Olshansky, Barbara - Interview master file
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Interviewer | We are very grateful to you | 0:05 |
for participating in the Witness to Guantanamo Project. | 0:08 | |
We invite you to speak of your experiences and involvement | 0:12 | |
with detainees and others involving Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. | 0:16 | |
We are hoping to provide you an opportunity | 0:21 | |
to tell you this story, in your own words. | 0:23 | |
We are creating an archive of stories of people in America | 0:26 | |
and around the world will have a better understanding | 0:30 | |
of what you've experienced over the years. | 0:32 | |
And future generations must know about Guantanamo. | 0:37 | |
And by telling you a story you're contributing to history. | 0:42 | |
So we're very grateful that you're tonight. | 0:45 | |
And if you'd like to take a break at any moment | 0:47 | |
please let us know. | 0:50 | |
And if you say something | 0:51 | |
and you would like us to remove it, we shall remove it | 0:53 | |
if you let us know at the end of the interview | 0:56 | |
and we'd like to begin by asking you to tell us your name | 0:59 | |
and a little bit background where you were born | 1:03 | |
and where you grew up and your education, and then your age | 1:06 | |
and then moving into your work. | 1:11 | |
- | Well, I should say first I'm grateful | 1:16 |
for this opportunity | 1:19 | |
I haven't really had this opportunity | 1:23 | |
to explain my experience on the record. | 1:25 | |
So my name is Barbara Olshansky. | 1:32 | |
I was born in Brooklyn, New York. | 1:37 | |
I was raised in the Syrian Jewish community in New York. | 1:41 | |
My mother's from was from Aleppo Syria. | 1:46 | |
I went to the Eastman school of music | 1:52 | |
and the University of Rochester as an undergraduate | 1:57 | |
and to Stanford Law School in California. | 2:00 | |
And most recently to Johns Hopkins School of Public Health | 2:04 | |
for a master's in public health, in humanitarian relief. | 2:09 | |
Interviewer | When were you born? | 2:15 |
- | I was born in New York Hospital in 1960, | 2:17 |
which makes me 105. | 2:23 | |
No, that's just how I feel, I'm 56. | 2:26 | |
Actually I feel a little bit younger these days | 2:31 | |
now that there's only 45 people left in Guantanamo. | 2:34 | |
With the fewer number. | 2:40 | |
I think I get younger. | 2:43 | |
It seems to work that way. | 2:45 | |
Interviewer | And after you graduated from Law School, | 2:47 |
just briefly what did you do | 2:50 | |
just a short period before Guantanamo? | 2:54 | |
- | I clerked for the Chief | 2:57 |
Justice of the California Supreme Court | 3:00 | |
quite an infamous judge. | 3:03 | |
Her name was Rose Elizabeth Bird, the most progressive judge | 3:08 | |
and the first woman judge on the court. | 3:12 | |
And I clerked with her until the end of her tenure. | 3:15 | |
When she wasn't reconfirmed by the voters | 3:18 | |
there was a big lobby by the insurance industry against her. | 3:23 | |
And then I went to a small law firm | 3:29 | |
where I represented blue collar unions. | 3:31 | |
And that was my first like practice job. | 3:35 | |
I did that for five years, then tried to bridge the gap | 3:40 | |
between occupational safety and environmental safety. | 3:46 | |
And I went to the Environmental Defense Fund | 3:49 | |
a nonprofit environmental advocacy group. | 3:52 | |
And I was there for about four years. | 3:56 | |
And then I went to the Center for Constitutional rights. | 3:59 | |
And that's where- | 4:03 | |
Interviewer | What year did you join them in? | 4:05 |
- | It was a very interesting beginning. | 4:14 |
It was in the fall of '96. | 4:17 | |
And I started along | 4:21 | |
with a good friend of mine, Norma Ramirez. | 4:24 | |
We started the day after William Kunstler died | 4:26 | |
and we hadn't heard the news | 4:31 | |
and we were standing outside pushing the buzzer | 4:33 | |
and no one was there | 4:37 | |
but we quickly found out | 4:40 | |
about the Memorial and our first day ended up | 4:42 | |
being this incredible Memorial service | 4:45 | |
honoring the life of William Kunstler. | 4:51 | |
So it was quite a way to start at CCR. | 4:53 | |
Interviewer | And where were you in 9/11? | 4:58 |
- | So at the time I lived on Avenue C in the East Village | 5:06 |
the Center for Constitutional Rights | 5:14 | |
is on Broadway at Bleaker. | 5:16 | |
So it's just directly straight across the East Village. | 5:19 | |
And I was with the man who would become my husband | 5:24 | |
who is now my ex, | 5:33 | |
but I think that day every minute | 5:34 | |
of it will be in my memory. | 5:42 | |
It was incredibly sunny, but also cold. | 5:44 | |
And we saw smoke on the way to work. | 5:47 | |
But we really didn't know what happened. | 5:57 | |
And I was supposed to be delivering employment | 6:00 | |
discrimination, papers down | 6:06 | |
to number seven World Trade Center. | 6:08 | |
And as I started walking down Broadway | 6:14 | |
we actually could see the second plane hit. | 6:18 | |
And we went and before the television stations went out | 6:22 | |
we heard some reports and then we just | 6:30 | |
my husband and I just took tables out of the building. | 6:36 | |
He had his office, he worked | 6:40 | |
at another NGO in the same building | 6:43 | |
and we took tables outside and water and paper towels. | 6:45 | |
And people started streaming up Broadway. | 6:52 | |
And we started offering people, water | 6:56 | |
use of our cell phones | 7:01 | |
and telling people what news we had heard | 7:03 | |
and then helping people as much as we can. | 7:10 | |
I didn't know, ironically or one man came up | 7:19 | |
whose eyes he was having tremendous trouble | 7:23 | |
with his eyes, but I guess because of ash | 7:28 | |
and I had eyedrops and I brought him in and cleaned his eyes | 7:31 | |
and I put in the eye drops and I did it a couple of rounds | 7:34 | |
and it turned out that he was the individual | 7:39 | |
that ended up being appointed to represent Jose Padilla. | 7:45 | |
And so that was one of my entrees into that world. | 7:56 | |
He called me cause he knew I was at the Center | 8:05 | |
for Constitutional Rights | 8:08 | |
and asked me to work on the case with him. | 8:09 | |
I hadn't known him before, but to him, I was | 8:13 | |
he couldn't remember my name, the girl who saved his eyes | 8:17 | |
he said, and he is eccentric. | 8:20 | |
Interviewer | Can we move into that? | 8:25 |
But just after that first day | 8:27 | |
when you save people and gave them water the next morning | 8:30 | |
were you back in business work | 8:35 | |
or when did it start where you started worrying | 8:37 | |
about people who might be arrested because of the? | 8:40 | |
- | It was the next day. | 8:43 |
Some of us went to work. | 8:51 | |
Some couldn't for the people | 8:52 | |
in our Boroughs couldn't come in. | 8:54 | |
And there was a cordon | 8:57 | |
that went across the city at 14th street. | 9:02 | |
And since I lived below 14th street, | 9:05 | |
I was free to move around there | 9:09 | |
and the phones were just ringing off the hook | 9:14 | |
and there were people calling and it was all women actually. | 9:21 | |
I don't remember a man calling. | 9:28 | |
And they were saying, | 9:30 | |
"They took my husband, my son, my uncle, | 9:32 | |
they took all of the male femme members of our family | 9:36 | |
that were eating at this restaurant." | 9:39 | |
And it was who took them? No names. | 9:42 | |
I said, "Any badges, any insignias, any letters?" | 9:46 | |
"No." And I said, "What did they tell you?" | 9:51 | |
"Agent Mike." | 9:53 | |
And that was when we knew | 9:55 | |
that people were being rounded up | 9:57 | |
and the phones were just running off the hook | 9:59 | |
and it just kept going like that. | 10:04 | |
And I had done some work on behalf of the Muslim community | 10:08 | |
in a discrimination case and working to get a Muslim | 10:15 | |
an Imam in the fire department. | 10:20 | |
And so a lot of people knew me | 10:24 | |
and people just started calling. | 10:28 | |
And as week went by, | 10:31 | |
I couldn't handle all those phone calls. | 10:40 | |
A lot of people spoke Arabic. | 10:42 | |
And I was the only one in my office that did. | 10:45 | |
So I called my mother and asked her to come down to help. | 10:48 | |
Interviewer | Where were the rest of the people at CCR? | 10:56 |
- | Some came into the office. | 11:00 |
Interviewer | Were they doing the same kind of work? | 11:01 |
- | Yeah, they were trying to | 11:03 |
but for people that didn't have much English | 11:05 | |
it was really very hard. | 11:08 | |
So most of those calls were routed eventually to my mom. | 11:11 | |
Interviewer | Who also spoke Arabic? | 11:15 |
- | Well, it was her first. | 11:18 |
It was her native tongue. | 11:20 | |
And till the day she passed away, | 11:21 | |
she would ask me, what did I hear about this woman | 11:27 | |
and her husband or this woman said she remembered all | 11:31 | |
of these people that she spoke with. | 11:34 | |
And it was actually the first time she said to me | 11:38 | |
"I understand now what you do." | 11:45 | |
She, wasn't very happy | 11:49 | |
with my choice of profession, mostly salary. | 11:50 | |
And I think that work with her made a difference. | 11:56 | |
- | So, you're telling us for history | 12:03 |
that the day after 9/11, | 12:05 | |
on 9/12 U.S. was already rounding up | 12:07 | |
Muslims in New York City? | 12:10 | |
- | Yeah. | 12:12 |
And there's a backstory to this | 12:13 | |
which is that Dick Cheney had been part | 12:20 | |
of a group much earlier in the early eighties. | 12:27 | |
That was very far to the right | 12:33 | |
much further than any Republicans in Congress. | 12:37 | |
And I believe it was called the New Century Foundation | 12:41 | |
or the, I think it was. | 12:48 | |
And they put out a series of white papers | 12:50 | |
and draft legislation that they wanted passed | 12:54 | |
to strengthen the military state. | 13:01 | |
None of those bills, very few ever made it to the floor. | 13:06 | |
None of them ever passed Congress, but they sat waiting. | 13:12 | |
And on October 26th, why do I remember that? | 13:18 | |
The day that the USA Patriot Act | 13:24 | |
was passed almost every one of those laws | 13:27 | |
and what were white papers turned into legislation. | 13:34 | |
We're part of that two foot high law | 13:38 | |
that was put on senators and congressmen desks. | 13:43 | |
And so already there was an idea | 13:49 | |
of what should be happening. | 13:56 | |
And the task force that became the joint terrorism | 13:58 | |
task force, the FBI, the CIA, the Department of Justice | 14:02 | |
and eventually the NSA even agencies | 14:09 | |
that were supposed to only look externally came together. | 14:13 | |
And so as very quickly, people were being rounded up. | 14:18 | |
And what was amazing to us is, | 14:26 | |
we we're taking the names down of all these men | 14:30 | |
and boys who are gone like just vanished in the middle | 14:33 | |
of the night in their underwear, in their pajamas. | 14:37 | |
I mean, they were just taken. | 14:39 | |
And so what could we do? | 14:41 | |
So we started with the local police precinct | 14:44 | |
then One Police Plaza, the police headquarters. | 14:47 | |
Then we went to the local FBI offices. | 14:51 | |
Nobody heard anything, nobody knew anything. | 14:55 | |
And then coincidentally, going | 14:58 | |
to the Metropolitan Detention Center | 15:02 | |
on another case for another man unrelated to this, he said | 15:05 | |
"They're bringing Arabs in here. | 15:11 | |
And I don't know who they are. | 15:14 | |
I don't know their names. | 15:16 | |
And they had hoods on them and, or they were bloody." | 15:18 | |
And so then we went | 15:24 | |
to the court to try and find out no magistrate | 15:28 | |
and no judge had any case listed on their docket. | 15:32 | |
There was nothing anywhere. | 15:36 | |
And it turns out of course, | 15:39 | |
that there was an order by John Ashcroft, | 15:41 | |
who was then Attorney General | 15:44 | |
that none of this should be listed. | 15:46 | |
It took us weeks and weeks to find | 15:49 | |
out where people were being held | 15:52 | |
and the scope of it across the country just | 15:53 | |
dawned on us as time went on. | 16:01 | |
And we were never able to find out how many people | 16:04 | |
the case went up in two different circuits | 16:14 | |
for us on the Freedom of Information Act. | 16:17 | |
And in one circuit in the sixth circuit, | 16:20 | |
Judge, Damon Keith wrote an incredible opinion | 16:24 | |
and said, "Yes you get to know this. | 16:26 | |
This is America." | 16:28 | |
And in the first circuit we lost | 16:30 | |
and the Supreme Court refused to take it. | 16:32 | |
And so we were never able to find | 16:37 | |
out how many we knew from our network | 16:40 | |
which was broadening on this issue with American Friends | 16:45 | |
Service Committee and groups like that. | 16:52 | |
And the Council on American Islamic Relations | 16:54 | |
and other groups that we knew | 16:58 | |
that there were at least 3000 people that were being held. | 17:00 | |
And at the same time, all political prisoners. | 17:03 | |
So people who are from like the Black Panther Party | 17:09 | |
who were in Angola, like Angola Three | 17:12 | |
they were all put on special lockdown, even | 17:16 | |
though many of them were in solitary confinement already | 17:19 | |
they no longer had privileges. | 17:24 | |
And that happened across the country to people | 17:25 | |
that were native American rights activists | 17:28 | |
that were in Federal prison, | 17:31 | |
like the Federal Bureau of Prisons, | 17:33 | |
the order came from Ashcroft, which we eventually saw. | 17:36 | |
And that case is gonna be argued tomorrow. | 17:39 | |
Nancy Chang and I brought that case. | 17:44 | |
John Ashcroft ordered them to lie to the lawyers. | 17:47 | |
And he said- | 17:53 | |
Interviewer | And what were they supposed to say? | 17:55 |
- | "This is a matter of national security. | 17:58 |
You are not allowed to divulge to anyone | 18:01 | |
who is in detention, | 18:04 | |
who is being held in any prison or jail in any | 18:07 | |
