10/09/14 – Clive Stafford Smith – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, and this is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Our first guest up on the show today is Clive Stafford Smith, the founder of Reprieve, and he's doing so many great things on so many great issues.
It's hard to keep track of them all.
In fact, welcome back to the show, Clive.
How are you doing?
I'm doing all right.
Thanks very much.
Very happy to have you back on the show here.
I was telling him earlier, I'm not exactly sure where in the British Isles you're from, but you're an American hero to me.
Well, it's very nice of you to say.
Yeah, yeah, no, you do really important work.
The center of the universe, lovely place.
Oh, there you go.
All right, cool.
Well, so here's the thing.
First of all, I believe I saw on Twitter today that your organization is proclaiming, maybe it's been proclaimed, and you're reminding us that today is the World Day Against the Death Penalty.
Is that right?
That's right.
It is indeed.
Yeah.
So tell us about that, how'd that come about, and what's happening with it?
Well, it's certainly been one of my obsessions over the years that, you know, as the years have gone by, an increasing number of countries have decided that the death penalty doesn't achieve a whole lot, and the UN declared World Day Against the Death Penalty.
They have a vote on a moratorium worldwide each year that is carried by a majority of countries, but unfortunately, of course, there are some who don't.
Anyway, look, we can only aspire, and one day I hope we'll put it all behind us.
And can you talk about any kind of major organizations that are, other than Reprieve, or, you know, some projects that you guys are doing, or, you know, anything important that people can learn about this?
Yeah, let me tell you a bit about a case that I've been very much involved in for the last three weeks.
It's, you know, the US has 3,000 people on death row, but Pakistan has three times as many.
There are 9,000 people on death row.
And I was down there a while back, and the judge was telling me that he thinks 60% of them are innocent.
And he was the same judge who was sentencing someone to death.
But the case I've been dealing with is the case of a British national, a guy called Mohammed Asghar, who was sentenced to death for blasphemy, because he allegedly put PBUH, as in, peace be upon him, on his business card.
So they sentenced him to death for that.
Now, you know, Mohammed Asghar is a profoundly mentally ill, paranoid schizophrenic who was in a mental hospital in Scotland, until he was released.
And then he went to Pakistan and, and put this on his business card.
They sentenced him to death four years ago, he's been on death row now for four years.
But two weeks ago, last Thursday, a guard busted into his cell in maximum security prison on death row there, shot him in the back and screamed death to the blasphemer.
And, you know, Mohammed fortunately wasn't killed, he was injured and was taken to the hospital.
But you know, this is the sort of thing that we're dealing with down there.
And, and honestly, it's more dangerous representing blasphemers than it is representing multiple murderers, because the government in Pakistan has really ceded the land of reason to some of the people who misinterpret Islam in a way that's just pretty crazy, right?
Yeah, exactly.
It's completely open to interpretation.
Any old thing could be considered blasphemy, you know, out of context or anything, who knows?
Well, it's like a witch hunt.
Crazy, absolutely crazy.
And then, you know, I'm sure you're aware of this guy that was just released from death row here in Texas the other day, who it turns out, of course, well, I don't know, of course, but not surprisingly, the prosecutor had, you know, has been found not in trouble, but has been found to have been guilty of some kind of misconduct in the case in preventing the defense from knowing the whole thing.
The guy had no ability to cooperate in his own defense, his publicly appointed lawyer completely sold him out.
And, and it was on it was his, his new wife had murdered her own baby, and it was pinned on him.
And, and they knew that she was the one who did it, but they were happy to flip her against him.
So they could get two people, they didn't care that she was going to be getting out early, and he'd be doing the hard time, even though she was the murderer, and they knew it.
Well, you know, I've spent much of today working on the case of a chap in Florida, who was sentenced to death back for a crime in 1986 in Miami.
And, you know, over the years, he's always insisted that he was innocent.
And over the years, I've represented him now for 21 years, we've developed the evidence that proves he is.
And in fact, you know, this is a crime that was committed, it was a murder of two unfortunate people in the DuPont Plaza Hotel in downtown Miami.
And this is a murder committed by the Medellin cartel, Pablo Escobar.
And, you know, my client, Chris Maharaj, 28 years in prison for something he absolutely didn't do.
And yet, he's still there.
And we got him off death row, but he's still serving life.
He's 75 years old.
And it is patently clear to any reasonable person that he did nothing at all, he had nothing to do with the crime.
And instead, it was all done by Pablo Escobar's people.
And I've got a whole bunch of them now to say it.
And yet he's still there.
It is astounding to me that people are unwilling to accept when a mistake has been made.
Because, you know, this isn't a statistic, this isn't a matter of, you know, 5% or 10%, or whatever you may think.
It's a matter of one human being who has only one life, who's spent almost three decades in prison for something he didn't do.
It's just a crime.
All right.
And then, yeah, and this is going on now, how many how many nations in the world, America's what are America's peers when it comes to the death penalty on earth?
You mentioned Pakistan, where they murder, execute blasphemers.
They don't really kill people.
There are 192 members of the UN, there's a majority of countries that don't use the death penalty, about 130.
