Contra Costa Times
By Rebecca Rosen Lum
Times staff writer
Nov. 25--In his important new book "Eight O'Clock Ferry to the Windward Side," Clive Stafford Smith tracks the perfect storm of haste, incompetence and cruelty that conspired to imprison and methodically brutalize hundreds of hapless detainees of Guantanamo Bay -- in some cases for years.
President George W. Bush has maintained that the men housed at Guantanamo Bay were the most violent in the world, "picked from the battlefield in Afghanistan."
But like the interrogators he quotes, lawyer Stafford Smith concludes that a slim minority of the detainees had any link to violence, al-Qaeda or radical Islam. "I never believed the military would get it as wrong as they have," Stafford Smith writes.
A page-turner named for the transport that takes Stafford Smith to his clients, "Eight O'Clock Ferry" has the momentum of a political thriller. In fact, John le Carre praises "Eight O'Clock Ferry" on the book jacket.
We meet Binyam Mohamed as he vomits from a beating administered by three men in black masks. A so-so student who joined a mosque near his home in England in hopes that it could help him stay clean and sober, Mohamed was passing through Pakistan when he was arrested.
Sami al-Laithi was a journalist nabbed for crossing the border into Afghanistan while on assignment. Certain that he was an "enemy combatant," soldiers would fracture his vertebrae during a "forcible cell extraction" at Guantanamo.
Aftershock
Stafford Smith, an Englishman who has devoted much of his career to defending death-row inmates in the American South, is not the first to chastise Bush for squandering the enormous good will he enjoyed after the 9/11 terror attacks.
That evaporated shortly after ill-considered sweeps of suspected enemy combatants dispensed with the due process that characterizes the West, he writes.
He said the rush to incarcerate had much to do with the nation's shock at being invaded for the first time since 1812. That haste ensured students, business owners, academics and youths as young as 11 would fill the cells.
Reward monies of $5,000 per head guaranteed that in Pakistan, where the average income is $720 a year, young men with Arabic names and faces would be eagerly handed over to American authorities, he argues.
"Many of my clients in Cuba had insisted that, far from being captured on the battlefield of Afghanistan, they had been seized in Pakistan and (sold) to the Americans like slaves at auction," Stafford Smith writes.
Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf wrote in his own memoir that his country "earned bounties totaling millions of dollars."
Stafford Smith also quotes CIA operatives, aghast at how little the "enemy combatants" knew.
"Only like 10 percent of the people at Guantanamo are really dangerous (and) should be there, and the rest are people that don't have anything to do with it," says one. "They don't even understand what they're doing here."
Growing skepticism
Stafford Smith enlivens clean prose with a dark wit. His descriptions of life at Guantanamo, where driving over an iguana triggers a $10,000 fine, are drolly comic. And the violent passages sting with merciless detail -- such as when soldiers take a blade to the genitals of his client, Binyam Mohamed.
"Westerners think that they are inured to violence," Stafford Smith writes. "They think they see it all in the movies, but most have never come close to a rib-fracturing, concussion-inducing physical beating."
Undoubtedly, many will ask whether torture does deter an imminent attack. Stafford Smith put this question to those who claim to know. What he finds is that while academics are more likely to argue for the value of torture, interrogators harbor considerable skepticism.
"Within 48 hours the enemy will know that the prisoner has been taken and will already have taken steps to minimize the predicted dissemination of intelligence," veteran intelligence interrogator "Big Bill" Cowan says.
The nation is already exporting the horrors of Guantanamo to clandestine locations through rendition -- 500 in Afghanistan, 200 in Kandahar, more than 12,000 in Iraq, an unknown number elsewhere in secret prisons, Stafford Smith writes.
He quotes a State Department lawyer who said a colleague admitted that the administration was on the lookout for "the legal equivalent of outer space."
For the United States, the only nation to insist on trials for the architects of Nazism -- Winston Churchill voted for summary executions -- Guantanamo represents a sharp and heartbreaking reversal of course.
False admissions
Even while the administration voiced its support for Akbar Ganji, an imprisoned Iranian journalist on a hunger strike, soldiers were strapping down detainees at Guantanamo, inserting 43-inch feeding tubes through their noses, then forcefully pulling them out.
Those who resigned themselves to compromises in human rights after 9/11 might pay special heed to the case of Binyam Mohamed, who was beaten so badly, so often, that he blurted out whatever he thought his captors wanted to hear. They wanted to hear that he had been in on a meeting with Jose Padilla, a Chicago man the government alleged was nursing plans to detonate a "dirty bomb."
"When a criminal suspect is coerced into falsely confessing it is an enormous tragedy," Stafford Smith writes. "But when someone like Binyam is coerced into confessing about a radioactive bomb plot, the resulting panic filters into the lives of millions of people around the planet. It does not only result in the conviction of a potentially innocent man, but can change government policy, too."
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