All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, you guys, introducing Clive Stafford Smith.
He is a lawyer, the founder of the organization Reprieve, and you might remember we've spoken to him on the show in years back, all about torture and all kinds of illegal rendition and so forth in the Bush years.
And now here he is sticking up for Julian Assange as an expert witness at the extradition hearings in the United Kingdom.
Welcome to the show, sir.
How are you doing?
Well, I'm doing very well.
And you make it sound like we always talk about such incredibly cheerful matters.
Yeah, well, you know what?
We do important work, and I'm very proud to talk about the great work that you're doing.
Well, thank you.
But anyway, you killed it up there.
And the bad guys were trying to get you to admit that what Assange did is different than publishing a thing or two the way any other journalistic organization might.
And you refuse to let them get away with it, according to the reporting I read.
So could you please tell us about that?
Well, I mean, there are several crucial things in Julian Assange's case.
And the first, which I think we as Americans and notwithstanding my strange accent, I am American.
In fact, I was just filling out my my form to vote.
You know, we really relish the First Amendment and the right to free speech and the right to publish and so forth.
And one of the crucial elements of Julian Assange's case is that he is would be the first person I believe ever in the history of the United States tried a criminal offense when he's been the recipient of leaked information.
And it's one thing if you, Scott, were the one to leak classified information, but if you receive it, you know, that's a very different thing.
And Julian Assange was was receiving it and then publishing it as people would with the First Amendment.
And now others have been charged.
Right.
But they just ended up backing down.
Yes.
And, you know, the real issue with Julian Assange is that some of the things he leaked and I think this was the relevance of my testimony, some of them have provided the basis for what I think are incredibly important lawsuits where American officials have committed criminal offenses.
And this is one of the bizarre things to me, that he leaks information about how certain Americans have tortured my clients, have murdered them, and they want to prosecute him for that.
But not the American officials like John Yoo, for example, who were the ones behind validating the torture.
That's pretty shocking.
Yeah.
You know what?
I'm going to skip right to the thing that raised my eyebrows the most here when I read actually, I hadn't even had a chance to read your whole statement here, but I read some coverage of it that you cited that and I think at an airbase, it was Bagram or somewhere in Afghanistan, they murdered a guy right there on the tarmac as an interrogation tool against the other guy.
You know, this was one of the extraordinary things, if I had to say, and we should remember that just today, just a few hours ago, was the 19th anniversary of the attack on the World Trade Center, which was a horrendous, monstrous criminal attack that took many, many innocent lives.
And I think the big mistake we made, first off, was to call that an act of war, because in doing that, we glamorized people and said they were warriors instead of just out and out murderers.
And what we did was we banged a whole bunch of people up in Bagram Air Force Base and other places, and then abused them horribly.
And when I first went to Guantanamo Bay, when we finally got in there, because the Bush administration forced us for two and a half years to keep us out.
But when we finally got in there, I interviewed a chap called Mohsen Beg, and Mohsen described his time in Bagram, described these things that I just couldn't believe my country was doing, torture, torture.
But he also described a murder that he witnessed where another prisoner was murdered.
And this turned out later to be a murder that was thoroughly investigated and what Mohsen told me was true.
But when I submitted my notes, 30 pages of notes about Mohsen's torture and about this chap being murdered, I was originally told by the people, you know, everything that he said to me was deemed classified until they cleared it.
And I was originally told that all of my 30 pages of notes were classified.
And I, you know, I confronted the guy and I said, how can this be?
And he said that this was reflecting the methods and means of interrogation.
And I said, you cannot be serious.
You cannot be telling me that murdering someone is an American method of interrogation.
And, you know, that was the position they took, which was just crazy, crazy.
We finally got them to change that around.
But there were still a lot of those sorts of absurd rules about what should be classified.
Well, now, but just to clarify here, that was their line of BS or they literally murdered a guy in front of another guy just to impress him how serious they were in an interrogation.
Their line, the crucial thing here is what they said was classified.
And this is what Julian Assange is up against, right?
He's being prosecuted for revealing secrets.
Now, a secret is what the US government says is a secret.