of the places that any of these people were." | 18:10 | |
And so it became this, what we used to | 18:12 | |
joke it was, the cocktail napkin way of finding | 18:20 | |
out who's in detention. | 18:24 | |
Somebody would say there's a guy Mohammed from Yemen | 18:27 | |
and that's how we started to know. | 18:34 | |
And the policy was called a hold until cleared policy. | 18:37 | |
And it meant no one was charged with any crime, | 18:42 | |
none of these people ever were not a single individual. | 18:48 | |
And they were supposed to prove themselves clean | 18:53 | |
of any affiliation with any terrorist group. | 19:00 | |
How do you prove a negative? | 19:04 | |
Interviewer | If CCR didn't exist | 19:07 |
was there alternatives at that time? | 19:12 | |
- | No. | 19:15 |
Interviewer | And if you weren't | 19:16 |
there were there alternatives? | 19:17 | |
- | Well, I mean, it wasn't just me. | 19:18 |
It was me and Nancy and Bill Goodman was a Legal Director. | 19:20 | |
Interviewer | But they knew you. | 19:22 |
- | Yes. | 19:25 |
Interviewer | So they wouldn't have know | 19:26 |
where to call if they didn't know you? | 19:27 | |
- | I don't know about the Arab American community | 19:31 |
who they would have called. | 19:33 | |
I know that I was trusted because of the cases that I did. | 19:36 | |
I don't know, actually | 19:51 | |
there are other political lawyers that have always been part | 19:52 | |
of the the satellite system of CCR. | 19:55 | |
Cooperating lawyers like Robert Boyle | 20:00 | |
and people who are just, and Michael Deutsch | 20:02 | |
from the People's Law Office in Chicago. | 20:05 | |
I like to think | 20:10 | |
that people would have found their way | 20:11 | |
to those folks eventually. | 20:13 | |
It was a lot of legwork and a lot of pushing people | 20:22 | |
and a lot of like, sort of playing characters. | 20:26 | |
Hi, I'm a college student doing survey. | 20:31 | |
I mean, just to find out who was where. | 20:34 | |
Interviewer | And running parallel to this was, | 20:40 |
I assume Guantanamo or something else, | 20:44 | |
because by December there were these other lawyers coming | 20:48 | |
to CCR to talk to them about that. | 20:52 | |
- | Well so during that first part in September and October | 20:54 |
where we're really working on this hold until cleared case | 21:06 | |
'cause people are vanishing right and left | 21:09 | |
and preparing the papers for that. | 21:14 | |
And then the USA Patriot Act comes out. | 21:17 | |
And then the presidential executive order | 21:23 | |
that created this fictional category of enemy combatants. | 21:29 | |
And that said that the vice-presidents has | 21:34 | |
the authority to hold people anywhere in the world | 21:37 | |
that he wishes basically without due process of law. | 21:40 | |
And that was one of the first little booklets | 21:45 | |
like pamphlets that I wrote was an analysis | 21:50 | |
of what that meant. | 21:52 | |
And fairly soon after we got a call at CCR from actually | 21:57 | |
two separate sets of foreign human rights lawyers | 22:08 | |
one was, I don't know if you've got | 22:12 | |
to meet her Gareth Pierce. | 22:15 | |
Interviewer | Yeah we got to meet her. | 22:16 |
- | Who was one of the dearest people in the world. | 22:18 |
And she called us on behalf of two British citizens. | 22:23 | |
Shafiq Rasul and Asif Iqbal. | 22:28 | |
And Steve, I guess you met Steve also from Australia. | 22:32 | |
And he called and said to me, | 22:40 | |
"There's some Australian that are gone too." | 22:44 | |
And we're hearing very strange things about where they are. | 22:48 | |
And so that was our first introduction to the fact | 22:52 | |
that people were being rounded up in a similar way | 23:01 | |
to what was happening domestically | 23:07 | |
outside the United States. | 23:08 | |
We didn't have all of the details about where people were | 23:10 | |
but we knew some about Shafiq and Asif we knew that | 23:15 | |
one of them was getting married | 23:24 | |
and he was going to his father's village. | 23:26 | |
And so to meet his bride-to-be and the family. | 23:28 | |
And so we had some sense | 23:32 | |
that things were not happening | 23:35 | |
the way they were being described to us. | 23:38 | |
And the first thing that we filed actually | 23:40 | |
was based on, well, there's an organization | 23:49 | |
that I won't name their name. | 23:58 | |
They're not illegal advocacy organization, | 24:01 | |
but we found out that people | 24:05 | |
were being held in Guantanamo, in dog cages | 24:11 | |
out in the sun, completely exposed to the elements. | 24:15 | |
And they were being bitten by rats and scorpions. | 24:22 | |
And they were not being fed. | 24:25 | |
They're being only given water. | 24:29 | |
And so one of the first pleadings | 24:31 | |
that we filed was before the Inter-American commission | 24:35 | |
which governs the Southern hemisphere | 24:39 | |
and we filed a pleading that said | 24:44 | |
you're holding people without due process. | 24:49 | |
This constitutes torture cruel | 24:55 | |
and inhuman and degrading treatment. | 24:58 | |
And of course there was no response from the United States. | 25:02 | |
And that was sort of the opening salvo. | 25:08 | |
What came next was our request | 25:16 | |
for what are called article five battlefield hearings. | 25:21 | |
And this is a part of the story | 25:26 | |
that people don't really know. | 25:28 | |
I think many people think the Center | 25:29 | |
for Constitutional Rights just barged in | 25:33 | |
and decided to represent people in Guantanamo. | 25:35 | |
But actually what we did is they, | 25:39 | |
they had started a war and we said | 25:43 | |
"If you're detaining people, then you have to | 25:46 | |
have an article five hearing under the Geneva Conventions" | 25:50 | |
which we had done it with in every war | 25:53 | |
even the Kuwait situation we had done it. | 25:57 | |
And all you do is you have soldiers ask whether | 26:03 | |
are you a civilian or a soldier and make that assessment. | 26:07 | |
And if you're a civilian to go home, | 26:11 | |
and if you're a soldier, you're a prisoner of war | 26:13 | |
and that wasn't happening. | 26:15 | |
Interviewer | How did you know that wasn't happening? | 26:20 |
- | We knew from talking to reporters | 26:24 |
who were on the ground, | 26:32 | |
eventually we developed a very good relationship | 26:36 | |
with a lot of the African reporters. | 26:39 | |
And so we knew that | 26:45 | |
that wasn't happening and very soon after | 26:47 | |
George Bush announced that the people who are being sent | 26:53 | |
to Guantanamo were in a legal black hole | 26:58 | |
that no law at all applied to them. | 27:03 | |
And then we knew, | 27:07 | |
he tossed the Geneva Conventions out the window | 27:10 | |
and then we were, "Oh, no, okay, now we're here. | 27:15 | |
So what do we do?" | 27:24 | |
And internally at CCR, it was a rough time. | 27:28 | |
There weren't very many of us | 27:36 | |
there's many more now than there were then | 27:39 | |
but we were split and it was hard. | 27:43 | |
It was a number of days | 27:45 | |
and probably just three or something, but it felt | 27:47 | |
like forever that we were trying to figure | 27:50 | |
out what do we bring this suit | 27:54 | |
a Federal lawsuit on their behalf or not. | 27:58 | |
And CCR has always been different | 28:02 | |
from the American Civil Liberties Union. | 28:11 | |
CCR's mission has been to work for oppressed peoples | 28:17 | |
and people whose politics align with ours. | 28:22 | |
And we align with theirs. | 28:26 | |
But here we have a president saying, | 28:29 | |
"These are the worst of the worst." | 28:31 | |
And we didn't know who these people were. | 28:33 | |
We didn't really know. | 28:34 | |
But then on the other side was this idea | 28:41 | |
that you're putting, we are creating a black hole | 28:44 | |
where we're putting people | 28:50 | |
where anything can be done to them | 28:51 | |
and no one can watch. | 28:53 | |
And in the end that argument won out. And- | 28:56 | |
Interviewer | Can I interrupt for a moment? | 29:02 |
Were people afraid of being unpatriotic? | 29:05 | |
Is that why they wouldn't take these cases? | 29:07 | |
Or did they not want to represent these worst | 29:09 | |
of the worst foreigners? | 29:12 | |
Or what was it that caused a split? | 29:14 | |
- | I think there was | 29:17 |
the news was overwhelming about, I mean, | 29:26 | |
it was so close to the attacks | 29:32 | |
the fires are still burning | 29:37 | |
at the World Trade Center | 29:38 | |
and everyone is repeating what the president is saying | 29:43 | |
that these are the worst of the worst. | 29:50 | |
Is that who we want to represent? | 29:52 | |
That was really the other side. | 29:58 | |
I think we don't know who they are. | 30:00 | |
And what will it do? | 30:08 | |
How can we do this case just us? | 30:12 | |
I mean, literally there's like seven people sitting | 30:16 | |
in a room and when we decided to do it | 30:19 | |
some of us went to our friends at other organizations. | 30:31 | |
I went to two friends of mine at the ACLU and I said | 30:36 | |
"We are gonna need your help. | 30:41 | |
The scope of this is too large," and they couldn't do it. | 30:44 | |
They weren't allowed to do it. | 30:55 | |
And it was the same, pretty much everywhere. | 30:57 | |
Interviewer | Why do you think? | 31:01 |
- | The answer was that it was too hot. | 31:05 |
It was too politically hot | 31:08 | |
for them to take it on. | 31:16 | |
And I guess still be funded, | 31:18 | |
and CCR had been funded by the very old left | 31:23 | |
for a long time, to the extent that they were still alive. | 31:26 | |
I think it was partly, | 31:31 | |
we had a sense that we would be supported. | 31:35 | |
And we were also led by people like Michael Ratner | 31:37 | |
and Jules Lobel and people who had been fighting | 31:44 | |
for political prisoners, their whole lives | 31:49 | |
and for whom backing down, wasn't an option. | 31:52 | |
And so it became us that that filed the case. | 31:58 | |
Interviewer | Can I ask, what you were thinking? | 32:07 |
I mean, what was going on in your head | 32:10 | |
and in the energy around you, | 32:12 | |
because did you believe in your heart | 32:14 | |
that America had in a sense turned overnight | 32:17 | |
that now it was taking people | 32:21 | |
and putting them in a black hole? | 32:24 | |
what were you thinking about? | 32:27 | |
- | I think when I first started hearing | 32:33 |
that people were being taken away | 32:35 | |
in the middle of the night | 32:37 | |
and that the people weren't told | 32:39 | |
which agency was taking them | 32:42 | |
or the name of the agent | 32:44 | |
or officer that had arrested their husband | 32:46 | |
or uncle or grandfather, | 32:48 | |
and that no one was telling us where people were. | 32:55 | |
I think that was when I started thinking, | 32:59 | |
well this is not okay. | 33:01 | |
And like, there's things that are going on. | 33:06 | |
And why is there no listing on any court's calendar? | 33:08 | |
Like what is this? | 33:14 | |
And, then when the presidential executive order came out | 33:17 | |
I guess I spent a few days | 33:26 | |
before I wrote that book, "Secret Trials and Executions." | 33:28 | |
And it took me a while to absorb like | 33:34 | |
what the language meant. | 33:37 | |
And it was just a sentence, but it was so broad | 33:38 | |
and it was so clear | 33:47 | |
that it meant the authorization of disappearing people. | 33:49 | |
That by the time we decided | 33:55 | |
to file the Guantanamo challenge | 33:58 | |
It seemed like maybe even we weren't doing enough | 34:04 | |
because even in our papers, in the Federal court | 34:07 | |
we were just saying, "Give them a battlefield hearing." | 34:11 | |
We weren't saying "You're lying to the whole world." | 34:14 | |
We were saying "If this was a war, | 34:19 | |
give them a battlefield hearing." | 34:20 | |
And so I don't think the full impact of that hit me. | 34:22 | |
It didn't take long for it to hit me. | 34:33 | |
One of the first meetings we had was at NYU Law School | 34:37 | |
and Joe Margulies was there and Michael Ratner, | 34:42 | |
and also there were all of five people, I guess | 34:54 | |
included one woman and four guys who were from the judge | 35:06 | |
advocate General's office from each | 35:11 | |
of the different armed forces. | 35:13 | |
And these are people who basically gave up | 35:14 | |
their military career and volunteer | 35:17 | |
to represent people in Guantanamo. | 35:19 | |
But for us especially for me to walk | 35:23 | |
into a room where everyone's in uniform, it was like, whoa. | 35:26 | |
But before that we're walking across | 35:31 | |
the park into NYU and the signs outside | 35:39 | |
say "Terrorists Lawyer Meeting." | 35:44 | |
And there's like an arrow | 35:48 | |
and Michael and I both stand back | 35:49 | |
and it's like so now they've named us. | 35:55 | |
Interviewer | Who wrote that? | 35:58 |
- | Whoever. | 36:00 |
Interviewer | At NYU? | 36:01 |
- | And so every few steps | 36:04 |
was another sign that said that. | 36:07 | |
And I thought, well, now we're there. | 36:08 | |
And that was when I think I realized, | 36:15 | |
I'm the terrorist's lawyer. | 36:18 | |
Interviewer | Did you get any death threats or? You did. | 36:20 |
- | Many. | 36:25 |
Interviewer | And why and when? | 36:26 |
- | Well, there were reporters who sit | 36:30 |
at the Federal courts to watch every pleading. | 36:37 | |
So it didn't take long after we filed | 36:40 | |
for people to see our names, Michael Ratner, mine | 36:41 | |
and Stephen Watt, and the Center for Constitutional Rights. | 36:46 | |
And it has our phone number. | 36:48 | |
And then we're in the New York Times. | 36:53 | |
And the press was wow, it was overwhelming. | 36:58 | |
The press was overwhelming | 37:05 | |
for seven years that I did that work. | 37:06 | |
And People knew our address. | 37:12 | |
It was on the pleadings and people followed me home. | 37:18 | |
I remember looking out the window of another apartment | 37:27 | |
and seeing men in brown shirts with baseball bats | 37:31 | |
like lined up across the street | 37:36 | |
and going out the fire escape | 37:38 | |
