:36 | |
that then affected, | 42:42 | |
and has continued to affect his detention since then, | 42:43 | |
it really messed with his cognitive abilities. | 42:47 | |
It really messed with his, which was, | 42:49 | |
I'm sure was their intention, | 42:52 | |
it really messed with his ability to tell | 42:53 | |
how much time had passed, | 42:57 | |
what was happening at the same time, | 42:59 | |
who was in the room, all of that. | 43:01 | |
And so, one of the things that we're trying to do now, | 43:03 | |
and that he's very diligently | 43:08 | |
and sort of methodically trying to do | 43:12 | |
is bring back all of those memories | 43:15 | |
all of these things that may have been suppressed | 43:17 | |
or may have sort of blended together over time | 43:20 | |
as just one ugly three and a half-year nightmare. | 43:24 | |
Now three and a half year, 16 year, | 43:27 | |
however, 13 years at this point, almost 14. | 43:29 | |
And really try to separate them out | 43:34 | |
and figure out who did what at what time. | 43:35 | |
And I'll tell you, | 43:40 | |
we're in the middle of pre-trial hearings for this trial | 43:41 | |
which is a death penalty case. | 43:45 | |
And we rely on the government to give us discovery for that. | 43:47 | |
And one of the things that we've asked for is this category, | 43:50 | |
very large category of torture evidence, right? | 43:53 | |
Of everything that was done to him | 43:56 | |
by the CIA at the black sites. | 43:58 | |
And the government has at every possible opportunity | 44:01 | |
withheld all of that as much of that evidence | 44:05 | |
as they possibly can. | 44:09 | |
It has been a struggle to get even the most basic details. | 44:10 | |
And that is by design, | 44:16 | |
the military commissions act | 44:17 | |
and the rules governing the military commissions | 44:20 | |
allow the government to make substitutions for information | 44:23 | |
that's classified. | 44:28 | |
Now, I hold a top secret security clearance. | 44:30 | |
I hold the same security clearance as the prosecution does, | 44:32 | |
but under the military commissions rules, | 44:36 | |
the prosecution may look at the whole body of evidence | 44:38 | |
and they may take a document | 44:42 | |
that has something about Ammar Al-Baluchi in 2003, 2004, | 44:44 | |
and they can make a substitution. | 44:48 | |
They can make a summary of it. | 44:49 | |
Now, the judge has to approve the summaries, | 44:52 | |
but the result of this has been... | 44:54 | |
The government would like to say they've given us | 44:57 | |
all the CIA medical records. | 45:00 | |
What the CIA medical records look like, | 45:02 | |
and this is something we've been litigating recently, | 45:04 | |
our sheet of paper that actually have headings | 45:07 | |
very similar to this, right? | 45:11 | |
Mid 2003, right? | 45:13 | |
And the list of one sentence non-sequitors, right? | 45:15 | |
So, there's one page in particular | 45:19 | |
that I used as an example when we litigated this, | 45:22 | |
I think this was in October of last year, | 45:25 | |
that says mid 2003. | 45:27 | |
And one of the lines is | 45:29 | |
Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, which is Ammar's birth name, | 45:34 | |
administered Ensure after 86 hours of prolonged standing. | 45:41 | |
Okay? It's just one sentence. | 45:46 | |
All right. | 45:48 | |
And I said, I looked at this and as a lawyer, right? | 45:50 | |
Or as just a human being, reading this sentence, | 45:54 | |
there are a thousand questions that you have, right? | 45:58 | |
Why was he given Ensure? | 46:02 | |
Ensure, of course, is the nutritional supplement, right? | 46:04 | |
Why was he given Ensure? | 46:07 | |
Why wasn't he just given a meal? | 46:08 | |
How is it administered? | 46:10 | |
Was it administered through feeding tube? | 46:11 | |
What happened? Did he drink it? | 46:14 | |
Why would he been standing for 86 hours? | 46:16 | |
Was he shackled while he was standing for 86 hours? | 46:18 | |
Was he naked? Was he hooded? | 46:22 | |
Was he beaten? Who was in the room? | 46:24 | |
Was there a doctor present? | 46:26 | |
I mean, was he interrogated while he was standing | 46:30 | |
for 86 hours? | 46:32 | |
Was he allowed to sleep at any point? | 46:33 | |
Had he already been sleep-deprived before they strung him up | 46:35 | |
for 86 hours? | 46:38 | |
I mean, the possibilities, as you can see, are just endless | 46:39 | |
for that kind of thing. | 46:42 | |
So, for the government to give me a sentence like that | 46:43 | |
and say, "Now you have his medical records," | 46:47 | |
and that's the evidence that I'm supposed to use | 46:50 | |
in a death penalty trial | 46:54 | |
where my client is on trial for his life | 46:55 | |
is just astonishing. | 46:58 | |
Interviewer | Did the judge approved this summary? | 47:02 |
- | The judge approved that particular summary, | 47:05 |
but of course, we then went back and said, | 47:08 | |
"Here are the many problems, judge, with this summary." | 47:10 | |
And I think he's still considering | 47:14 | |
what more to do about that. | 47:16 | |
Interviewer | Why do you think the government declassified | 47:17 |
what you read to us so far? | 47:20 | |
- | So, that's actually a really interesting question | 47:23 |
because it follows a timeline | 47:27 | |
set by the Senate selected committee on intelligence. | 47:28 | |
Up until the the intelligence committee report | 47:32 | |
was declassified, | 47:38 | |
or really the executive summary of the report | 47:39 | |
which is much smaller than the actual report was redacted | 47:43 | |
and declassified in December, 2014, | 47:47 | |
none of these were declassified. | 47:50 | |
None of these statements were considered to be releasable | 47:53 | |
by the government. | 47:56 | |
The government essentially classified | 47:57 | |
all of Ammar's memories of his own torture, | 48:00 | |
literally everything in his mind about what had happened | 48:04 | |
to him was considered classified by the U.S. government. | 48:10 | |
Now, ask yourself what the reason for that might be. | 48:13 | |
And the reason is just because it is shameful | 48:16 | |
and it is illegal. | 48:19 | |
And so, what happened was after that long prolonged fight | 48:21 | |
between the CIA and the intelligence committee | 48:29 | |
to release that little portion, | 48:31 | |
and that portion was released. | 48:33 | |
And that portion of course, went into some detail | 48:34 | |
about the horrific techniques that were used. | 48:37 | |
At that point, the government said, | 48:40 | |
"Okay, we really don't have an excuse anymore | 48:42 | |
"for not declassifying things like this | 48:47 | |
"that talk exclusively about treatment." | 48:50 | |
Now, you'll notice in some of these, | 48:56 | |
there are still redactions, | 48:58 | |
there are still portions that have black lines over them. | 49:01 | |
And actually, there's one here that's kind of amusing | 49:08 | |
because Ammar has redacted it himself | 49:12 | |
because he knew if it says in black site, blank, | 49:16 | |
during, blank, | 49:20 | |
because the government of course, considers the locations | 49:22 | |
of the black sites to be classified. | 49:24 | |
So, basically, anything treatment-related | 49:28 | |
is now considered to be technically releasable, | 49:33 | |
but it still has to go through | 49:36 | |
a lengthy declassification process. | 49:38 | |
I mean, these statements from the ones that were given to us | 49:40 | |
in 2015 to maybe six months or so to go through | 49:44 | |
declassification. | 49:47 | |
I've had items in for months and months and months | 49:51 | |
at a time. | 49:53 | |
So, it's still quite a process | 49:54 | |
but it really wasn't until then that we started out this. | 49:56 | |
Interviewer | So, were you (indistinct) along that term. | 49:59 |
Did you ever get a definition of what that exactly entailed? | 50:04 | |
- | So, no. | 50:08 |
And actually one of the reasons that we now know | 50:10 | |
more about the techniques that were used on Ammar | 50:15 | |
is because of a movie called "Zero Dark Thirty." | 50:18 | |
And this is a movie that was, | 50:22 | |
it's a Hollywood movie, big-budget film | 50:24 | |
that was made about the killing of Osama bin Laden. | 50:28 | |
It was made by Kathryn Bigelow, | 50:32 | |
was very famous Hollywood director, Oscar-winning director, | 50:34 | |
and a screenwriter named Mark Boal. | 50:39 | |
And what happened was Mark Boal essentially went to the CIA | 50:43 | |
some years. | 50:48 | |
The movie was released in 2012. | 50:48 | |
So, this would have been 2009, 2010, | 50:50 | |
about, I think he initially approached the CIA | 50:54 | |
about doing a movie on another topic. | 50:57 | |
And then of course, Osama bin Laden was killed in 2011. | 51:00 | |
And the focus of the movie changed to that. | 51:03 | |
And the CIA at this point, | 51:06 | |
we now know from documents that have been released | 51:08 | |
from the SSEI report that at this point, | 51:12 | |
the CIA was starting to panic about the rendition program | 51:15 | |
about the fact that the intelligence committee | 51:19 | |
was going to try and release this report, | 51:21 | |
that the world was gonna find out | 51:25 | |
how many illegal things DCI had been engaged in | 51:27 | |
and they needed to go on the offensive. | 51:30 | |
And I think there's there's actually a document that's cited | 51:32 | |
in the intelligence committee report | 51:34 | |
where CIA officials says we either eat or get eaten. | 51:36 | |
We have to be aggressive | 51:41 | |
about what the public knows about this. | 51:42 | |
And so they saw in this an opportunity | 51:47 | |
to basically propagandize what they had been doing. | 51:50 | |
And over the course of the next, however period of time, | 51:54 | |
they had a number of meetings. | 52:01 | |
I think from the unclassified information we've had | 52:04 | |
through other organizations that have filed foyer requests, | 52:08 | |
something like 23 meetings between filmmakers | 52:12 | |
and CIA officials and hundreds of communications. | 52:16 | |
I think we were able to count | 52:20 | |
upwards of a hundred communications. | 52:21 | |
We don't have the communications, | 52:25 | |
we're kind of litigating to get them, | 52:26 | |
but there were communications. | 52:28 | |
And there have been now many stories written by journalists | 52:29 | |
about the collaboration between the CIA and the filmmakers | 52:34 | |
on this movie. | 52:39 | |
So, when this movie came out, | 52:41 | |
I was not part of Mr. Al-Baluchi's team at this point. | 52:44 | |
But a member of the team apparently saw it and said, | 52:47 | |
"Hang on." | 52:51 | |
The first 25 minutes are almost exclusively the torture | 52:52 | |
of a detainee, the torture of a detainee named Ammar. | 52:56 | |
And this team member came back and said, | 53:00 | |
"That's Ammar. That's Ammar Al-Baluchi." | 53:02 | |
There are many factual parallels in the film | 53:07 | |
between the character Ammar and Ammar Al-Baluchi. | 53:11 | |
It says in the film | 53:16 | |
that he's Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's nephew. | 53:17 | |
Yeah. It talks about him being a money guy for Al-Qaeda. | 53:21 | |
And of course, several of the allegations | 53:27 | |
against Mr. Ammar have to do with finances. | 53:29 | |
And so, there are those parallels. | 53:33 | |
And there are several reasons that we now know a lot more | 53:35 | |
about what the CIA told these filmmakers | 53:41 | |
specifically about Ammar. | 53:44 | |
One has to do with the water torture | 53:47 | |
that you just asked about. | 53:49 | |
In the film, | 53:50 | |
the character Ammar notably is not waterboarded. | 53:51 | |
Now at the time, and even now, | 53:54 | |
waterboarding is what everybody associates with the CIA, | 53:57 | |
right? | 54:01 | |
So, if you're going to depict the torture by the CIA, | 54:02 | |
why would you not show a man on a board being waterboarded, | 54:07 | |
right? | 54:11 | |
That's not what they show in the film. | 54:11 | |
They show essentially what is called water dowsing. | 54:13 | |
They show the character of Ammar being doused | 54:18 | |
with cold water while on a mat, while on a tarp. | 54:21 | |
And that tarp was important | 54:25 | |
because that's exactly how Ammar was tortured with water. | 54:28 | |
He was put on a tarp and that tarp was then used | 54:32 | |
to move the water to further drown him. | 54:36 | |
