Alright, my friends, you're listening to Anti-War Radio on Chaos 927-959 in Austin, Texas.
I'm Scott Horton and our guest today is Candace Gorman.
She runs her own law firm in Chicago, practices civil rights law, writes for In These Times and The Huffington Post.
Her own blog is GTMOblog.blogspot.com.
She represents at least one of the detained at America's military base in Guantanamo Bay.
Welcome to the show, Candace.
Thank you very much, Scott.
It's good to talk with you.
I heard of you first when I interviewed Andy Worthington and he talked about how one of your clients was found innocent, I think it was twice, whatever tribunal refused to classify him as an illegal enemy combatant.
So they just got rid of those two panels and brought in a third panel, which duly convicted in whatever legal sense you can apply that word, and decided your client was guilty after all.
I say only, there were two panels, not three, it was another detainee who had the three panels.
Oh, I see.
But my client was found innocent the first time, actually in a weird coincidence, there was a whistleblower that came forward in June, Colonel Stephen Abraham, who was very instrumental in gathering the materials for those tribunals.
And he only sat on one panel, and that was Mr. Al-Jazali's first panel.
And he used that as an example to show how weak the evidence was, he actually called the evidence against my client garbage.
He did not know that my client was tried again, he assumed that he had been set free, because there was absolutely no evidence that he was any kind of enemy combatant.
But since this is all made up, ad hoc, military, executive order law, I guess, there's no protection from double jeopardy.
Correct.
Although, I'm arguing, if I could ever get in front of a court, maybe a court would say there is such a thing as double jeopardy, but so far the courts don't want to hear anything.
Well, now, didn't it take years before any of these guys were even allowed to see any lawyers?
At what point did you start representing this guy?
I started representing Mr. Al-Jazali at the end of 2005, actually two years ago now, in October 2005.
Lawyers were not even allowed onto the base until the Supreme Court in 2004 ruled that the men were entitled to attorneys.
I think attorneys first started showing up later that fall, after rules were set up to make it impossible for us to properly represent our clients.
And you do just have the one client there?
I have a second client, who I've only seen a few times, he's not as interested in following any legal processes, he's not so interested in having an attorney, because he has no confidence in the legal system in the United States.
I do file things on his behalf and I visit him occasionally.
Who knows how many times military guys have gone in there and told him that they were his lawyer and then interrogated him and tricked him?
I've read quite a few reports of stories like that.
And I've heard those reports from both my clients, that interrogators have come in and told them that they were attorneys.
Both my clients wanted to have me prove to them that I was a real attorney when I went to see them the first time, which is kind of hard to do.
I showed them my business card and they both laughed, they were sophisticated enough to know that you can go to any printing company and print up cards.
But I also carry with me my license from the state of Illinois, and the state of Illinois issues a license every year, and I've been an attorney now for 25 years.
I have all 25 of them in my wallet, so when I started pulling them out for year after year, both of them had the same reaction, okay, I believe you.
Well, that's good at least.
At least they trust you.
Let's go ahead and stick with this theme of just basic Article I, Section 9 and Bill of Rights type things here, basic constitutional operations that we have in this country.
You can't be tried for crimes that weren't crimes when you committed them, you can't be tried twice for the same crime, you're supposed to be allowed to talk with your lawyer in secret.
Please, I'm sure there's more on the list.
Well, you're supposed to be told what you're charged with, and you're supposed to actually be charged with something.
And neither of my clients have been charged with anything, and neither have been told what they're even being accused of.
And since there is no evidence against them in any of the records, for my client Mr. Al-Jazawi, I have seen what's called the classified file, which is the secret information about why he's being held, and it's garbage, there would be nothing to tell him, even if I was allowed to tell him, because there's nothing there.
There's no accusation of any sort.
They don't even make a false accusation, they just say, well, this guy, he is who he is, maybe a member of whatever he's a member of.
Yeah, he's an Arab.
He was an Arab living in Afghanistan, married, and the main thing they seem to be questioning is why he got how he got there.
He must be a terrorist if he was living in Afghanistan.