in the back to go to work the next day. | 37:41 | |
People left voicemails that said | 37:46 | |
"I know where your office is. | 37:50 | |
Eighth floor, third window from the corner." | 37:52 | |
Lots of hate mail. Hate email. | 37:57 | |
Interviewer | How do you, I mean, this is important | 38:02 |
because we haven't heard this from heard some of this | 38:05 | |
but not to the extent you had describing, | 38:07 | |
I know I said this before | 38:12 | |
but it's important what was going on? | 38:13 | |
I mean, you went to withstand all of this. | 38:16 | |
What inspired you to stand up to all of this? | 38:18 | |
- | The idea that this country | 38:35 |
which was a political refuge for my family. | 38:43 | |
Would do these kinds of things to people. | 38:53 | |
I don't know to say just wasn't okay. | 39:07 | |
And you know what, I was very lucky to be | 39:14 | |
in a place where we all felt the same way | 39:17 | |
and where we had a strong leader. | 39:21 | |
It was an incredibly difficult time. | 39:30 | |
A lot of it was a blur. | 39:41 | |
Sometimes Michael Ratner would laugh at the death threats | 39:43 | |
because he'd spent his whole, | 39:45 | |
he's 25 years older than me, and he'd spent his whole life | 39:50 | |
having that happen for one struggle or another. | 39:55 | |
But I wasn't used to it. | 40:00 | |
And for one reason or another, Michael made me | 40:03 | |
the upfront spokesperson for a lot of it. | 40:11 | |
And so my face was out there | 40:14 | |
And it was always a toss up | 40:21 | |
when I would go to give a talk somewhere | 40:26 | |
about whether like people would throw things | 40:30 | |
at me in the audience, | 40:33 | |
or whether there would be people who would applaud | 40:34 | |
that the effort at maintaining the rule of law in that time | 40:40 | |
until we won the Rasul's case, Sahfiq's case | 40:49 | |
was an incredibly difficult time. | 40:56 | |
And I just remember one night, | 41:03 | |
we did a lot of know your rights work in mosques | 41:09 | |
around New York city and Bill Goodman | 41:13 | |
and Stephen Watt would go into the men's portion. | 41:17 | |
And I would go into the women's | 41:21 | |
and we would give these talks. | 41:22 | |
And one night it was actually a while | 41:24 | |
after we finished, we had gone to get something to eat. | 41:29 | |
And we were, I guess, just walking back down | 41:32 | |
from like Ninth Street or something in the East village. | 41:39 | |
And there were all these men with baseball bats and knives | 41:42 | |
that were headed towards the Masjid | 41:49 | |
like the school on the corner. | 41:52 | |
And I remember thinking, | 41:55 | |
we don't have anything, call the police | 42:00 | |
but who knows how soon they're gonna get in. | 42:05 | |
And all of a sudden, somebody just yelled "Make a chain." | 42:08 | |
And we made a human chain | 42:13 | |
like that went around the Masjid, and eventually they left. | 42:15 | |
And I just remember thinking, | 42:23 | |
how safe is anyone who's an Arab or Muslim? | 42:27 | |
And that was very worrying to us also, like | 42:32 | |
what was this gonna look | 42:37 | |
like here in addition to what was happening out there? | 42:39 | |
And it was a very intense time. | 42:43 | |
Interviewer | Were you surprised | 42:49 |
when the U.S. Supreme Court granted sit on Rasul | 42:51 | |
and leading up to that did you think that it could happen? | 42:54 | |
- | We didn't think that, we lost really badly | 42:58 |
in the courts below really badly. | 43:02 | |
Like, you can't lose worse than we lost, | 43:04 | |
like if they could have kicked us | 43:07 | |
out of the court house, they probably would have | 43:08 | |
we didn't think the Supreme Court would take the case. | 43:13 | |
And once it took the case | 43:18 | |
we certainly didn't think that we would win. | 43:19 | |
It was like this incredibly arduous effort | 43:25 | |
like writing the briefs | 43:29 | |
everyone having like different things | 43:31 | |
they wanted to change each little nuance, | 43:35 | |
it was gonna make a difference. | 43:38 | |
And then the question was, who's gonna argue? | 43:41 | |
And it was pretty clear that it couldn't be, | 43:45 | |
this radical lawyer | 43:51 | |
from the Center for Constitutional Rights | 43:53 | |
that was not gonna be in our client's interest. | 43:54 | |
And that's when I asked Judge John Gibbons, | 43:59 | |
if he would do it. | 44:04 | |
Interview | Did all of you finally agree on the briefs or? | 44:06 |
- | Yeah, I mean it was like this very arduous effort. | 44:10 |
But we did. | 44:17 | |
Interviewer | And were you afraid , | 44:18 |
if you thought you won't get a ruling | 44:20 | |
were you afraid that further court | 44:21 | |
bad law would result in this could make things worse, or? | 44:24 | |
- | I think, we didn't let ourselves | 44:29 |
think about what the worst case scenario would be. | 44:32 | |
The decision of the Fourth Circuit | 44:41 | |
which is what went up to the Supreme Court | 44:43 | |
was already bad enough. | 44:46 | |
I mean, cementing in anything that they wanted it to. | 44:49 | |
And so we didn't really think about it. | 44:55 | |
And it was a number of weeks where there | 45:01 | |
one of the reporters whose beat was the Supreme Court, | 45:09 | |
he would say, "They're in conference now, in your case | 45:12 | |
I know that there's gonna be decision on Friday," | 45:15 | |
and Friday would come and go. | 45:17 | |
And there was no decision. | 45:18 | |
And it happened like probably four times. | 45:19 | |
And like maybe three, and on the fourth time, | 45:21 | |
and I was like, "Bob, I'm really tired. | 45:26 | |
Like, don't I know they didn't decide. | 45:28 | |
He goes, "Well, they did." | 45:31 | |
And just the way he said, "Well, they did." | 45:34 | |
And I thought, okay, we lost. | 45:36 | |
And, he goes, "Are you sitting down?'" | 45:40 | |
And I remember saying, | 45:44 | |
"Yeah I'm sitting down in my office, I'm sitting down." | 45:46 | |
And I said, is it that bad?" | 45:48 | |
He said, "No, no, no, it's that good. | 45:50 | |
And I fainted. | 45:55 | |
I just dropped the phone and fell off the chair. | 45:58 | |
And, then he's like yelling | 46:03 | |
and I'm like, "Yes, I'm here." | 46:04 | |
And I don't think I, we couldn't really absorb it. | 46:06 | |
He faxed the opinion to us | 46:14 | |
and I think we just thought, habeas Corpus | 46:16 | |
like the writ of habeas Corpus is going | 46:24 | |
to those people in Guantanamo, | 46:26 | |
and we weren't thinking logistics or anything. | 46:29 | |
We were just amazed. | 46:34 | |
And I think we all went out to celebrate. | 46:37 | |
And then the next morning I came | 46:42 | |
into work and my voicemail had crashed. | 46:43 | |
And the voicemail CCR at that time took 40 messages. | 46:47 | |
And I was like, "What is this?" | 46:53 | |
I was like, "What?" | 46:54 | |
And when they rewound the tape and we like, could listen | 46:55 | |
to the voicemail messages, it was all these people | 47:01 | |
from all these law firms that were volunteering | 47:06 | |
to represent people in Guantanamo pro bono. | 47:12 | |
And I was amazed, they were people who were | 47:16 | |
from these white shoe wall street, law firms, | 47:23 | |
and they weren't just anybody. | 47:27 | |
They were the managing partners. | 47:28 | |
And there were people that I had litigated against | 47:30 | |
in employment discrimination cases and race discrimination. | 47:32 | |
And they're calling me and asking me if they can volunteer. | 47:36 | |
And I just was floored. | 47:42 | |
And in a way that was like, incredibly | 47:47 | |
I don't know what to say like, sort of uplifting. | 47:57 | |
There's people out there who understand | 48:01 | |
and who are willing to work on it. | 48:05 | |
And that was quite an amazing beginning. | 48:11 | |
Interviewer | But they weren't there until | 48:17 |
Supreme Court decided the case or the day before. | 48:19 | |
- | Once the decision came down | 48:23 |
and the court said, it's about the rule of law | 48:24 | |
and yes then it was the day after. | 48:28 | |
After it was announced, yes. | 48:31 | |
But even so they didn't know | 48:34 | |
who these people were and you still had that repetition | 48:37 | |
of the worst of the worst. | 48:43 | |
And yet they were stepping out. | 48:46 | |
And I do have to say that, that part of the story | 48:51 | |
that I think is amazing is that, | 48:56 | |
those law firms and those men, they fought, | 49:04 | |
and continue to fight. | 49:12 | |
And they spent millions of dollars. | 49:14 | |
Some of those law firms, | 49:18 | |
millions defending people in Guantanamo, | 49:20 | |
sending investigators to Afghanistan, | 49:22 | |
going to Afghanistan, themselves, going to meet | 49:25 | |
with family members and doing everything they could. | 49:28 | |
And that to me was an amazing testament | 49:38 | |
to who Americans could be. | 49:43 | |
Well in the end it was a good thing | 49:55 | |
that it was a few weeks | 49:57 | |
before our first meeting with anyone. | 49:59 | |
Maybe it was actually a few months | 50:03 | |
because my hair was magenta and I had a nose ring. | 50:06 | |
And I didn't think anyone would listen | 50:10 | |
to me if they saw what I looked like, | 50:12 | |
and plus I was 30 years younger | 50:15 | |
than everyone else who was volunteering | 50:17 | |
Interviewer | So CCR then decided | 50:24 |
they would become a clearing house. | 50:25 | |
They hadn't thought of that though | 50:27 | |
until the blowout of phone calls? | 50:28 | |
- | We didn't and it was an incredible effort. | 50:31 |
Because these partners were tax lawyers, bankruptcy lawyers. | 50:38 | |
They did mergers and acquisitions. | 50:44 | |
They were not human rights lawyers | 50:47 | |
although to a person | 50:49 | |
they will call themselves human rights lawyers today | 50:52 | |
which is to me an amazing thing. | 50:55 | |
But they didn't know anything. | 50:59 | |
They didn't know what the Geneva Convention said. | 51:02 | |
They didn't even know what | 51:06 | |
like the writ of habeas Corpus was. | 51:07 | |
I mean, this is not part of their life | 51:09 | |
and they hadn't ever been none of them. | 51:12 | |
I can't remember a single one having ever been | 51:19 | |
inside a federal prison, | 51:22 | |
no less, a super maximum correction facility | 51:26 | |
and Guantanamo was, | 51:30 | |
well the newer parts are better than that. | 51:37 | |
But in the beginning | 51:42 | |
what these men saw was not | 51:44 | |
like anything they could have imagined | 51:47 | |
that their country would do. | 51:49 | |
And so, I spent a lot of time, we created these | 51:51 | |
like short courses for them, like a crash course | 52:00 | |
in international humanitarian law, | 52:04 | |
teaching them the Geneva Conventions | 52:07 | |
and in habeas corpus | 52:09 | |
what the human rights protections are | 52:14 | |
what the human rights treaty say | 52:17 | |
how they're enforceable or not, | 52:20 | |
that issue of the enforceability of foreign treaties | 52:23 | |
in U.S.courts is still being played out now. | 52:27 | |
And so this is something | 52:31 | |
that they all had to go through | 52:35 | |
and then I decided we needed help | 52:41 | |
so that when they met their clients | 52:44 | |
they would be able to recognize | 52:47 | |
and understand what was happening | 52:51 | |
for them emotionally and psychologically. | 52:53 | |
And I invited some people | 52:57 | |
from the Bellevue Center for Survivors of Torture | 53:02 | |
to come and be part of the training. | 53:05 | |
And even so when people returned from Guantanamo | 53:09 | |
I sort of was the the shrink that when people called | 53:15 | |
and sometimes they just needed to talk about what they saw. | 53:20 | |
It was very, I think jarring startling | 53:27 | |
for a lot of these men in the beginning | 53:34 | |
it was mostly the managing partners. | 53:38 | |
And it was- | 53:40 | |
Interviewer | When did you first know or have an inkling | 53:41 |
that there was torture in Guantanamo | 53:44 | |
or that the men were mistreated? | 53:46 | |
Did you have? | 53:48 | |
- | It was when we first heard about dog cages | 53:53 |
and we knew that the most basic things | 54:01 | |
that you give to prisoners of war weren't being provided | 54:06 | |
and that they were receiving medical treatment | 54:10 | |
for rat bites and scorpion bites and things like that. | 54:13 | |
And we knew it was bad. | 54:16 | |
How much worse it became we learned incrementally over time | 54:23 | |
Interviewer | From detainees who were released? | 54:33 |
- | No, well, from detainees | 54:36 |
who in their meetings with their attorneys | 54:40 | |
Could sort of intimate a little bit | 54:46 | |
about what was happening for them. | 54:49 | |
They were all of these meetings | 54:51 | |
weren't supposed to be monitored, but they were. | 54:53 | |
And all of our thoughts and everything | 54:56 | |
that occurred we were supposed to reduce to writing | 54:59 | |
which then went through a court security clearance office | 55:03 | |
in Crystal City, in the Pentagon. | 55:06 | |
And so everything got redacted that they didn't want out. | 55:09 | |
And we all signed these protective orders | 55:14 | |
like we signed our life away. | 55:18 | |
And so it was how much can we put in the papers? | 55:23 | |
How much can we say? | 55:29 | |
And there were also people Naval officers | 55:37 | |
in Guantanamo who couldn't bear to be a part | 55:46 | |
of what they were witnessing, who would I assume go home | 55:51 | |
or somewhere on leave and call me from a payphone. | 55:56 | |
I never knew their names. | 56:02 | |
I never asked their names. | 56:03 | |
I had a friend in the Pentagon | 56:06 | |
I would ask for their number | 56:08 | |
their dog tag number and say, | 56:12 | |
"I just wanna know if this is a valid number, that's it." | 56:15 | |
And friend that's all she would do. | 56:18 | |
And so I would know that was a person. | 56:22 | |
Interviewer | What would they call you about? | 56:26 |
- | They would call about people being chained | 56:35 |
to the ceiling with their feet off the floor for days. | 56:40 | |
They would talk about people being chained hands to foot | 56:49 | |
to a stud in the floor | 56:54 | |
