ALEX MILLER: So this is hate mail.
CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH: Yeah, yeah.
ALEX MILLER: Who do you think sent it?
An American, a Brit?
CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH: I have no idea.
I think British.
ALEX MILLER: What are they accusing you of?
CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH: I'm accused, I think, of being--
where is it?
A human rights jihadist.
ALEX MILLER: And is this you being kind of a Geppetto
figure, puppeteer--
CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH: Apparently holding all of
Great Britain.
Oh, look.
It is from Britain.
It's second class.
ALEX MILLER: Second class.
That's a little bit of an insult.
He wants to threaten you, but he's not in any great rush.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
ALEX MILLER: Clive Stafford Smith is the UK Legal Director
of Reprieve, a nonprofit organization who represent the
legal rights of people in secret prisons
all around the world.
He's the kind of person that cynical people call a
do-gooder as an insult.
But I think that's good, because he's actually doing
something good.
In 2010, Barack Obama made a campaign promise to close
Guantanamo Bay.
Three years later, and we're still no closer
to seeing it shut.
BARACK OBAMA: As a matter of policy, the preference of the
United States is to capture terrorist suspects.
When we do detain a suspect, we interrogate them.
And if the suspect can be prosecuted, we decide whether
to try him in a civilian court or a military commission.
The glaring exception to this time-tested approach, is the
detention center at Guantanamo Bay.
ALEX MILLER: Clive has represented inmates of
Guantanamo Bay since it opened in 2002.
To date, he's helped release 65 prisoners and still acts
for 15, including this guy, Shaker Aamer.
He's a British citizen who has been held in the prison since
2002, despite being cleared for release six years ago.
In March, 2013, Shaker Aamer joined the hunger strike at
Guantanamo Bay.
Reprieve estimate that over 130 inmates are currently
rejecting food, and a bunch of them are being force fed by
the American Army.
Some of your clients are engaged in a hunger strike at
the moment.
How long has that been going on?
CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH: Well, I always wonder when the last
time was that I didn't have food for 24 hours, let alone
48 hours, let alone now 120 days.
About 120 of them have gone without food for four months.
And, of course, some of them are being force-fed.
ALEX MILLER: Can you explain the process of force-feeding?
Because I think that some people hear it, and they think
of some people holding someone down and then putting, like, a
spoon in their mouth.
But it's not like that at all.
CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH: There's a tube.
It's 120 centimeters long.
And they stick it up your nose, and they force-feed you
through that twice a day.
Instead of leaving it in for days at a time and just
force-feeding you through the tube, which is the easiest way
to do it for the prisoners, they pull it out after every
single feeding.
They put people in restraint chairs that look a bit like
the electric chair.
And it's advertised by the manufacturer.
And it says on it, "like a padded cell on wheels." And
they strap you in this thing, and they have a head strap.
And they stuff this thing up your nose.
And then they bend the tube over your head, so
you can't bite it.
And then they leave you there for two hours, and
they force feed you.
And if you vomit, they carry on doing it.
They won't let you go to the toilet while you're there.
So you have to piss on yourself, effectively.
BARACK OBAMA: Imagine a future, 10 years from now or
20 years from now, when the United States of America is
still holding people who have been charged with no crime on
a piece of land that is not part of our country.
Look at the current situation, where we are force-feeding
detainees who are being held on a hunger strike.
ALEX MILLER: Would you shut Guantanamo tomorrow?
CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH: Of course I'd
shut Guantanamo tomorrow.
ALEX MILLER: What would you do with the prisoners in there
who are deemed to be an actual risk?
CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH: Well, it's incredibly easy.
First, there are 86 of the 166 prisoners who have been
cleared for release.
52%.
So we just send them back home.
With the others, there's a group of people who have been
designated for trial.
Give them a proper trial.
I don't care if they give them a proper trial in Guantanamo.
They can bring the jury down there for all I care.
ALEX MILLER: What I was going to talk about was
radicalization within Guantanamo as caused by the
torture perpetrated by the American Army.
CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH: So you've got to
love that, don't you?
We have tortured them so badly that we've pissed them off.
So now we can't set them free, because they
might be angry at us.
You know, first, that's absurd, the notion that you
can torture people and then hold them because you've
tortured them.
But second, it's also just not true.
ALEX MILLER: Do you believe there is a large terrorist
threat against the West?
CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH: If you had taken the entire
membership of al-Qaeda on 9/11, you could have put it
all on one page of paper.
And if you had taken the reservoir of goodwill for
America on September the 12th, it would
have flooded the Atlantic.
And by using this whole paradigm of war on terror and
by jettisoning our values, what we did was we inspired,
if you will-- and I hate that word, because who wants to
inspire someone to go around killing innocent people-- we
inspired hundreds of people to hate us.
And we drained the reservoir of goodwill to such an extent
that now, 90% of Pakistanis think we, the Americans, are
the bad guys.
ALEX MILLER: How do you see the hunger strike working out?
CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH: I don't know how the hunger strike's
going to resolve.
We've had a bunch in the past, and it's always resolved in
the military basically beating them into submission.
But this time, because people are so desperate--
and you know, part of the hunger strike, they're
force-feeding them a particular thing
that induces that--
I don't think they thought about this-- but it induces
depression.
And,
You know, people like Shaker Aamer have never met his
11-year-old son who was born on the day that he arrived in
Guantanamo.
And so why would these guys ultimately, some of them not
commit suicide?
And that's the danger.
I think people are going to die there.
And I've got to say, my favorite of all the guys there
is Shaker Aamer.
And I told him the story about Hurricane Carter.
I don't know if you remember the story with Bob Dylan and
the whole song.
ALEX MILLER: He had the song, yeah.
CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH: When he was banged up for something he
didn't do, a matter he didn't do, he recognized that the
whole prison system is about crushing him.
And so he did exactly the opposite of
everything they would say.
So Shaker started doing the opposite of
everything they said.
And he had this thing where he'd go out to the little cage
where they would let him do rec, which
meant sitting around.
And he said, I want to stay here for seven days as a
peaceful protest.
And they said, if you do that, we'll beat you up.
And so he came to this compromise where he would ask
them a question every day.
And if they got the question right, he'd go voluntarily.
And if they didn't, he'd make them beat him up.
So he began by asking them the name of the vice president.
And they got that wrong.
So they beat him up.
But, you know, to my surprise, that really reinforced
Shaker's sense of self.
And he came back from being immensely depressed to being
in control of his life again.
ALEX MILLER: There are obviously a lot of other
similar places to Guantanamo Bay around the world that
people are less aware of.
CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH: Well, Guantanamo's evil twin sister
is Bagram, which is in Afghanistan.
And it is an incredibly sad thing that no one does know
about Bagram, because it's far worse than Guantanamo.
I've never met my client.
I can show you his birth certificate.
And it gets worse than that.
The one I can sort of vaguely talk about, because some of
it's public, is the Binyam Mohamad torture, where he was
taken to Morocco and a razor blade taken to his genitals,
and so forth.
You know, if I came to you and I said, oh boy, have I got
some interesting stuff on Binyan's case, you would
naturally want to see it.
But I can't show it to you, because it's secret.
And that's the frustration of the secrecy story is it's far
more significant, in a way, than the torture, because the
government's doing awful things, and you can't know
about them.
ALEX MILLER: Perhaps through the kind of success of the
demonization of places like Guantanamo, then that has
encouraged a bomber to give up with taking prisoners and just
kind of start using drones en masse.
Does that ever worry you?
CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH: Oh, of course it does.
I mean, when I first went to Guantanamo, one of the yahoo
Republican people down there said, if you insist on legal
rights for these terrorist sons of bitches,
we'll just kill them.
And the reason Guantanamo ended up having so many
innocent people in it was because we were dropping
leaflets saying, if you turn this guy with a beard in,
we'll give you $5,000.
You know, that translates in Europe or America to about a
quarter of a million dollars.