There's very few that use it very much.
Unfortunately, the ones that use it a lot and actually execute in order that China, Iran, the United States.
Now, you know, that's not a company that we want, we ought to want to be in.
And, you know, it's one of those things that I think a lot of our friends, you know, in the US, you know, sometimes we're just not aware of that, that the overwhelming majority of the people who we call friends around the world have long since given up on the death penalty.
And, you know, we haven't lost anything by giving up on it.
It's not as if the death penalty achieves anything meaningful in terms of reducing crime.
All right.
And now, can you tell me, I believe I read this, sir, but I'm sorry, I'm behind on things.
Are you the lawyer for Abu Wael Da'id in this court case here?
Oh, look, I'm involved in it.
But actually, all the heavy lifting is being done by other people.
And that reprieve, Corrie Crider and Alka Pradhan have been doing a lot of that along with the law firm of Lewis Barks out there in Washington.
And they've been having, I'm sure, as you know, this hearing for three days this week on the whole issue of force feeding.
Right.
Yeah, we know Corrie.
I've interviewed her in the past many times.
That's good to see.
Was she always with Reprieve?
Or that's new?
Yeah, yeah.
She has.
I mean, ever since she left law school, she has been one of the great stars of Reprieve.
OK, I'm sorry.
You know, I always confuse her, I think, with a great reporter with a similar name, too.
But I've interviewed them both.
Anyway, point is, well, she's doing great.
I mean, tell us about the victory here, then.
Well, it's an astounding case, isn't it?
And look, we put on three live witnesses, three medical professionals, including a general who was a military professional, too.
All of whom were very, very critical of the process of force feeding in Guantanamo.
Now, of course, the military doesn't like to call it force feeding.
They like to call it enteral feeding.
But I was amused that one of them forgot and started talking about force feeding during this process.
But all three of these experts talked about how it's one thing to force feed people to try and stop them from dying.
I mean, I could perhaps accept that, even though as a medical matter, it's considered unethical to force feed someone who's competent and who is on a hunger strike for a moral purpose.
But that's not what's going on in Guantanamo.
What's going on there is the force feeders, the people being force fed, are being punished for their hunger strike.
All right.
I'm sorry.
I got to interrupt you.
I got to interrupt you so we can take this break.
I'm real sorry.
I didn't realize the time.
We'll be right back over to Clive Stafford Smith from Reprieve.
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All right.
So welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I'm talking with Clive Stafford Smith from Reprieve about very important developments in the case of the hunger strikers down in Guantanamo Bay and their force feedings.
And I'm very sorry, Clive, for the interruption there.
No, no, not at all.
Not at all.
You were explaining that they're not saving these men's lives.
They're punishing them for daring to try to starve themselves to death.
Is that right?
Well, that's true.
Look, one of the top rules in Guantanamo right now, which is very sad to say, is that it is illegal to protest.
And other way or the client that you talked about, whose case is before the judge in Washington right now, he is in need of a wheelchair.
He's disabled.
And one of the punishments, if you'll believe it, that they imposed on him for daring to go on a hunger strike was they took away his wheelchair.
They told him that if he was going to go on a hunger strike, he was going to be force fed and he either had to walk to his force feeding or he would be what's called FCE, forcible cell extraction, where they basically beat him up.
Now, for a long time, he'd been using his wheelchair and they just said, no, you can't do it anymore.
But, you know, that's just barbaric.
And it's really beneath us.
And it's very disappointing, I think, when the military takes that perspective.
And thank goodness that the judge is actually having an open hearing now where we've put on three live witnesses to testify about what's really going on.
The government has refused to put on any witness live.
They've submitted statements from people which they just read out in court that they don't dare put any witnesses on live because they know we'll cross examine them and show what's really happening.
Yeah.
And now can you tell us about this doctor that testified at the trial about the methods of force feeding?
Well, there were three different medical experts who testified, but they testified about the methodology.
Now, you know, my problem with this goes all the way back to 2006 when they started using a process of making it intentionally, gratuitously painful.
So, you know, before that, they were doing it in a way that, for example, they would leave the force feeding tube up the prisoner's nose if he wanted it, so he could, you know, keep it up there.
And then they would force feed him, but they would use small tubes, so it wouldn't hurt as much and they wouldn't force the food into him.
They wouldn't use this horrendous torture chair that they use now.
So the whole process was much more humane.
Then, unfortunately, just in the new year of 2006, General Bence Craddock was quoted in the New York Times.
This is not me making this up.
This is what he said in the New York Times.
He said that we're going to make it less convenient, his words, for the prisoners to be on hunger strike, by which he meant they were going to make it gratuitously painful.
Now, you know, that's just so sad.
We should not be doing that.
If we're going to force feed people to save their lives for humanitarian reasons, that's one thing.
If instead we're going to make the force feeding gratuitously painful to try to abuse these prisoners so that they give up their peaceful strike, that's a very, very different thing.
And it's just wicked, frankly, that the government's doing this.
Well, so they would claim that, hey, look at what a rock and a hard place position that we've been put in here.