in like roasting heat and tearing their hair out. | 56:58 | |
The most memorable of these phone calls | 57:04 | |
came when it's actually sort of half a funny story. | 57:07 | |
I never know whether it's okay | 57:13 | |
to laugh about Guantanamo or not. | 57:15 | |
But I was the way that we arrange representation is | 57:17 | |
that law firms were given detainees from one country | 57:26 | |
so that if they could make their trips | 57:34 | |
to families and they would go to one country. | 57:36 | |
And if there was many people | 57:40 | |
from that country, like from Yemen | 57:41 | |
then it would be two or three law firms working together. | 57:43 | |
And during all this time | 57:48 | |
we never got the list | 57:51 | |
of who was in Guantanamo or where they were from. | 57:52 | |
So in order to file, we won the right to file a habeas | 57:55 | |
but we couldn't talk to anyone in Guantanamo. | 58:00 | |
We had to get a next friend | 58:04 | |
a family member to authorize us to bring a habeas petition | 58:07 | |
on behalf of the person that they thought was in Guantanamo. | 58:11 | |
And so I was working on a case, | 58:17 | |
because I did the templates for all of the pleadings | 58:27 | |
my name was like in 800 cases or something. | 58:31 | |
Anyway I was working on half of the Uyghurs | 58:34 | |
who are Chinese Muslims | 58:38 | |
from the far Western province in China | 58:41 | |
with this very funny man named | 58:43 | |
from McCutchen Doyle, named Sabin Willett | 58:47 | |
who was a bankruptcy lawyer, his whole life. | 58:52 | |
And he wrote mystery novels on the side. | 58:54 | |
And it was just a very funny man | 58:56 | |
and Sabin never could quite sit still enough | 58:58 | |
to go through the training session. | 59:04 | |
But I had received a phone call from someone | 59:07 | |
on the Naval base in Guantanamo that said that | 59:13 | |
that the Uyghurs and of course, | 59:21 | |
we didn't know how many there were at that point | 59:25 | |
but that the Uyghurs were arrested mistakenly | 59:27 | |
by the military that it had been, the Department | 59:31 | |
of Defense had acknowledged that it was a mistake. | 59:34 | |
And they had been trying to find a place to send them | 59:37 | |
because they couldn't go back to China | 59:41 | |
because their status as practicing muslims | 59:45 | |
made them in trouble in China. | 59:50 | |
And so he said, so, | 59:53 | |
"They're trying to find other places for them to go." | 59:58 | |
And I said "They're innocent. | 1:00:01 | |
You just told me that they're innocent." | 1:00:04 | |
And he said, "They weren't supposed to be picked up | 1:00:06 | |
but they were on some trip, | 1:00:09 | |
visiting some cultural site." | 1:00:11 | |
And I just was okay, so the next, so I call Sabin and I say | 1:00:13 | |
"We have to go to court like right away." | 1:00:18 | |
And he like flies down from Boston. | 1:00:20 | |
And the next morning we're in court. | 1:00:22 | |
And we filed the papers | 1:00:27 | |
and the judges that hasn't even had a chance to read them. | 1:00:32 | |
And he says, "So what's going on?" | 1:00:35 | |
And Sabin is like he disrupts me up front. | 1:00:39 | |
And I say, "Your honor | 1:00:41 | |
that we have good information that our clients | 1:00:42 | |
the Uyghurs are innocent. | 1:00:51 | |
And the Department of Defense has found that | 1:00:53 | |
and that they are currently | 1:00:55 | |
in the process of trying to find a place for them. | 1:00:57 | |
And they have to be released if there's no basis | 1:01:01 | |
for their detention, they have to be released." | 1:01:05 | |
And I will never forget turning to my counterpart | 1:01:07 | |
from the Department of Justice | 1:01:14 | |
the Senior Trial Attorney Terry Henry, | 1:01:15 | |
and the judge saying, "Mr. Henry," | 1:01:19 | |
and trying to say, "Well, your Honor," | 1:01:21 | |
and then he talks to his co-counsel and he goes, | 1:01:27 | |
"Well your honor, I have a little bit of an..." | 1:01:29 | |
and I did something that is completely out of decorum. | 1:01:32 | |
Like you're never supposed to do this. | 1:01:35 | |
And I just turned to him and I said, | 1:01:37 | |
"Terry Henry you better tell the truth right now." | 1:01:39 | |
And the judge like got really mad at me | 1:01:43 | |
and he called us all into his chambers | 1:01:46 | |
and he actually slammed his desk. | 1:01:48 | |
And he said, "Mr. Henry, I just want an answer. | 1:01:51 | |
Yes or no?" | 1:01:56 | |
And he said, "Yes." | 1:01:58 | |
And then he said, "Now you're gonna be back here tomorrow. | 1:02:01 | |
And you're gonna tell me what countries | 1:02:03 | |
the Department of Defense has approached." | 1:02:05 | |
And of course they hadn't approached anyone. | 1:02:08 | |
And then we were sort of like off to the races. | 1:02:10 | |
And the next thing I knew was I was | 1:02:17 | |
on a plane to Geneva where I hadn't really ever lobbied | 1:02:19 | |
before the United Nations. | 1:02:25 | |
And what I was doing was knocking literally knocking | 1:02:27 | |
on the doors of the permanent missions to the United nations | 1:02:29 | |
of countries that I thought might be willing to take them | 1:02:34 | |
because they were innocent. | 1:02:37 | |
And so I went first to Sweden. | 1:02:39 | |
I don't know, like I just thought Sweden will help. | 1:02:41 | |
And I got the door slammed in my face | 1:02:44 | |
and then I went to the UN High Commission | 1:02:51 | |
for Refugees and thinking that they could help. | 1:02:54 | |
And there was a Frenchman who was very high up and he, | 1:02:58 | |
I don't wanna swear, but he said, | 1:03:06 | |
"Why the hell should we help you? | 1:03:09 | |
This is your mess. | 1:03:12 | |
It's your country. | 1:03:14 | |
You fix it." | 1:03:15 | |
And I didn't know what to say. | 1:03:16 | |
And the lunch ended. | 1:03:20 | |
Then I went back the next day and I said, | 1:03:21 | |
"I'd like you to take you to lunch again." | 1:03:22 | |
And then he said something equally gruff. | 1:03:25 | |
And I was crying into my salad literally. | 1:03:29 | |
And then he said, "Oh, don't cry. | 1:03:32 | |
Can't bear it when women cry." | 1:03:33 | |
And, then he proceeded to help me find countries | 1:03:37 | |
that he thought might be immunable, | 1:03:43 | |
since the Department of Defense would say they | 1:03:47 | |
were innocent, except they would never say that. | 1:03:51 | |
They would say, they're no longer an enemy combatant | 1:03:54 | |
or they're not an enemy combatant. | 1:03:58 | |
They wouldn't say "We made a mistake | 1:04:00 | |
picking up sightseers in Pakistan." | 1:04:02 | |
They didn't say that. | 1:04:04 | |
Interviewer | And they didn't help you find a country? | 1:04:05 |
You had to do it 'cause later on | 1:04:08 | |
they did have ambassadors. | 1:04:11 | |
But at that point it was you, who was doing that. | 1:04:13 | |
- | Yeah, it was. | 1:04:15 |
And it was just crazy. | 1:04:16 | |
I mean, when I think of it now, I think what kind | 1:04:18 | |
of nut was I knocking on the doors | 1:04:21 | |
of all these different embassies, | 1:04:24 | |
but no there wasn't. | 1:04:28 | |
And what we were finding, as time went on is that, | 1:04:29 | |
there were these kind of trumped up hearings | 1:04:40 | |
that they were holding on Guantanamo. | 1:04:42 | |
And even in those, it became clear | 1:04:44 | |
that they didn't have anything on people | 1:04:46 | |
that they rounded up people. | 1:04:50 | |
And I think we started finding out more | 1:04:53 | |
from people after we learned about | 1:05:04 | |
Camp Iguana for the children. | 1:05:10 | |
And that I think, interestingly, even though I told it | 1:05:17 | |
to the New York Times, they didn't print it. | 1:05:22 | |
It was Vikram Seth from the UK Guardian | 1:05:25 | |
that printed the story about how they were | 1:05:30 | |
children as young as four in Camp Iguana. | 1:05:35 | |
Interviewer | Four? | 1:05:37 |
How did the four year olds get to (indistinct). | 1:05:40 | |
- | Well according to one JAG officer, | 1:05:43 |
when they would round up people | 1:05:50 | |
no one spoke Dari or Pashto or Urdu, | 1:05:51 | |
and they would round up all these people | 1:05:55 | |
and there'd be a child just sitting there | 1:05:58 | |
and they would just take them too | 1:06:01 | |
and when we thought we had gotten them all out | 1:06:03 | |
I said something not very good to Alberto Gonzalez | 1:06:13 | |
on the telephone, but it turns out that there were | 1:06:17 | |
many more children than they admitted to. | 1:06:23 | |
And so the seven that were released | 1:06:26 | |
without us having to go to court, I might've told him | 1:06:31 | |
that I would bite him in the back of his leg and not let go | 1:06:35 | |
until they went home. | 1:06:38 | |
Like, I don't know. | 1:06:40 | |
I think sometimes I got a little possessed. | 1:06:42 | |
Interviewer | So Barbara I'm trying to understand. | 1:06:43 |
So a lot of the information you've got | 1:06:45 | |
was somewhat secretive in this, | 1:06:47 | |
and it wasn't official that you couldn't really use | 1:06:49 | |
in a court because you had no witness to testify to that? | 1:06:52 | |
- | Well, it was also under the protective order. | 1:06:55 |
And so we could file sealed papers | 1:06:59 | |
but sealed papers would go | 1:07:04 | |
through the court security office and be redacted. | 1:07:05 | |
And a lot of the information we were getting | 1:07:11 | |
was the cocktail napkin method | 1:07:14 | |
and whatever somebody could sort of glean | 1:07:18 | |
from a meeting with their detainee | 1:07:24 | |
and whatever made it through | 1:07:27 | |
into the mail that went | 1:07:34 | |
through the international committee of the Red Cross. | 1:07:35 | |
Interviewer | So why did the court believe you | 1:07:37 |
if you had really no substance, you had nobody | 1:07:40 | |
that you could point and say, "I got this from so-and-so." | 1:07:43 | |
- | You know, about the Uyghurs. | 1:07:47 |
I don't think Terry Henry was willing to lie. | 1:07:59 | |
I think it was really clear that, | 1:08:04 | |
and what had been said to me is a few days after they were | 1:08:08 | |
in Guantanamo, they realized they made a mistake. | 1:08:13 | |
And this was many months afterwards. | 1:08:15 | |
Interviewer | (indistinct)who called you to tell you that? | 1:08:17 |
- | And I never asked for names. | 1:08:21 |
I didn't wanna know names. | 1:08:23 | |
And there's a very unhappy piece of this | 1:08:25 | |
with someone who did send me a list | 1:08:34 | |
of people's names | 1:08:38 | |
from Guantanamo (crosstalk) you did Matthew Diaz. | 1:08:42 | |
I don't think I'll ever get over that. | 1:08:51 | |
So he sent me these, the second kind of shrunken list | 1:08:59 | |
in a Valentine's day card. | 1:09:03 | |
What had happened is there was a piece | 1:09:06 | |
of legislation that was coming in called | 1:09:09 | |
The Detainee Treatment Act of 2005. | 1:09:11 | |
That was gonna strip everyone | 1:09:15 | |
of the rights of habeas Corpus. | 1:09:17 | |
And I filed a class action, habeas Corpus case. | 1:09:19 | |
There'd only been one before | 1:09:27 | |
in the history of the United States. | 1:09:29 | |
And in an effort to grandfather everyone in. | 1:09:33 | |
So where we could we would ask a detainee | 1:09:37 | |
who else do you know? | 1:09:44 | |
Mohammed X, Ibraheem Y from so-and-so. | 1:09:45 | |
And that's how I wrote the papers. | 1:09:49 | |
And then that case got filed before judge. | 1:09:55 | |
It was like a new habeas petition. | 1:10:00 | |
And it was before the judge who we were originally before | 1:10:03 | |
in the first case, | 1:10:07 | |
but she was following the rule of law. | 1:10:08 | |
So she accepted the case. | 1:10:12 | |
And we said, we should get to go | 1:10:15 | |
to Guantanamo to get the list and meet everyone. | 1:10:16 | |
And they said, no national security you can't. | 1:10:20 | |
And we said, "You pick whoever you want, | 1:10:25 | |
you pick the most, pick John McCain | 1:10:28 | |
pick anyone that you want to go to and get this list. | 1:10:32 | |
No. And, but I did know that we had gotten everyone | 1:10:34 | |
in under the protection of like the class action, habeas. | 1:10:41 | |
Not long, that was in January, I filed it. | 1:10:49 | |
And in February I got this Valentine at work | 1:10:52 | |
and it was actually stamped on the outside JTF GTMO | 1:10:55 | |
and it was handwritten and handwritten to me. | 1:11:02 | |
And I thought, it's gotta be a joke. | 1:11:05 | |
I have like too many wise guy friends, | 1:11:07 | |
like I dunno how I like, | 1:11:10 | |
and somebody else in the office, another lawyer, | 1:11:13 | |
she thought I don't know if you met Maria Lahood or no? | 1:11:19 | |
Interviewer | Never interviewed her. | 1:11:21 |
- | She thought it was a trap. | 1:11:24 |
And that if we opened it | 1:11:26 | |
and it had information to which we weren't entitled | 1:11:31 | |
that they would go after us. | 1:11:35 | |
And, I opened it and inside was this list of names. | 1:11:40 | |
And so it was in these little cards | 1:11:45 | |
and it had like columns and the rows and the name. | 1:11:48 | |
And then it would say, I think it would say age internal, | 1:11:53 | |
it had like codes, but like their intern | 1:12:01 | |
their internee number language. | 1:12:05 | |
And then there was | 1:12:09 | |
like a series of columns with alphanumeric codes. | 1:12:09 | |
And we didn't know what they were, and we did try | 1:12:12 | |
and match them with the names that we had | 1:12:17 | |
that far through the cocktail napkin method. | 1:12:20 | |
And we couldn't match them. | 1:12:25 | |
And I now know that that was | 1:12:28 | |
because the Department of Defense | 1:12:30 | |
was doing a terrible job at understanding Arabic | 1:12:34 | |
and understanding dialects and understanding people's names. | 1:12:38 | |
And I had this one conversation with someone | 1:12:41 | |
and she said, "Well, we're using modern standardized Arabic. | 1:12:45 | |
And I said, "That's for writing." | 1:12:50 | |
And, she said, | 1:12:53 | |
"Well you don't know what you're talking about." | 1:12:55 | |
And I'm like, "Well, yes, I do. | 1:12:56 | |
It's my language. | 1:12:59 | |
It's my family's language." | 1:13:01 | |