So that really is the default.
Any Arab-Afghan so-called is automatically an enemy combatant.
Right.
Now, Afghanis are not Arabs, so if you're an Arab in Afghanistan, that was considered suspicious.
Afghan military actually sent out bounties, they airlifted them, they dropped them off planes, thousands and thousands of these bounty forms saying, turn over your terrorists, your murderers, your thieves, and we will give you enough money to care for your village for the rest of your life.
Millions of dollars, it actually says millions of dollars in this bounty leaflet.
And so people were turning over Arabs, because they were strangers, even though Mr. Al-Jazawi had lived there six or seven years and was married and had a young daughter, he was picked up in a part of Afghanistan where he didn't live, because he went with his wife and daughter when the bombing started to her family's village.
They did not know him, they thought they could get enough money to care for their village for the rest of their lives, out he goes.
Do you know how many Arab-Afghans there were, or how many Arabs there were in Afghanistan, I guess is a better way to say it, in 2001, I know that it was a few hundred, maybe as many as 1,500 or 2,000 that were actually buddies with Bin Laden, I doubt it was even that many.
I doubt if it was even that many.
But how many total Arabs were in there?
Thousands?
Thousands and thousands.
Thousands and thousands.
Yes.
So I have heard there were less than 200 actually working with Osama Bin Laden, but that didn't matter to the United States.
Yeah, well and apparently actually getting Osama Bin Laden and his buddies, the actual Al Qaeda guys, wasn't on their list at all, it was get everybody but them, I suppose.
Well it looked like we did.
Yeah.
Alright now, so this guy, Ghazali, that you're representing, obviously you're his lawyer and so you're not going to tell me that he's a terrible guy or anything, but the government seems to think that he's a member of a Libyan resistance group, is that right?
That's one of the things they've said about him, which even if that was true, which it isn't, but even if it was true, that doesn't make him a threat to the United States.
It certainly doesn't make him a member of Al Qaeda.
And this Libyan group that they're claiming that he's a part of wasn't even on our State Department watch list until 2005, three years after he was picked up.
So in other words, someone who's belonged to that group could come into the United States between 2002 and 2005, while Mr. Al-Jazali was sitting in Guantanamo, and travel freely.
That's funny, is this group, they're a resistance group fighting against Muammar Gaddafi?
Correct.
And so now Muammar Gaddafi's enemies are our enemies.
So it would seem.
And I would also like to point out that every Libyan that's in Guantanamo, which there are about nine of, every Libyan is accused of being a member of this group.
Every Algerian, which there's about 11 of, that's what my other client is, is accused of being a member of the Algerian resistance group.
So any nationality that they find, what they've pegged on them is to be, because they weren't found in their own country, they were living in other places.
They're obviously, our government thinks that they are fighting the government of the country they left.
So they've declared all of them that way.
And Mr. Razak Ali, coincidentally, the government thought he was Libyan when they picked him up for whatever reason.
I mean, they didn't even know what country he was from.
And so they initially pegged him as a member of the Libyan resistance group.
Then they found out he was Algerian, and they said, oh, he's a member of the Algerian resistance group.
Yeah, that sounds pretty convincing to me.
Why not just torture the truth out of him?
I'm sure they'll admit it, but there are a few water boardings.
Yeah.
Now let's talk, there's so many different directions we can go here.
Tell me more about your client, Al-Ghazali.
He's got hepatitis, he's dying, is that it?
Yeah, when I first became his attorney, Mr. Al-Ghazali was desperately trying to find an attorney.
The only way detainees at Guantanamo were allowed to get counseled was by passing their name to detainees that had counsel, because there was no sign-up sheet, and you couldn't get on the phone and call an attorney.
So the way they were getting attorneys was saying to the person in the cell next to them, hey, you've got an attorney, will you tell your attorney that I want one, too?
And so that's how I got Mr. Al-Ghazali.
He desperately wanted an attorney because he was sick, and because he was getting no treatment that he would die there, and no one would even know he was there.