These people are trying to kill themselves.
We have to save them.
Well, and look, that's illegal.
The Tokyo Declaration of 1975 says that medical professionals can't do that if the prisoner is competent and making a competent decision.
And you have to think about where these prisoners are.
These guys have been there for 12 years without charge, without trial, they've been cleared.
Many, you know, most of the people I represent have been cleared for seven years.
So on one level, it is perhaps reasonable that the prisoners want to go on a protest, even if it means that they die, like Bobby Sands with the IRA, if you remember that.
But that's not the issue.
The issue really isn't that and frankly, if it was me, I'm not sure I would starve myself to death.
The issue is, if the government genuinely believes that it has a moral duty to stop them from dying, if the government genuinely believes that it should override the medical rules of ethics, then they've got to do it in a humane way.
They can't do it in a way that is intentionally trying to make it painful to try to force the people to give up their strike.
That's just, that's just wrong.
I mean, you know, look, you can't torture people just because they're doing something you don't like.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I was reading a little bit about this and I saw the magic word pneumonia and I know people, I really like people who died in pneumonia.
And I saw that that could be one of the results of stuffing the tubes down these men's throat all the time.
What's up with that?
Well, yeah, I mean, look, there are different things that they were doing.
For example, they were using olive oil as a lubricant to put the tubes down, which is just medically wrong.
I mean, that can cause you to die under certain conditions.
And look, with all of this, all we want is for the judge or for whomever to oversee what's going on down there, because you know what happens when people behave in secret, act in secret, they start just believing their own fantasies.
And I was in Guantanamo last week.
It was the 32nd time I've been down there.
And frankly, it's not my Caribbean resort of choice.
But things in a way have got worse in the last few years, because, you know, people have lost interest in overseeing it and so on and so forth, to such an extent that now you've got a bunch of prisoners who are desperate.
I mean, 12 years, take Shakarama.
Shaq has been there for 12 and a half years.
His youngest child was born the day he got to Guantanamo, which was Valentine's Day 2002, 12 and a half years ago.
And he was cleared in 2007 by George Bush.
He was cleared again in 2009 by President Obama.
He's still there.
And his wife and four children are in London.
There's no reason he couldn't go back to London tomorrow.
He's just being held.
And of course, he's desperate.
Anyone would be desperate under those circumstances.
And he is absolutely, unalterably innocent, and no one can claim anything different.
Now, I read a piece by Ray McGovern late last night, too, about how at this trial, the government tried to call, oh, they didn't even call an expert, they just sort of entered their own opinion as evidence or something somehow, and tried to dispute the doctor who just left the room.
And then someone called him back, he got word anyway, he called back and rebutted what they were saying.
Oh, yeah, you know, that was just a ridiculous thing.
The government put on, they've just done their little Google research themselves, you know, this is the level at which they're treating prisoners down there.
So they were talking about how the size of tube, you know, we've claimed that you should use a number eight tube or a number 10 tube, not the 14 tube that they're using, which is just really painful for the prisoners, and which results in the food going in much faster and makes prisoners vomit.
Now, they came up and said, these are pediatrics, they're just for little children.
And they're totally wrong.
I mean, yes, to be sure you use number eight tubes for children, but that's to pump their stomachs, not to force feed them.
And you know, they just looked that up on Google, and they're submitting it to the judge's evidence.
This is medical fact.
So fortunately, the doctor was there, and he came right back in and said, this is ridiculous.
You know, you people can't even Google properly, let alone treat the prisoners properly.
Yeah, well, it's the same thing as always, you know, what they're doing is criminal.
So it needs a bunch of dishonesty to try to make it passable.
And so, you know, I wish that was true.
I don't think that's true at all.
I don't think people are being dishonest.
I think they're just outright incompetent.
And, you know, this is far more dangerous.
If you're dealing with a dishonest, corrupt person, you can deal with that person much more easily.
It's sort of like a corrupt police officer in a death penalty case.
If you know that person's corrupt, you go around and you talk to the soon to be ex-spouse or whatever, and you get the truth out of people and you find out what's really going on.
I've done that many times.
The much greater problem are true believers, people who really believe that they're doing the right thing, but they're just emphatically wrong.
Because the problem is they will then plow on, and they're absolutely certain and they're zealot and all the rest of it.
They're just, they're just wrong.
Yeah, they're much more dangerous because they'll look you in the eye.
They'll swear up and down that is true.
They'll take a polygraph and they'll pass it, but they're just wrong.
Yeah.
Well, and certainly one way or the other, it's they're, they're wrong for whatever reason they're wrong and they sure are dangerous.
It's incredible.
And I'm sorry that, you know, there's just too much.
I was going to try to fit three subjects into this interview and it's just not going to work, but I do want people to please go and read about this new report that Reprieve helped put together about the double tap drone strikes in Pakistan.
That's a whole other interview in and of itself, but I'm afraid we got to go, but thank you very much for your time.
Thank you very much.
I really appreciate it.
Nice to talk to you.
Thank you.
That's the great Clive Stafford Smith, y'all.
He's at Reprieve.
We'll be right back.
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