And I said, "And we don't all understand each other | 1:13:02 | |
I speak Levantine Arabic. | 1:13:06 | |
If you're from Lebanon or Jordan or Syria, we're cool. | 1:13:09 | |
If you're from Morocco, I don't understand | 1:13:13 | |
what you're saying for the most part." | 1:13:15 | |
And she's like | 1:13:17 | |
"Everyone understands modern standardized Arabic." | 1:13:19 | |
And then I said, "Most of the people there don't read | 1:13:21 | |
and write, so how are you doing that?" | 1:13:24 | |
And so we did get to give them a notice | 1:13:28 | |
that was translated into Arabic, | 1:13:32 | |
and that was read to them in Arabic. | 1:13:35 | |
But when we tried to match the names | 1:13:39 | |
from the cards we couldn't | 1:13:43 | |
and so it was like what is this? | 1:13:45 | |
And Michael Ratner just wanted to give it straight | 1:13:49 | |
to the New York Times, like the Pentagon papers. | 1:13:52 | |
But people were worried | 1:14:00 | |
because there was people like Maria | 1:14:01 | |
that thought it was a trap. | 1:14:04 | |
And so I went, | 1:14:06 | |
a bunch of the lawyers got together. | 1:14:08 | |
And it was decided I would ask outside counsel. | 1:14:11 | |
And I went to a law firm that I had worked | 1:14:14 | |
with on as a pro bono partner in other cases. | 1:14:16 | |
And they put together this amazing team | 1:14:21 | |
of a former U.S. attorney and a whistleblower expert | 1:14:24 | |
a white collar crime, criminal expert. | 1:14:31 | |
I mean, it was an incredible team. | 1:14:33 | |
And they said, the chances are | 1:14:35 | |
that this is top secret level material | 1:14:37 | |
that since Bush has called it a war | 1:14:42 | |
even if we didn't think it was a war | 1:14:45 | |
that under The Alien and Sedition Act | 1:14:48 | |
holding the paper in your hand constitutes treason | 1:14:53 | |
you don't have to publish it. | 1:14:57 | |
You're not entitled to have it. | 1:15:00 | |
And they say, you have to give it | 1:15:02 | |
in to the Joint Terrorism Task Force. | 1:15:04 | |
And I didn't want to do that. | 1:15:07 | |
It was somebody's handwriting on the front. | 1:15:11 | |
And so I said, okay, how about this? | 1:15:13 | |
How about if I asked the judge, Judge Kohler Kotelly | 1:15:17 | |
if she holds it in escrow, in her court chambers | 1:15:21 | |
and if we win the right to their names | 1:15:25 | |
then she unseals it for us. | 1:15:28 | |
And so the lawyers, Michael Ratner | 1:15:31 | |
and Joe Margulies and another lawyers finally | 1:15:33 | |
they all said, "Okay, all right, all right." | 1:15:36 | |
So I called the judge's chambers | 1:15:38 | |
Terry Henry wasn't even interested in being on the phone. | 1:15:42 | |
I just thought it was ridiculous. | 1:15:44 | |
And she said like, I'm talking | 1:15:46 | |
to her law clerk and I hear a law clerk repeating it to her. | 1:15:54 | |
So she's in the background. | 1:15:57 | |
And the judge says really loud, "There is no way | 1:15:59 | |
in hell that I am keeping those | 1:16:03 | |
documents in my court room." | 1:16:05 | |
And it was just like, "Oh, okay." | 1:16:07 | |
So then I asked her, "Will you issue an order | 1:16:11 | |
for it to be held in escrow in the court security office | 1:16:16 | |
in Crystal City and for them to lock it away. | 1:16:20 | |
And you will, if we win the rights to their names | 1:16:24 | |
then your order can be issued unsealing it." | 1:16:27 | |
She said, "That's fine." | 1:16:30 | |
And we called, and I'll say her name | 1:16:32 | |
Christine Campbell agreed | 1:16:35 | |
and said she would obey the court's order. | 1:16:38 | |
And after five o'clock, she called me that day. | 1:16:41 | |
And she said, they decided | 1:16:44 | |
they couldn't obey the court's order. | 1:16:45 | |
And a Federal agent would be at my office | 1:16:47 | |
at 6:00 AM the next morning to take everything | 1:16:50 | |
that they thought was necessary. | 1:16:56 | |
Interviewer | That includes the letter and anything else? | 1:17:00 |
- | And I don't know what happened that day. | 1:17:05 |
I was really a klutz coffee spilled all over the envelope. | 1:17:10 | |
You couldn't really read the handwriting anymore | 1:17:13 | |
and this guy, so I'm at my office really early. | 1:17:20 | |
And I didn't know the office at that time looked | 1:17:25 | |
like it had been in office since the Civil Rights era, | 1:17:30 | |
like cigarette burns and gum all over. | 1:17:33 | |
I mean, it just. | 1:17:35 | |
And I there's like nobody around | 1:17:37 | |
and the buzzer rings and I opened the door | 1:17:40 | |
and there's a guy in a black trench coat. | 1:17:42 | |
And I just, like I said, "Really" I tried. | 1:17:45 | |
And I just thought | 1:17:49 | |
and he was like, not smiling at all. | 1:17:51 | |
And he puts on the gloves and he goes, "Let's go." | 1:17:54 | |
And I said, "Here it is." | 1:17:57 | |
And he goes, "Well, how many people have handled that?" | 1:17:59 | |
And I'm like "A whole lot." | 1:18:01 | |
And he goes, "Well | 1:18:04 | |
then they're all gonna have to be interrogated." | 1:18:05 | |
And I thought, I was like, "No, it came to me. | 1:18:08 | |
And I just showed it to people in my office." | 1:18:12 | |
And he goes, "I'm sorry." | 1:18:15 | |
And, we gave him the copies | 1:18:23 | |
well all the copies that I knew about at least. | 1:18:24 | |
And then I didn't hear anything for a long time. | 1:18:29 | |
And I came back | 1:18:34 | |
from doing work in Southern Africa in Namibia | 1:18:38 | |
And there were Naval police waiting for me at the airport. | 1:18:44 | |
They took me into custody | 1:18:53 | |
and I was held in Norfolk Naval base. | 1:18:56 | |
Interviewer | Really? | 1:18:59 |
- | Yeah. They took my phone and my laptop. | 1:19:02 |
Interviewer | Were you told, you were a prisoner? | 1:19:09 |
What were you told? | 1:19:11 | |
- | I was a material witness | 1:19:12 |
and then that Matthew Diaz, who, I didn't know who that was. | 1:19:14 | |
Interviewer | Really? | 1:19:19 |
- | And I know that he was not any person that ever called me. | 1:19:22 |
I didn't recognize his voice. | 1:19:26 | |
And I never asked for names. | 1:19:27 | |
We had some orders that like, | 1:19:30 | |
rules that we operated under and no, I had no idea. | 1:19:34 | |
And so he's like, "You're here as a material witness." | 1:19:39 | |
And I'm like, "I don't know, what are you talking about?" | 1:19:43 | |
And he said, "There's gonna be, a court martial, | 1:19:45 | |
and for your friend, Matthew Diaz." | 1:19:49 | |
"What friend, Matthew Diaz, what are you talking about?" | 1:19:54 | |
And they had asked us all a lot of questions | 1:19:58 | |
but none of us knew anything. | 1:20:05 | |
It just came in the mail as a Valentine. | 1:20:09 | |
That's all we knew. | 1:20:11 | |
So it didn't go anywhere. | 1:20:12 | |
And all of a sudden, I'm held on the Naval Base | 1:20:16 | |
and somebody took pity on me and gave me a cell phone. | 1:20:23 | |
And I called someone | 1:20:32 | |
who is now a really dear friend of mine. | 1:20:35 | |
He was on that panel at the law firm | 1:20:37 | |
that helped us think through the issue. | 1:20:39 | |
His name is Sheldon Krantz. | 1:20:43 | |
And I called him and I said, "I'm in trouble. | 1:20:45 | |
I'm in Norfolk Naval base. | 1:20:48 | |
And I need a lawyer and I don't know what's going on. | 1:20:51 | |
And, I have to go 'cause I don't have a phone." | 1:20:55 | |
And that's still is like I think the besides, | 1:21:01 | |
having clients of mine, | 1:21:11 | |
die the day before they were supposed to be released | 1:21:14 | |
were being tortured, | 1:21:20 | |
my role in what happened | 1:21:23 | |
to Matthew Diaz is something I will never get over. | 1:21:25 | |
I asked him so many times would left me file a request | 1:21:34 | |
for a pardon with Obama. | 1:21:42 | |
And he wouldn't. | 1:21:46 | |
I don't know that Obama would have granted that. | 1:21:52 | |
I don't know. | 1:21:55 | |
Interviewer | And Mathew wouldn't let you | 1:21:56 |
file a pardon on his behalf? | 1:21:58 | |
Do you know why he wouldn't? | 1:22:00 | |
- | No. What happened in the cases I'd never been | 1:22:03 |
in a court martial proceeding so I didn't | 1:22:11 | |
but the guy who was Matthew's defense lawyer | 1:22:16 | |
didn't really know what to do. | 1:22:20 | |
And I just said, "You take me as your witness in the middle | 1:22:21 | |
of the prosecutor's case so that I can say, | 1:22:28 | |
that we already had all | 1:22:37 | |
of this information when it came that it wasn't anything new | 1:22:38 | |
that it was," and he did that. | 1:22:42 | |
And so I got to testify really | 1:22:49 | |
for Matthew during the proceeding. | 1:22:52 | |
They charged him with five counts of treason | 1:22:56 | |
which in time of war are punishable by the death penalty. | 1:22:59 | |
They hadn't said that they were seeking it | 1:23:04 | |
but they hadn't said they weren't yet. | 1:23:06 | |
And at the end of the case, I petitioned the judge | 1:23:09 | |
to be able to make a victim impact statement | 1:23:17 | |
as part of the American public. | 1:23:22 | |
I was shocked when he left me. | 1:23:26 | |
And I spoke for 45 minutes about Matthew Diaz | 1:23:28 | |
being a hero of the most traditional American kind. | 1:23:31 | |
Like a true Patriot who believes in the rule of law | 1:23:37 | |
and who's position actually, | 1:23:41 | |
the founding fathers wrote about in the Federalist papers. | 1:23:46 | |
And instead of a life sentence, five times over | 1:23:49 | |
he got six months in a minimum security facility, | 1:24:00 | |
but they stripped him of his pension. | 1:24:05 | |
And then they went after his license to practice law. | 1:24:08 | |
And I tried to intercede in that | 1:24:15 | |
the bar wouldn't let me. | 1:24:17 | |
Interviewer | Did you ever speak to Matt | 1:24:22 |
once he was released? | 1:24:25 | |
- | Oh, oh yeah. | 1:24:27 |
I spoken to him quite a number of times. | 1:24:28 | |
I was a big past about the pardon thing | 1:24:31 | |
but I think in the end it was probably more | 1:24:35 | |
for me to feel better than maybe for him. | 1:24:38 | |
If history is written the right way. | 1:24:46 | |
It will say about him | 1:24:48 | |
what I said about what he is. | 1:24:50 | |
He's too humble, a person to openly play that role | 1:24:55 | |
but it needs to be said. | 1:25:02 | |
Interviewer | I'm so glad you said it | 1:25:04 |
because obviously he didn't say that to us | 1:25:06 | |
that's not what he would do. | 1:25:07 | |
I just want to | 1:25:11 | |
I think this adds to the impact of your history. | 1:25:12 | |
How long were you in the Naval prison at Brigg | 1:25:15 | |
and what exactly got you out of that? | 1:25:19 | |
- | Not it wasn't until a few days after | 1:25:22 |
the judge ruled and the jury ruled | 1:25:31 | |
in the court marshal that I was given leave | 1:25:34 | |
to exit the base. | 1:25:47 | |
Interviewer | So how long were you in the base? | 1:25:48 |
- | Probably like a month. | 1:25:56 |
Interviewer | A month? | 1:25:57 |
- | I'm a little bit sure it's a month. | 1:25:58 |
Interviewer | You were held there. | 1:25:59 |
You had to an attorney presumably during that time? | 1:26:02 | |
- | Well, after someone lend me their phone | 1:26:06 |
and I called Sheldon yeah. | 1:26:08 | |
Interviewer | And then he came to down. | 1:26:09 |
- | He came to visit. | 1:26:10 |
Interviewer | But you were in a cell? | 1:26:11 |
- | No, I mean, I was in a room like this with an iron door | 1:26:13 |
I couldn't go out anywhere. | 1:26:29 | |
They had my laptop and my cell phone. | 1:26:37 | |
I wasn't allowed to have a TV or radio. | 1:26:40 | |
And the prosecutor showed me that he had an indictment | 1:26:45 | |
in my name for the same five counts of treason. | 1:26:53 | |
And so it started out with a threat, | 1:26:58 | |
and then when I was leaving he grabbed my arm | 1:27:04 | |
hard enough to make a bruise. | 1:27:13 | |
And he just said, "Don't forget professor Wells chance. | 1:27:15 | |
We're watching you all the time, wherever you go. | 1:27:19 | |
And whatever you do." | 1:27:22 | |
Interviewer | And you were released. | 1:27:29 |
Can you tell us exactly when you were | 1:27:31 | |
and why you were finally released? | 1:27:33 | |
- | Well, I was being held as a material witness | 1:27:35 |
for that court martial. | 1:27:37 | |
I think they waited until they had decided which facility | 1:27:42 | |
they were gonna send Matthew to. | 1:27:46 | |
And until he was gone and his family was gone. | 1:27:48 | |
When his family, like when his wife, like we were | 1:27:57 | |
all sequestered and so I wasn't supposed to see anybody | 1:28:02 | |
but I would say I have to go to the bathroom | 1:28:07 | |
and his wife would be in the bathroom. | 1:28:09 | |
So I would sort of- | 1:28:10 | |
Interviewer | Sure. She was also in the Naval Base? | 1:28:11 |
- | No she was just there for the court martial again. | 1:28:14 |
And they were so nice to me, despite what I did. | 1:28:18 | |
Interviewer | The family was? | 1:28:24 |
But the Federal government kept you in the Naval base | 1:28:29 | |
for a month because you received this letter. | 1:28:32 | |
What did they want you to do with that letter? | 1:28:36 | |
They didn't know what to do with it. | 1:28:38 | |
What did they charge you | 1:28:40 | |
with those five or threatened to charge you? | 1:28:41 | |
- | I think they thought I was | 1:28:48 |
I would guess that they thought I was lying on the stand | 1:28:49 | |
that I did know Matthew Diaz | 1:28:51 | |
that he did call me or, but I wasn't. | 1:28:53 | |
I didn't, he didn't. | 1:29:03 | |
His response was a reflexive response | 1:29:04 | |
to our lawsuit and he sent it | 1:29:08 | |
to me cause I filed that class action habeas. | 1:29:11 | |
I filed it, and I said, we need to have the names. | 1:29:16 | |
And I filed it, | 1:29:19 | |
with like Muhammad X, like 500 people. | 1:29:20 | |
And so there was no conspiracy | 1:29:28 | |
there was nothing like that. | 1:29:35 | |
It was a person taking a heroic step | 1:29:37 | |
to do the right thing. | 1:29:45 | |
And I guess nobody believed that. | 1:29:49 | |
That's my guess about why it went down that way. | 1:29:52 | |
Interviewer | Why don't we take a five minute break? | 1:30:01 |
John is that okay? | 1:30:06 | |