So I got his name, I started corresponding with him before I was given permission to go to the base, and he didn't want to tell me about his health conditions except in person, so we had to wait a number of months before I had passed my security clearance and received permission to go to the base.
And when I went to see him the first time, which was in July of 2006, I, of course, had never seen him before, so I didn't know what he had looked like before, but this man, his skin was very yellow.
He was very thin and jaundiced looking, just very unhealthy looking, but he was animated.
We had a good conversation.
He was so happy to have an attorney once I showed him my 25 different licenses, and we talked about the health problems he was having, and he suspected he had hepatitis because he had had a blood test before he got married, and the blood test showed positive for hepatitis.
When he took the test the second time, it showed negative.
He never had any symptoms of the disease, and didn't think twice about it until after he was sitting in Guantanamo for a year and a half and started getting sicker and sicker.
And then he started to suspect that maybe that blood test those years earlier was right, and maybe now it was kicking in.
Well, Michael Moore says that the health care for the Al-Qaeda detainees at Guantanamo is great.
Does that not count if you're a make-believe member of a Libyan group that you're not a member of?
And so what's for the Al-Qaeda guys that get the good health care?
Yeah, I think it was former Senator Frist that said that the Guantanamo detainees get better health care than most Americans, and I was thinking he must mean those 41 million that have no health care, which maybe is better health care than no health care, but for Mr.
Al-Jazali he might as well have no health care.
Well, and we keep reading about doctors and psychiatrists and so forth or psychologists participating in torture, so it sounds like they'd be better off with no health care than government health care to me.
What about that?
What about torture?
Has your client been tortured down there in Guantanamo Bay?
He has in the early days, and I have to tell you, we finally talked about all of that in my last visit, and my notes were just cleared yesterday, and they weren't all cleared.
The government has held a couple of pages of my notes as classified.
Which means that you can't repeat whatever you know it said to me?
Right, and I haven't had a chance to review it to know what has been cleared and what hasn't, but I can tell you in the early years of his stay at Guantanamo, he was tortured, and I can tell you that there's a different form of torture going on now, because now most of the men are in two camps at Guantanamo.
They're called camps five and six.
They're kept in solitary confinement 22 to 24 hours a day, depending on the day.
They have no natural light.
The only fresh air they have is if they get that one or two hours outside, but sometimes that's offered to them at three o'clock in the morning, at which time most of the detainees, including Mr. Al-Jazawi, don't want to get up from sleep to go stand out in the dark.
They have no one to talk to, even if there are prison cells around them, which there's only four or five in this area, but there's no way of talking to the other detainees unless you get on the floor and yell through the hole where the food is shoved in.
So this is another form of torture.
They get one book a week, but it's the same books that have been there for years, so they have nothing to do.
I asked Mr. Al-Jazawi how he spends his time now.
I can tell he's losing his mind.
This has been seven months.
No, I'm sorry, it's longer than that.
It was December when he was moved there, 06.
He washes his clothes over and over again and paces, and he can only pace one or two steps because he's so weak, and then he sits down and washes his clothes more.
I think you wrote either in these times or the Huffington Post that last time you saw him, he told you that he's catching himself talking out loud to no one.
Yes.
A sure sign of mental breakdown there.
Yeah, I mean, there is no one to talk to, so he's found himself talking and answering to himself.
We talked about this, he's very scared, he doesn't want to lose his mind.
He has hoped still that he will get out of there and see his young daughter, who's now just over six years old, who he hasn't seen since she was a couple months old, and he doesn't want to lose his mind.
He doesn't want to have his body completely wracked, which he's in such bad shape.
We talked about what he can do, we talked about trying to read, but now his eyes are going.
He's having trouble reading, he gets headaches and his eyes are all dry, and he said it's just impossible to read anymore.
So he's got to think and try to remember things, try to exercise a little, even though it's so hard for him.
But we've talked about little things that he could try to do to try to keep his mental health as positive as possible and try to not let his body come to the hepatitis.
I find myself wondering, the government contract to Kellogg-Brown and Root to build these prisons, at the end of the day when it all gets divided up into dividend checks, how much is that really worth to the Cheney family?