People in Pakistan and Afghanistan would turn their
own grandmothers in for that sort of money.
And then what happened in November 2011, when I was in
Islamabad, is we had this meeting about drones with a
bunch of the families of the victims from Waziristan.
And it was really a great meeting, the first time they'd
met a Westerner.
And I told them the American perspective that no innocent
people were being killed, and they snorted.
But we discussed what we could do.
Three days later, the 16-year-old kid who'd I met at
that meeting, Tariq Aziz, was killed.
And it was because some bastard informant had stuck a
GPS tag on his car.
ALEX MILLER: But, yeah.
I mean, how does it get to a point where Obama's signing
off on the death of your 16-year-old friend?
CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH: It's because he's been given
misinformation.
And they're using the same intensely flawed intelligence
that resulted in Guantanamo Bay.
ALEX MILLER: You've used this phrase a lot of people have
used about us kind of sleepwalking
into the drone era.
CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH: Wait a minute.
I said it first.
ALEX MILLER: OK.
You coined a phrase, which has been jumped upon.
CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH: Because I was very pleased
with myself for that.
Because the drone age has resonance in the Stone Age.
And, I just like it.
I'm sorry.
There are very few things I can claim.
Honestly, I steal most things from others.
ALEX MILLER: Now that America's set the precedent
that you can fly these robots around the planet, executing
people you don't like without anyone's permission or without
any trial, where does that leave us with China, with
Russia, with India in the future?
CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH: I don't think it's any great secret
where we're going, in a way.
Because we had dystopian movies in the 1980s and 1990s.
You know, all those ones in LA where you have drones flying
everywhere.
And we all thought, ooh, that's horrible.
Well, we're well on that route.
And I think, ultimately, we will end up with some sort of
international convention on it.
I've got a video of the New York Police Department with
their first drone, which they got for terrorism.
Now they've not had a single terrorist prosecution as a
result of all of the money we poured into the NYPD.
But they do have a drone.
And you know what they did with it, of course, was they
spot two people making out on the roof of an apartment.
And then they just go around and around them for 30
minutes, watching.
Now, honestly, I'm not too paranoid about anything.
Because frankly, I know the CIA snoops on all of my emails
and things, because I was told by people in the know.
And, you know, my wife and I, when I go to Guantanamo, we
periodically send happy little notes to the CIA, apologizing
for being so boring.
Because I just don't give a damn, frankly.
But I'm a very privileged person in the sense that,
yeah, they come after me every now and then, but I can defend
myself, by and large.
There are a lot of people who are in much greater
jeopardy than me.
And those tend to be the people we hate.
And that's what concerns me a lot more.
ALEX MILLER: I've read somewhere--
I mean, Lord knows if it's is true or not-- but I read
somewhere that in Fatah areas, mothers have taken to telling
their children, eat your supper and go to bed, or the
drones will come and get you.
Which said something about the kind of psychological impact
of the presence of these robots have had.
CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH: Well, there's certainly that.
But actually, in a way more pernicious, what mothers
really say to their children is, you can't go to school
today because the drones might get you.
And when you look at who the victims are of this process--
you know, one can quibble, if it's quibbling, about who's
killed, and whether they're militants and whatever.
What you can't quibble about is the fact that there are
800,000 people in Waziristan who are being terrorized by
these drones on a daily basis, who aren't guilty of anything.
But I don't know about you.
I'm actually quite keen to limit the use of weapons that
kill people as much as we can.
And I don't care what they are.
ALEX MILLER: But, you know, you're a pinko.
CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH: I realize that.
ALEX MILLER: Yeah.
CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH: Can you just give me my full title?
A commie, pinko, liberal.
ALEX MILLER: A commie, pinko, liberal, son of a bitch.
CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH: There we go.
-Will you compensate the innocent family victims?
That will make us safer here at home.
I love my country.
I love the rule of law.
But drones are making us less safe and keeping people in
indefinite detention in Guantanamo,
and making us unsafe.