John | That's fine. | 1:30:06 |
Interviewer | Now we back on Johnny? | 1:30:07 |
John | Yeah. | 1:30:08 |
Interviewer | So you were just saying | 1:30:09 |
about your work in Guantanamo. | 1:30:12 | |
Did you ever get a break? | 1:30:14 | |
- | No, and especially | 1:30:17 |
as time went on and we knew more and more | 1:30:24 | |
about what was happening in terms of torture. | 1:30:26 | |
It was actually almost from the beginning. | 1:30:34 | |
It was pretty much 24 hours a day, seven days a week. | 1:30:37 | |
Interviewer | How did you manage that? | 1:30:40 |
- | No, I don't know. | 1:30:43 |
It's all a blur. | 1:30:47 | |
I mean, there were press calls from Australia | 1:30:49 | |
at three in the morning. | 1:30:52 | |
And then being off at six to make sure | 1:30:54 | |
that we had papers in the court by nine. | 1:30:57 | |
And it just, I suppose, that's why I'm not married anymore. | 1:31:01 | |
It was very hard. | 1:31:12 | |
And we were trying to match strategies | 1:31:14 | |
against a huge operation. | 1:31:21 | |
I had never heard | 1:31:27 | |
of the Defense intelligence Agency before then | 1:31:28 | |
and the Defense Department, | 1:31:34 | |
and the Justice Department look at the resources they had. | 1:31:36 | |
And, so even when the judge said that the Uyghurs | 1:31:42 | |
were supposed to be released, | 1:31:46 | |
the Justice Department they immediately appealed | 1:31:50 | |
and they filed the appeal and it's Friday, late afternoon. | 1:31:54 | |
And the appeal is supposed to be heard | 1:31:59 | |
in the Court of Appeals on Monday morning. | 1:32:01 | |
And I'm in the office on Saturday. | 1:32:04 | |
And all of a sudden I learned | 1:32:07 | |
that the Uyghurs are on a plane to Tirana Albania. | 1:32:09 | |
And that there's no reason for us to have the hearing | 1:32:18 | |
in the Court of Appeals because they've released them | 1:32:21 | |
to some country they've never heard of | 1:32:24 | |
never been to have no resources. | 1:32:27 | |
And we don't have the ability to contact them | 1:32:40 | |
or arrange anything for them. | 1:32:43 | |
And so this game of every time we make a gain in the courts | 1:32:48 | |
and it's recognized | 1:32:55 | |
that this is what the law says, something new occurs. | 1:32:56 | |
There's some new kind of hearing that they create. | 1:33:02 | |
And even though we're supposed to have access | 1:33:07 | |
to all of the information about the person | 1:33:11 | |
before that hearing happens, oh, there's yet another file | 1:33:14 | |
or there's somebody new to testify. | 1:33:18 | |
And it was this game of like, trying to catch up | 1:33:20 | |
when you're walking in, somebody has a race car. | 1:33:29 | |
It was really just an unbelievable thing. | 1:33:34 | |
And the experience of the Uyghurs | 1:33:37 | |
in Albania during that time was horrific. | 1:33:40 | |
There was a very strong Uyghurs American community here | 1:33:46 | |
and they had this great advocacy group | 1:33:48 | |
that was working really hard for them, wonderful people. | 1:33:50 | |
And through them, I heard a lot | 1:33:55 | |
of what they were trying to do in terms of raising money. | 1:33:59 | |
And I worked on some fundraisers with them. | 1:34:03 | |
And then we learned that | 1:34:06 | |
that announcement that was done by the U.S. government | 1:34:12 | |
of them being in Tiran Albania, prompted the | 1:34:16 | |
Chinese government to send teams of diplomats, to Albania | 1:34:19 | |
to seek their extradition. | 1:34:29 | |
So they could stand on trial | 1:34:30 | |
for being enemies of the state and China. | 1:34:33 | |
And all of a sudden were in this mess, trying to talk | 1:34:35 | |
to the Chinese government about | 1:34:41 | |
how these people were sent there against their will. | 1:34:44 | |
And it was just, and then- | 1:34:50 | |
Interviewer | Could you talk to them? | 1:34:54 |
- | No, not really. | 1:34:57 |
I mean, they know their English. | 1:34:59 | |
One of them spoke a little bit of English | 1:35:02 | |
but no one we knew spoke Uyghur | 1:35:05 | |
and they didn't speak Arabic. | 1:35:09 | |
And what we did have was in the beginning | 1:35:18 | |
a woman in the Albanian government who decided that | 1:35:21 | |
that it wasn't okay that they were hung | 1:35:26 | |
out to dry by the U.S. government. | 1:35:28 | |
And she hid them. | 1:35:30 | |
Interviewer | When they first arrived? | 1:35:32 |
- | When they first arrived | 1:35:34 |
and I spoke with her, she spoke some English | 1:35:35 | |
and she told me the different places | 1:35:40 | |
that she could take them | 1:35:43 | |
but that she was gonna eventually run out of places. | 1:35:44 | |
And she didn't know how much she could evade the entreaties | 1:35:47 | |
that were happening by the Chinese Government. | 1:35:53 | |
And I just was always waiting to hear, | 1:35:58 | |
that they were somehow kidnapped | 1:36:03 | |
and taken back to China or, and it- | 1:36:05 | |
Interviewer | How did the Albanian Government | 1:36:09 |
finally stop powerful Chinese? | 1:36:12 | |
- | I don't know what happened in those negotiations. | 1:36:16 |
I know that eventually the U.S Government | 1:36:21 | |
gave some money to the Albanian government, I guess | 1:36:25 | |
as payment for taking them. | 1:36:31 | |
But what a life to be put in the middle of a country | 1:36:36 | |
that is nothing like you've ever experienced | 1:36:42 | |
where you don't know the language, you don't know a soul | 1:36:47 | |
you don't know how to earn a living. | 1:36:51 | |
You don't know. | 1:36:52 | |
Interviewer | The Uyghurs went to Palau | 1:36:57 |
well it's the same story | 1:36:59 | |
but it was even worse for them | 1:37:00 | |
'cause they didn't even know the tropics | 1:37:01 | |
came from a cold climate. | 1:37:03 | |
- | And really that place, that country | 1:37:06 |
as a place to go came out of a joke by Gita that, | 1:37:15 | |
at one point she just said, "Well | 1:37:21 | |
if the government ever comes after me, tell them | 1:37:23 | |
I'd like to go to the tiny island nation of Palao." | 1:37:25 | |
And it was a joke, but it was like our inside kind of joke. | 1:37:29 | |
Interviewer | You think the government had heard that joke | 1:37:36 |
and you think that's what it's? | 1:37:39 | |
- | No, I don't really know. | 1:37:41 |
Interviewer | You used to say that before? | 1:37:42 |
- | It was definitely | 1:37:46 |
it was like our, like, it was her joke. | 1:37:47 | |
Like everyone's like, "Gita where is Palau | 1:37:50 | |
you don't even know where Palau is. | 1:37:53 | |
Interviewer | And that was before they were sent there? | 1:37:54 |
- | Because the first besides Shafiq and Asif. | 1:38:00 |
They were released in March before. | 1:38:10 | |
But besides them the Uyghurs being sent | 1:38:18 | |
to Albania was like the first grouping shipped off | 1:38:22 | |
by the Defense Department. | 1:38:27 | |
And that was because, | 1:38:29 | |
their cover was blown and we knew they were innocent. | 1:38:32 | |
And so they got sent to Albania. | 1:38:36 | |
I actually think that I found this out first | 1:38:45 | |
through a friend who now sits | 1:38:47 | |
on the African court of human rights, but was working | 1:38:53 | |
for the Southern African Development Community SADC | 1:38:57 | |
which is a regional body in Southern Africa. | 1:39:03 | |
And he told me that United States had approached | 1:39:06 | |
several Sub-Saharan African countries with payments to try | 1:39:13 | |
and convince them to take Guantanamo detainees. | 1:39:21 | |
So they tried with the government of Gabon and Togo | 1:39:26 | |
and I can't remember the third country | 1:39:33 | |
each of those countries said, "No | 1:39:34 | |
we're not gonna be a party to what you're trying to do." | 1:39:36 | |
And that was their first efforts to find a place | 1:39:46 | |
for the Uyghurs | 1:39:49 | |
they were gonna send them to Gabon. | 1:39:51 | |
And then eventually they settled, I guess, on Albania | 1:39:53 | |
which was willing to take the money. | 1:39:56 | |
And for a very long time | 1:40:02 | |
they really weren't trying, | 1:40:05 | |
the Uyghurs were an exception | 1:40:07 | |
because they'd been found out. | 1:40:08 | |
But once we knew that people that had been found | 1:40:13 | |
to be no longer enemy combatants, we knew | 1:40:19 | |
that we could get the courts to get them ordered out | 1:40:23 | |
if we had a place. | 1:40:28 | |
And that's when I started knocking | 1:40:30 | |
on the doors of the embassies. | 1:40:31 | |
Interviewer | But did you continue that, | 1:40:34 |
after the Uyghurs went to Albania? | 1:40:38 | |
Did you still look for other countries? | 1:40:40 | |
- | Yeah. The judge who heard the Uyghur case | 1:40:43 |
Judge Robertson compelled Terry Henry, the Government | 1:40:48 | |
to offer proof of where, of countries | 1:40:54 | |
that they had approached. | 1:40:58 | |
And so he came with this letter to Sweden | 1:41:00 | |
like that was the only letter that he brought. | 1:41:05 | |
And I had already spoken | 1:41:07 | |
to the Swedish ambassador to the UN. | 1:41:11 | |
So I just, I was like, "You're such a faker," | 1:41:13 | |
and the Judge wasn't having any of it, | 1:41:19 | |
he like looked at both sides | 1:41:22 | |
of the letter and he said, "Is that all you have?" | 1:41:23 | |
And he said, "The next time we have a meeting | 1:41:27 | |
you better have more. | 1:41:30 | |
So they would come with letters that were like to | 1:41:32 | |
whom it may concern literally. | 1:41:34 | |
And so they really didn't care | 1:41:38 | |
for the authority of the courts either. | 1:41:45 | |
It was whatever the executive ordered. | 1:41:51 | |
And so, I kept going back | 1:41:55 | |
to Geneva and knocking on doors. | 1:42:00 | |
Interviewer | Can I switch topics for a moment? | 1:42:05 |
We can go back to that. | 1:42:07 | |
But you met since I don't wanna forget | 1:42:08 | |
about Jose Padilla, since you said that you, | 1:42:11 | |
met the lawyer Andy for- | 1:42:17 | |
- | Andrew Patel. | 1:42:19 |
Interviewer | Patel so is there something in that story | 1:42:20 |
I don't wanna spend too much time on Jose | 1:42:23 | |
'cause it's not really part of our project | 1:42:25 | |
but we did interview his mother. | 1:42:26 | |
- | Oh you did? | 1:42:28 |
Interviewer | So I would like to, if there's something | 1:42:29 |
if there's a story there and your involvement with him | 1:42:32 | |
I wouldn't mind having it | 1:42:36 | |
on tape if otherwise we can move on. | 1:42:37 | |
- | Well, so Jose Padilla story is important | 1:42:42 |
for a number of reasons. | 1:42:52 | |
One is it happens early on and he's an American citizen | 1:42:54 | |
and he's originally taken into custody | 1:43:02 | |
as a material witness under the material witness statute. | 1:43:09 | |
And unfortunately for him, the judge who he is | 1:43:15 | |
before Judge, Michael Mukasey. | 1:43:20 | |
And when they take them as a material witness, | 1:43:24 | |
they take them in such a way that he is unavailable to us. | 1:43:32 | |
We can't speak to him. | 1:43:37 | |
We're not allowed to see him. | 1:43:41 | |
And it comes huge effort to get | 1:43:43 | |
Andy Patel or Donna Newman or me | 1:43:49 | |
or anyone to have access to him. | 1:43:51 | |
So he is completely isolated in solitary confinement. | 1:43:55 | |
No one's talking to him. | 1:43:58 | |
He has no idea what's going on. | 1:44:00 | |
They are creating the story around him. | 1:44:05 | |
Eventually it becomes clear | 1:44:13 | |
that he's just a guy that converted to Islam prison. | 1:44:14 | |
But he magically changes | 1:44:23 | |
from being a material witness to a defendant. | 1:44:29 | |
And so what we realize is that this is | 1:44:36 | |
first of all, they're holding an American citizen. | 1:44:42 | |
And now this category that was applied | 1:44:48 | |
to people outside the United States. | 1:44:50 | |
So the enemy combatant, well now | 1:44:52 | |
an American citizen can be an enemy combatant. | 1:44:56 | |
And under that presidential executive order | 1:44:59 | |
they can be held to anywhere without access | 1:45:03 | |
to a quarter council and without charge indefinitely. | 1:45:06 | |
And so then it becomes | 1:45:10 | |
like this incredible effort to get access to him | 1:45:12 | |
because if he is being called an enemy combatant | 1:45:17 | |
and he's put in that category, we'll never see him again. | 1:45:23 | |
And that's where we first start to understand | 1:45:27 | |
that these categories are not gonna just be | 1:45:32 | |
for people that had a gun on the field. | 1:45:40 | |
Which they didn't want to call them a soldier | 1:45:44 | |
because then the Geneva Conventions come into play. | 1:45:47 | |
So we're gonna call them something | 1:45:50 | |
that never existed in international law. | 1:45:51 | |
And so we were battling that categorization the whole time | 1:45:55 | |
but now we have Jose Padilla and he's an American citizen. | 1:45:59 | |
And so now it comes clear | 1:46:05 | |
that an American citizen can be treated the way | 1:46:09 | |
the people have been treated that went to Guantanamo. | 1:46:16 | |
And the thing is that we could never make | 1:46:20 | |
that like penetrate to the public. | 1:46:29 | |
I think people were so scared that, | 1:46:36 | |
those things they didn't hear. | 1:46:42 | |
Interviewer | So CCR was involved | 1:46:45 |
as one, the attorneys for Jose? | 1:46:47 | |
- | Yeah. | 1:46:51 |
Interviewer | And people were scared | 1:46:53 |
because the U.S. made him scary or ? | 1:46:55 | |
- | Well, I think, | 1:46:57 |
they just put him in the category | 1:47:00 | |
of every Muslim Arab man is a terrorist. | 1:47:02 | |
Interviewer | When you were in the Naval break. | 1:47:15 |
And so I'm not faulting youth think | 1:47:18 | |
of Jose while you were there. | 1:47:21 | |
And I know that Andy was there. | 1:47:23 | |
- | I remember Andy Patel like having met | 1:47:31 |
so Andy got to meet Jose Padilla and they were | 1:47:35 | |
in court when they came and designated him | 1:47:40 | |
as a material witness and took them away. | 1:47:44 | |
And I remember Andy saying that he was, | 1:47:47 | |
just a regular guy who never got | 1:47:54 | |
to too much schooling, | 1:47:56 | |
who, was like comforted by and felt a part | 1:47:57 | |