You know what, I thought the same thing about all these tax benefits too, that someone should do a look to see what's the actual benefit to both G.W. and to Cheney with all these tax breaks and the contracts.
G.W. gets a big break from this inheritance tax stuff, when his dad kicks over, he's not going to be giving as much to the government for inheritance tax.
So there's a lot of policies and a lot of ways that they've made, I think, a ton of money personally.
It's Anti-War Radio, I'm Scott Horton talking with Candace Gorman.
You're a lawyer, tell me, shouldn't these guys be hung from ropes until they're dead?
The people that run our government who've done this?
I think they should be tried, I think they'll be found guilty, and I think they should be imprisoned for the rest of their lives.
I mean there's precedence for this, right?
War crimes trials and so forth in the past?
Yes, Nuremberg is a good example.
Well what are the parallels between our current situation and Nuremberg?
Surely you're not comparing the Department of Justice to the Gestapo.
Not exactly, but I was actually just saying that there is a background for doing war crimes trials and Nuremberg is one.
I don't think I would compare our Justice Department to the Gestapo, but I would compare it to the very worst of the worst of judicial systems.
Well you wrote an article, I guess, where you compared the military to the Gestapo.
Yes, I have.
And what was the comparison there?
I can't remember the exact article that you're talking about.
Oh yeah, it was the torture techniques, it was the, yeah, we're torturing them, but look, there's not a bruise on them, we didn't do nothing.
Yeah, and you know, I read something interesting from the Justice Department, I forgot the man's name, I might have written about it on my blog, who has said why what they're doing is not torture, and he has said that the Supreme Court has said that torture is conduct that shakes the conscience, and his conscience hasn't been shaken by anything they're doing, so he doesn't think it's unconstitutional.
For one thing, that's a dishonest review of what the Supreme Court has said, because it's not anyone in particular's conscience, it's humanity's conscience, and certainly humanity's conscience has been shaken by what we've been doing at Guantanamo, at Abu Ghraib, at the many black hole sites around the world.
Well and for those whose consciences aren't shaken, why don't you do us a favor and tell us about what happens to Guantanamo detainees who decide to go on a hunger strike, and how the doctors go about keeping them alive.
Yeah, and we have our poor reporter from Al Jazeera, who is part of that hunger strike and is losing his mind and body as we speak.
What they do is they take a tube, I actually had this, I actually witnessed this procedure at a conference of Guantanamo attorneys back in the spring.
They have this tube, now there is a very small tube that can be used and is actually used in hospitals, but we don't use that small tube.
We use this tube that's an eighth of an inch thick.
It gets put down, I think it's seven or eight feet long, it gets put down their nose, down their throat, and into their stomach, although sometimes they miss and it goes through their windpipes, and then they choke and they gag and they throw up.
They're strapped in these chairs, every part of their body is strapped, their head is strapped, their neck is strapped, their arms are strapped to the arms of the chair in a couple of different places, their waist is strapped, their legs are strapped, and the tube is taken out every time they're fed, and for some of these men they're being fed two and three times a day now because they are dying, because they want to die, because they don't want to stay in indefinite detention without charges, and this is their only way of protesting.
So this is being done to them two or three times a day, where the tube is taken in and taken out and taken in, it's a very cruel, cruel mechanism.
And not even shoved down their throat, but shoved up their nostrils, is that it?
It starts from going into the nostril, then down the throat.
You know, it's funny because I guess my first reaction is to compare the American regime to the Nazi regime, this is how they treated their prisoners, at least some of them, but I guess the other comparison could be made that this is not how Americans treated literal Nazis when they were our prisoners of war.
Yes, and I'm trying to remember who was one of the military officials, and I'm not sure if it was Mo Davis, there's a couple of people I write about who have been my nemesis over these years, who have talked about the fact that the Koreans did this, the North Koreans did conduct like this, and I'm thinking, is this our goal, to think to a level of an enemy that we said was engaged in war crimes when they had this conduct?
When they engaged in this conduct?
