Last week, the legal black hole and PR catastrophe of Guantanamo Bay seemed at last to be entering its endgame. A total of 141 prisoners - the largest group yet - are to be freed after US investigators determined that they could no longer be classified as “enemy combatants”. And there is one man who, if the remaining 350 are released, will have time on his hands. He is Clive Stafford-Smith, one of Britain’s leading human rights lawyers, who has spent the past five years shuttling between the UK and Cuba every six weeks while also fitting in trips to the US and the Middle East to represent about 40 Guantanamo detainees. At last, his pithy sound bites, delivered in an accent lost somewhere in mid-Atlantic, and his permanent residency on the world’s news channels, seem to be paying off.
When I caught up with him early one morning on one of his fly-by appearances at his London offices he was in a bullish mood: “Yeah, they want to shut it down.”
For a long time Stafford-Smith has thought that the closure of the prison was inevitable. “As soon as the US Supreme Court overruled President Bush and allowed lawyers to visit the base, the Pentagon realised that the prison had become militarily useless,” he says.
I had expected Stafford-Smith’s offices to be an Oxbridge style-quad with honeyed stone and a gold plaque announcing his credentials. Instead, he works out of the offices of Reprieve, the charity where he is legal director. It is an oppressive red-brick building devoid of any signs or names. For a lawyer so tireless in his criticism of western secrecy, Stafford-Smith seems to have sublet his headquarters from a particularly shadowy branch of the CIA. We’re speaking in a room with bare walls the colour of prison porridge, furnished only with a table and two chairs. Despite the bleak surroundings, Stafford-Smith has bonhomie in bottleable quantities, even though much of his working life involves recording the “Advanced Interrogation Techniques” - a euphemism for sleep deprivation, unbearably loud thrash metal and extremes of hot and cold - that some of his Guantanamo clients have faced.
So with the imminent closure of the camp, can we expect to find him in London more often? No. Whatever Donald Rumsfeld’s plans, he thinks the detainees themselves could force the US to keep Guantanamo open. He pauses to relish the irony. “Prisoners from places like Libya and Uzbekistan are going to claim asylum because they have a real fear of persecution if they are sent home. Where are they going to go? Because the Americans have said these guys are wicked terrorists, they’ve made their own job of finding an asylum state impossible. They’re never going to move these prisoners to the US mainland because that would give them legal rights. So there will be a rump of 60 or 70 prisoners who they can’t get off the island for the next generation.”
Stafford-Smith is nudging 50, has close-cropped hair and a beanpole frame preserved by his habit of skipping lunch to save time. Though we are both wearing navy suits, he apologises for his. “I don’t normally wear a suit to work,” he says, pulling on his lapel and grimacing. “I have to be in court later.”
I ask whether he is sure that prisoners are being tortured in Guantanamo. I thought he would immediately reel off a litany of abuse. Instead, he speaks slowly and carefully: “It would be a big mistake to think people are sitting around saying, ‘how can we torture an innocent person?’ But whether it’s torture or abuse, there are a lot of bad things happening in Guantanamo. It’s got worse in some ways because they’ve got this permanent Prison Camp 5 which they tout as a modern, up-to-date maximum security prison. Well, yeah. But first, these guys haven’t been tried for anything. And second - what the Americans consider a maximum-security prison, the rest of the world considers abuse. This is solitary confinement where the guards make a whole lot of noise so prisoners can’t talk to each other.”
He thinks the abuse comes, not from orders from on high, but from increasingly desperate interrogators who are “all total amateurs without training or directions”. “The worst person they’ve come up with is the guy who allegedly drove Osama bin Laden’s car. If at the Nuremberg tribunals we’d said, forget Hermann Goering, we’re going to try Adolf Hitler’s secretary, it would have been a joke.”
So if none of the high-value al-Qaeda prisoners is in Guantanamo, where have they been taken to? He drops his voice and becomes conspiratorial: “The latest word is Morocco. According to my information, some of them were in Germany at Ramstein air base. The Germans have been total hypocrites - there is no way the Americans have been interrogating Khalid Shaikh Mohammed [the alleged mastermind behind the attacks of September 11 2001] without them knowing.”