of something when he converted in prison. | 1:48:03 | |
And he said | 1:48:08 | |
he's not gonna survive being locked away forever | 1:48:10 | |
with no one to talk to ever again. | 1:48:16 | |
And, I just remember thinking, | 1:48:22 | |
okay, we can't we gotta do something. | 1:48:27 | |
And eventually Andy got access to him | 1:48:31 | |
and the government had no proof of their story | 1:48:38 | |
that he had a dirty bomb, | 1:48:43 | |
that it's so far from who we understood who he was | 1:48:46 | |
and what kind of guy who was that it was just crazy. | 1:48:51 | |
But, it did make me very worried about, | 1:48:56 | |
who else is at risk of being designated in that way? | 1:49:09 | |
How many people do we not know about? | 1:49:13 | |
And all during the time that we're doing this work | 1:49:17 | |
we're hearing about prisons and other places. | 1:49:22 | |
And so that's when | 1:49:28 | |
the so-called black sites start becoming an issue. | 1:49:29 | |
And, that was very worrisome. | 1:49:39 | |
Who's in there? | 1:49:40 | |
How many people are in there? | 1:49:42 | |
How many places do we have like that? | 1:49:43 | |
And what are we doing to people there? | 1:49:45 | |
Now, once June, 2004 happened, and we won the Rasul Case | 1:49:50 | |
Bush stopped sending people to Guantanamo. | 1:49:59 | |
So they were going somewhere else. | 1:50:02 | |
And we knew some of them were going to Afghanistan | 1:50:04 | |
'cause we knew about the terrible old Soviet prisons | 1:50:07 | |
that were there, that they were | 1:50:12 | |
using the salt box and all of those places. | 1:50:14 | |
And they're horrible. | 1:50:20 | |
I mean, I've seen them, they're just horrible. | 1:50:21 | |
And then we started hearing about Diego Garcia | 1:50:23 | |
and maybe Poland and so all of a sudden | 1:50:29 | |
I'm like finding out about, | 1:50:38 | |
so somebody calls me a whistleblower, who is one | 1:50:46 | |
of these people that does the weather and flight plans | 1:50:51 | |
for commercial airlines or people that you hire. | 1:50:55 | |
And they tell you, the weather is gonna be great in the UK. | 1:50:58 | |
When you land at Heathrow blah, blah, blah. | 1:51:01 | |
Here's, these runways will be open and all of that. | 1:51:03 | |
And it's this guy who calls me | 1:51:07 | |
from Texas completely out of the blue. | 1:51:09 | |
And he says, "I have some information for you." | 1:51:11 | |
And I say, "I don't think we should talk on the phone." | 1:51:16 | |
He comes to New York. | 1:51:19 | |
And he spends a few days telling me | 1:51:20 | |
that he arrange the flights Forever Green Airlines | 1:51:25 | |
which is the CIA airline that is sending packages, | 1:51:32 | |
which are people to all of these places. | 1:51:39 | |
And that he has the records | 1:51:43 | |
of the flights and the tail numbers | 1:51:50 | |
of the planes and the places. | 1:51:53 | |
he told me there's this runway at Heathrow | 1:51:58 | |
that's the refueling stop | 1:52:02 | |
before they go to the black sites and other parts of Europe. | 1:52:03 | |
And he had all of this information. | 1:52:05 | |
And I knew that there was a Swiss Senator who was part | 1:52:09 | |
of the council of Europe, | 1:52:13 | |
a body that I've never heard about here. | 1:52:17 | |
And this guy, Dick Marty, who was a hero of mine | 1:52:20 | |
and he was starting to put together the flight plans. | 1:52:24 | |
And I just packed up everything this guy said | 1:52:28 | |
and I sent it to Senator Marty. | 1:52:31 | |
And we spent I don't know how many days | 1:52:33 | |
weeks putting together the flight plans | 1:52:38 | |
and the tail numbers | 1:52:41 | |
and try figure out who was going, where | 1:52:44 | |
and where they were stopping. | 1:52:46 | |
And eventually he did this incredible report | 1:52:47 | |
about Europe's complicity in extraordinary rendition. | 1:52:51 | |
And we were sending people | 1:52:57 | |
to third countries for interrogation under torture | 1:53:01 | |
and then they'd either go to Guantanamo or Bagram Airbase | 1:53:04 | |
or Diego Garcia or wherever else we were sending them. | 1:53:07 | |
And, the work just kept expanding. | 1:53:12 | |
And that at all of these points | 1:53:19 | |
that there were people who said, "I can't stand it." | 1:53:26 | |
And Daniel Ellsberg came forward | 1:53:31 | |
and came with the information | 1:53:40 | |
or sent the information is how we were able | 1:53:42 | |
to put the pictures together or help other people | 1:53:47 | |
like Dick Marty put the pictures together. | 1:53:51 | |
Interviewer | The person in Texas you don't have to | 1:53:53 |
tell us it goes, | 1:53:56 | |
because then you found out his name, obviously. | 1:53:57 | |
- | Yes. | 1:53:59 |
We had lots of conversations | 1:54:02 | |
before he made the decision to really talk about all | 1:54:04 | |
of this information, because he knew that it was, | 1:54:11 | |
he couldn't be in that industry anymore. | 1:54:13 | |
There's like, it's very small group | 1:54:15 | |
of people that does this kind of planning. | 1:54:17 | |
And so he knew that | 1:54:19 | |
and he was concerned about his family | 1:54:22 | |
and what kind of retaliation would be subject to? | 1:54:26 | |
And CCR didn't have any resources to, | 1:54:32 | |
we couldn't do anything. | 1:54:39 | |
And so I couldn't tell them we could do anything. | 1:54:40 | |
The best I could do is say | 1:54:46 | |
"You and your family can come stay with us, | 1:54:48 | |
if you want to relocate here," | 1:54:52 | |
it just was, and in the end, | 1:54:55 | |
he made the decision to do it. | 1:54:58 | |
Interviewer | Do you know, | 1:55:02 |
what happened to him afterwards? | 1:55:03 | |
- | I know that he left that job and he was looking | 1:55:05 |
for other jobs, other positions in the aviation industry. | 1:55:09 | |
I didn't talk to him much longer after that. | 1:55:15 | |
Interviewer | So one of the things | 1:55:17 |
that you brought up today | 1:55:18 | |
which is remarkable and heroic is the word you used is | 1:55:20 | |
that there these people out there in America, | 1:55:24 | |
who just kind of reached out on their own. | 1:55:27 | |
- | Unprotected, like just there was somebody else | 1:55:31 |
in this small town called Waterloo, Louisiana, | 1:55:39 | |
you couldn't make it up. | 1:55:47 | |
Who's calling me and telling me | 1:55:51 | |
that there's something strange going on | 1:55:53 | |
because there's all of these planes | 1:55:56 | |
that are leaving in the middle of the night. | 1:55:59 | |
And it's like the least used airport | 1:56:01 | |
in like the entire United States. | 1:56:05 | |
And all of a sudden | 1:56:07 | |
all these flights are going in and he can't help | 1:56:08 | |
but think that it's the CIA. | 1:56:10 | |
And it's the kind of thing where CCR always had a lot | 1:56:14 | |
of conspiracy theorists that, | 1:56:18 | |
and everyone always thinks that if you work at CCR | 1:56:20 | |
you must be a conspiracy theorist. | 1:56:23 | |
Except this time there was a conspiracy. | 1:56:24 | |
So, and he's like laughing because that can't be right. | 1:56:27 | |
And I'm like, "Oh, actually it can be right." | 1:56:31 | |
And then what we found out was | 1:56:35 | |
that people that had been rounded up | 1:56:38 | |
in the days immediately after 9/11 | 1:56:43 | |
many of them were sent back to their country | 1:56:47 | |
of origin through these night flights | 1:56:51 | |
that left from Waterloo, Louisiana. | 1:56:55 | |
And we found that out because people would call us | 1:56:57 | |
from Amman and they would say, "Do you remember me? | 1:57:02 | |
I can't reach my wife I'm in Amman." | 1:57:07 | |
And all of a sudden we, | 1:57:12 | |
and what we also found out is | 1:57:15 | |
they weren't very careful | 1:57:18 | |
that who they are either arrested or sent back | 1:57:20 | |
because there were people who had won political asylum | 1:57:24 | |
in the United States and were citizens | 1:57:28 | |
that they had sent into the middle east, | 1:57:31 | |
and they were terrified. | 1:57:35 | |
And so we worked the best that we can. | 1:57:38 | |
I actually asked airlines | 1:57:42 | |
to give people free flights back to the U.S. | 1:57:44 | |
Like, I don't know where I got the nerve to do that, | 1:57:49 | |
but it was crazy. | 1:57:52 | |
And it was all | 1:57:55 | |
because some guy thought it was really strange | 1:57:56 | |
about all these flights coming | 1:57:58 | |
out of this airport in Waterloo, Louisiana. | 1:58:00 | |
And I thought- | 1:58:05 | |
Interviewer | And you said, when you said to some, | 1:58:09 |
that man in Texas | 1:58:11 | |
that you shouldn't talk to on the phone | 1:58:12 | |
did you think your phones were tapped? | 1:58:14 | |
- | Well, we knew at that point, | 1:58:15 |
there was that lawsuit against the NSA | 1:58:18 | |
extensively on the roving wire taps, | 1:58:24 | |
but there were all these, | 1:58:26 | |
so all of the people CCR were named plaintiffs, in part, | 1:58:29 | |
because I thought, well, | 1:58:38 | |
at least we'll be famous | 1:58:40 | |
if the NSA is tapped us | 1:58:42 | |
and as the case went forward, | 1:58:46 | |
the court did force them to say | 1:58:47 | |
whether we were being wiretapped. | 1:58:49 | |
And so we then all knew we were. | 1:58:53 | |
And what all we could do was ask the court to try | 1:58:56 | |
and force the NSA | 1:59:01 | |
to give us a way to be delisted some process | 1:59:02 | |
by which we could petition to be delisted. | 1:59:07 | |
Some administrative process, | 1:59:09 | |
some due process, no, there wasn't. | 1:59:12 | |
Interviewer | But your lawyers and clients, | 1:59:22 |
how did they justify? | 1:59:24 | |
- | They taped attorney client meetings in Guantanamo. | 1:59:28 |
They taped attorney client meetings | 1:59:32 | |
in all the prisons that we were in. | 1:59:35 | |
The Sixth Amendment wasn't there either | 1:59:41 | |
along with the Fifth Amendment or the 14th | 1:59:43 | |
or pretty much any of them. | 1:59:46 | |
It's funny because I've been looking | 1:59:53 | |
for a job since I graduated | 1:59:59 | |
from public health school and I've done some consulting work | 2:00:01 | |
for like the World Health Organization. | 2:00:07 | |
I've been working on a tax on health care | 2:00:11 | |
and healthcare workers in hospitals around the world. | 2:00:15 | |
And so I applied for a couple of jobs | 2:00:23 | |
that I thought I was really qualified for | 2:00:27 | |
and I didn't even get an interview. | 2:00:30 | |
And so I called a man who used to be on the board of CCR. | 2:00:31 | |
Who's very involved for a long time. | 2:00:36 | |
And who does career placement | 2:00:38 | |
for law students at CUNY law school? | 2:00:39 | |
And I said, "Okay, Franklin so what's the deal? | 2:00:42 | |
Why am I like not getting an interview with like the | 2:00:49 | |
for this ACLU prison project position in Berkeley?" | 2:00:53 | |
And he goes, "What do you think?" | 2:00:59 | |
And I said, "I don't know, Frank," | 2:01:01 | |
Then I've been a law professor. | 2:01:02 | |
Then I went to public health school, like no one | 2:01:04 | |
knows who I am anymore. | 2:01:06 | |
And he said "Wrong." | 2:01:08 | |
And he goes so now that you know that like that, | 2:01:18 | |
this is gonna be who you are. | 2:01:23 | |
So you regret anything that you did?" | 2:01:26 | |
And I said, "Well, no, of course not." | 2:01:30 | |
And he goes, "Okay, so what bothering me for?" | 2:01:33 | |
But for a long time I did tell people | 2:01:40 | |
that I was subject to a roving wiretap | 2:01:45 | |
because the way that that worked is by meeting with you | 2:01:49 | |
the wiretap attached to you. | 2:01:54 | |
And we all had to tell. | 2:01:58 | |
Interviewer | Every person? | 2:02:03 |
- | Yeah and I lost friends that way. | 2:02:04 |
There were people that said, I can't do this, | 2:02:09 | |
that worked for the United nations | 2:02:13 | |
or agencies where it wasn't gonna be okay. | 2:02:16 | |
Interviewer | Well I wanna get back to that. | 2:02:30 |
I think it was a question I was going to end with | 2:02:32 | |
but wanna just put in a few other questions | 2:02:35 | |
before we go to that. | 2:02:37 | |
And that is, I assume you've been to Guantanamo a number | 2:02:39 | |
of times or not at all? | 2:02:42 | |
And was that deliberate | 2:02:44 | |
you didn't want to go or? | 2:02:45 | |
- | I was never granted security clearance. | 2:02:46 |
Interviewer | Did you apply? | 2:02:50 |
- | Oh, yes many times. | 2:02:51 |
And the irony is that before 9/11, I had worked | 2:02:55 | |
on a case against the Nuclear Regulatory Commission | 2:03:00 | |
as part of my regular civil rights case. | 2:03:03 | |
It was on behalf of a native American nation. | 2:03:06 | |
And there was a plan to put, | 2:03:12 | |
a spent fuel facility on the land that border Mexico | 2:03:23 | |
in that was part of native American reservation. | 2:03:35 | |
And they wanted me to challenge the decision to do that. | 2:03:40 | |
And I had to get top secret security clearance | 2:03:46 | |
to get access to those plans. | 2:03:51 | |
And of course, | 2:03:54 | |
they were gonna build it on a fault line | 2:03:56 | |
which I thought was problematic and convinced the judge. | 2:03:58 | |
But I had four months before 9/11 | 2:04:01 | |
I had top secret security clearance. | 2:04:06 | |
After 9/11 I didn't anymore. | 2:04:09 | |
And I couldn't get it. | 2:04:13 | |
Interviewer | But the other people at CCR did get, | 2:04:14 |
so why did they get and you didn't? | 2:04:16 | |
- | I don't know if it was my background, | 2:04:23 |
my mother's father was originally from Aleppo. | 2:04:30 | |
My mother's mother was Palestinian. | 2:04:35 | |
I don't know if it had to do with that. | 2:04:38 | |
I don't know if it had to do with like | 2:04:40 | |
what they saw as my role. | 2:04:44 | |
I don't know. | 2:04:48 | |
Interviewer | Wow. Did you regret it? | 2:04:50 |
Would you have liked to go to Guantanamo? | 2:04:57 | |
- | Yeah. In the beginning I felt like, everyone's going, | 2:05:00 |
but I knew it didn't take long | 2:05:05 | |
for me to know what every inch of that place looked like. | 2:05:12 | |
Down to the six point restraint chair | 2:05:21 | |
that they used when they were | 2:05:24 | |
