By Sophie Rose Walker — February 2, 2012

Are human beings better than the worst fifteen minutes of their lives? Clive Stafford Smith thinks so. And he’s not an optimistic hippy. He is the legal Director of not-for-profit charity, Reprieve, and has represented 83 prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, freed 66 of them, and been there 20 times (6 months spent accumulatively). His most recent visit was in November 2011 to see the last British prisoner held there, Shaker Aamer.

January 2012 is the ten-year anniversary of Guantánamo Bay taking its first inmates in 2002. But without looking at the statistics of what has changed since then, what does being ten years on really mean for the progress of human rights, and our views on terrorism and detention without trial?

“Just as it is absurd for the UK and US to think that terrorism has made the world a suddenly dangerous place (it has not, certainly compared to other challenges we face), so the mistakes of the Bush and Blair era have not made the world vastly more horrible”, says Clive. “If we look back 50 years, the world has come a long way. Bush and Blair were, I hope, just a brief trough in the general march along the path to a fuller appreciation of human rights.”

It seems like we aren’t so much marching along that path, more reluctantly plodding. I wonder whether Westerners aren’t more confused about public security than ever. Society places an extraordinary stigma on racial stereotypes of those more likely to be a threat, and what distinguishes Stafford Smith’s legal and moral approach from his interpretation of the law is that he sees the average notion of prejudice and fear as scarring the judicial system. And he isn’t shy about proselytising it; the video on the Reprieve website called “Why I defend guilty people”, says it in no uncertain terms. Not to mention his simple, comprehensive and perfectly executed columns in the New Statesman and the Guardian.

But he doesn’t think that Westerners are more scared and stupid than ever before. “I think they have been scared for a long time and their politicians have worked hard to make it so. Whether it is fear of black people, the Soviets, of crime, or whatever, it was ever thus, and ever a way to ensure that people do not (a) criticize their politicians, and (b) focus on how their lives could be made better.”

I suggest that one of the reasons the public remain scared or confused is because of hype, and an explicit lack of understanding of political jargon. This year is the start of the run-up to the US presidential election campaign, and the onset of the ‘promise-making season’ looms again. President Barack Obama pledged to close Guantánamo within a year of taking office, and it was a defining aspect in his differences to Bush and his administration. The strong reaction to him not keeping his promise is perhaps indicative of the complexity of administrative constraint in actually carrying out political intentions.

“It’s not entirely Obama’s fault”, he explains, for not closing Guantánamo yet, “and I don’t see a whole lot of point in yelling at him. It’s not as if he is the bad guy here – there are a number of Republican candidates who want to enlarge Guantánamo and use waterboarding (referred to as torture by the Spanish Inquisition, if not the Bush Administration). But that does not mean we are not morally obliged to press all the harder for the place to close.” Having said that though, it appears to boil down to the fact that “it’s simply because Obama dithered, and allowed the other side to turn it into a political football. A shame, but there we are.”
I begin to wonder where this relative apathy originates; severe exhaustion of a relentless legal career, or just an understanding, unlike his hippy counterparts, that the reality of shutting down Guantánamo isn’t really affected by protests at the White House and the public’s reaction.

Not only is the US administrative situation not transparent, but neither is the judicial system. Clive’s book, Bad Men (2007), which was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize, describes in detail his visits to the detention centre and the experiences he had there with his clients. One assumes that such intense, personal involvement constitutes a long-term relationship with the men he meets. I ask whether he feels only half the job is done, to release the innocent prisoners, whilst the remainder is to seek legal compensation and recognition once they are free.

“Of course they should be compensated,” Clive says without hesitation. “In the US, one is compensated if the supermarket leaves water on the aisle and you slip over, so how can it be that they are not compensated for a decade of unjust imprisonment?”
“But for reasons that I fear are rather complex, albeit dealt with at some length in my upcoming, ‘best-seller’ (my mother will at least buy a few copies) Injustice, they will get no compensation and the US judicial system will continue to insist that the Emperor is well-clothed.”

