Video and Transcript: Guantánamo Lawyers Facing US Jail Time?

Clive Stafford Smith and Ahmad Ghappour, lawyers for a number of Guantánamo Bay detainees, have been summoned to court over a letter they sent to President Obama detailing the torture their client Binyam Mohamed claims he faced. Stafford Smith and Ghappour face charges of 'unprofessional conduct' and revealing classified evidence, and will attend a hearing in Washington, DC on May 11. Stafford Smith has called the charges "frivolous", pointing out that all information in the letter, classified or otherwise, had been redacted by censors, leaving only the subject line "In re: torture of Binyam Mohamed". Like Stafford Smith I'd also question the sanity a law that makes revealing classified information about Guantántamo Bay to the President of the United States a crime.



AMY GOODMAN: This last story, an unusual development in the case of Binyam Mohamed, the British resident recently released after seven years in US custody, where he claims he was repeatedly tortured, first in a secret CIA prison, later at Guantanamo. Binyam Mohamed’s lawyers, Clive Stafford Smith and Ahmad Ghappour, could face six months in a US prison, The Guardian newspaper revealed last week, because of a letter they sent to President Obama explaining their client’s allegations of torture by US agents.

Officials from the Department of Defense who monitor and censor communication between Guantanamo prisoners and their lawyers filed a complaint against Mohamed’s lawyers for “unprofessional conduct” and for revealing classified evidence to the President. The memo the lawyers sent to Obama was completely redacted except for the title. It had urged the President to release evidence of Mohamed’s alleged torture into the public domain. Clive Stafford Smith and Ahmad Ghappour have been summoned before a D.C. court on May 11th.

I’m joined now in these last few minutes by Clive Stafford Smith, director of the British legal charity Reprieve.

Welcome to Democracy Now! Clive Stafford Smith, you’re afraid of being arrested if you come into this country?

CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH: No, I’m going to come to the country, because I want to face the charges. I mean, the charges are, to my mind, frivolous, because—it may be confusing to your listeners when you say that we supposedly revealed classified evidence and then say it was all censored—it was all censored. There wasn’t one iota of classified evidence revealed. So the real question, I guess, here is why the government continues to cover up the evidence of Binyam Mohamed’s torture.

AMY GOODMAN: But please explain, because I think this can be very confusing, what it is they said you did in this letter to President Obama. You are Binyam Mohamed’s lawyer.

CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH: Well, I wrote a letter to President Obama and attached to it a memorandum that was going to originally be the evidence that showed that Binyam was tortured. But that evidence we had to submit through the classification review process. So, ultimately, the two-page memo of evidence that Binyam had been tortured was all redacted, as you mentioned, so it was all blacked out. I mean, even to the President it was blacked out. And the only thing left in it was, you know, “In re: torture of Binyam Mohamed.”

What we were trying to do was get President Obama the information he needs to make a judgment as to whether the US should continue to cover up this evidence of torture. And it’s paradoxical that the President of the United States is not being permitted to make that judgment in a meaningful way.

AMY GOODMAN: So you will come to the United States for this May 11th hearing?

CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH: Oh, my goodness, yes. I mean, I am, I will say, offended by this process, but nothing would keep me away. I want to clear both mine and Ahmad’s name. And I want the real issue to be why the government continues to cover up the evidence of Binyam’s torture, because how can it be that we, as Americans, are not allowed to know when our government officials have committed criminal offenses against people like Binyam Mohamed? That just makes no sense at all. And if, indeed, someone should be on trial here, it should be the people who tortured Binyam.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’re going to leave it there. Clive Stafford Smith, thank you very much for this update.

CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH: Thank you.
Video of the exchange on Democracy Now! as well as the transcript are available here.

Saturday Contribution To Britain's Anti-Terror Campaign

This person clearly doesn't support the Policing Pledge. They should have their home raided, their family threatened with being shot, and then be followed by a police helicopter for two weeks.

EA's Canuckistan in The Guardian: State-sanctioned Snitching

Canuckistan, aka Steve Hewitt, has become the second Enduring America in the past few days to be featured in The Guardian's Comment Is Free with this piece on how the UK government is encouraging its citizens to become stake-holders in counter-terrorism. If you weren't feeling inspired about Bruce Schneier's contest, this might help:

State-sanctioned snitching

The UK's new counter-terrorism strategy of neighbour spying on neighbour echoes proposals that caused outrage in the US

Steve Hewitt

Whether similar controversy as in the US will appear in the UK remains to be seen. Past experience with CCTV would suggest not. Nevertheless, there remains a fine line between encouraging a well-informed public to be vigilant about terrorism and promoting paranoia that will lead to neighbour spying on neighbour.