That's exactly the way he was tortured, | 54:39 | |
the way they show in the movie. | 54:42 | |
Interviewer | Was he head down | 54:43 |
or when you said the water drowned him? | 54:44 | |
- | So basically, the water would be poured on this tarp | 54:47 |
and you could then manipulate kind of the tarp | 54:50 | |
to move the water to cover his face. | 54:53 | |
So, that's one. | 54:58 | |
Yeah, that was one parallel. | 55:00 | |
Another is there's a scene in the movie | 55:03 | |
where one of the interrogators says, | 55:06 | |
"You step off this mat and I hurt you." | 55:10 | |
Now, this is not a technique that's written about | 55:14 | |
in the legal memos. | 55:17 | |
This is not a technique that anybody had talked about | 55:18 | |
publicly before this movie came out. | 55:21 | |
It is a however a technique that was used on Ammar, | 55:23 | |
my client Ammar, | 55:28 | |
where you create a prison within a prison | 55:30 | |
and you have to stand on this one mat | 55:32 | |
and you can't step off or pain is coming. | 55:35 | |
These are very specific things that show up in this movie | 55:40 | |
that were certainly not made public | 55:45 | |
until the movie came out. | 55:50 | |
And even then, several of them weren't really confirmed | 55:51 | |
until we had the SSEI report which came out in 2014, | 55:54 | |
two years later. | 55:58 | |
And so, it raised a lot of very interesting questions | 56:01 | |
about just how much so-called classified information | 56:04 | |
the CIA shared with filmmakers making a propaganda movie | 56:09 | |
that was gonna show the CIA in a positive light | 56:14 | |
when they withhold that same information | 56:17 | |
from the defense attorneys | 56:19 | |
trying to prevent Mr. Al-Baluchi from being put to death | 56:21 | |
by the U.S. government. | 56:24 | |
Interviewer | Why would the CIA | 56:25 |
and the filmmakers use his name | 56:28 | |
and describe him as if he was the person | 56:30 | |
that you're representing? | 56:33 | |
- | I think because at the time, | 56:36 |
and this is speculation on my part, | 56:39 | |
but at the time the CIA was aware | 56:40 | |
that the intelligence committee report | 56:44 | |
was going to come out. | 56:47 | |
And one of the claims that the CIA made | 56:48 | |
that is reported in the intelligence committee report, | 56:51 | |
well, there's several claims that the CIA made, | 56:54 | |
factual claims about how the use of torture techniques | 56:56 | |
on Ammar led to X breakthrough | 57:03 | |
right in the search for Osama bin Laden | 57:08 | |
or X information about so-called other plots | 57:10 | |
and all of that. | 57:15 | |
Now, we don't know any of that to be true. | 57:16 | |
In fact, if the movie is true, | 57:18 | |
then what we see in the movie is actually the implantation | 57:22 | |
in one scene of false memories in the character of Ammar. | 57:25 | |
And so, we have no idea how much of this is truth. | 57:28 | |
And we know that the CIA told a lot of lies in this as well | 57:31 | |
that were specifically debunked | 57:34 | |
by the intelligence committee. | 57:35 | |
But with speculating one reason for them | 57:37 | |
to have collaborated with us | 57:42 | |
and to try to have specifically Ammar | 57:44 | |
or specific individuals depicted in this movie | 57:49 | |
is to essentially poison the well, | 57:53 | |
to set out the battlefield before we even start the war, | 57:56 | |
right? | 58:01 | |
And to, speaking as a litigator, | 58:01 | |
influence the jury pool ahead of time. | 58:05 | |
Interviewer | When people watched that movie, | 58:09 |
I remember reviewers often said, | 58:12 | |
"This is really torture life. | 58:14 | |
"This is really not as bad as it really is." | 58:15 | |
Do you have any thoughts about that? | 58:19 | |
- | Yes. | 58:21 |
As disturbing as that film is, | 58:22 | |
and as much as certainly those parts of it | 58:25 | |
should never have been made, | 58:28 | |
my belief based on what I now know | 58:33 | |
about what happened to Ammar | 58:36 | |
and what happened to some of these men, | 58:36 | |
it does not come close to depicting the horror | 58:40 | |
of what happened to them at the black sites | 58:46 | |
by U.S. officials. | 58:48 | |
I mean, and you can hear some of it really | 58:51 | |
in Ammar's own words, right? | 58:54 | |
When he says things like, | 58:56 | |
the U.S. government had my both hands tied together | 58:58 | |
for 120 days straight. | 59:01 | |
And then when my torturers decided to move me | 59:06 | |
to black site X, they had to cut the handcuffs off | 59:09 | |
by bolt cutter because the handcuffs were so rusted. | 59:12 | |
They wouldn't open with the keys anymore, right? | 59:15 | |
Now, again, we know while he was handcuffed like this, | 59:17 | |
he was being beaten, he was naked. | 59:21 | |
They used sexual torture on these men. | 59:23 | |
He was sleep-deprived | 59:26 | |
to a point where he has not slept a full night of sleep | 59:27 | |
since before he was arrested. | 59:33 | |
He cannot sleep anymore. | 59:35 | |
He's incapable of sleeping more than a couple of hours | 59:37 | |
at a time, | 59:40 | |
because at the black sites, | 59:41 | |
they intentionally kept him sleep-deprived. | 59:44 | |
They would play loud music. | 59:47 | |
They would play heavy metal and all of that constantly. | 59:49 | |
And they would make sure that he never slept enough | 59:53 | |
to be fully refreshed or really try to really recover | 59:56 | |
from anything that had been done to him. | 1:00:02 | |
And he cannot sleep now. | 1:00:04 | |
There are days he comes that when I see him | 1:00:06 | |
when he has not slept a wink all night. | 1:00:09 | |
And this is a man who, again, | 1:00:13 | |
who is supposed to be trying to participate | 1:00:14 | |
in his own defense | 1:00:17 | |
Interviewer | Does he wake up and from nightmares | 1:00:19 |
or from flashbacks | 1:00:23 | |
or what just caused him not to sleep anymore? | 1:00:24 | |
- | What he says is that he still hears the music in his head | 1:00:27 |
when he tries to sleep. | 1:00:33 | |
It comes back to him and it plays in his head | 1:00:35 | |
and he can hear the music. | 1:00:38 | |
He can hear what the guards are yelling at him. | 1:00:40 | |
It just never leaves him. | 1:00:43 | |
And he started to explore more now | 1:00:45 | |
the impact of particularly the music torture | 1:00:49 | |
and he's trying very hard to understand | 1:00:52 | |
what kinds of sounds, what songs were used. | 1:00:57 | |
He's trying to remember specifics about it | 1:01:00 | |
in the hopes that he can find some sort of way | 1:01:02 | |
to almost purge that, I certainly hope he can | 1:01:06 | |
for his own health, | 1:01:10 | |
because it's at a point where he's very functional. | 1:01:11 | |
He's actually very, well-spoken, he's educated. | 1:01:16 | |
He's very participatory in his case. | 1:01:21 | |
But you can see the effect on him | 1:01:26 | |
and you can see I've worked on his case now for a year | 1:01:28 | |
and a half. | 1:01:30 | |
And I can see the difference in him | 1:01:31 | |
just over that year and a half. | 1:01:33 | |
Interviewer | What do you see? | 1:01:35 |
- | He's a young man, he's 39 years old, right? | 1:01:38 |
And he's just a few years older than me. | 1:01:41 | |
And when I sit with him for a full day, | 1:01:43 | |
whether in court or in a meeting cell, | 1:01:47 | |
over the course of that time | 1:01:53 | |
if we talk about difficult subjects, | 1:01:57 | |
if we talk about his torture, for example, | 1:01:59 | |
he'll need to stop. | 1:02:02 | |
He'll need silence after a period of time. | 1:02:03 | |
He'll need to maybe put dark glasses on | 1:02:06 | |
because his eyes are very sensitive under fluorescent lights | 1:02:08 | |
because they used fluorescent lights at the black sites. | 1:02:14 | |
He'll need to change subject. | 1:02:18 | |
Sometimes he has trouble despite his best efforts. | 1:02:20 | |
You could almost see him visibly wrestling to focus | 1:02:24 | |
on a particular task or a particular topic. | 1:02:29 | |
And he has real trouble finishing small tasks, | 1:02:33 | |
writing us letters, writing statements, | 1:02:37 | |
finishing kind of a thought from start to finish | 1:02:41 | |
because of that, | 1:02:46 | |
because of sort of these constant things | 1:02:47 | |
that are swirling in his head. | 1:02:50 | |
And you see it, you see the frustration on his face. | 1:02:53 | |
The little bit of independent medical assessment | 1:02:58 | |
that we've had done on him, | 1:03:02 | |
we know he has PTSD, severe PTSD. | 1:03:03 | |
We know he has anxiety. | 1:03:06 | |
We know that he's obviously sleep-deprived. | 1:03:09 | |
He can't sleep properly. He has neurological... | 1:03:13 | |
Interviewer | How do you know | 1:03:16 |
he was traumatically (indistinct)? | 1:03:17 | |
What does that mean? | 1:03:19 | |
- | So, one of the things that we've been trying to get | 1:03:20 |
for a very long time is an MRI of his brain. | 1:03:23 | |
And for years, we've been asking for this | 1:03:26 | |
because that would be definitive. | 1:03:28 | |
What we have had done is we've have had a doctor | 1:03:30 | |
with a security clearance examine him, | 1:03:34 | |
over a length of time, meet with him several times. | 1:03:38 | |
And that doctor has said, unequivocally, | 1:03:40 | |
that all of the symptoms that he shows, | 1:03:43 | |
including like the pain, when he has pain, | 1:03:46 | |
the flashing in his eyes, the shooting pains, | 1:03:49 | |
things like that, | 1:03:55 | |
all of these things taken together | 1:03:56 | |
are unequivocally pointing to a traumatic brain injury, | 1:03:59 | |
which is a very specific element, right? | 1:04:03 | |
It's a very specific thing that can be dealt with, | 1:04:06 | |
that can be treated. | 1:04:11 | |
But without that MRI, you can't begin the treatment, | 1:04:14 | |
without a proper medical assessment, | 1:04:19 | |
without the constant care of a psychiatrist | 1:04:21 | |
and a psychologist, proper medications, sleep studies, | 1:04:27 | |
that kind of thing. | 1:04:32 | |
You can't begin to treat it. | 1:04:33 | |
And all of that is after they spent three and a half years | 1:04:36 | |
breaking his trust in United States government officials | 1:04:41 | |
and doctors | 1:04:44 | |
Interviewer | You had said earlier | 1:04:45 |
that he wasn't getting medical treatment. | 1:04:47 | |
Why wouldn't the government now provide him | 1:04:50 | |
medical treatment? | 1:04:53 | |
What's the government (indistinct)? | 1:04:53 | |
- | Over time, there have been different answers to this | 1:04:56 |
from different government officials. | 1:05:00 | |
We know that the official department of defense line | 1:05:04 | |
is that they receive excellent medical treatment. | 1:05:08 | |
The department of defense likes to say | 1:05:11 | |
in their press briefings that they receive | 1:05:14 | |
better medical treatment than they would get at home, right? | 1:05:16 | |
As if they're much better off at Guantanamo | 1:05:19 | |
than they would be with their families | 1:05:21 | |
after 14 years of detention without charge. | 1:05:25 | |
The reality is, | 1:05:31 | |
the government did in fact build something like a, | 1:05:33 | |
what they call a $20-million medical facility at Guantanamo. | 1:05:37 | |
I can't figure out for the life of me | 1:05:42 | |
what they spent that money on. | 1:05:45 | |
(Alka laughs) | 1:05:47 | |
I can't. | 1:05:48 | |
I have now represented a number of detainees | 1:05:49 | |
some with very serious medical problems | 1:05:52 | |
and I cannot tell you what the money is being spent on | 1:05:55 | |
because it's not the medical staff, | 1:06:00 | |
the medical staff rotate in and out every few months | 1:06:03 | |
because Guantanamo, I think is considered a hardship station | 1:06:07 | |
and they can't spend too much time there. | 1:06:10 | |
So, there's no continuity of care. | 1:06:12 | |
It's not the equipment because again, | 1:06:14 | |
I think in Mr. Ali Nashiri has court ordered MRI. | 1:06:21 | |
We can't get an MRI machine to Guantanamo. | 1:06:24 | |
It's not medications or therapies or any anything like that | 1:06:28 | |
because they don't have those. | 1:06:32 | |
They're not given those. | 1:06:33 | |
Mr. Al-Baluchi when he complains of pain | 1:06:36 | |
or anything like that, | 1:06:41 | |
they basically just throw painkillers at him. | 1:06:42 | |
He tries to tell them what I've just told you about. | 1:06:46 | |
