Clive Stafford Smith, the distinguished human rights attorney who co-founded the anti-death penalty nonprofit Reprieve and whose work earned him the Gandhi International Peace Award in 2005, maintains a frenetic travel schedule as part of his global fight against injustice. Between flights, Stafford Smith took the time to speak to The Progressive about the latest prisoner from the Guantánamo Bay Detention Camp that he has agreed to represent—the eighty-eighth since 2002.
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Clive Stafford Smith
“Eighty-five are home, and another two will be soon, hopefully,” Stafford Smith says, emphasizing that being cleared for release doesn’t mean one gets to leave. Regarding his twenty years spent visiting America’s gulag, Stafford Smith vows, “I was here when it started, and I plan to be here when it ends.”
When he volunteered his services in 2002 to detainees held as “enemy combatants” at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, Stafford Smith had established a reputation as a death penalty lawyer who represented 300 prisoners in the southern United States, preventing execution in all but six cases. He joined attorneys like the late Michael Ratner, as well as Joe Margulies and Tom Wilner, all of whom believed that then President George W. Bush’s Executive Order establishing military tribunals to combat “international terrorism” was unconstitutional. When asked why he volunteered—a choice that still consumes him—he answered that “liberty is eroded at the margins.”
In other words, what we don’t see can hurt us, and in 2002—in the wake of the 9/11 attacks—the Bush Administration was determined to ignore the rule of law. In her 2008 book, The Dark Side, The New Yorker staff writer Jane Mayer details the extraordinary lengths Stafford Smith went to in order to discover the names of missing people who might be inside Guantánamo.
The Bush Administration refused to reveal these names, even after the Supreme Court ruled in 2004 in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, that the executive branch could not hold prisoners indefinitely without charges—due process entitled them to a lawyer. Stafford Smith traveled to countries like Bahrain and Jordan, where he held press conferences, hoping to find relatives who could retain him on behalf of a detainee. By the end of 2004, he had collected more than 900 names of missing persons. As he explains, “I hoped that we could open it up to scrutiny; forced to present evidence, they would have to shut [Guantánamo] down.”
In 2007, Stafford Smith published a book, Bad Men: Guantánamo Bay and the Secret Prisons, about his experiences working on behalf of Guantánamo detainees. In it, he alleges that although the British government had not tortured “war on terror” prisoners, they were complicit in it.
The Bush Administration refused to reveal the names, even after the Supreme Court ruled in 2004 in that the executive branch could not hold prisoners indefinitely without charges.
Like Stafford Smith, attorney Shelby Sullivan-Bennis learned the value of trust in her defense of Guantánamo detainees—and also the power of love. She argued the case of Saifullah Paracha, who was finally released from Guantánamo in October 2022 after eighteen years of being held there. At seventy-five, Paracha was a different man from the one who disappeared in Bangkok, Thailand, during a business trip in July 2003. For a month, his family had no idea where he was.
Sullivan-Bennis, who is now an assistant public defender in Rhode Island, tweeted the following after his release, recalling the deadly cat-and-mouse game the United States played with those it had arrested:
“A man who became like a second father to me over the years that I was his lawyer in Guantánamo Bay was just returned home. Never charged with a crime, Saifullah Paracha waded thru years of hearings—before federal judges and military reps—and he cleared every single benchmark. And then the progress stopped. Defense attorneys know the feeling of powerlessness—it is endemic to the nature of any ‘criminal justice’ system. But I cannot begin to describe the feeling of powerlessness heralded by the most powerful government in the world sitting on its haunches refusing to honor its word.”
During the last decade, when she’s not in court, Sullivan-Bennis has tried to keep the media spotlight on her clients. In a 2017 article in HuffPost, she described the world-famous prison as a place where time has stopped—“a fifteen-year hiatus from reality.” At that time, Sullivan-Bennis was representing eight men, including Tolfiq al Bihani, who was cleared by the U.S. government in 2010 yet was still in shackles many years later. All of them had spent more than ten years in prison without being charged with a crime. She reminded readers that it costs $445 million a year to keep the Guantánamo prison open—more than $29,000 per prisoner, per night—and asked: Do you feel safer?
Even when the CIA’s record of kidnapping, abuse, and torture gets the attention of U.S. lawmakers, there is no closure for its victims. In December 2014, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released a long-awaited report on the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program. It concluded that the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques was not an effective means” of obtaining accurate information or gaining detainee cooperation. The report called the CIA’s methods “brutal.” Many Americans already knew the takeaway: that the CIA had committed atrocities with no Congressional oversight.
As we look back on the policies and programs that were justified in the name of the “war on terror,” what is remarkable is not how much has changed in twenty years, but rather how little.
As we look back on the policies and programs that were justified in the name of the “war on terror,” what is remarkable is not how much has changed in twenty years, but rather how little. One need only speak with those formerly imprisoned at Guantánamo who now struggle to remake their lives.
Moazzam Begg, a fifty-five-year-old British man of Pakistani heritage who was held by the United States in extrajudicial detention for nearly three years, details in his 2006 memoir, Enemy Combatant: My Imprisonment at Guantánamo, Bagram, and Kandahar, the abuse inflicted by U.S. guards. He now advocates for Guantánamo prisoners and other people impacted by the “war on terror” as a senior director at the London-based human rights organization CAGE.
Interviewed in 2011 for Columbia University’s Rule of Law Oral History Project, Begg explained that neither the United States nor the United Kingdom have ever acknowledged the false imprisonment and torture of Guantánamo prisoners, who live with the shadow of stigma and the stresses of long absence.
Guantánamo shatters their relationships with family members. Begg said he came “home to see children that I have never seen” and found that the British government’s attitude was “not even a ‘sorry.’ ” Instead, it was, “You were in Guantánamo, now you’re back home, pick up your life, that’s your problem now.”
In 2003, CAGE (then called CagePrisoners) was organized to be a voice for those who had “disappeared” behind prison walls—men whom former Vice President Dick Cheney had called “the worst of the worst.” One of its founders, Asim Qureshi, stresses that CAGE defends the principles of due process, the rule of law, and justice, not just individuals. “If we don’t defend these individuals [who] have had their rights taken away from them, then at some point these rights will be taken away from us as well.”
Thirty prisoners remain to this day at Guantánamo Bay.
CAGE’s investigative and legal work is mirrored by nonprofit organizations in the United States that also arose to defend the rights of political prisoners targeted in the “war on terror.” One of them is the Coalition for Civil Freedoms, founded in 2010 by people in the Muslim community who were victims of FBI sting operations and other post-9/11 surveillance and targeting. A 2021 titled “The Terror Trap: The Impact of the War on Terror on Muslim Communities Since 9/11” details entrapment cases throughout the United States. “When possible, we attend trials and hearings and are witnesses to show support and lessen the fear around these types of prosecutions,” the Coalition for Civil Freedoms notes on its website.
As these organizations seek legal redress for the victims of abuses and their families perpetrated in the name of U.S. national security, they help “rebuild American moral authority and credibility both at home and abroad,” as the American Civil Liberties Union phrased it.
Thirty prisoners remain to this day at Guantánamo Bay—a black hole symbolizing what journalist Jane Mayer calls “the dark side” of American justice.