And what they told me, this was the official line when I did this, was the official line was that murdering that man was one of the methods of interrogation, as in intimidating people not to talk to him.
And, you know, that's that's crazy.
But so was torture.
And so were all these other things.
And, you know, this is just wrong.
This is not American, is it?
Well, we know from Colonel Larry Wilkerson on this show first and then the AP's count verified his that one hundred and eight people were at least died.
I don't know exactly how they all died, but one hundred and eight people died in the military's custody.
That's excluding the CIA, black sites and everything.
But that's just in military custody in Afghanistan in Iraq or two.
And I think that was a minimum.
That's true.
And there were all sorts of other things going on, too.
And I wish this was all historical.
But actually, just before we started talking here today, I was writing up something for one of my continuing Guantanamo clients.
And, you know, you've got 40 people left in Guantanamo.
This is not a historical thing.
And you would think after all these years having, you know, we've managed to get 740 people out of Guantanamo.
And you have to remember that for them to be released from that, the top six U.S. intelligence agencies have to say they're not a threat to the United States.
So that means that 94 percent of the prisoners that they've admitted were basically innocent of what they were accused of.
But there are still 40 there and there are still seven people who I represent.
And you'd think they'd have all the really bad guys there now.
But, you know, this guy I was writing about, this guy, a chap called Ahmad Rabbani, who is, you know, he's a taxi driver from Karachi who was sold for a bounty and on September the 10th, 2002, sold to the U.S.
He was he was said by the Pakistanis to be a terrorist called Hassan Gul.
And he said, no, I'm not.
I'm not a terrorist.
I'm a taxi driver called Ahmad Rabbani.
But they took him to the dark prison in Kabul, tortured him for 545 days.
What we didn't know when I first met him in 2006 was that the fact that came out in the Senate torture report, which was that while he was in the dark prison, the U.S. captured Hassan Gul, the real guy.
And what's even more shocking is Hassan Gul apparently was cooperating, by which I suppose they mean he said he was Hassan Gul.
So they let him go and they sent him back to Pakistan, where he carried on his wicked ways.
And he was killed in a drone strike in 2012.
In the meantime, poor old Ahmad, who was not Hassan Gul, was sent to Guantanamo, where he has been since that time.
And he's got a 17 year old son called Jawad.
Who I met in Pakistan and Jawad was born after Ahmad was kidnapped is the only word for it.
And he's never touched his dad in 17 years.
And, you know, this is stuff that's still going on.
It's not history.
Absolutely crazy.
And and that's not the craziest of the stories of the people, the mistaken identities and so forth at Guantanamo Bay.
There's a guy they busted with a Tupperware thing full of sugar, who did 20 years there.
So, you know, 15 years.
Well, I had a 14 year old kid I represented there called Mohammed Al-Gharani.
And really, it's very hard not to laugh, except this poor child was so abused for it.
They he had never been to Afghanistan, right?
He'd gone to Pakistan from Saudi because he was black and the Saudis, you know, pretty racist.
And so to get an education, he went to Karachi and he just got there.
He knew nothing about 9-11 or anything.
And he was sold for a bounty.
And they interrogated him.
This is the I mean, you've got a lot.
This was they were interrogating him and they were using an interpreter who spoke Yemeni Arabic and Mohammed spoke Saudi Arabic.
And the word Zalat in Yemeni Arabic means money.
The Zalat in Saudi Arabic means salad or tomatoes.
So they start interrogating this 14 year old, you know, when he went to Pakistan, what Zalat did you have?
And he thought they were totally mad.
You know, why would you need tomatoes to go to Pakistan?
So he said, I didn't have any Zalat when I went to Pakistan.
You had to have Zalat.
And he said, no, I could get Zalat anywhere I needed it.
And he was talking about salad.
So they get excited because they think he's talking about money and they decide he's an al Qaeda financier.
So they ask him where he could get Zalat and he lists a series of vegetable stalls in Karachi, which they write down.
And they honestly think this 14 year old kid who's talking about tomatoes is a mid 20s al Qaeda financier.
And he ends up going to Guantanamo for that.
I mean, it's total madness.
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All right.