Look, this goes back 14 years. | 1:06:49 | |
This goes back to this head injury. | 1:06:52 | |
And he has been told by medical professionals | 1:06:55 | |
that we can't talk about that, we can't address any of that. | 1:06:57 | |
So in other words, they won't take medical history of him | 1:07:03 | |
because they don't wanna talk about the torture. | 1:07:07 | |
Now, I don't know why that is. | 1:07:09 | |
They all have security clearances. | 1:07:11 | |
They have to, to be in any kind of proximity with these men. | 1:07:12 | |
But they won't. | 1:07:18 | |
Ammar has tried. | 1:07:20 | |
Ammar has actually tried many times | 1:07:21 | |
over a long period of time. | 1:07:25 | |
He's been at Guantanamo now for over 10 years to get help, | 1:07:26 | |
that's his priority. | 1:07:32 | |
And he just can't do it. | 1:07:34 | |
Interviewer | Maybe wanna go back to this | 1:07:40 |
but you made me think again about something you said earlier | 1:07:41 | |
when you read about the doctor took a tape measure | 1:07:43 | |
of his leg, and then the doctor said | 1:07:46 | |
you can continue to torture him | 1:07:48 | |
because was just swollen up. | 1:07:49 | |
So, what can you say about the complicity | 1:07:51 | |
of the medical profession in all of this? | 1:07:55 | |
- | Well, we know, I have a lot to say on this topic. | 1:07:58 |
Great deal to say. I try to decide where to start. | 1:08:03 | |
So, as I would say, as a start, | 1:08:09 | |
we know that doctors designed the torture program, | 1:08:13 | |
the CIA torture program. | 1:08:17 | |
It was designed by two psychologists named James Mitchell | 1:08:20 | |
and Bruce Jessen, whose names were classified | 1:08:24 | |
or considered classified by the government | 1:08:28 | |
until very recently. | 1:08:30 | |
I had to refer to them previously as Swigert and Dunbar, | 1:08:32 | |
which are their aliases in the SSEI report. | 1:08:36 | |
You can probably tell how I feel about that. | 1:08:41 | |
But these two psychologists who had really no experience | 1:08:44 | |
with interrogation or torture or anything like that, | 1:08:51 | |
decided to take a technique called learned helplessness | 1:08:56 | |
which is a psychological sort of doctrine that's been... | 1:09:00 | |
It was developed over time by a series of psychologists | 1:09:08 | |
and tested on dogs, right? | 1:09:12 | |
When you give a dog an electric shock, | 1:09:14 | |
when they step off a mark, for example, | 1:09:19 | |
they learn to be helpless | 1:09:22 | |
so that even when there is no barrier | 1:09:24 | |
and they're not going to be shocked, they don't try, | 1:09:27 | |
they don't try to help themselves. | 1:09:30 | |
They don't try to get off the mat. | 1:09:31 | |
They don't try to get out of their circumstances | 1:09:32 | |
because they learned to be helpless. | 1:09:34 | |
So, these two men, Mitchell and Jessen took this idea | 1:09:36 | |
and turned it into an interrogation program. | 1:09:43 | |
They said, "We are going..." | 1:09:46 | |
And the most egregious thing about this | 1:09:48 | |
is that James Mitchell then had the audacity | 1:09:53 | |
to write a book about it, which was released late last year | 1:09:57 | |
in which he talks about how he took the concept | 1:10:00 | |
of learned helplessness | 1:10:05 | |
and decided to use it on human beings. | 1:10:06 | |
And decided to use it on human beings | 1:10:11 | |
in the most painful way possible. | 1:10:14 | |
And he discusses in great detail in his book | 1:10:16 | |
how essentially they were conducting medical experiments | 1:10:20 | |
on the detainees at the black sites. | 1:10:24 | |
They were tweaking the program as they went. | 1:10:28 | |
They were trying to figure out | 1:10:31 | |
what combinations of techniques worked best | 1:10:33 | |
to get so-called truths from these individuals. | 1:10:37 | |
We now know, thanks to the torture report, | 1:10:42 | |
that a great deal of the information that they got | 1:10:46 | |
led to dead ends or was just simply false information | 1:10:49 | |
because tortured men will say anything. | 1:10:53 | |
But that's where the involvement of doctors begins. | 1:10:57 | |
And from what I've read you from Ammar's statements, | 1:11:01 | |
Ammar saw doctors all the time. | 1:11:05 | |
They were in the interrogation rooms with him. | 1:11:07 | |
They told the interrogators how to torture him. | 1:11:09 | |
So, you can imagine what that does to psychology of someone | 1:11:14 | |
who would then at a later date has to put his trust | 1:11:18 | |
in doctors again. | 1:11:23 | |
And that deep seated distrust of doctors | 1:11:25 | |
really extends to all of the detainees now. | 1:11:30 | |
I have not represented a single person at Guantanamo, | 1:11:33 | |
and I've represented more than 10 people | 1:11:36 | |
who is happy to see a doctor, | 1:11:38 | |
who believes that a doctor is going to help them. | 1:11:42 | |
They are some who are more willing to try | 1:11:45 | |
like sir Baluchi because he simply has no other way | 1:11:48 | |
to get better. | 1:11:54 | |
He just wants to get better. | 1:11:55 | |
And he has the right to do that. | 1:11:57 | |
So, that was CIA use of doctors. | 1:12:00 | |
We also know that doctors were involved | 1:12:03 | |
at various stages in the torture at Guantanamo | 1:12:06 | |
of the non-CIA detainees, | 1:12:09 | |
ones who were brought over from Afghanistan, | 1:12:11 | |
from Pakistan and other places | 1:12:15 | |
and that they were intimately involved | 1:12:16 | |
in the early interrogations at Guantanamo. | 1:12:20 | |
They had behavioral psychologists take part | 1:12:23 | |
and sort of design the interrogation programs at Guantanamo. | 1:12:25 | |
And we also know in recent years, | 1:12:28 | |
doctors have been involved in the force feedings | 1:12:32 | |
at Guantanamo. | 1:12:36 | |
There have been a number of mass hunger strikes | 1:12:37 | |
at Guantanamo, | 1:12:40 | |
primarily on the habeas side of the men | 1:12:41 | |
who are being cleared for release | 1:12:45 | |
or being detained without charges for really no reason | 1:12:46 | |
whatsoever. | 1:12:50 | |
And they have engaged in hunger strikes. | 1:12:52 | |
And what happens is when the men go on hunger strike, | 1:12:53 | |
they're force-fed, | 1:12:56 | |
because the policy of the United States government | 1:12:58 | |
is not to let anybody die. | 1:13:01 | |
And this is a policy that comes from the Bureau of Prisons. | 1:13:04 | |
When prisoners go on hunger strike in prisons | 1:13:07 | |
in the United States, they are also force fed. | 1:13:11 | |
This is a practice that is contrary | 1:13:13 | |
to basically international consensus on ethics, | 1:13:16 | |
on what you do when someone is hunger striking | 1:13:23 | |
and in their right mind and you let them hunger strike. | 1:13:26 | |
That is the ethical consensus. | 1:13:31 | |
But United States has always been an outlier on this. | 1:13:33 | |
And so, they have continued to apply this policy | 1:13:36 | |
of force-feeding at Guantanamo, | 1:13:37 | |
but the way they do it at Guantanamo is much more brutal | 1:13:39 | |
and much more punitive than it is anywhere else. | 1:13:44 | |
They designed a special force-feeding chair for Guantanamo | 1:13:48 | |
that immobilizes you, right? | 1:13:53 | |
It's basically a seven-point restraint, | 1:13:55 | |
your head, shoulders, your arms, legs. | 1:13:57 | |
It looks very much like an electric chair | 1:14:02 | |
and it immobilizes you, | 1:14:06 | |
which is the most painful way to be force-fed | 1:14:08 | |
because then you have to have a tube placed down your throat | 1:14:10 | |
and anybody who's had to have a feeding tube | 1:14:14 | |
put down their throat will tell you | 1:14:17 | |
you need to be able to move your neck | 1:14:18 | |
and kind of swallow and get it down there. | 1:14:20 | |
It's not a pleasant thing. | 1:14:24 | |
And so, when you're completely immobilized, | 1:14:26 | |
it's just a medical person, | 1:14:28 | |
not even a doctor, usually. | 1:14:32 | |
Usually just somebody qualified somehow | 1:14:33 | |
to do this jamming a tube down your throat. | 1:14:36 | |
Oftentimes, the tubes were too big I think by design | 1:14:40 | |
because they were trying to make this a punishment. | 1:14:44 | |
They were trying to make it so painful | 1:14:47 | |
that they would end their hunger strikes. | 1:14:50 | |
And that was stated I think by, | 1:14:52 | |
it was stated by one of the former camp commanders. | 1:14:56 | |
I think it was John Bogdan a few years ago at Guantanamo | 1:14:59 | |
during one of the hunger strikes. | 1:15:03 | |
He said straight out, | 1:15:05 | |
it was either him or one of the previous commanders | 1:15:07 | |
who said straight out to the New York Times, | 1:15:08 | |
"We're gonna make this as an inconvenient for them | 1:15:10 | |
"as possible." | 1:15:12 | |
So, they came up with these procedures | 1:15:13 | |
and something astonishing happened | 1:15:15 | |
during my representation of a man named Abu Wayo Diab | 1:15:19 | |
who had been on hunger strike for seven years. | 1:15:23 | |
He'd been forced-fed basically for years. | 1:15:28 | |
One of the nurses at the medical facility said, | 1:15:31 | |
"I can't do this anymore." | 1:15:37 | |
And he refused, and he was almost court martialed for it. | 1:15:39 | |
But that was the first time that we heard of... | 1:15:44 | |
And I think in the years since, | 1:15:48 | |
I've heard of that other medical professionals | 1:15:50 | |
have refused to do this at Guantanamo. | 1:15:52 | |
That was the first I'd heard | 1:15:54 | |
that it was so bad that these people, | 1:15:57 | |
I think he was a Navy enlisted, refused. | 1:16:00 | |
He just refused to do it at great personal cost. | 1:16:03 | |
Interviewer | Just one before I forget what to ask you, | 1:16:08 |
is Ammar still writing these kinds of statements | 1:16:10 | |
that you read just today and are you encouraging it? | 1:16:13 | |
And... | 1:16:16 | |
- | Yes, very much so. | 1:16:18 |
I think it is incredibly as you can probably imagine, | 1:16:20 | |
it's incredibly difficult for him to write these statements. | 1:16:27 | |
Partially just because these are very painful memories | 1:16:31 | |
for him, | 1:16:35 | |
partially because it brings it back | 1:16:36 | |
and he then has to cope with the feelings | 1:16:39 | |
that that brings back. | 1:16:42 | |
And also partially because again, | 1:16:43 | |
as a result of his torture, | 1:16:46 | |
he has a very difficult time focusing | 1:16:48 | |
and writing a story or an experience from start to finish. | 1:16:52 | |
But for that reason, we think it's quite good. | 1:16:59 | |
And I think he recognizes that it's a very good exercise | 1:17:03 | |
for him to continue, to keep himself engaged, | 1:17:07 | |
to keep his brain working, | 1:17:11 | |
to give keep his cognitive functions. | 1:17:14 | |
And also for us to try | 1:17:16 | |
and put together the story of what happened to him. | 1:17:20 | |
Interviewer | Are you present when he writes this? | 1:17:23 |
- | Sometimes. | 1:17:25 |
Sometimes he starts to tell a story, | 1:17:27 | |
his memory will be jogged, or, and I'll say, | 1:17:33 | |
"Can we write this down, please? | 1:17:36 | |
"Because it'll help me to understand it better. | 1:17:38 | |
"And maybe it'll help you remember more." | 1:17:41 | |
And so, sometimes it's when I'm there. | 1:17:44 | |
And sometimes it's just on his own. | 1:17:45 | |
He'll remember something, | 1:17:49 | |
he'll spend some period of time trying to work on it | 1:17:50 | |
and write it and then when we get it, | 1:17:55 | |
we'll have to put it through classification review. | 1:17:58 | |
(Alka laughs) | 1:18:00 | |
So, it may be a long, long period of time | 1:18:01 | |
from when he initially thinks of it and starts writing it | 1:18:04 | |
to when we can finally share it with the public. | 1:18:06 | |
But yes, we are trying to get as much of this information | 1:18:10 | |
as we can | 1:18:16 | |
Interviewer | And you're doing it as I understand | 1:18:17 |
for two reasons. | 1:18:17 | |
One is for his mental health | 1:18:19 | |
and one is to let the public know about how he was treated. | 1:18:20 | |
Is that? | 1:18:25 | |
- | Really three reasons. The first is for him, | 1:18:25 |
for his mental health and as a form of therapy. | 1:18:28 | |
The second reason is for the case, | 1:18:35 | |
we need to know what happened to him | 1:18:40 | |