But surely he doesn’t think that torture is going on in impeccably liberal and anti-war Germany with its government’s knowledge? “Oh yeah, of course,” he shrugs, surprised by my wide-eyed questioning. Then he backtracks: “Certainly the Americans don’t have to get the Germans’ permission as they would on their bases in Britain because here they are owned by the RAF.”
And what about those secret CIA flights into Britain? Were they carrying prisoners for “extraordinary rendition” - the practice of sending terror suspects abroad for interrogation and, allegedly, torture beyond the reach of the US courts? Stafford-Smith implies that it is unlikely, since there would have been no need to go through the UK. But the government is still “up to their necks in it”.
“They had knowledge of rendition,” he says. MI5 met Binyan Mohammed [British resident and Guantanamo detainee] and told him that he was going to be rendered to the Middle East before they took him to Morocco.”
I ask meekly whether, in the age of the suicide bomber, the law has to step in before crimes are committed rather than afterwards. His long and lazy Loyd Grossman vowels rise with incredulity: “Guy Fawkes was a suicide bomber. People who say that somehow today’s a brave new world are ridiculous. It’s very hard for me to accept the theory that a tiny group of people, who no one ever talked about 10 years ago, are somehow more dangerous than the Soviet Union 25 years ago.”
For Stafford-Smith, the problem is us, not them. “The reason we had 7/7 in Britain is because of what Blair did. We create those lunatics by pissing the world off,” he says.
Despite the subject matter, there are times when Stafford-Smith’s mood seems so Tiggerish that I expect this former captain of rugger at Radley College to reach for a string of conkers out of his breast pocket. He lives by precepts that the members of a Californian commune might dismiss as moonshine. He aims to “look around the world at the people who hate each other most and get between them”; he believes we “could be saved from a terrorist attack by behaving decently”. And, perhaps his most otherworldly moment (”it was a really delusional part of my life”), he thought about becoming a Labour MP in 1997 - even though one glance at his politics would have Tony Blair frothing at the mouth.
Stafford-Smith’s stoner diction and easy moral lessons can make him appear impossibly smug. But the stereotype of the showboating human rights lawyer could not be further from his years of heroic underpaid grind. Before Guantanamo, he was already a candidate for liberal sainthood for the 26 years he spent in the American south defending 300 prisoners on death row. Legal aid was mostly non-existent for these overwhelmingly poor and black “capital cases”, so Stafford-Smith had to rely on donations to pay his hair-shirt salary of $25,000. Sixty per cent of his clients were eventually found not guilty. “You don’t have to be a genius to win those cases; you just have to do the work,” he says dryly.
Two decades of nights spent reading trial papers in budget motels, facing firebomb threats from pro-execution campaigners and seeing his clients die became “really, really wearing”. He was born in the same hospital as Nicky Ingram, the last Briton to be executed in the US. They knew each other for 12 years. “I got divorced while I was representing him. We used to talk about it,” he says. Stafford-Smith had to watch his execution: “They say methods of execution are all the same. But they’re not. The electric chair is really disgusting.” He closes down the conversation emphatically: “Anyway, I don’t want to bore you.”
Stafford-Smith is now nervously checking his watch. I ask, as a final question, how his twin causes - the death penalty and the war on terror - will look in a decade. “The death penalty is on its way out. Like in Britain, it will be the innocence issue that will get rid of it.” On the war on terror, his whiggish optimism is more strained: “It’s not going to be a matter of electing some Democrat after Bush and we’ll return to normal. America has learnt to hate and fear Muslims. When someone on hunger strike dies in Guantanamo, it’s going to make this whole cartoon business look like a pleasant little chat.”
Leaving that dark portent hanging in the air, he leaps from his chair. “I must dash or I’ll be held in contempt by some judge,” he laughs, already halfway down the corridor, without stopping to say goodbye.