I don't understand, and you know, this isn't just a detention to keep them off a battlefield.
First, you have to understand, most of these men were never found on a battlefield based on the government's own records.
Something like 92% of these people were not on a battlefield, they were not picked up by American forces, they were turned over to American forces.
91%, again, 92% according to the government's own documents were simply just sold by the Northern Alliance or a local group of villagers somewhere.
And the Pakistanis, you know, Musharraf, in his Kiss and Tell book last year, talked about the millions of dollars the Pakistani government made turning over Arabs that were visiting, some were tourists, visiting Pakistan, because there was so much money that was being offered by our government for anybody, and no questions were being asked.
They just played this clip the other day, the Chinese law on PBS, and one of the audio clips that they added in there at the beginning is George Bush saying, no, we're not going to treat them as prisoners of war.
These people are killers, which, of course, we give killers regular trials in American courtrooms every day, again, gave at least some sort of rule of law surrounding the military tribunals that convicted the Nazis and the Japanese war criminals at the end of World War II.
When we're talking about Nazis and the Imperial Japanese, what, they weren't killers?
They were killers and gave them trials, and here are a bunch of people who, turns out, Ms. Gorman, are not killers, and that's why they're not being given prisoner of war status.
That's why they're treating them to all this phony law so that they'll never have to be held for account for filling a prison full of innocent people.
Right.
When you say filling, you should also know, and your listeners should know, that the prison has been slowly dwindling in population, and the military and the Bush administration has gotten away with still yelling this name, these are the worst of the worst, these are killers, but then 15, 20 at a time, every month or two, are sent home quietly.
And I'll tell you about the last two groups, after the last detainee died in his cell back in May, the Saudi man that I wrote about, the government has been very quiet about his death.
They basically just said it was an apparent suicide until one of their military lawyers came out this week in response to my article saying this was not a suicide, this was medical neglect.
There's been a response, because I read that article, you're talking about Abdelrahman al-Amri.
Correct.
Yes, the military lawyer McCarthy, who a judge in one of my cases has given his testimony zero weight because he fabricates things, he claims that he saw Mr. Amri's body after he died, and that he had committed suicide with some string-like mechanism.
That was his description.
This guy's in a prison that is the maximum security prison.
There is no string-like substance around there.
And according to the reporter, it was in the Miami Herald, according to the reporter, he wouldn't further elaborate about what this string-like substance was.
But now, since you wrote an article about it, I think that was your most recent one for In These Times, right?
Correct.
And now you've had a response from who?
From Captain McCarthy.
He's the top military lawyer at the base.
It wasn't a response to me.
A reporter, I think, read my article and questioned him, and that was the response that he gave.
Okay, now I'm sorry I interrupted, because you were on a tear about how these guys are all innocent.
Well, they've got them in these cells as though they're the worst of the worst criminals, as though they've been charged and found guilty of something, instead of being treated like prisoners of war.
If we think that we wanted to keep them off a battlefield, even though they were never on one, we don't have to treat them to the harshest treatment of all treatments.
This is like a maximum security prison in the United States, except for the maximum security prisons in the United States, they actually allow reading material, they allow televisions and radios.
I mean, these guys are shut off from any news.
When we visit them, we're not allowed to tell them about news unless there's a way it directly relates to their case.
Well, and you're being eavesdropped on all the time as you talk, right?
Yes.
Now, we're not supposed to be.
There's a protective order in place from the court that says they can watch us with this post-circuit TV, but they're not supposed to listen to us.
But it's clear, in my situation, it's been clear that they have listened, because they filed papers about things that they could only have known either by reading my notes or listening to me.
And now, when you talk about these guys basically all just being rounded up and so forth, I'm reminded of Yasser Hamdi, who it used to be Padilla and Hamdi, those were the two cases of American citizens who had been labeled enemy combatants and turned over the government.
And Hamdi had been born in Louisiana, but raised and lived most of his life in the Middle East and had been captured, quote unquote, on the battlefield in Afghanistan, who knows what that means.
And this guy was cited personally, individually, as the worst of the worst and the definition of why we need Guantanamo Bay Prison and so forth.