and the government is trying to withhold every detail. | 1:18:42 | |
And so, we still need all of this confirmed. | 1:18:45 | |
We need the records from the CIA and we need all of that. | 1:18:51 | |
But whatever we can get from him goes a long way | 1:18:55 | |
to try and to put together that story | 1:18:58 | |
and there is still so many missing pieces. | 1:19:01 | |
And then the third is what you mentioned | 1:19:05 | |
with regards to the public is, | 1:19:08 | |
the military commission is perhaps the only forum | 1:19:12 | |
that may ever exist for any sort of torture accountability | 1:19:20 | |
for what happened to these men. | 1:19:26 | |
There will never be, at least my belief, | 1:19:29 | |
is that there will never be trials | 1:19:31 | |
of the CIA officials who engaged in torture. | 1:19:34 | |
We're never gonna see Dick training on trial | 1:19:39 | |
or Donald Rumsfeld on trial. | 1:19:41 | |
There will not even be any sort of truth | 1:19:44 | |
and reconciliation commission on this. | 1:19:47 | |
The closest we have ever gotten | 1:19:49 | |
is the highly redacted executive summary | 1:19:51 | |
of a 6,000-page report. | 1:19:55 | |
The 6,000-page report contains a chapter on Mr. Al-Baluchi | 1:19:56 | |
that I can't read. | 1:20:00 | |
So, that's as far as we've gotten. | 1:20:03 | |
So, this military commission, | 1:20:05 | |
whatever we can say in open session, | 1:20:08 | |
whatever we can take to the public is the best form | 1:20:11 | |
that we have of torture accountability. | 1:20:18 | |
Interviewer | Can you explain to the public | 1:20:24 |
and people are watching just generally | 1:20:26 | |
why does it help to make your case to expose | 1:20:28 | |
how he was treated? | 1:20:31 | |
- | First because from the beginning, | 1:20:34 |
from basically, September 12th, 2001, | 1:20:38 | |
a lot of things happened after September 11th. | 1:20:47 | |
Some of them very understandable, | 1:20:51 | |
and some of them over time, not so understandable. | 1:20:53 | |
After September 11th, as we all know, | 1:20:59 | |
we were all upset, angry, | 1:21:01 | |
touched in different ways by the enormity of this tragedy. | 1:21:08 | |
And it led us in some ways to put in place measures | 1:21:13 | |
that would keep us safe, right? | 1:21:22 | |
To improve. | 1:21:24 | |
In other ways, it brought out some of the worst aspects | 1:21:27 | |
of our country. | 1:21:33 | |
And one of those is what I mentioned before | 1:21:36 | |
is the creation, not necessarily the creation, | 1:21:38 | |
but the highlighting, the emphasizing of the other, | 1:21:42 | |
of the other in society, right? | 1:21:46 | |
The brown, non-white, the non-Christian, | 1:21:49 | |
non-American, other. | 1:21:54 | |
And so that shift in mindset, | 1:21:59 | |
or perhaps that emphasizing post September 11th | 1:22:03 | |
is what allowed the creation of Guantanamo Bay, | 1:22:09 | |
is what allowed the creation of the military commission. | 1:22:13 | |
Something that hasn't never been considered legal, right? | 1:22:18 | |
In international law or anywhere else, | 1:22:23 | |
the creation of a special court | 1:22:26 | |
for a particular group of human beings, | 1:22:28 | |
that's never been considered legal. | 1:22:31 | |
That is anathema to everything that we stand for, | 1:22:33 | |
but people still think it's okay. | 1:22:38 | |
They thought it was okay in 2001 | 1:22:41 | |
and they think it's okay now. | 1:22:43 | |
So, the more details we can put out in the public | 1:22:47 | |
about not just how Ammar was treated, | 1:22:52 | |
not just how all of these men were treated, | 1:22:57 | |
and not just because it was wrong because it's wrong, | 1:23:03 | |
because it's illegal | 1:23:06 | |
and because it diminishes us as a country | 1:23:07 | |
and as a moral authority, | 1:23:09 | |
but also because it made us less safe, | 1:23:12 | |
it led to the wrong conclusions. | 1:23:16 | |
It led to the wrong alleyways. | 1:23:18 | |
It led to false intelligence. | 1:23:21 | |
It led us into wars we shouldn't have been in. | 1:23:22 | |
It led to in some ways, further destabilization | 1:23:26 | |
of an entire region. | 1:23:32 | |
It undermined our security. | 1:23:34 | |
it undermined our counter-terrorism efforts. | 1:23:36 | |
And that's what people really need to understand | 1:23:40 | |
on a macro level that this is not just about one person, | 1:23:43 | |
Ammar's experience, | 1:23:47 | |
Ammar's torture is representative of all the mistakes | 1:23:49 | |
that we made post September 11th. | 1:23:53 | |
The military commission is the best sort of crucible | 1:23:55 | |
of all of those mistakes. | 1:24:01 | |
You have non-citizen Muslim men being tried | 1:24:04 | |
in a courtroom in a small part of an island we don't own | 1:24:08 | |
specifically to get them out from U.S. law | 1:24:14 | |
which is supposed to be blind, | 1:24:20 | |
specifically to put them outside of the reach of justice, | 1:24:22 | |
just to circumvent all of those values. | 1:24:29 | |
And it is now being held up by, frankly, our enemies, right? | 1:24:32 | |
People who we want in jail, in legitimate jail, | 1:24:36 | |
as an example of how we have unclean hands. | 1:24:43 | |
And that is something that the public | 1:24:47 | |
still doesn't understand. | 1:24:51 | |
They still don't understand | 1:24:53 | |
how the walling of Ammar Al-Baluchi makes us less safe | 1:24:54 | |
and has just diminished us in the world. | 1:25:06 | |
Interviewer | People might ask, | 1:25:13 |
and I have heard people ask so I'll ask you. | 1:25:14 | |
Why does that help his trial? | 1:25:20 | |
Why does it help not convict him if he was guilty? | 1:25:21 | |
Maybe you could tell us what charges he was charged with, | 1:25:26 | |
but is his guilt somehow connected | 1:25:30 | |
to what you just described? I think people (indistinct). | 1:25:32 | |
- | In many ways. | 1:25:36 |
One of the interesting things about the military commissions | 1:25:38 | |
is that as we know, | 1:25:43 | |
the rules have been written from scratch. | 1:25:45 | |
One rule in any system of law | 1:25:48 | |
is that you may not use torture-acquired evidence, right? | 1:25:52 | |
That's going back 500 years, 600 years. | 1:25:56 | |
Even during the Spanish inquisition, | 1:25:59 | |
they were careful about using torture-acquired evidence. | 1:26:01 | |
They still did it but they understood | 1:26:04 | |
that this was not something that should be done. | 1:26:06 | |
Now, the military commissions act as now written, | 1:26:11 | |
it was written once before, | 1:26:15 | |
thrown out 'cause it was unconstitutional | 1:26:17 | |
and then it was sort of retooled. | 1:26:18 | |
As now written, does not allow torture-acquired evidence. | 1:26:21 | |
What it does do though, | 1:26:24 | |
and kind of a Coda that's been hidden | 1:26:25 | |
is it allows torture-derived evidence. | 1:26:28 | |
It allows for the admission of so-called coerced-evidence | 1:26:30 | |
that the judge finds to be of probative value. | 1:26:34 | |
And they're talking about, | 1:26:38 | |
they wrote this provision very specifically | 1:26:39 | |
because they had in mind a very specific situation. | 1:26:43 | |
And that is what happened to Mr. Al-Baluchi | 1:26:48 | |
and the other defendants | 1:26:50 | |
after they were brought to Guantanamo Bay. | 1:26:52 | |
They had at this point been tortured by the CIA, | 1:26:54 | |
interrogated, re-interrogated, re-interrogated, | 1:26:57 | |
re-interrogated for years. | 1:26:59 | |
They're brought to Guantanamo, | 1:27:02 | |
they still don't have lawyers. | 1:27:04 | |
They don't have any representation. | 1:27:05 | |
They sit at Guantanamo for about six months | 1:27:07 | |
and then they are re-interrogated by the FBI this time, | 1:27:10 | |
not by the CIA. | 1:27:15 | |
And the FBI makes it clear to them. | 1:27:16 | |
"Hey, you understand, we're not the CIA, | 1:27:18 | |
"you're not being tortured right now, right? | 1:27:21 | |
'You're not being tortured. You're fine. | 1:27:23 | |
"You've had a cup of coffee this morning at breakfast. | 1:27:25 | |
"You're sitting in a chair, | 1:27:27 | |
"we're just talking. You're good." | 1:27:28 | |
And then they proceed to ask then what I can only imagine | 1:27:32 | |
are exactly the same questions that these men were asked | 1:27:37 | |
at the black sides, right? | 1:27:44 | |
And even if they weren't the same questions, | 1:27:45 | |
these guys know what the right answers are by now, right? | 1:27:47 | |
You step off the mat and I'll hurt you. | 1:27:50 | |
You watch that movie, you see them planting false memories. | 1:27:53 | |
You see them beating them to a pulp. | 1:27:57 | |
You see the water torture, | 1:28:01 | |
you see what they say under duress. | 1:28:03 | |
And now they're being asked again by U.S. officials, | 1:28:06 | |
like I don't know that an FBI agent looks different | 1:28:09 | |
from a CIA agent necessarily. | 1:28:11 | |
Throughout being asked at Guantanamo Bay, | 1:28:15 | |
still in detention by U.S. officials, the same questions. | 1:28:17 | |
And that is the evidence | 1:28:21 | |
that the government would like to admit against these men. | 1:28:23 | |
That is very clearly to me, torture-derived evidence. | 1:28:28 | |
It may not be tortured-acquired. It is torture-derived. | 1:28:32 | |
And that would fall squarely within that coercion provision | 1:28:34 | |
of the military commissions act. | 1:28:40 | |
And so, when you ask, | 1:28:42 | |
what is the publication of the Ammar's torture | 1:28:47 | |
do for his case? | 1:28:52 | |
I think it, aside from just provoking outrage, | 1:28:54 | |
which is something I absolutely want to do. | 1:28:58 | |
I want people be angry and upset and horrified | 1:29:00 | |
and understand how grotesque this was. | 1:29:04 | |
But aside from that, it needs to plant that doubt, | 1:29:08 | |
that very legitimate doubt | 1:29:13 | |
about how much of this evidence is actually true. | 1:29:15 | |
How much of it can really be substantiated, right? | 1:29:19 | |
Just because it's the FBI sitting in the room with them | 1:29:23 | |
doesn't mean that these are the right answers, | 1:29:26 | |
that this is anything close to what really happened. | 1:29:29 | |
The point is the only fact, even now, | 1:29:33 | |
14 years later that has been proven about Ammar Al-Baluchi, | 1:29:38 | |
is that is a torture victim, that's it. | 1:29:43 | |
They've had 14 years | 1:29:46 | |
and that's all that has been established. | 1:29:48 | |
Interviewer | You had mentioned that he was a nephew | 1:29:51 |
of KSM, you think that plays into this? | 1:29:54 | |
- | Of course. | 1:29:57 |
of course. | 1:29:59 | |
And I don't represent Mr. Mohammed | 1:30:00 | |
and I will say of course as a lawyer, | 1:30:03 | |
nothing has been proven against him. | 1:30:07 | |
He remains innocent until he's proven guilty. | 1:30:09 | |
But public reports, right? | 1:30:13 | |
Always talk about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed | 1:30:15 | |
as the alleged mastermind of September 11th. | 1:30:16 | |
And there is a very pervasive narrative | 1:30:18 | |
about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. | 1:30:23 | |
And so, absolutely, there is an element of that. | 1:30:25 | |
But all we can do as Mr. Al-Baluchis lawyers, | 1:30:31 | |
and as lawyers in a trial in which five men are being tried | 1:30:34 | |
jointly, right? | 1:30:42 | |
Is emphasize the fact that we are the United States. | 1:30:44 | |
We consider these men to be innocent | 1:30:48 | |
until they're proven guilty. | 1:30:50 | |
That's the end of it. That is it. | 1:30:53 | |
It is up to the government | 1:30:55 | |
to bring whatever evidence they have | 1:30:57 | |
against any of these men. | 1:30:59 | |
And it hasn't happened yet. | 1:31:01 | |
Interviewer | You seem like an incredibly strong person | 1:31:05 |
having gone through what you just described over these, | 1:31:07 | |
how do you handle it? | 1:31:11 | |
- | Well, I have to preface it by saying | 1:31:15 |
it is always easier to be the person on the periphery | 1:31:19 | |
than it is to be the person who's undergone it. | 1:31:22 | |
One of the things that continually astonishes me | 1:31:27 | |
about Mr. Al-Baluchi is his resilience. | 1:31:30 | |
He has been tortured worse than almost any other person | 1:31:37 | |
I have ever met. | 1:31:41 | |
I've met a lot of former detainees | 1:31:43 | |
and represented a lot of former detainees. | 1:31:44 | |
