The dangerous distraction of Guantánamo

[struggle4progress]

Philippe Sands discovers 'the legal equivalent of outer space' in Clive Stafford Smith's survey of Guantánamo, Bad Men

Saturday June 16, 2007
The Guardian

Bad Men: Guantánamo Bay and the Secret Prison
by Clive Stafford Smith
320pp, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £16.99

~snip~ Stafford Smith explains why, in this humane and entertaining account of his first-hand experiences with current and former detainees, at Guantánamo and beyond. It is a quintessentially British account, mixing wry humour with irony and understatement, written by a campaigning participant with years of hard-edged experience dealing with the mundanities and excesses of US prison life. Having watched the execution of many of his clients seems to have given him a unique eye for detail.

He describes a system of abuse in which mind-numbing respect for the rule of law is mixed with a capacity for brutality. It is a system that is surreal and absurd, as is clear from the hilarious but devastating account of the first (and only) military commission hearing of his client Binyam Ahmed Mohamed, an Ethiopian citizen charged with conspiring to build dirty bombs. Stafford Smith attended the hearing with Mohamed's military lawyer, Major Yvonne Bradley, who argued that she might be compromised in acting on behalf of Mohamed because her law firm (the US Department of Defense) was also representing other detainees who might have interests that conflict with those of Mohamed. This caused some difficulties for the judge, Colonel Ralph Kohlmann, the presiding officer charged with delivering justice, who obviously did the best he could in the face of Mohamed's constant, intelligent and ironic arguments. Although Stafford Smith recognised Kohlmann's decency, he had done his homework and the difficulties multiplied. With the help of Google (every lawyer's best friend these days) he dug up Kohlmann's postgraduate essay at the US Naval War College, in which he had argued that tribunals of the kind on which he now sat were unwise in prosecuting the war on terror.

A hearing that should have lasted a few short minutes dragged on for hours as ever more procedural points were taken, challenging the fairness of the proceedings. None of these issues seemed to have any answers in the rule book. Eventually Kohlmann retired to decide what to do. When he returned, his decision was to suspend the hearing for three months. Stafford Smith tells us that was because the Pentagon was "real-time monitoring the case" and decided to step in to halt the proceedings to prevent further embarrassment. The US supreme court later ruled that the military tribunals were illegal. Mohamed's hearing was never resumed. He is still at Guantánamo. Five years on we do not know how serious a threat, if any, he posed.

The story of the Mohamed hearing that never was is a metaphor for President Bush's war on terror. Decent Americans, like Kohlmann and Bradley, have been trying to give effect to hopeless ideas and rules that were never properly thought through. These may yet generate harms that could, over the long term, be greater than those they were intended to address. If the prospects of the US abandoning its fundamental constitutional values were not so serious, Bad Men would just make us laugh. Stafford Smith never allows us to forget that the detainees are real people, with real families and real stories. The greatest danger we face, the US diplomat George Kennan once wrote, is that we shall become like those who seek to destroy us. ~snip~

http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/politicsphilosophyandsociety/0,,2104014,00.html