So now you're on the stand virtually in Assange's hearing and you're bringing all this stuff up and saying, because Wikileaks published this information, it made a difference in my legal cases here.
Right.
And that was the crux of your testimony.
Well, I was there in person.
Oh, you were.
OK.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But so I was basically testifying about the different things that were leaked that were so important.
And so, for example, one of them is what they call J-PAL, the Joint Prioritized Effects List, which was basically a kill list, what they euphemistically call a disposition matrix in Afghanistan about the people on the Afghan-Pakistan area that we wanted to kill.
And they, you know, Wikileaks leaked a list of six hundred and sixty nine names.
All of these people that they wanted to kill had pseudonyms, you know, it just illustrates how puerile some of these things are because they use pseudonyms for these targets that were like porn stars and, you know, all sorts of ridiculous names like that.
And these were not just people they thought were terrorists.
They were people they thought were drug dealers.
And so what we were doing was we were executing people without trial for what we thought was peddling drugs in that area and doing it by drone.
And, you know, that was just something that was exposed by Wikileaks.
And then so but then your argument to the court is that that proves the value of this publishing rather than that is a terrible national security breach that should have been kept secret to protect America's interests.
Well, no, that's true.
That's true.
I mean, when they leaked, for example, all those documents from Guantanamo Bay in a quite wide, the U.S. government thought that that was a security breach.
I have no idea because there was nothing in there that threatened national security.
What it did was it exposed how the U.S. had put 779 people in Guantanamo Bay based on unbelievably bad evidence.
So, for example, it exposed the fact that this one chap who was given the number 252 had given a statement that last 85 minutes.
So he'd been talking to an interrogator for 85 minutes and he'd snitched on 92 people, so more than one person a minute.
And it just made up stories about these people, which resulted in them being locked up in Guantanamo.
And, you know, what came out with all of these things and then I was doing a whole bunch of work on those cases, too, was how these informants were the basis for what the U.S. was saying was incredibly important intelligence, but it was actually total nonsense, including in one case, this chap who said that al-Qaeda was working with Saddam Hussein on weapons of mass destruction.
All right, well, the power went out and messed that up, but to pick up on one important track, I believe I read that you mentioned Binyam Mohamed in your testimony there at the Assange hearing.
Can you explain the context of that story to us, please, sir?
Yes, I certainly can.
Binyam was one of the prisoners I represented in Guantanamo Bay.
He was a British guy and he was accused of being a part of the nuclear bomb plot.
If you recall, back in 2002, there was a theory that there'd been a plan to blow up a nuclear weapon in downtown New York and Binyam was meant to be the one behind it.
And, you know, this was just part of the stuff.
He was rendered to Morocco, where they took a razor blade to his genitals every two weeks for a year and a half as part of the torture.
And he had admitted that he had read how to build a nuclear bomb when he was being tortured.
And he had described how to do that.
And basically, for you physicists out there, it went like this.
You put your uranium in a bucket and you swing it around your head for 45 minutes and somehow that divides up uranium-235 from uranium-239.
And Bob's your uncle, you've got your weapons grade uranium.
And it was just totally fantastic.
But it wasn't until I got in to see him in Guantanamo that he was able to tell me that this was all nonsense.
And it was something, when he was tortured about whether he'd ever read anything about nuclear anything, he told them about this spoof article he read from 1970 something.
And I tracked it down.
And it was published in Florida in 1974, I think, by this woman as a spoof.
And she was no longer around.
But I found her daughter, who was then working for the L.A. Times, and her daughter wrote a piece about her mom being behind this nuclear bomb plot because these mad people had tortured Dinyan into saying that this was how they were going to build the nuclear bomb.
And, you know, the reason that's so weird, Scott, and extreme is...
Can I just ask you real quick?
Am I right that that was Rosa Brooks, who's now the Georgetown law professor?
Oh, that's right.
Yeah, that is.
I didn't know.
Yeah, that was because she was the writer for the L.A. Times at the time.
And she's made herself very famous in the last couple of weeks.
So that's just a connection to help people realize what it is we're talking about.