He has been tortured more than almost all of them | 1:31:46 | |
put together. | 1:31:50 | |
And he remains, | 1:31:52 | |
I know people look at me funny when I say this, | 1:31:58 | |
but it remains the absolute truth. | 1:32:01 | |
He remains considerate, well-spoken, | 1:32:03 | |
he is interested in the world around him. | 1:32:07 | |
He is interested in his team members about my life, | 1:32:09 | |
about my interests. | 1:32:14 | |
He asks about my family. | 1:32:16 | |
He understands the team dynamics. | 1:32:18 | |
He tries to improve the team dynamics. | 1:32:22 | |
He wants to learn about the law, | 1:32:24 | |
about the strategy that we are pursuing. | 1:32:27 | |
We run every decision by him and he makes the final calls. | 1:32:29 | |
We talked to him about advocacy. | 1:32:35 | |
He weighs in on all of that. | 1:32:37 | |
And that every time I meet with him is astonishing to me | 1:32:39 | |
because many of my former clients who had all been tortured | 1:32:44 | |
but had not been maybe through the intensity of torture | 1:32:49 | |
that he has been through were far less able, | 1:32:52 | |
understandably far less able to participate, | 1:32:57 | |
far more just angry, far more incoherent. | 1:33:01 | |
And I say that not in a pejorative way | 1:33:08 | |
but in a truly, truly empathetic way. | 1:33:10 | |
When you see what these men who have been through | 1:33:16 | |
and the fact that they've been essentially isolated | 1:33:18 | |
or in solitary confinement for over decade, | 1:33:20 | |
completely understandable that they would be like that. | 1:33:24 | |
And the fact that Ammar is not is stunning. | 1:33:27 | |
So that, when you talk about, what is my experience? | 1:33:33 | |
How do I cope? | 1:33:38 | |
That's always at the back of my head, | 1:33:41 | |
that I get to leave Guantanamo. | 1:33:44 | |
I go home, I have the ability to watch TV | 1:33:48 | |
or to go walk to the bookstore and buy a book | 1:33:56 | |
or to read people magazine, | 1:34:00 | |
which I do and I report on various aspects of pop culture | 1:34:03 | |
to Ammar who kind of looks at me and says, | 1:34:07 | |
"How can you possibly be interested in any of that?" | 1:34:10 | |
(Alka laughs) | 1:34:12 | |
But I can do that. | 1:34:15 | |
And he can't. | 1:34:17 | |
he can't pick up the phone and call his mother. | 1:34:19 | |
I can. He can't talk to his siblings. | 1:34:23 | |
I can. If I'm upset, I can call my brother. | 1:34:28 | |
I can send an email to my husband, | 1:34:32 | |
and he just can't do that. | 1:34:35 | |
So, that helps to put things in perspective. | 1:34:37 | |
Aside from that, anybody who knows me | 1:34:42 | |
will tell you that I am constantly angry. | 1:34:45 | |
And I say that with a smile. | 1:34:50 | |
I say that with a smile on my face. | 1:34:51 | |
(Alka and Interviewer laughs) | 1:34:52 | |
I am never not angry. | 1:34:54 | |
And I've learned to smile while I say that. | 1:34:56 | |
I am always angry, I am always angry about all of this. | 1:35:01 | |
And it never leaves you. | 1:35:07 | |
I talk about it. My specialization is human rights. | 1:35:09 | |
And I litigate and I advocate for Mr. Al-Baluchi. | 1:35:14 | |
I travel a lot. I speak to students. | 1:35:21 | |
I speak to human rights advocates, UN officials, | 1:35:23 | |
and I have to tell his story in the best way that I can | 1:35:29 | |
to make people understand | 1:35:34 | |
the horror of what happened to him. | 1:35:36 | |
And you can't tell it without being angry. | 1:35:38 | |
And very sad at the bottom of that, but angry. | 1:35:45 | |
I mean, to my core at what this means for the country, | 1:35:49 | |
what this means for him on a personal level. | 1:35:55 | |
I know him. | 1:35:58 | |
He's my client. I represent him. | 1:36:00 | |
He is a human being who I spend time with | 1:36:02 | |
what it means for him on a personal level | 1:36:05 | |
all the way out to to what this means for my country | 1:36:07 | |
and how we move forward from this. | 1:36:10 | |
So, now, I'm always angry, | 1:36:15 | |
something that my husband comments on sometimes. | 1:36:17 | |
(Alka laughs) | 1:36:21 | |
But I work with a great team. | 1:36:22 | |
There are other attorneys on my team. | 1:36:26 | |
We have paralegals, we have investigators | 1:36:28 | |
all of whom work around the clock just on this. | 1:36:30 | |
And so, we lean on each other a lot. | 1:36:35 | |
I lean on my colleagues in the Guantanamo Bar | 1:36:37 | |
some of whom have been doing this for far longer | 1:36:41 | |
than I have and I read a lot of people magazine. | 1:36:42 | |
(Alka laughs) | 1:36:47 | |
Interviewer | Where do you see yourself going? | 1:36:49 |
Do you see yourself... | 1:36:50 | |
Is this ever gonna to trial | 1:36:52 | |
and you see yourself staying with it till the end | 1:36:54 | |
or where are you going after that? | 1:36:56 | |
- | We will eventually go to trial. | 1:37:01 |
I don't, again, it's a parallel universe down there | 1:37:04 | |
in which we go to trial in any normal universe. | 1:37:08 | |
There would be no way. | 1:37:11 | |
But we've been in pretrial hearings now | 1:37:12 | |
for four and a half years, | 1:37:15 | |
four and a half years roughly, maybe more than that. | 1:37:18 | |
And if I were to guess in a normal courtroom | 1:37:20 | |
given the amount of discovery we have gotten | 1:37:28 | |
and have yet to receive, we'd be decades from trial. | 1:37:30 | |
A fair estimate would be four years, | 1:37:38 | |
five years still from trial. | 1:37:41 | |
The government would very much like to start trial | 1:37:43 | |
next year. | 1:37:46 | |
That's what they've recently asked the judge to do, | 1:37:47 | |
is to set a trial date for next year. | 1:37:50 | |
I don't think that's gonna happen. | 1:37:51 | |
There's no way, we don't even have the infrastructure. | 1:37:53 | |
Just getting to the nuts and bolts of it. | 1:37:54 | |
There's only one courtroom at Guantanamo. | 1:37:57 | |
And there are two cases | 1:37:59 | |
one of which predates the 911 case, the Nashiri case | 1:38:01 | |
that they're tryna find dates. | 1:38:05 | |
There's just not space. | 1:38:06 | |
They're not even enough beds at Guantanamo | 1:38:08 | |
(Alka laughs) | 1:38:11 | |
for everybody down there. | 1:38:11 | |
So, there's a lot to work out before this happens, | 1:38:13 | |
but someday this will go to trial. | 1:38:17 | |
The system is so rigged. | 1:38:21 | |
It is so biased that I don't see how these men | 1:38:26 | |
who are not convicted by it, right? | 1:38:34 | |
They are making it as impossible as they can | 1:38:39 | |
for us to put on a defense. | 1:38:43 | |
They are doing that by withholding evidence. | 1:38:46 | |
They are doing that by driving wedges between the attorneys | 1:38:48 | |
and these men who already have very deep trust issues. | 1:38:51 | |
They are doing it by preventing people from having access | 1:38:58 | |
to the sessions, being able to properly observe | 1:39:05 | |
what's happening, | 1:39:08 | |
and a thousand different ways they are rigging this trial. | 1:39:10 | |
And they did it from the moment they wrote | 1:39:15 | |
the Military Commissions Act. | 1:39:17 | |
So, we will see, | 1:39:19 | |
but we're fighting hard, as hard as we can. | 1:39:21 | |
We've recently mounted major challenges | 1:39:29 | |
to the jurisdiction of the commission. | 1:39:31 | |
It's a war tribunal, right? | 1:39:34 | |
It's essentially a war court. | 1:39:38 | |
That's the prosecution calls it all the time. | 1:39:39 | |
As far as I know, we were not at war in 2001, | 1:39:43 | |
we were not in a war. | 1:39:48 | |
Nobody considered us to be in a war. | 1:39:49 | |
And so, when you really go | 1:39:52 | |
and you look at the legal minutiae, right? | 1:39:53 | |
Devil is always in the details and for better or worse, | 1:39:57 | |
there are facts around what happened and what did not happen | 1:40:01 | |
on September 11th and prior to September 11th. | 1:40:04 | |
So, there are very real questions | 1:40:06 | |
about where are we actually at war? | 1:40:08 | |
Does this court actually have jurisdiction? | 1:40:10 | |
The court does have jurisdiction. | 1:40:13 | |
What kind of crimes can it try? | 1:40:15 | |
Can it only try work crimes? | 1:40:18 | |
'cause it's a war court? | 1:40:20 | |
Was conspiracy a war crime on September 11th, 2001? | 1:40:22 | |
The law says no. Was terrorism as standalone crime? | 1:40:27 | |
Was that a war crime on September 11th? | 1:40:31 | |
All international experts say no. | 1:40:35 | |
Hijacking? And hijacking we know is a crime, | 1:40:38 | |
was it a war crime? | 1:40:41 | |
No. So, these are kind of some of the major questions | 1:40:42 | |
that we're going to be litigating over the next months | 1:40:47 | |
and years. | 1:40:51 | |
And we are trying very hard to chip away | 1:40:53 | |
at some of the more blatantly unfair aspects. | 1:40:56 | |
I mean, the entire thing is illegal. | 1:41:01 | |
Interviewer | But it sounds to me like you're an in it | 1:41:04 |
for the long haul. | 1:41:06 | |
(Alka laughs) | 1:41:08 | |
- | Until I drop, I think. | 1:41:10 |
It is impossible to tell at any given point | 1:41:16 | |
whether the commissions are gonna exist tomorrow | 1:41:19 | |
or what is going to happen. | 1:41:24 | |
But the legal challenges and the personal connection | 1:41:26 | |
with the client are such that it is | 1:41:33 | |
probably the most difficult job I will ever have | 1:41:39 | |
and weirdly the most fulfilling. | 1:41:43 | |
Interviewer | And most important to you I'm sure. | 1:41:48 |
- | Yes. | 1:41:49 |
Interviewer | Before, I wanna, and get it. | 1:41:51 |
And when I do, I like to have you read those letters. | 1:41:52 | |
So, like have him on film and show him on film. | 1:41:55 | |
But I just want to, | 1:41:57 | |
you mentioned something before we started | 1:41:58 | |
about communications with witnesses overseas | 1:42:00 | |
and I thought it might be using for the viewer to understand | 1:42:03 | |
what that is about. | 1:42:07 | |
- | Of course. | 1:42:09 |
So, one thing that I often say when I describe the trial | 1:42:10 | |
is that the 911 case which is a specific case | 1:42:17 | |
being tried before the military commissions | 1:42:23 | |
against five descendants, one of whom is Mr. Al-Baluchi. | 1:42:24 | |
That case is being brought against the alleged perpetrators | 1:42:28 | |
of 911. | 1:42:34 | |
Now, as such, it is the biggest criminal case | 1:42:35 | |
that has ever been tried in U.S. history. | 1:42:39 | |
And it is the biggest both in terms of import | 1:42:41 | |
for the country | 1:42:45 | |
and just in terms of literally how many years, countries, | 1:42:46 | |
pieces of evidence it encompasses. | 1:42:53 | |
It is alleged to have been a worldwide conspiracy. | 1:42:56 | |
It involves a large number of countries. | 1:42:59 | |
If you include the countries reported to have, | 1:43:03 | |
in which people Al-Qaeda operatives and, etc, | 1:43:08 | |
are reported to have operated | 1:43:11 | |
and post September 11th, the number of countries | 1:43:14 | |
maybe in which they were to which they were transferred | 1:43:19 | |
or that may have participated in their interrogations. | 1:43:22 | |
It's an enormous number of countries. | 1:43:27 | |
It is an enormous number of people | 1:43:30 | |
who were cycled through these black sites, | 1:43:32 | |
who were held at Guantanamo, | 1:43:37 | |
who may have known Mr. Al-Baluchi or the other defendants | 1:43:40 | |
maybe before they were kidnapped and disappeared. | 1:43:45 | |
So, there are aspects of the actual charges against them | 1:43:53 | |
that have to be investigated, | 1:43:57 | |
the so-called conspiracy. | 1:43:59 | |
There are aspects of mitigation | 1:44:01 | |
that have to be investigated. | 1:44:04 | |
There are aspects of the torture | 1:44:07 | |
that have to be investigated. | 1:44:09 | |
It takes us everywhere, which is partially why | 1:44:10 | |
each individual has such a large team. | 1:44:14 | |
And honestly, we don't have nearly the number of people | 1:44:17 | |
that we need to fully investigate this, | 1:44:20 | |
which is another reason that this is taking so long. | 1:44:22 | |
So, I work a lot on the torture issues | 1:44:27 | |
and that involves speaking to former detainees. | 1:44:33 | |
It involves speaking to experts on torture, | 1:44:37 | |
medical, psychological, historical. | 1:44:40 | |
It involves speaking to foreign government officials, | 1:44:44 | |