But Clive says defiantly that regardless of whether compensation is sought and achieved imminently, there is definitely life after Guantánamo for the freed men. “Of course there is. Some have made something very positive out of their ghastly experience, the same as people exonerated from death row often have.” I am somewhat surprised that he says this. Indeed, although they return to families and resume contact with Facebook (clearly, the paramount of liberty and autonomy), the psychological trauma inflicted hinders the extent to which a normal life can be resumed.

And that trauma inflicted is the still, ten years on, the subject of continued heated debate. The illegal use of interrogation methods such as waterboarding to obtain classified information from the prisoners is one of the greatest objectives against which Clive campaigns. Although, he says, “people generally understand that torture is not a reliable way of obtaining the right information, if any at all, unless they are total idiots. But that is not the real challenge of the ‘War of Terror’ (as Borat calls it). Rather, the real danger is the rapid encroachment of secrecy, where the powers that be have conflated national security with political embarrassment in order to cover up their sins. That runs through the political system, to the extent that Tony Blair thinks that the Freedom of Information Act was his biggest mistake – he clearly cannot spell I-R-A-Q, and he should be touting it as one of his greatest contributions.”

“You get compensation for slipping over in a supermarket in the US, but not forbeing unlawfully imprisoned for a decade”

I want to laugh. But not being able to spell is no laughing matter. And neither is waterboarding. The rate of error with the US arresting potential terror suspects and then releasing them due to lack of evidence is bigger than in any other area of law.
Clive admits that he can’t speak for other areas of law. “But again, (horribly self-advertising) my book will explain why we make so many mistakes in the judicial system generally. Actually, thinking about it in the context of one case where I have lost for 19 years (the poor chap is totally innocent and yet will die in prison) has made me think about why we make so many mistakes, but there are so many reasons (permeating every aspect of the process) that it will take the whole book to go into them, I am afraid.”

If it is frustrating for a lawyer to not be able to straightforwardly explain how and why so many mistakes are made with false arrests, then it only perpetuates the notion of secrecy that Clive talks about. It’s no wonder that the public perception of what actually constitutes ‘intelligence,’ that elusive term used to describe the information gathered about a suspect, is somewhat shrouded. Or is the reality that ‘intelligence’ isn’t complex code, but habit; errors have been recorded of Muslim family names being mistaken for forenames, and of inferential links between suspected terrorists being based on cultural habit.

The Tipton Three are three young British men from Tipton who were arrested in Afghanistan under unusual circumstances, even though they said they were just travelling. Claims that they had come into contact with weaponry were falsely linked to terror training, they say. So, it seems, even to Clive, that what is gathered from intelligence is not arbitrarily collected information.

Clive disagrees that the whole concept of ‘intelligence’ is just a myth promoted by governments to merit arresting innocent bearded men. “Intelligence is generally a notion that is used to keep secrets, which is a shame, as most intelligence does not need to be secret. Indeed, we would all be a lot safer if there were a whole lot fewer secrets.” Clive’s involvement with the Wikileaks scandal was testament to his mission to expose secrecy. But that said, he continues, “we have to obey the laws rather than merely violate them because we disagree with them – albeit constantly working to change those that are unwise.”

So he’s not a lawbreaker. But Clive certainly bends, twists and weaves his way through the legal system, to almost redefine the human rights of those he defends. Unsurprisingly, his principle of ‘people being better than the worst 15 minutes of their lives’ is not well regarded by many lawyers. “Sadly most lawyers enter the profession for all the wrong reasons – wealth and all that nonsense. So it is not surprising that most of them do not focus on the needs of those who are most unfortunate. But that does not matter, as it only takes a small group of people to change the world, and there will be enough people dedicated to justice to carry us forward.”

What carries forward into the next ten years on that high security island in Cuba is unknown, but what is for sure, is that Clive Stafford Smith will fight to the bitter end. Some ends are not quite so bitter though; a poignant Youtube video of two former inmates, Shafiq Rasul and Ruhal Ahmed, reuniting, and meeting for the first time since being released with former guard, Brandon Neely, who initiated the contact via Facebook, to apologise for his treatment of them. They accept his apology, and are now friends in the virtual world at least. How surreal, twisted and utterly humane; perhaps it is testament to the fact that true dedication to justice can’t be implemented by lawyers, but by the villains and victims themselves. M