And then they let him go, time served, to send him back to Saudi Arabia.
Yeah, and then we've got Mr. David Hicks, the Australian Taliban, and he became the next worst of the worst.
That was the first hearing they were going to do, because he was so bad.
And so what did they do?
They made a plea deal where he got eight months and most of it being served in Australia.
And part of his plea deal is that he can't talk to the press until January after the Australian elections.
What kind of plea deal is that coming from?
Our military prison setting up a plea deal where he can't talk to the Australian press until after the Australian elections?
Yeah, don't tell him that we tortured you, it might cost the prime minister his spot.
Yes, we also had to find a statement saying that he promised he wouldn't talk about being tortured.
Well now, let me ask you this.
Why not just go ahead and give this guy a bogus trial and send us him to death and put him in front of the firing squad?
They've gone through all this, why let him go with eight months?
They've done nothing wrong, they charged him with something that wasn't even against the law when he was picked up.
Yeah, but so what?
Well, fortunately, the plea deal worked out by his very, very excellent attorney to get him out of there because the court didn't want to be embarrassed with the lack of evidence against him, with the fact that the sentence would be overturned by the Supreme Court because you can't charge people with things that weren't against the law when you were picked up, and the charge was something that was incomprehensible.
So basically, I'm sorry, because I'm not a lawyer, I'm trying to understand this, if somebody's an enemy combatant...
I'm a lawyer, I don't understand it.
Well, yeah, clearly, this is all just made up by David Addington, we're left to try to sort it out.
But so if your client's been declared an enemy combatant or found to be one or what have you by the second tribunal after the first one said he was innocent, then that's not the same as finding him guilty.
Now they still need to hold another trial before they can put him in front of the firing squad, and then they would, at least to some degree, have to try to prove a case against him at that point, and you're saying that they're not even willing to go that far even in their kangaroo court to try to make a case against these people.
And the government has admitted that only a handful of the men at Guantanamo will ever be charged with anything, so being held as an enemy combatant is not the same as being charged with something.
So these men, 90, well, only a handful, it's like 97 or 98% of them, will never be charged with anything.
They will stay there, if Bush and Cheney stay forever, they would stay forever, because they're going to be held to the end of the war on terror.
And since terror has been going on for centuries and centuries, there's not a whole lot of likelihood that it's going to end sometime in the next couple of years.
Wow.
So tell me, did I characterize that right when I said this is all just made up law by the vice president's lawyer?
Is that really where we're at here?
Well, I don't know which individuals are responsible for this made up law, but yes, it is made up law.
There are terms that have never been used in court.
Okay, now how many people are left there at this point, do you know?
330 approximately.
Okay, so at this rate, I guess even if Bush declares himself emperor and stays in power and it's still the same administration, a few more years of this, them letting go 20 here and 20 there, and finally these people have their liberty back, right?
Maybe.
I'm trying to be optimistic.
Maybe.
I'll tell you about the Saudis, the Saudi government after this last man died has made a real effort to get all of their men out of there, so a lot of the last three groups of people that have left Guantanamo over the summer have included a lot of the Saudi detainees.
I think there's still about 30 or 40 left, but a lot of them are back in Saudi Arabia.
When I tell them that, they say, oh, they're going to be in trouble in Saudi Arabia, and I tell them what happened when they get home, they're amazed because the Saudi government for one thing has flown in the planes to pick them up at Guantanamo.
Once they are put on the Saudi plane, all the shackles are taken off and they're free to walk around on the plane.
When they get to Saudi Arabia, the plane was brought to the royal wing of the airport.
We don't have one of those yet for Bush, but they have a royal wing at the airport in Saudi Arabia, and they were all given new clothes so that when they greeted their families, they weren't wearing whatever grub we gave them.
They had food brought in so that they could meet with their families and have meals with their families.
They were treated very nicely, and although they are being kept in detention for a maximum of six months, a retraining program is what the Saudis are calling them, so that if any of these men are actually considered somewhat of a zealot, which so far the Saudi government has said none of them are, but they're being talked to and worked back into society by giving them a week or two at home and then they come back for a few days, kind of like a work release program.