current government officials, human rights officials. | 1:44:50 | |
We have investigators | 1:44:56 | |
who are looking into Mr. Al-Baluchi's personal history, | 1:44:58 | |
right? | 1:45:02 | |
As anybody would in this kind of criminal case. | 1:45:03 | |
So, it takes us all over the world. | 1:45:06 | |
And I have to emphasize again | 1:45:09 | |
that part of the reason we have to do so much | 1:45:11 | |
of this investigation ourselves and we have to do it right | 1:45:15 | |
is because the government is continuing to withhold | 1:45:18 | |
so much information. | 1:45:20 | |
Interviewer | And you were saying something | 1:45:22 |
about government possibly interfering | 1:45:24 | |
with those communications. | 1:45:26 | |
- | Oh, yes. The government has a history | 1:45:28 |
as long as the military commissions | 1:45:32 | |
of interfering in the attorney client privilege. | 1:45:34 | |
Now, I will say, the only positive thing | 1:45:40 | |
you will ever hear me say about the military commissions | 1:45:44 | |
is that I recognize that it is a privilege to be employed | 1:45:48 | |
by the government to litigate against the government. | 1:45:56 | |
And that is a privilege that you don't have | 1:46:00 | |
in many countries. | 1:46:02 | |
And so, I recognize that, and I appreciate it. | 1:46:03 | |
That said, | 1:46:07 | |
if you're going to employ a prosecution and a defense, | 1:46:10 | |
you have to try to make it fair for both sides. | 1:46:15 | |
And the government has consistently stacked | 1:46:19 | |
the playing field against the defense. | 1:46:25 | |
They've done this in various ways. | 1:46:28 | |
One of them was | 1:46:29 | |
perhaps the most kind of the most outlandish one, | 1:46:31 | |
was in the placement of listening devices | 1:46:36 | |
in attorney-client meeting rooms several years ago | 1:46:40 | |
over a long period of time. | 1:46:44 | |
This was before I came to the commissions | 1:46:47 | |
but several of my colleagues were there at the time. | 1:46:49 | |
And basically they're these devices | 1:46:53 | |
that were disguised as smoke detectors | 1:46:56 | |
in attorney-client meeting rooms, | 1:46:58 | |
in rooms that are used only for meetings | 1:47:00 | |
between defense attorneys and these particular detainees. | 1:47:04 | |
And people were curious, people said, | 1:47:08 | |
"What are those? What are they?" | 1:47:12 | |
And we were told there were smoke detectors. | 1:47:14 | |
And finally one enterprising counsel looked closely at it | 1:47:16 | |
and then went, and I think just looked up the brand name | 1:47:21 | |
that she saw on it | 1:47:26 | |
and found out that actually, they're listening devices. | 1:47:27 | |
And the government's, | 1:47:32 | |
well, the prosecution's response was, we had no idea | 1:47:36 | |
and we didn't listen to anything. | 1:47:40 | |
And we don't have any records | 1:47:42 | |
and they're taking them out right now, right? | 1:47:43 | |
Now, I laugh about it but here's the thing, | 1:47:47 | |
when you've been held incommunicado | 1:47:50 | |
for years at a time, right? | 1:47:53 | |
With no legal representation, with nobody on your side. | 1:47:55 | |
And then all of a sudden, | 1:47:59 | |
somebody walks in and says, | 1:48:01 | |
"I work for the U.S. government. | 1:48:06 | |
"And by the way, I'm here to represent you." | 1:48:07 | |
Okay? There are major issues to overcome. | 1:48:10 | |
When you then find out that the same government | 1:48:14 | |
that employs your lawyer | 1:48:16 | |
is listening in on the conversations | 1:48:19 | |
in which you are saying very private things to your lawyer, | 1:48:21 | |
it really does destroy whatever trust may have built up | 1:48:27 | |
to that point. | 1:48:33 | |
And it is a struggle to overcome that. | 1:48:34 | |
That's just one example. | 1:48:38 | |
There are examples of Mr. Al-Baluchis legal materials | 1:48:39 | |
being seized from his cell, right? | 1:48:44 | |
Legal materials are clearly marked. | 1:48:46 | |
There are very specific markings. | 1:48:48 | |
You can see it on one of his letters, | 1:48:51 | |
attorney-client privileged communication. | 1:48:53 | |
He has waived this privilege, | 1:48:55 | |
which is why I'm able to show this. | 1:48:57 | |
But at the big top and bottom of this page, | 1:48:59 | |
it says attorney-client privilege communication, right? | 1:49:03 | |
That's one of the things. | 1:49:06 | |
They have to have these markings on them. | 1:49:07 | |
They also have to have markings of his detainee number. | 1:49:10 | |
They're given numbers just like any other prison. | 1:49:14 | |
His number is 10018. | 1:49:17 | |
So, it has to say 10018. | 1:49:19 | |
These are all clearly marked, | 1:49:22 | |
these legal materials we mark diligently | 1:49:23 | |
every single piece of paper. | 1:49:25 | |
And so, when guards from the joint task force at Guantanamo | 1:49:28 | |
go into his cell and just take his legal materials, | 1:49:33 | |
confiscate them. | 1:49:37 | |
Lord knows what with them, right? | 1:49:38 | |
We don't know if they're reading them. | 1:49:40 | |
If they're mining information from them | 1:49:42 | |
to give to the prosecution, we have no idea, | 1:49:44 | |
but just that act, right? | 1:49:48 | |
Destroys in a moment that trust. It's so fragile. | 1:49:50 | |
And there have been countless incidences like that. | 1:49:55 | |
Interviewer | Are these materials returned? | 1:49:59 |
- | Some of them eventually are returned but... | 1:50:01 |
Interviewer | You have no idea what happened to them? | 1:50:05 |
- | No idea what happened in between. | 1:50:07 |
Some of them have been kept. | 1:50:09 | |
And this is something that comes up very often | 1:50:10 | |
in the pre-trial litigation | 1:50:12 | |
and just at the last hearing in March. | 1:50:14 | |
One of the other defendants counsel | 1:50:17 | |
was talking about how the gentleman's legal papers | 1:50:18 | |
were taken and kept for weeks, right? | 1:50:21 | |
And he raised the alarm and they were still held. | 1:50:25 | |
(Alka laughs) | 1:50:28 | |
And these are things that nobody's supposed to touch | 1:50:30 | |
other than him and his lawyers. | 1:50:33 | |
This is just a basic tenant of criminal law. | 1:50:35 | |
Interviewer | You also mentioned, | 1:50:41 |
which I thought it'd be interesting just for our viewers | 1:50:42 | |
that people in Guantanamo, | 1:50:45 | |
the detainees get to watch legals from our project. | 1:50:48 | |
- | Yes. | 1:50:54 |
So, they obviously don't have any kind of internet access | 1:50:54 | |
or anything appropriate, anything like that. | 1:50:58 | |
But they do have basically access to media | 1:51:02 | |
that their lawyers send them | 1:51:08 | |
and everything goes through privilege review | 1:51:10 | |
and things like that | 1:51:13 | |
to make sure that nothing contraband and anything like that. | 1:51:15 | |
But yes, they do have access to some media | 1:51:18 | |
that we can send to them. | 1:51:23 | |
And the wide world of Guantanamo literature | 1:51:24 | |
and resources are all relevant to them. | 1:51:30 | |
And so, yeah, a large number of detainees at Guantanamo, | 1:51:33 | |
Ammar included have seen some of the videos | 1:51:38 | |
and the content on your website and are really very grateful | 1:51:43 | |
for the spotlight and the recognition. | 1:51:49 | |
I would say that there is something wrong happening | 1:51:56 | |
at Guantanamo because over time, | 1:52:01 | |
Guantanamo has against the best efforts of a lot of people | 1:52:06 | |
become normalized, right? | 1:52:11 | |
Guantanamo, it's a thing that's there, | 1:52:13 | |
it's in Cuba, it's a prison. | 1:52:15 | |
It's where we keep bad guys. | 1:52:17 | |
That's the narrative about Guantanamo. | 1:52:18 | |
And for these guys who have now been in there for, | 1:52:21 | |
I think all of them would have been there over a decade. | 1:52:24 | |
For all of them, | 1:52:28 | |
just the fact that there are people out in the world | 1:52:30 | |
who maybe don't represent them, | 1:52:33 | |
don't have any particular, anything to gain from it | 1:52:35 | |
but recognize and talk about the fact that, | 1:52:38 | |
"Hey, this is still wrong. | 1:52:43 | |
"This still not right. You're 13, you're 16. | 1:52:45 | |
"This is still not right." | 1:52:51 | |
It means a lot to them. | 1:52:53 | |
And I think it it goes a long way | 1:52:54 | |
in maintaining their resilience. | 1:52:56 | |
Interviewer | Do they watch it on a cell phone | 1:52:59 |
just copying on twitter? | 1:53:02 | |
- | No. Some of them have computers. | 1:53:03 |
(Alka clears throat) | 1:53:09 | |
Like Mr. Al-Baluchi because he's a defendant, | 1:53:10 | |
he's military commissions has his own kind of laptop | 1:53:13 | |
that's obviously locked down from all sorts of things. | 1:53:18 | |
He has no internet access or anything like that. | 1:53:20 | |
But he does have the ability to watch materials. | 1:53:23 | |
Interviewer | Watch a DVD or a thumb drive? | 1:53:27 |
- | Yeah. Not a thumb drive | 1:53:28 |
but he does have the ability to watch from DVDs | 1:53:30 | |
and he has the ability to to watch videos | 1:53:34 | |
and things like that. | 1:53:37 | |
So, yeah. | 1:53:38 | |
So, he's been able to see them | 1:53:39 | |
and some of the other guys who have the same capability | 1:53:41 | |
of these mails has been able to see them. | 1:53:45 | |
Interviewer | So, okay. | 1:53:48 |
Is there something that I didn't ask you | 1:53:50 | |
that you came you wanted to share with us | 1:53:51 | |
just about yourself or your clients in Guantanamo? | 1:53:56 | |
And then I do wanna not end until we read those documents | 1:54:00 | |
that you're filming. | 1:54:04 | |
Is there something that I didn't ask you | 1:54:05 | |
that you thought about? | 1:54:06 | |
I think what you said about President Obama was very telling | 1:54:08 | |
and interesting. | 1:54:11 | |
I don't know whether you wanna say anything | 1:54:12 | |
about the kinds of administration of President Trump | 1:54:13 | |
or whether you wanna say anything about Guantanamo | 1:54:17 | |
going forward if it's always gonna continue or whether, | 1:54:20 | |
(indistinct) about that. | 1:54:23 | |
- | Well, President Trump in a lot of ways | 1:54:25 |
in this administration are easier to deal with in many ways | 1:54:28 | |
than the previous administration, | 1:54:36 | |
because they've made clear from the beginning | 1:54:38 | |
what their position is on Guantanamo. | 1:54:41 | |
I think the attorney general has, | 1:54:44 | |
aside from showing a profound lack of knowledge | 1:54:48 | |
about anything on Guantanamo | 1:54:51 | |
and demonstrating that numerous times to the press | 1:54:52 | |
and just repeating blatantly false facts about it | 1:54:56 | |
has made clear that he considers Guantanamo | 1:55:02 | |
to be a great solution for what's happening. | 1:55:04 | |
Also demonstrating his lack of knowledge | 1:55:07 | |
about counter-terrorism. | 1:55:08 | |
And so, that in many ways makes it very easy. | 1:55:12 | |
We know they're not going to close Guantanamo. | 1:55:17 | |
We have no interest in doing so. | 1:55:19 | |
They have no interest in learning about the history | 1:55:21 | |
of Guantanamo. | 1:55:23 | |
They have no interest in learning | 1:55:24 | |
about how Guantanamo undermines our safety. | 1:55:26 | |
They have no interest in it. | 1:55:30 | |
And so, it's very, very sad for the men | 1:55:31 | |
who are left at Guantanamo, but we know it, | 1:55:35 | |
which is a certainty that not exist | 1:55:39 | |
in the previous administration. | 1:55:44 | |
And that was almost a form of torture in and of itself | 1:55:45 | |
for some of these men. | 1:55:52 | |
To have that hope that they will be released, | 1:55:54 | |
to have that, not hope. | 1:55:58 | |
I mean, that guarantee that they were gonna be released, | 1:55:59 | |
that President Obama is here, they're going home. | 1:56:04 | |
And then year after year, after year, after year | 1:56:07 | |
to not just have that hope dashed, | 1:56:11 | |
but have President Obama litigate against them going home, | 1:56:13 | |
force-feed them. | 1:56:20 | |
And at the end of the day, leave a whole bunch of them there | 1:56:22 | |
to be kept there indefinitely by this administration | 1:56:27 | |
was worse in some ways. | 1:56:30 | |
Because it really did break a lot of those men. | 1:56:33 | |
A lot of my clients who kept having their hopes dashed, | 1:56:43 | |
it just broke them down completely. | 1:56:49 | |