With much fanfare, the government of Gordon Brown unveiled Contest 2, its sequel to the UK's previous counter-terrorism strategy. In the lead-up to its emergence, bits of the programme were leaked to the media, including that approximately 60,000 people such as security guards and shop clerks would receive training on what to watch for in terms of suspicious behaviour and how to react in the aftermath of a terrorist attack.

That aspect of the strategy was preceded by a new anti-terrorist campaign launched by the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) and the Metropolitan police involving advertisements appearing at tube stations, on billboards in London and elsewhere, and even on the radio. These ads raise the spectre of terrorism and the reward for action by diligent citizens who in the tube and billboard ads notice suspicious behaviour, such as chemical containers in a skip or an individual studying CCTV cameras, and report the incidents via a confidential anti-terrorism hotline. The radio commercial provides the alternative to citizens failing to act with the sound of a devastating explosion.

In a UK context these campaigns represent an effort to widen public participation in counter-terrorism, essentially turning citizens into stakeholders in the effort. They also reflect a continued government concern about the risk of terrorism, particularly through low-level attacks carried out by so-called "self starters" who exist outside those groups and individuals already known to the police and security service.

Encouraging suspicion through counter-terrorism training of ordinary citizens or public advertising campaigns is not, however, without its own risks. There is the potential for certain citizens to be demonised and stigmatised when their activities receive excessive scrutiny and, through calls to the hotline, to unwarranted attention from the police. Indeed, this point plus the wider implications for civil liberties of state-sanctioned snitching were the issues that emerged when a similar effort was proposed in the US in 2002.

In January 2002, the Bush administration introduced the Terrorism Information and Prevention System (Tips) with the goal of increasing public participation in domestic counter-terrorism. The goal of Tips was to "enable millions of America transportation workers, postal workers, and public utility employees to identify and report suspicious activities linked to terrorism and crime". It was to do so by setting up a special hotline, similar to the one in the British advertising, that these workers could call to report suspicious behaviour. The US deputy attorney general hailed the programme as providing "millions of American truckers, letter carriers, train conductors, ship captains, utility employees, and others, whose routines allow them to be the 'eyes and ears' of police, a formal way to report suspicious or potential terrorist activity".

The programme largely escaped wider public attention until a story in an Australian newspaper compared it to something that could have emerged from the former German Democratic Republic. Very quickly a maelstrom of criticism erupted that ran across the American political spectrum from the American Civil Liberties Union and the Village Voice on the left to the New York Times in the centre to Republican congressmen Dick Armey and Bob Barr on the right, the latter who called it a "snitch system", that appeared to typify "the very type of fascist or communist government we fought so hard to eradicate in other countries in decades past". The New York Times ran interviews with some workers who potentially might be called upon to report information. A delivery driver remarked on the increased number of satellite dishes he had delivered to "Arabs" after 11 September while another driver complained that "[i]mmigrants stare more than anybody else". In an editorial the paper decried the new version of the programme: "Even if it is limited to public places, the programme is offensive. The idea of citizens spying on citizens, and the government collecting data on everyone who is accused, is a staple of totalitarian regimes."

By then, Tips had made a host of enemies, including Armey, the then Republican majority leader in the House of Representatives. With little fanfare, Armey inserted a clause into the Homeland Security Act that prohibited any efforts to implement Tips. The programme died when Bush signed the act into law in November 2002.

Whether similar controversy as in the US will appear in the UK remains to be seen. Past experience with CCTV would suggest not. Nevertheless, there remains a fine line between encouraging a well-informed public to be vigilant about terrorism and promoting paranoia that will lead to neighbour spying on neighbour.

Anglo-American Gift Wars 2: The Return Visit

Remember the kerfuffle last month when Gordon Brown's highly symbolic, thoughtful gifts to the Obama family were reciprocated with 25 lousy DVDs? And how it turned out that those DVDs were most likely DRMed and therefore unwatchable in the UK? Well the Obamas decided to go one better on their return trip and offered up an iPod. To the Queen. Who, it turns out, already had one anyway.

Now I don't want to cast aspersions about the President of the United States, but according to this article the iPod contains video of the Queen's visit to Washington and Virginia, and the last time I checked (ie just a minute ago) the iTunes Store didn't sell videos of Royal visits. Which means that tech-savvy Obama must have put those videos on there himself- and this, while it doesn't rank up there with, say, invading another nation under false pretences, is possibly illegal.

I won't rail against the insanity of repressive copyright laws in our digital world here but I will say this- when even POTUS and the Queen are at it, everyone's a copyright criminal. Someone call the police- they're all still down at the Bank of England I think.