Well, I mean, what was remarkable about that, of course, is if I torture you, Scott, and I get you to say you're a terrorist, you know, that's bad and it's bad for you.
But when they tortured Dinyan and came up with this story and John Ashcroft, then the attorney general, interrupted his visit to Moscow to broadcast this to all America, it terrified people into thinking that genuinely there might be a nuclear bomb in New York.
And this was an excuse for having the FBI, the civilian domestic police, arrest the American-born American citizen, Jose Padilla, on American soil at O'Hare Airport.
And then the next day, turn him over to Donald Rumsfeld, who held him without charges at the brig in South Carolina for four years or something.
Yeah, that was one of the things against Jose.
That's true.
Yeah.
And they had tortured it out of this guy by taking razor blades to his parts.
That's American foreign policy for them.
Now, but you explain this to the judge and you says to the judge that this is relevant to the story of WikiLeaks.
How exactly, Clive?
Well, you see, with all of these things, what we're talking about here is who's the criminal?
You know, Binyam's no more a terrorist than my grandmother.
And he's been out and about since we got him out 12 years ago, you know, happily married and getting on with his life.
But who really was the terrorist there?
Was it Binyam or was it the people who were behind this horrifying torture that then resulted in the whole of America being terrorized?
And, you know, one of the things when you're talking about whistleblowers, and that's really what Julian Assange is, is they do these things from their perspective in the public interest and they reveal things that others would rather they didn't reveal.
And I think I think honestly, if you took a poll of all Americans and asked, who's the bad guy here, the person who was tortured, who has never proven to do anything or the person who did the torture.
And I do think even in this day and age that we would have 95 percent of people saying that the crooks are the torturers.
And in that case, what Julian Assange and WikiLeaks did was reveal reveal criminality as opposed to anything else.
Yeah.
And then.
But so I'm not sure, though, that that really matters, right?
What if they had just leaked a bunch of stuff about some very low level, you know, barely felony scandal at the local garbage concern, you know, with a corruption at the mayor's office or something that that barely mattered?
Would that be much different?
Because it seems like it's really not different.
Well, the problem is that we have an overpowerful government that is saying that these are secrets.
And, you know, if you ask me, here we are today, the 19th anniversary of the tragedy of 9-11.
And if you ask me what the very worst thing that's come out of 9-11 has been, it wouldn't even be torture.
It wouldn't even be rendition.
It would be over secrecy because the government has become obsessed with making things secret that actually are just embarrassing.
And, you know, this goes it's very dangerous for America.
There was one of the examples that I was bringing up in testimony was about the cables.
You may remember the WikiLeaks cable gate where they revealed all these intensely embarrassing cables.
And I was involved at the time in litigation in Pakistan over the US program for assassinating people in Waziristan because I was doing a lot of work there and I was meeting all these people who were not terrorists at all, but they were being killed.
You know, the US was trying to kill dangerous people, but they were using snitches who they were paying money, who had no interest in doing something that was going to endanger them.
So they would inform on people who weren't dangerous and then the US would kill them with drones.
And there were scores of these Hellfire missiles being fired at people.
You know, they're trying to kill Ayman al-Zawahiri, who was the second in command to bin Laden.
And instead of killing him, they killed 56 children.
And, you know, first you have to imagine that they're your children and I've got a 12 year old and imagine what would happen if they killed my son and how I would feel.
But second, you have to think, how does this really benefit America that we're pissing off everyone in Waziristan so that we became the most hated nation in Pakistan when this was going on?
And Wikileaks revealed these cables that showed that the incredibly corrupt Pakistan prime minister at the time, Gailani, was pretending to be opposed to these drone strikes, but actually had said to Anne Patterson, who was then the US ambassador, had said, look, we'll complain in the National Assembly just for appearances sake, but then we'll do nothing.
And so that was revealed by Wikileaks.
And by revealing that, we then brought the litigation with Imran Khan and were able to stop that, which was great for all the children who are being killed and also great for America, because it meant that as of 2019, there have been no murders of little children in Waziristan by the US and the US reputation has begun to be salvaged.
Yeah, I mean, and I'm sorry, because I don't mean to be too flippant about the garbage and the mayor.