The last suicide we saw at Guantanamo was in 2012 | 1:56:51 | |
and it was on non-Latif | 1:56:55 | |
and that was a really very tragic story | 1:56:59 | |
of a man who had been cleared. | 1:57:01 | |
Interviewer | Several times. | 1:57:06 |
- | Several times. And just tryna go home to meet his son, | 1:57:07 |
didn't pose a threat to anybody. | 1:57:12 | |
And the government, just for the sake of taking him, | 1:57:15 | |
just for the sake of taking him, | 1:57:19 | |
for no reason other than they were the government | 1:57:20 | |
and they had to be right | 1:57:23 | |
forced this position that any evidence they put forward | 1:57:26 | |
no matter how dubious, | 1:57:32 | |
was to be given the presumption of truth, right? | 1:57:34 | |
And so, even though it didn't matter | 1:57:38 | |
that other non-statements had been mistranslated, | 1:57:40 | |
didn't matter that we didn't have people on the ground | 1:57:43 | |
who spoke proper Arabic or whatever dialect, | 1:57:46 | |
didn't matter. | 1:57:49 | |
It just mattered that they were the U.S. government | 1:57:51 | |
and they could say whatever they wanted | 1:57:53 | |
about this little brown man from Yemen. | 1:57:55 | |
And he killed himself, | 1:57:58 | |
and he killed himself because of that. | 1:58:00 | |
And I think had they not really cracked down | 1:58:02 | |
on prison security after that, | 1:58:07 | |
there would have been more suicides. | 1:58:09 | |
And I hate to have to say that | 1:58:11 | |
because I don't mean for my clients | 1:58:13 | |
or any of my former clients to appear to be weak | 1:58:17 | |
because they live through a great deal. | 1:58:20 | |
But at a certain point, you break. | 1:58:25 | |
Interviewer | Did you break it? | 1:58:31 |
Did you go in there with a hope? There were no (indistinct). | 1:58:32 | |
- | Oh, yeah. That was the first thing. | 1:58:35 |
The morning after, | 1:58:39 | |
I still remember those so vividly, | 1:58:40 | |
the morning after President Obama was elected, | 1:58:43 | |
no, I'm a liberal. | 1:58:46 | |
I don't identify with any particular party | 1:58:48 | |
but I'm very liberal and I'm happy to say that. | 1:58:50 | |
The first thing I went to work, | 1:58:55 | |
I was still at White & Case at this point. | 1:58:57 | |
I burst into the office of my mentor, | 1:58:59 | |
a partner who I'm very still very close with. | 1:59:03 | |
And I said, he's got a (indistinct) came out. | 1:59:05 | |
It's the first he's doing, | 1:59:09 | |
like he's gonna put in an executive order. | 1:59:11 | |
Like it's the first thing he's gonna do. | 1:59:13 | |
It feels like a weight has lifted. That's what I said. | 1:59:17 | |
Like it feels like a weight has lifted, | 1:59:19 | |
like this horrible thing that has existed | 1:59:23 | |
in the back of our heads. | 1:59:26 | |
And I wasn't even involved in Guantanamo at the time. | 1:59:27 | |
I didn't represent anybody. | 1:59:30 | |
It was this horrible thing | 1:59:32 | |
that had been at the back of our consciousness | 1:59:34 | |
for years now. | 1:59:36 | |
Like it was finally going away. | 1:59:38 | |
And then he came into office | 1:59:43 | |
and he issued the executive order and I go, | 1:59:44 | |
"Oh my God. It's gonna happen. It's gonna happen." | 1:59:47 | |
And then a year passed and it hadn't happened | 1:59:51 | |
and healthcare was on the table. | 1:59:58 | |
(Alka laughs) | 2:00:00 | |
and we're talking a lot about healthcare, | 2:00:01 | |
which, big fan of healthcare. | 2:00:01 | |
Everybody should have healthcare. | 2:00:04 | |
But then the conversation became, | 2:00:07 | |
well, he can either do healthcare or he can do Guantanamo. | 2:00:10 | |
And at that point, I was fairly certain | 2:00:13 | |
Guantanamo was not gonna happen. | 2:00:17 | |
But for the men who were there, | 2:00:20 | |
there were still being led out in trickles. | 2:00:23 | |
And so, when you see one or two people being let out, | 2:00:25 | |
you think maybe I could be next. | 2:00:28 | |
Maybe it could be me. | 2:00:30 | |
And so, it was just infinitely harder for them. | 2:00:31 | |
Interviewer | So, would you took it on, | 2:00:38 |
I mean, we'll pretty much know when you took it on | 2:00:41 | |
in spite of that disappointment and (indistinct). | 2:00:43 | |
- | I think because of that disappointment | 2:00:46 |
I mean, it really, it drove home the point, right? | 2:00:49 | |
That this issue, it's not a liberal issue | 2:00:52 | |
or a conservative issue. | 2:00:55 | |
It's just a right or wrong issue. | 2:00:56 | |
And all three administrations have been wrong so far. | 2:00:59 | |
We haven't had one that's been right. | 2:01:03 | |
I couldn't tell you if the election had got another way. | 2:01:05 | |
I can't tell you that it would have gone the right way | 2:01:08 | |
necessarily. | 2:01:12 | |
We know that Democrats and Republicans | 2:01:14 | |
all support Guantanamo by and large. | 2:01:17 | |
So, yeah. I mean, it's really whether you are willing | 2:01:21 | |
to look at the facts and the law | 2:01:27 | |
and admit that this is wrong or not. | 2:01:29 | |
And so far, I haven't seen a public official | 2:01:32 | |
who's really willing to stand up and say no. | 2:01:35 | |
And I think it's because of that that I wanted to do this. | 2:01:40 | |
I'm a bit of a contrarian. | 2:01:49 | |
(Alka laughs) | 2:01:50 | |
Interviewer | And also very inspiring. | 2:01:51 |
I'm sure people who watch this will be very inspired by you | 2:01:52 | |
(indistinct). | 2:01:55 | |
- | I hope so. We need help. | 2:01:56 |
(Alka laughs) | 2:01:57 | |
We need all the help we can get. | 2:01:58 | |
Interviewer | So, why don't you show us | 2:02:01 |
what you're holding | 2:02:02 | |
and so that we can get a closeup of it (indistinct) | 2:02:03 | |
wanna do that. | 2:02:07 | |
And then... | 2:02:09 | |
- | Well, one of the things I just wanted to raise really fast | 2:02:10 |
as we're now... | 2:02:14 | |
I wanted to actually show you Ammar now. | 2:02:16 | |
Interviewer | Good. | 2:02:20 |
- | We have, you saw this picture of him. | 2:02:20 |
It seems a lifetime ago when he was young | 2:02:25 | |
and this is him now. | 2:02:28 | |
This is in one of the most recent photos that was taken | 2:02:33 | |
by the ICRC. | 2:02:36 | |
It's allowed to take photos of him every once in a while. | 2:02:38 | |
Interviewer | And then we're allowed | 2:02:41 |
to publish that photo? | 2:02:42 | |
- | Yes. He's allowed to have photos taken by the ICRC | 2:02:44 |
and we're allowed to publish those particular photos | 2:02:49 | |
we are not able to take any other kind of photos of him. | 2:02:51 | |
But you can see obviously the passage of 17 years | 2:02:57 | |
and the infliction of torture. | 2:03:02 | |
Interviewer | Did he (indistinct) | 2:03:06 |
when he was first captured? | 2:03:07 | |
- | No. | 2:03:08 |
And often those glasses are dark glasses | 2:03:11 | |
to shield his eyes from the light. | 2:03:14 | |
Interviewer | Do you wanna give better shuttle there? | 2:03:17 |
- | Yeah. | 2:03:19 |
And this is actually from our current amnesty campaign | 2:03:20 | |
to get him torture rehabilitation which he is entitled to | 2:03:24 | |
under the convention against torture, | 2:03:29 | |
which last I checked we are still a party of, | 2:03:31 | |
last I checked. | 2:03:34 | |
And even if we're not, is customary international law | 2:03:35 | |
therefore binding on the United States. | 2:03:38 | |
But really, what I wanna do, | 2:03:42 | |
in an ideal world, Ammar would be honestly released | 2:03:45 | |
from medical rehabilitation. | 2:03:54 | |
He would be given the rehabilitation that he deserves. | 2:03:57 | |
There is no manner in which he can be given a fair trial. | 2:04:00 | |
There is no manner in which any of this can take place now | 2:04:08 | |
in a way that is consistent with our law. | 2:04:14 | |
And so, we need to recognize that | 2:04:18 | |
and we need to remove the death penalty | 2:04:22 | |
and we need to give these men at the very minimum, | 2:04:27 | |
the medical treatment that they need. | 2:04:31 | |
Interviewer | And can I just establish, | 2:04:34 |
does the government deny that he needs medical treatment | 2:04:36 | |
or they say that he gets all that he needs | 2:04:39 | |
or what's their response? | 2:04:42 | |
- | The government's response is really very... | 2:04:44 |
It depends on who you mean by the government really. | 2:04:48 | |
The prosecution's response is essentially, | 2:04:51 | |
that's not our problem. | 2:04:54 | |
We don't have anything to do with that. | 2:04:57 | |
That's a detention center issue. | 2:04:58 | |
The department of defense says, | 2:05:01 | |
"Yeah, he gets everything he needs." | 2:05:03 | |
There have been isolated occasions | 2:05:05 | |
when we have made request for certain things. | 2:05:07 | |
Like we've made requests for him to see, | 2:05:11 | |
say, an ophthalmologist or a sleep specialist | 2:05:14 | |
or something like that. | 2:05:18 | |
And occasionally, they will grant that | 2:05:19 | |
or say that they may be in the future | 2:05:21 | |
or something like that. | 2:05:23 | |
It's just been recently reported. | 2:05:26 | |
We have received an order for him to get an MRI. | 2:05:28 | |
But again, | 2:05:32 | |
that involves the actual bringing of an MRI machine | 2:05:33 | |
to Guantanamo which has not happened yet. | 2:05:36 | |
We would like him to undergo a sleep study | 2:05:40 | |
to see if there's any way that we could improve his sleep. | 2:05:42 | |
Interviewer | And do they respond to that? | 2:05:47 |
Or what do they say when you... | 2:05:48 | |
- | We haven't had a response to that. | 2:05:49 |
So, yeah, | 2:05:52 | |
I mean, sometimes these things just languish for years | 2:05:53 | |
at a time and we keep hammering on it. | 2:05:56 | |
We take it to the public as much as we can. | 2:05:59 | |
And we say, "Look, this man has been tortured." | 2:06:01 | |
That's indisputed that he was tortured. | 2:06:03 | |
He needs help. He needs care. | 2:06:07 | |
He needs medical treatment. | 2:06:09 | |
I don't care what you think based on what false information | 2:06:11 | |
about what he did or anything else. | 2:06:16 | |
Like the fact of the matter is he was tortured, | 2:06:18 | |
he needs treatment. | 2:06:20 | |
Interviewer | And you had said something | 2:06:23 |
about his handwriting. You felt was interesting to you. | 2:06:26 | |
- | I just, what I meant was I can talk until I lose my voice | 2:06:29 |
about everything that happened to Ammar. | 2:06:37 | |
I can tell you how he's was walled. | 2:06:39 | |
I can try to demonstrate that for you. | 2:06:42 | |
I can talk about all the techniques. | 2:06:44 | |
I can describe to you the scenes in "Zero Dark Thirty," | 2:06:46 | |
that show for entertainment purposes, | 2:06:49 | |
the torture of my client. | 2:06:52 | |
It's like medieval bear baiting. | 2:06:55 | |
The fact that that has been made into popular entertainment. | 2:06:57 | |
I can do that. | 2:07:03 | |
But, I don't think it's anywhere near as effective, frankly, | 2:07:04 | |
as when you see it in his own words. | 2:07:09 | |
When you see, this is his handwriting. | 2:07:13 | |
This is what he has written down on a piece of paper, | 2:07:17 | |
laboring to write every single word of this | 2:07:20 | |
and to recall what happened to him. | 2:07:24 | |
You can see in his handwriting | 2:07:28 | |
and how cramped it is, how it's... | 2:07:31 | |
Some words are bigger than others. | 2:07:34 | |
You can see how it affected him | 2:07:37 | |
and the impact that it still has on him | 2:07:42 | |
to recall all of this. | 2:07:45 | |
Interviewer | (indistinct). | 2:07:49 |
- | And so, I can talk for hours about it | 2:07:55 |
but it's not nearly as effective as spending a minute | 2:07:59 | |
or two minutes just reading it in his own words. | 2:08:02 | |
Interviewer | Does he know you are showing this | 2:08:13 |
to the public? | 2:08:17 | |
And I guess he supports that. | 2:08:18 | |
- | He does. Everything that he shares with us, | 2:08:20 |
I get his permission | 2:08:24 | |
before we share it with the public, | 2:08:25 | |
because some of the details of what happened | 2:08:27 | |
are very private. | 2:08:30 | |
He has been very forthcoming with those details | 2:08:31 | |
but they are his, they are his memories, | 2:08:34 | |
his experiences to share or not. | 2:08:36 | |
And he is again, in the interest of getting better, | 2:08:39 | |
like getting the treatment he needs, | 2:08:43 | |