putting the nasal gastric tube up people's noses. | 2:05:26 | |
Interviewer | You've mentioned off camera | 2:05:36 |
and I don't know as much, but just | 2:05:38 | |
because you had such a good impression of Feroz Abbasi | 2:05:41 | |
is there something you'd like to tell us on camera? | 2:05:44 | |
Cause we did an interview with him | 2:05:46 | |
and I have a couple of the questions and we can- | 2:05:49 | |
- | So Feroz Abbasi, he's a | 2:05:52 |
I think a person of tremendous resilience | 2:05:59 | |
and courage after he was released | 2:06:03 | |
and Musab was also released around the same time | 2:06:08 | |
and Musab wrote the book. | 2:06:16 | |
Feroz, we spoke and he wanted to know more about like | 2:06:19 | |
what's the training that we're giving people | 2:06:27 | |
who are going to represent people in Guantanamo. | 2:06:30 | |
And, I was talking | 2:06:33 | |
about the difficulty of conveying to people | 2:06:34 | |
what they might see in their client | 2:06:40 | |
like how their client might feel or behave. | 2:06:47 | |
And he said, "I will do that." | 2:06:50 | |
Interviewer | How? | 2:06:51 |
- | And he made a video. | 2:06:53 |
I don't know if you've seen that video? | 2:06:57 | |
Interviewer | No. | 2:06:58 |
- | The video. It's an incredible thing. | 2:07:01 |
I would assume that CCR has it. | 2:07:07 | |
Interviewer | What a shame? | 2:07:10 |
- | Or I can just describe to you | 2:07:13 |
The video is | 2:07:16 | |
it's just Feroz talking at a camera | 2:07:20 | |
and he talks about how he was treated. | 2:07:23 | |
But that's not the part that is unbelievable | 2:07:34 | |
is him talking about being | 2:07:38 | |
in solitary confinement for so long. | 2:07:40 | |
And having the sense that he, and being aware | 2:07:49 | |
that he was losing his sanity | 2:07:53 | |
and that he was outside of himself | 2:07:56 | |
and watching his body make small circles | 2:08:02 | |
inside his cell walking | 2:08:07 | |
and seeing the body talking and having, | 2:08:10 | |
a separate consciousness watching over | 2:08:16 | |
and knowing that he was thinking | 2:08:21 | |
that he was losing his mind. | 2:08:24 | |
Interviewer | He, was certainly one | 2:08:27 |
of the brightest people. | 2:08:29 | |
- | It was the most astounding things that he did. | 2:08:32 |
(crosstalk) and it galvanized everyone | 2:08:40 | |
and made everyone all of a sudden | 2:08:46 | |
saw someone who was clearly extremely bright | 2:08:48 | |
and extremely articulate and so willing | 2:08:51 | |
and able to describe what was happening to him | 2:08:58 | |
that it was every time I saw it, | 2:09:02 | |
when we ran one of those training sessions, | 2:09:05 | |
it would like knock me back | 2:09:09 | |
on my heels every time, | 2:09:11 | |
because it was all of a sudden in human form, | 2:09:13 | |
like in front of you | 2:09:24 | |
what we were doing to people, | 2:09:26 | |
and there was no escaping it. | 2:09:29 | |
Sometimes people would try and say, | 2:09:33 | |
"Well maybe the U.S. didn't mean to blur," | 2:09:34 | |
or lots of ways that people try | 2:09:37 | |
and not the cognitive dissonance | 2:09:40 | |
comes in all different ways. | 2:09:44 | |
But when you watched Feroz Abbasi | 2:09:47 | |
talk about that there was nothing else. | 2:09:51 | |
That was what we were and what we did. | 2:09:56 | |
And he's amazing person that he was willing to do that. | 2:10:03 | |
I think it made a lot of people | 2:10:15 | |
very dedicated to doing that work. | 2:10:18 | |
Interviewer | He's inspiring. | 2:10:23 |
You left because since you had told me | 2:10:30 | |
you we're doing 24/7, did you burn out | 2:10:33 | |
is that why you left or did you leave for another reason? | 2:10:36 | |
- | No, I left. | 2:10:40 |
That just sounds so prosaic. | 2:10:43 | |
I left because my husband said, | 2:10:44 | |
he couldn't really live with me doing. | 2:10:49 | |
Interviewer | That's not prosaic that's life. | 2:10:54 |
- | And he thought I was gonna just whittle away. | 2:11:00 |
Interviewer | Well, how'd you feel | 2:11:08 |
about the way you were ready to you think? | 2:11:10 | |
- | No, I mean I don't know | 2:11:12 |
when I would've decided to leave | 2:11:24 | |
but it was hard leaving that work. | 2:11:28 | |
But in part what I told myself, | 2:11:37 | |
which I do believe is that I had been | 2:11:39 | |
at CCR for 12 years and Nancy Chang, who was one | 2:11:43 | |
of the CCR lawyers who did a lot of this work with me. | 2:11:51 | |
She had left and we had had a long conversation | 2:11:59 | |
about making room | 2:12:05 | |
for the next generation of people's lawyers. | 2:12:10 | |
And CCR never had a lot of money. | 2:12:13 | |
We made nothing. | 2:12:18 | |
And, there weren't a lot of spots there. | 2:12:22 | |
And she was a bit older | 2:12:27 | |
than me about maybe 10 years older. | 2:12:30 | |
But when we were talking about it | 2:12:34 | |
it made sense to me, you know, she said, | 2:12:39 | |
"Well so what happens when we die | 2:12:42 | |
if there's not the next group?" | 2:12:45 | |
And I really believe that. I'm I'm really glad. | 2:12:47 | |
And as I left CCR, we got these huge grants, | 2:12:58 | |
they would just tell me to go and talk to a bunch of people. | 2:13:07 | |
And I would just talk | 2:13:10 | |
about the work we were doing and what I believed in. | 2:13:11 | |
And they would just write these huge checks anyway. | 2:13:13 | |
So there's a lot of people's lawyers at CCR | 2:13:16 | |
which is a great thing. | 2:13:20 | |
And because I had started the International Justice Network | 2:13:23 | |
the other NGO that work for a while, | 2:13:28 | |
I was doing parallel to CCR. | 2:13:35 | |
So I was doing both. | 2:13:37 | |
And it was hard because I was flying | 2:13:39 | |
to Kabul three times a year. | 2:13:42 | |
And we were doing, | 2:13:47 | |
the same case that we did for Guantanamo, | 2:13:51 | |
we did for Bagram Base. | 2:13:53 | |
And I did it as a clinic with law students at Stanford. | 2:13:58 | |
I don't think they loved that so much, but we did win. | 2:14:02 | |
And so I was still doing that work for well until I went | 2:14:09 | |
to public health school. | 2:14:14 | |
And so it sort of still continued, but just not at CCR | 2:14:18 | |
and with a population that CCR couldn't | 2:14:24 | |
at that time afford to represent. | 2:14:27 | |
Interviewer | Well, could you just for the viewer | 2:14:30 |
when you started public health school | 2:14:34 | |
what happened to the program? | 2:14:38 | |
- | Tina foster, who was my partner in starting | 2:14:40 |
the International Justice Network. | 2:14:43 | |
We actually enlisted some Guantanamo lawyers | 2:14:46 | |
whose clients were released | 2:14:52 | |
to represent people in Afghanistan. | 2:14:54 | |
And so they're still doing that. | 2:14:57 | |
And I still have a little role | 2:15:01 | |
and I have to decide | 2:15:06 | |
whether I'm gonna go back to working more on that. | 2:15:06 | |
Since the U.S. transferred the prison | 2:15:14 | |
to the government there | 2:15:19 | |
we have less of, we can use the U.S. courts less frequently | 2:15:23 | |
but we have built a network of activists, journalists. | 2:15:29 | |
And there's the Afghan Human Rights Organization | 2:15:37 | |
which is just one lawyer at the top and 25 doctors. | 2:15:40 | |
And so it's still that work sort of still continues. | 2:15:46 | |
And part of the reason for going to public health school | 2:15:55 | |
was in the hope that I would be able to get, | 2:16:00 | |
health professionals to come and provide some services | 2:16:06 | |
to former detainees, whatever people were open to, | 2:16:12 | |
even if it was a medical exam for the whole family | 2:16:19 | |
or some starting some basic community | 2:16:23 | |
health worker program there. | 2:16:30 | |
And, now that I officially have my degree, | 2:16:35 | |
I haven't given up on that idea. | 2:16:40 | |
Interviewer | I mean the Guantanamo detainees | 2:16:41 |
certainly could use your help. | 2:16:43 | |
And there's some people who would probably | 2:16:45 | |
be able to give you access to some of them. | 2:16:48 | |
When you have all your connections. | 2:16:51 | |
Looking back what can you tell us | 2:16:55 | |
about your experiences at CCR and about America? | 2:16:59 | |
I know that's a huge question | 2:17:03 | |
but I think you have a good read | 2:17:05 | |
on it all now that you've been away from it for a while. | 2:17:09 | |
And you were so in the trenches, if you will | 2:17:12 | |
I'm curious to know how you see it. | 2:17:16 | |
- | Oh wow (crosstalk) well I mean, obviously, | 2:17:30 |
I tried very hard to get a job | 2:17:41 | |
at CCR when the executive director who hired me | 2:17:45 | |
Ron Daniels, he say, I was like a bad penny. | 2:17:51 | |
I kept turning up until they hired me. | 2:17:55 | |
I wouldn't have traded my time there | 2:18:03 | |
for anything in the world. | 2:18:06 | |
I think the people that I got to know and work with | 2:18:09 | |
whether they were lawyers or anyone working | 2:18:15 | |
at CCR on the board, or part of that satellite group | 2:18:20 | |
of People's Lawyers there, they were really all my heroes. | 2:18:24 | |
Despite the fact that and I think for a long time | 2:18:34 | |
people thought CCR was this throwback to another time. | 2:18:39 | |
CCR was the bedrock of the country when no one | 2:18:46 | |
was willing to stand up and say this isn't right. | 2:18:54 | |
And that's an amazing thing. | 2:19:01 | |
There are times I wish, like I could say, | 2:19:09 | |
to the world that this little place | 2:19:13 | |
is a place that did that. | 2:19:19 | |
I don't think I ever anticipated | 2:19:30 | |
that I would be in front of judges, | 2:19:32 | |
having spent hours memorizing the Federalist papers | 2:19:37 | |
so that I could say, "This is what Madison said," | 2:19:45 | |
arguing to a very conservative judge. | 2:19:52 | |
"If you decide against us, you're deciding | 2:19:57 | |
against what the founding fathers said." | 2:20:01 | |
I never thought I would be the person standing | 2:20:06 | |
on the Federalist papers in the constitution | 2:20:10 | |
telling judges "This is the heart | 2:20:13 | |
of what our country is, | 2:20:21 | |
and you can't fight against the rule of law. | 2:20:24 | |
You can't fight against us." | 2:20:30 | |
For me, that was shocking. | 2:20:36 | |
I grew up with an older sister | 2:20:45 | |
who at 16 joined the Black Panther Party, | 2:20:47 | |
and I was a little kid | 2:20:50 | |
and she was playing Bob Dylan | 2:20:53 | |
the "Times They Are a-Changin'." | 2:20:58 | |
And she told me I shouldn't stand | 2:21:02 | |
for the Pledge of Allegiance. | 2:21:05 | |
And so I got suspended in first grade. | 2:21:07 | |
But I think I couldn't have imagined | 2:21:15 | |
that there would be people in the highest offices | 2:21:20 | |
in our government that would be doing | 2:21:27 | |
such terrible things to people. | 2:21:31 | |
I think I'm still shocked. | 2:21:44 | |
One of the people that I represented fairly recently | 2:21:51 | |
or a few years ago was Anwar al-Awlaki | 2:21:57 | |
that American citizen who was assassinated by drone. | 2:22:05 | |
His father called from Yemen. | 2:22:11 | |
His father was minister of agriculture | 2:22:13 | |
and asked me to represent him. | 2:22:16 | |
And I filed what it's called a confidential complaint | 2:22:19 | |
with the UN special repertoire | 2:22:25 | |
on extra judicial killing. | 2:22:27 | |
'Cause it was announced in the New York Times | 2:22:29 | |
that he was on the list of the assassinated. | 2:22:31 | |
And I just couldn't imagine that we were gonna | 2:22:35 | |
kill an American citizen without charge or trial. | 2:22:44 | |
And I understand the arguments | 2:22:54 | |
about why we use drones for killing people. | 2:23:06 | |
It's so hard for me to believe that. | 2:23:17 | |
I guess I just wonder | 2:23:24 | |
when does the pendulum swing back | 2:23:28 | |
to the time where we really believed in human rights | 2:23:32 | |
and civil rights and it doesn't look like | 2:23:42 | |
that's gonna be anytime soon. | 2:23:49 | |
And I think that's it's hard knowing that, | 2:23:53 | |
it may never be back, | 2:24:05 | |
in any time that I'll ever see it. | 2:24:10 | |
That the country was changed so drastically | 2:24:13 | |
that we're gonna be suffering | 2:24:25 | |
and causing other people to suffer for a long time. | 2:24:29 | |
Interviewer | Well, your work is not done, obviously. | 2:24:35 |
So is there something, or might say one more thing | 2:24:38 | |
but is there something you've probably answered it | 2:24:41 | |
but that you were thinking when you came here | 2:24:44 | |
that you knew you wanted to say, and that I didn't ask you? | 2:24:47 | |
- | No, not really. | 2:24:52 |
I mean, I think, people always ask me | 2:25:04 | |
how did I do that work? | 2:25:08 | |
Why do I think about going back to do that work? | 2:25:10 | |
And somehow I think I still believed | 2:25:13 | |
that there is that basic goodness | 2:25:25 | |
that we're all born with, I guess | 2:25:35 | |
a very Buddhist idea, but | 2:25:37 | |
and I don't think I could do this work if I didn't believe | 2:25:41 | |
that there was a way to reach people. | 2:25:44 | |
And the difficulty is it's hard | 2:25:54 | |
to tell this story to people. | 2:26:02 | |
People have a hard time hearing it. | 2:26:08 | |
They don't really wanna hear it. | 2:26:11 | |
And so it becomes something | 2:26:17 | |
that you don't really wanna tell anymore. | 2:26:17 | |
For me it's there all the time. | 2:26:22 | |
And so it wasn't something that I did wanna | 2:26:30 | |
say so much as, talking | 2:26:33 | |
saying it out loud makes it very real again. | 2:26:39 | |
Interviewer | Well, you do think people should hear it. | 2:26:44 |
And so- | 2:26:48 | |
- | I do. | 2:26:49 |
Interviewer | Future people will hear it. | 2:26:50 |
And you are an important part of it. | 2:26:53 | |
We need to take a 20 seconds of room tone before we can end. | 2:26:56 | |
So we'll do that. | 2:27:01 | |
And then we're done. | 2:27:03 | |
- | What's room tone? | 2:27:07 |
John | It's where we all sit very quietly 20 seconds. | 2:27:08 |
Okay begin room tone. | 2:27:13 |
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