So these men are being treated much kinder than our government would ever dream of treating anybody, nevertheless someone that's been declared an enemy combatant.
It just seems also frustrating that all this is taking place in this nebulous world of made-up law, where we all know that the American judicial system is plenty brutal enough to handle any quote-unquote killers, as the president calls them, that these people are really America's enemies.
Put them on trial in Fairfax County, Virginia.
What are they going to do?
Get acquitted?
Right.
I don't understand this.
I mean, it's not understandable, because it is all made up.
It's made up to cover up for a big fiasco.
The big fiasco was at the start of the war, we just thought we could, for some crazy reason, we thought the way to get our enemies was to send out bounties.
And we've gotten thousands and thousands of people, now only a handful went to Guantanamo.
We've got a million, not a million, but we've got thousands in Bagram Air Force Base.
We've got other bases in Afghanistan where other men are being held.
The Guantanamo men were not, you know, some people think, oh, well, these were the worst ones.
That's why they were sent to Guantanamo.
There is no rhyme or reason why these men were sent there.
It's not that someone said, oh, there's a lot of evidence against these people.
Some of the people that went to Guantanamo, they didn't even know who they were when they got there.
They didn't know what, if anything, there was against them.
And then they were trying to make up cases against them and try to justify taking these guys.
And, of course, our government is not one to say, oops, I made a mistake.
Our government is the one to hide every single possibility of a mistake and hope that the falling asleep news people will not cover it, which they've been very fortunate.
No one's been covering Guantanamo except for a few reporters.
Miami Herald has had a wonderful reporter covering this as kind of her main beat.
There's also an AP reporter that's been doing a lot in the New York Times, one guy.
But, you know, you can't get a story out to the American public about what's going on at Guantanamo with one or two or three reporters covering it when they can in between other stories.
Well, but, you know, if you look at all the foreign press, it seems like pretty much everybody else in the world knows what we're talking about right now, that, well, as you said, 92% of these guys, even according to government's own documents, are basically innocent people, that this whole thing is just a sham for the American population.
It seems like with all this information readily available online and so forth, that the jig will be up here at some point.
The jig's only up if someone cares enough to do something about it, and that's another very disturbing part of this whole scenario, because it's not just that the Bush guys and Cheney guys would try to get away with this.
Of course they would try to get away with this, but our courts have been asleep at the wheel on this.
Our courts have been afraid to have a confrontation with the executive branch in a time of a so-called war, and so they keep passing the buck, and nobody, all of these cases are concentrated in Washington, D.C., which is a very political court.
The D.C.
District Court is a very political appointee, and the D.C.
Circuit Court.
Right now, they're very conservative.
A lot of them were appointed by G.W. and Bush I, and we still even got some Reagan holdovers.
A lot of the Clinton appointees have left out of disgust, including former White House counsel to Clinton, whose name I'm forgetting right now, because they're not a logical bunch.
Some of them, I'm not saying all of them, are hacks, but a lot of them are.
When the government says anything, they just roll over and say, oh, okay, so the government says, we think it would be a danger to the security of the United States if lawyers are allowed to just bring their notes back.
They've got to review them, and the courts say, oh, okay.
I'm sworn to the Constitution myself.
I took an oath as an attorney, but yet, I am not considered trustworthy with my own notes.
This is the first time, this last visit, that I had notes that were declared secret, and I can tell you that what they're declaring secret is the torture that my client was subjected to, because that's all we talked about my last visit, was his history, because he wants the world to know, because he knows he's dying, and he wanted to share with me everything that has happened with him from day one.
There should not be anything secret in this horrible history that this man has been subjected to, but yet, two pages of this are being declared secret.
There's no names in there.
I'm not saying that, you know, I'm saying some soldier did something, and they want to protect the soldier's name.
This is what happened to him at the hands of our government.
And nothing in there about ties to Osama bin Laden or anything that would reveal sources and methods of American intelligence gathering or...