he is very supportive of any advocacy we can do | 2:08:45 | |
to get that for him. | 2:08:50 | |
Interviewer | Do you wanna show us the other writings | 2:08:52 |
again just so we can have that (indistinct)? | 2:08:54 | |
- | Of course. | 2:08:57 |
So, this is the one about prolonged restraining. | 2:08:58 | |
This is the one about how he was handcuffed | 2:09:04 | |
for 120 days straight. | 2:09:09 | |
And when he had to be moved from one black site to another, | 2:09:12 | |
they had to cut the handcuffs by bolt cutter | 2:09:15 | |
'cause they were so rusted | 2:09:19 | |
that they wouldn't open with keys. | 2:09:20 | |
And he actually goes on to talk about how, | 2:09:23 | |
because he had both his hands tied together, | 2:09:26 | |
he says during that time, half of my body, | 2:09:28 | |
either the left side or the right would go numb | 2:09:31 | |
because I couldn't move my arms away from each other. | 2:09:34 | |
Until this day, I'm suffering from this symptom | 2:09:38 | |
along with multiple neurological pains all over my body | 2:09:42 | |
as the handcuffs and restraints | 2:09:47 | |
are still being used on me daily. | 2:09:48 | |
And this is true. | 2:09:50 | |
He's still... | 2:09:51 | |
Interviewer | Why would they still be using them? | 2:09:52 |
- | Oh, at Guantanamo, anytime they're moved, | 2:09:54 |
they are handcuffed and restrained. | 2:09:57 | |
In the courtroom, when he sits in the courtroom with us, | 2:09:59 | |
he has a leg restraint on at all times. | 2:10:03 | |
Now, they have two guards for each detainee | 2:10:06 | |
standing right next to the table, | 2:10:09 | |
but he is restrained at all times. | 2:10:11 | |
And when we meet with him, he is restrained. | 2:10:14 | |
When they move them from wherever, | 2:10:17 | |
their cells or to the meeting rooms or to the courtroom, | 2:10:21 | |
they are handcuffed and restrained. | 2:10:24 | |
And I think there's some sensory deprivation as well. | 2:10:28 | |
Interviewer | Do they get any time to meet with other men | 2:10:32 |
in that facility? | 2:10:36 | |
- | Very seldom. | 2:10:38 |
Now, the conditions at Camp Seven, I believe, | 2:10:42 | |
and I don't know because I haven't been there, | 2:10:46 | |
but I believe them to have marginally improved | 2:10:48 | |
over a period of years, | 2:10:51 | |
but they are still in something very close | 2:10:54 | |
to solitary confinement. | 2:10:58 | |
The former special repertoire on torture Juan Mendez | 2:11:00 | |
defined solitary confinement is about 22 hours a day | 2:11:02 | |
without any other human contact really. | 2:11:06 | |
And these men have about 21 hours of solitary. | 2:11:09 | |
And they've been there for more than 10 years. | 2:11:12 | |
I believe they can occasionally kind of speak through | 2:11:16 | |
what they call the bean holes in their doors | 2:11:21 | |
with the other detainees. | 2:11:26 | |
And of course, when these five men come to court, | 2:11:27 | |
they are sitting in the courtroom together | 2:11:32 | |
and they can speak to each other at that point. | 2:11:34 | |
Interviewer | And you have one more? | 2:11:37 |
- | I do. This is the one where he talks about doctors, | 2:11:38 |
and it's actually called Doctors of the Dark Sites. | 2:11:47 | |
And this is the one where he starts off | 2:11:52 | |
talking about how all of the techniques were used together. | 2:11:53 | |
It was never just one. | 2:11:58 | |
It was always multiple techniques being used together. | 2:11:59 | |
And so, he describes all of the techniques. | 2:12:02 | |
"I wasn't just being suspended of the ceiling. | 2:12:05 | |
"I was naked, starved, dehydrated, cold, hooded, | 2:12:08 | |
"verbally threatened, in pain from the beating | 2:12:13 | |
"and water drowning as my head smashed | 2:12:18 | |
"by hitting against the wall for dozens and dozens of times. | 2:12:21 | |
"My ears were exploding from the blasting harsh music | 2:12:25 | |
"which is still stuck in my head, sleep-deprived for weeks. | 2:12:28 | |
"I was shaking and trembling. | 2:12:32 | |
"My legs barely supported my weight | 2:12:33 | |
"as my hands were pulled even higher above my head | 2:12:35 | |
"after I complained that the handcuffs were so tight | 2:12:38 | |
"as if cutting through my wrist. | 2:12:41 | |
"Then my legs start to swell as a result of long suspension, | 2:12:43 | |
"started screaming. | 2:12:48 | |
"And then the doctor comes, the doctor comes. | 2:12:50 | |
"The doctor came with a tape measure, | 2:12:53 | |
"wrapped it around my leg. | 2:12:56 | |
"And to my utmost shock, the doctor told the interrogators, | 2:12:57 | |
"No, that wasn't enough. | 2:13:01 | |
"My legs should get more swollen." | 2:13:03 | |
And he continues this, he's saying, | 2:13:06 | |
"Imagine the doctor tells the interrogators | 2:13:09 | |
"the leg wasn't swollen enough." | 2:13:11 | |
The medical doctor actually advocating for more torture. | 2:13:13 | |
And you can see in his language here | 2:13:16 | |
how he's getting more agitated. | 2:13:20 | |
"The medical doctor actually advocating for more torture. | 2:13:21 | |
"And this is what America came to. | 2:13:25 | |
"'Cause this doctor and other doctors are back home | 2:13:27 | |
"in America and they will be doing, | 2:13:30 | |
"the U.S. government train them to do. | 2:13:32 | |
"No doubt every now and then | 2:13:34 | |
they will miss long for their sadistic practice. | 2:13:35 | |
"And the American people may be the next victims." | 2:13:39 | |
I mean, logical conclusion. | 2:13:42 | |
And then here at the bottom, he just recalls | 2:13:47 | |
I think, oh yeah, he recalls he'd be checked out | 2:13:50 | |
by a doctor before he walked into each torture room. | 2:13:53 | |
The doctor would tell the interrogators | 2:13:57 | |
which methods they could use. | 2:13:59 | |
And then as he came out, the doctor would check him again | 2:14:00 | |
and then tell the interrogators | 2:14:05 | |
what else they could do in the next room. | 2:14:07 | |
Interviewer | Yeah. | 2:14:09 |
The doctor is actually making decisions. | 2:14:10 | |
Is that how you understand it? | 2:14:12 | |
- | Yes. | 2:14:14 |
I understand it as medical doctors who were on site | 2:14:17 | |
were making decisions about what techniques could be used, | 2:14:21 | |
how they could be combined | 2:14:25 | |
and really kind of horrifyingly how they could be combined | 2:14:27 | |
in order to get information from these men, right? | 2:14:35 | |
So, it's not just that there were doctors on site | 2:14:39 | |
to ensure that nothing happened. | 2:14:43 | |
It was not just that they were doctors in site | 2:14:47 | |
to check their pulse. | 2:14:49 | |
There were doctors on site to actively participate | 2:14:51 | |
in the torture of detainees. | 2:14:54 | |
Interviewer | One of the pieces that he wrote | 2:15:00 |
talked about how the irony of it being classified, | 2:15:02 | |
if it will be done by random people. | 2:15:08 | |
Could you talk to that? | 2:15:13 | |
- | Yeah. So, he's talked a lot about the classification | 2:15:15 |
of his memories and how even though these are his memories | 2:15:22 | |
or his experiences, | 2:15:30 | |
the government continues to classify them | 2:15:32 | |
and continues to prevent him | 2:15:34 | |
from being able to tell the world about them. | 2:15:37 | |
And he says that... | 2:15:39 | |
Interviewer | They were random. | 2:15:43 |
They were random and they wouldn't be classified. | 2:15:45 | |
- | Yeah. | 2:15:47 |
Well, he basically says like if this had happened to... | 2:15:50 | |
He makes the point often that if this had been other people, | 2:15:54 | |
right? | 2:15:58 | |
Anybody but these detainees, this is not classified. | 2:15:59 | |
Like since when, right? | 2:16:03 | |
I mean, you see police brutality | 2:16:05 | |
on a daily basis in our country, right? | 2:16:08 | |
I mean, arguably, that does not make the police look good | 2:16:11 | |
but people are not, I mean, it does happen | 2:16:13 | |
but people are not considered gagged | 2:16:17 | |
just because what they say may be contrary | 2:16:21 | |
to the government. | 2:16:25 | |
That's not a thing that happens. | 2:16:26 | |
It is not illegal, but by virtue of being him, | 2:16:28 | |
by virtue of being again, brown, non-citizen, Muslim, | 2:16:32 | |
detainee in the CIA system, | 2:16:38 | |
everything he says is classified. | 2:16:41 | |
Everything he thinks is classified. | 2:16:43 | |
Any Joe on the street, right? | 2:16:47 | |
Can talk about the CIA rendition program, | 2:16:50 | |
can look up what happened there, | 2:16:54 | |
who was reported to have been held there. | 2:16:58 | |
They can even look up all the public reports | 2:17:00 | |
about maybe where the black sites were. | 2:17:03 | |
Something that I can neither confirm nor deny, right? | 2:17:05 | |
As a government official. | 2:17:09 | |
But he can't, he can't talk about any of it. | 2:17:13 | |
And he's the one who it happened to. | 2:17:16 | |
James Mitchell, one of the psychologists, | 2:17:21 | |
one of the doctors who designed this program | 2:17:23 | |
can write a book giving out all sorts of details | 2:17:26 | |
that the government would classify | 2:17:31 | |
if they came from Ammar Al-Baluchi. | 2:17:34 | |
If Ammara Al-Baluchi wrote that book from his perspective, | 2:17:36 | |
we tried putting that through classification review, | 2:17:40 | |
that wouldn't see the light of day. | 2:17:42 | |
But because James Mitchell wrote it | 2:17:43 | |
and it makes the government look good, | 2:17:45 | |
made it past all the sensors. | 2:17:48 | |
He's on a book tour right now. | 2:17:49 | |
On top of the $40 million he got from the CIA, | 2:17:51 | |
he's now earning royalties from his book. | 2:17:53 | |
Interviewer | And if you told the stories | 2:17:57 |
that Ammar tells you, what would happen to him? | 2:17:59 | |
- | About? | 2:18:03 |
Interviewer | About his torture. | 2:18:05 |
- | Yeah. I try to tell these stories every chance I get. | 2:18:06 |
Interviewer | And some of them are classified | 2:18:11 |
you can't reveal them out. | 2:18:12 | |
- | Oh, some of them, I can't. | 2:18:13 |
Yeah, certainly the ones that Ammar... | 2:18:15 | |
The specifics that Ammar tells me | 2:18:18 | |
that have not specifically gone through | 2:18:20 | |
classification review, I can't share. | 2:18:22 | |
There are many details that I cannot share. | 2:18:26 | |
There are many details, | 2:18:30 | |
there actually comparatively very few things | 2:18:33 | |
that the government has given me that I can't share. | 2:18:36 | |
'Cause the government, | 2:18:39 | |
despite my security clearance | 2:18:40 | |
which I spent quite a lot of time getting | 2:18:42 | |
(Alka laughs) | 2:18:46 | |
and have strictly adhered to | 2:18:47 | |
because I'm not interested in undermining national security, | 2:18:50 | |
quite the opposite. | 2:18:53 | |
That's why I do this job. | 2:18:54 | |
They have given me relatively little classified information. | 2:18:56 | |
They don't trust me with it apparently. | 2:18:59 | |
But Ammar, anything he say, | 2:19:03 | |
just by virtue of being who he is, | 2:19:06 | |
everything he says is classified. | 2:19:07 | |
So, there is quite a bit that unfortunately, | 2:19:10 | |
I can't talk about that I would like to share about, | 2:19:13 | |
not just about the terrible things that happened to him, | 2:19:17 | |
but about him, about who he is as a human being, | 2:19:19 | |
but his interest about his views on things | 2:19:23 | |
that I would love to be able share. | 2:19:26 | |
But that I can't. | 2:19:27 | |
Interviewer | That's also classified. | 2:19:29 |
- | Yeah. It's everything out of his mouth. | 2:19:30 |
Everything that he writes down, | 2:19:32 | |
everything that comes out of his brain is classified | 2:19:33 | |
by the government until I get somebody with a rubber stamp | 2:19:36 | |
to stamp it and classify. | 2:19:43 | |
Interviewer | Well, I like to end with your big smile. | 2:19:47 |
(Alka and Interviewer laughs) | 2:19:48 | |
- | Because it's so ludicrous. | 2:19:51 |
Interviewer | (indistinct) what you're really feeling like | 2:19:54 |
with your anger. | 2:19:55 | |
- | That's one way to channel it. | 2:19:56 |
(Alka and Interviewer laughs) | 2:19:58 | |
- | Well, we need to take 20 seconds of room tone | 2:20:01 |
before we finally shut down. | 2:20:04 | |
So, (indistinct). | 2:20:05 | |
- | Okay. |
Item Info
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