But I mean, these are, as you're saying, incredible scoops.
I mean, Wikileaks deserves so much credit for the most important journalism of the last decade.
There's no question about that.
But I guess I'm just wondering whether that really makes a difference.
What if it was a kind of mild scoop, but still classified?
He said they were trying to nail him to the wall for that.
He's still got every right to do any of this that he wants either way.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, unless the real issue here is the balance between the public interest and their idea that this is genuinely a threat to America.
And you can't say it's a threat to America to reveal how incompetent the people are who are going around killing people, murdering people.
You know, that's not a threat to America, whereas the public interest, I think, is incredibly strong.
In fact, their substantive argument there when they ever have one is if the people of the world see, for example, all of the Abu Ghraib photos and video that that will cause terrorism, that if people see the truth and which is on one hand, you know, probably a little bit overblown maybe.
But on the other hand, it's an admission that what causes terrorism is the things that our government does to people rather than just some religious ideology hellbent on attacking North America for no reason.
Well, a lot of that's true.
And I've got to say, I really think about this, you know, when I'm bringing litigation on behalf of torture victims, I would I would really question whether I'd want to do it too publicly if I felt that the current government was committed to recognising the wrongs we've committed, apologising for it and moving on to a more civilised world.
Because it is, you know, when we reveal Abu Ghraib or when we reveal the pictures of people being tortured, it does inflame people.
But what really inflames people is the fact that we did it and we just shouldn't be doing it.
Right.
And if it weren't the current president, unfortunately, goes around saying that torture is OK.
And until we get politicians in the US and elsewhere to say, no, actually, torture is not OK, then we've got to keep on exposing it.
Right.
And it's such an admission on their part, you know, when they're kind of painted into a corner and don't have anything else to say that, listen, if the people see the truth of the kind of crimes we've been committing here, it could get innocent people killed.
Well, it is true.
And, you know, it's the same in other contexts.
You know, Tony Blair, the former prime minister of Britain, said that the biggest mistake he made in government was the Freedom of Information Act.
Obviously, he'd forgotten about the Iraq war.
But, you know, he said that because he said that, you know, it was all very fun exposing the corruption of the conservative government beforehand.
But when we got into power, people used FOIA to expose our corruption.
And that was just awful.
When he said that, I couldn't help but laugh.
I mean, you know, what on earth do you think you're doing, saying that it's OK for you to be corrupt, you know?
Yeah.
All right.
So I guess let's end with this.
Do you have any kind of prediction for what's going to happen with this extradition?
It seems like not just morality, but possibly even English and American law is on your side.
Maybe.
Well, you know, it may well be.
I'm just a witness.
And my interest was to expose some of the truth about what was happening.
And there is indeed a defense to extradition if it's a very political thing.
And frankly, it's pretty political what's going on with Assange.
But who knows?
I don't know if the judges are going to have the courage to do the right thing.
All right.
Well, I guess I'm going to doubt it, since this is all political and there's certainly no law at that level anyway.
So if it doesn't apply to the local deputy sheriff, it doesn't apply to the prosecutor and judge, you know.
Right.
That's probably true.
Anyway, we can only hope and we can keep on battling away.
Yeah.
Well, I sure appreciate the role that you played in sticking up for the guy, because as you know, so many people legal, you know, in the legal profession and in the media have just abandoned Assange for whatever reason.
They're convinced that he's the bad guy from a Superman movie or something that they're supposed to hate.
Who's so radioactive.
But it seems like a major betrayal of principle for them to turn their back on him the way they have.
Yeah, it is a shame.
Well, thank you for sharing an interest in it, Scott.
I appreciate it.
Yeah.
Really appreciate your time on the show.
OK.
See you guys.
That is Clive Stafford Smith.
He is the founder, of course, of Reprieve.
And you can read all about his testimony in the recent hearings by reading Craig Murray's recent piece at Antiwar.com.
Hypocrisy on display at Assange's extradition hearing.
The Scott Horton Show, Antiwar Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A., APSRadio.com, Antiwar.com, ScottHorton.org and LibertarianInstitute.org.