Nothing.
It's simply a cover-up of the torture that he suffered.
Correct.
Well, I guess that's what happens when the torturers are the ones who get to decide what's secret and what's not.
Is there no process of review for that matter?
Can you not take them to court and say, hey, judge, there's nothing classified in here?
I can.
Right now, I have a judge that's not interested in having me go before him.
Oh, yeah, that's that wonderful civilian judicial system that it seems like these guys, if they were to get a fair shake, would be put in front of them, right?
Right.
So the last document I filed with the court talking about abuses that were going on, abuses to the protective order.
The protective order are the rules that the attorneys have to follow when we go down there.
But for some reason, the military doesn't have to follow those same rules.
And so they were abusing it the last couple of times I've been down there.
They are reading my attorney-client mail, the military, as I'm standing there, which they're not allowed to do.
And I filed a motion with the judge, and they also were not giving my mail to my client.
So my client was just in despair.
He thought I abandoned him.
He thought I wasn't coming to see him anymore.
I wasn't writing to him.
He kept writing me letters and saying, I haven't had a letter from you.
Now, I go every two months because he's so sick.
I was there in July, and then I went in September.
From July until the beginning of September, he did not receive one of my letters, even though I had sent many letters.
One of my letters, it was dated August 15th, I hand-delivered to him in my meeting on September 24th, because as I was going in, the guard handed it to me and said, oh, this came for your client, and it's from you.
Do you want to just give it to him?
So I'm hand-delivering my own mail, and it was mail that was five weeks old.
So my client was in despair.
He thought not only is he dying, but his attorney has abandoned him.
I asked the judge to please step in, make them give mail to him.
I wanted the judge to allow me to call my client before I came to assure him that I was still representing him and to tell him that I was coming in September, and I asked the judge to order them to stop reading my mail.
You can't read my mail before I go in to see my client, but he hasn't bothered to rule on that.
Well, good luck.
It sounds like you have a long process ahead of you.
I don't know how long it will be, because I don't think my client is going to be alive too much longer.
He's very, very ill.
And they're giving him no medical care at all there?
No medical care at all.
I mean, I don't know.
I'm no doctor.
I don't know what the treatment is for hepatitis B, but it's got to be something, right?
Well, they obviously don't know what the treatment is, because they haven't been treating them.
But yes, there is treatment.
I filed affidavits from two world-famous doctors on liver treatments and hepatitis, one from Switzerland and one from the University of Chicago, telling them what should be done for him, telling them what kind of tests should be done so they can figure out just how bad off he is.
And the judge said, no, the government claims that my client doesn't want to be treated.
And the judge said, the government says your client doesn't want to be treated, so no, I'm not going to order anything.
And I said, he does want to be treated, and that's not good enough.
So these men that want to die, these men that want to starve themselves to death because they can't stand the despair any longer, are force-fed and tortured.
And the men who want health care and want to live are tortured by not being given any health care.
It's quite a system we've got there.
Sounds like it.
All right, folks.
Candace Gorman, she's a civil rights lawyer in Chicago.
She represents Abdulhamid al-Ghazawi, a dying, tortured detainee at Guantanamo Bay.
You can read all she writes at the Guantanamo blog.
It's GTMOblog.blogspot.com, and she also writes for In These Times and The Huffington Post.
Thanks very much for your time today, Candace.
If I could just add one thing.
The Amnesty International has just taken on the cause of Mr. al-Ghazawi yesterday, and they put out an urgent appeal worldwide for people to contact Guantanamo officials, and also I asked them to have everyone copy my representative, who is a wonderful representative, Jan Schakowsky, in Congress.
The information is on my blog for who people can contact, but this is maybe one way to get worldwide attention, not only to Mr. al-Ghazawi, but to let the people at the base see that the world is watching what's going on.
Oh, that's great.
You know, I meant to ask you what you thought we could do about it as non-lawyers out here, so I'm glad you had a chance to say that.
That again is GTMOblog.blogspot.com.
You can find all that information there.
Thanks, Candace.
Thank you very much, Scott.
