The Rule of Law Oral History Project: How the Guantánamo Prisoners Have Been Failed by All Three Branches of the US Government

Two days ago I posted excerpts from an interview about Guantánamo and my work that I undertook as part of The Rule of Law Oral History Project, a five-year project run by the Columbia Center for Oral History at Columbia University Library in New York, which was completed at the end of last year.

In this follow-up article I’m posting further excerpts from my interview — with Anne McClintock, Simone de Beauvoir Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison — although, as in the previous article, I also encourage anyone who is interested in the story of Guantánamo and the “war on terror” — and the struggle against the death penalty in the US — to visit the website of The Rule of Law Oral History Project, and to check out all 43 interviews, with, to name but a few, retired Justice John Paul Stevens of the Supreme Court; A. Raymond Randolph, Senior Judge in the US Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit; Ricardo M. Urbina and James Robertson, retired Senior Judges in the US District Court for the District of Columbia; Lawrence B. Wilkerson, Former Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell; Joseph P. Hoar, Former Commander-in-Chief, United States Central Command (CENTCOM); former military commission prosecutor V. Stuart Couch and former chief prosecutor Morris D. Davis; Brittain Mallow, Commander, Criminal Investigation Task Force, and Mark Fallon, Deputy Commander, Criminal Investigation Task Force. Also included are interviews with former prisoners, lawyers for the men, psychologists and a psychiatrist, journalists and other relevant individuals.

In this second excerpt from the interview, I explain how, at the time Anne and I were talking (in June 2012), the situation for the Guantánamo prisoners had reached a new low point, as the Supreme Court had just failed to take up any of the appeals submitted by seven of the men still held. These all related to the men’s habeas corpus petitions, and the shameful situation whereby, for ideological reasons, primarily related to fearmongering, a handful of appeals court judges, in the D.C. Circuit Court, had effectively ordered District Court judges to stop granting habeas corpus petitions submitted by the prisoners (after the prisoners secured 38 victories), by demanding that anything that purported to be evidence submitted by the government — however risible — be given the presumption of accuracy unless it could be specifically refuted.

For the Supreme Court decision, see my articles, “The Supreme Court Abandons the Guantánamo Prisoners” and “Meet the Seven Guantánamo Prisoners Whose Appeals Were Turned Down by the Supreme Court,” as well as my appearances on Democracy Now! and RT, and for the political maneuvering of the D.C. Circuit Court, see “As Judges Kill Off Habeas Corpus for the Guantánamo Prisoners, Will the Supreme Court Act?” and “Lawyer Laments the Death of Habeas Corpus for the Guantánamo Prisoners.”

With inaction for the president, and restrictions on the release of prisoners that were raised by cynical lawmakers, June 2012 represented the point at which it could be inarguably stated that the Guantánamo prisoners had been failed by all three branches of the US government. This was something that became abundantly clear just three months later, when Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif, a Yemeni prisoner with mental health problems, who had been cleared for release under President Bush and President Obama, died at the prison, allegedly by committing suicide. For my analysis, see “Obama, the Courts and Congress Are All Responsible for the Latest Death at Guantánamo.”

The excerpt below comes from Day 2 of my three-day interview, and is from pages 43 to 59 of the transcript, which is available here. Please note that, in the passages below, I have added a few links that are particularly useful for readers wanting to know more.

Excerpt from The Rule of Law Oral History Project interview with Andy Worthington

Conducted by Anne McClintock

Q: I wonder if we could pick up some of the threads from yesterday. Perhaps we could start with last week on June 11 [2012]. It seems to me that something fairly momentous happened, a critical legal turning point for the prisoners, and I wondered if you could perhaps recap what happened and what that might mean for the prisoners.

Worthington: Yes. There have always been—not always. Initially, there was only one route out of Guantánamo, and that was diplomatic arrangements between the Bush administration and the home countries of the prisoners who were held. Now, from almost the beginning, in fact, from the beginning, from day one, a handful of lawyers who realized that something terribly wrong had taken place started to try to get habeas corpus rights for the Guantánamo prisoners. It took two and a half years for that process to lead to the Supreme Court ruling in Rasul v. Bush, in June 2004, that the prisoners did have habeas corpus rights.

Now what that did, hugely importantly—what that did was it opened the prison to visiting lawyers. It broke the spell of silence that had enshrouded Guantánamo for all that time, where, effectively, we found out afterwards, they were torturing people with impunity. And they stopped, at least in the sense of the torture program. They didn’t call it that, but that’s what it was. They stopped. As soon as they were going to be subjected to outside scrutiny, then they changed the way they behaved in that sense.

They fought back with the help of a compliant Congress, which twice passed legislation that included provisions designed to strip the prisoners of the habeas corpus rights that the Supreme Court had given them. So the Detainee Treatment Act in 2005 and the Military Commissions Act in 2006. It took until June 2008 for the Supreme Court to revisit its ruling and to rule—I think this is important—that the habeas-stripping provisions that Congress had passed in those two acts were illegal, were unconstitutional rather, and to insist that the prisoners had constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights.

Now that’s a huge ruling, but what they didn’t do, what the justices didn’t do, was stipulate exactly what the standards were to justify the ongoing detention of prisoners when they submitted their habeas corpus petitions to the District Court in Washington, D.C.

So the judges of the District Court got together. They decided what the standards were and they started reviewing the habeas corpus petitions of the men. Something over two dozen of those cases were won by the prisoners.

Q: And that was when, Andy?

Worthington: Actually, I think the figures are different than that. Thirty-eight cases? I can’t remember the exact numbers [Note: It was 38 cases]. A majority of the cases were won by the prisoners from October 2008 until the summer of 2010. It led to the release of over two-dozen prisoners, so the only people who left Guantánamo through any legal means were the ones who had their habeas corpus petitions granted and were released from Guantánamo. In the summer of 2010, in particular, the D.C. Circuit Court, so the court of appeals in Washington, the District of Columbia, started fighting back in earnest. Actually, in January 2010, they issued a ruling claiming that there should be no constraint on the president’s wartime powers, which pretty much everyone disagreed with. The alarming figure was Judge A. Raymond Randolph.

Now he’s a senior judge in the D.C. Circuit Court. He had approved every piece of legislation under Bush relating to Guantánamo that was subsequently overturned by the Supreme Court. But he and some of his fellow judges decided that the rules were too lax; that what the District Court judges were doing was releasing prisoners by granting their habeas corpus petitions. They decided they were doing that because they weren’t approaching the alleged evidence in the right way, so they imposed restrictions on the District Court’s ability to have any kind of objective analysis of the evidence. [A] number of rulings have been issued and have ended up, towards the end of 2011, with a ruling in which an intelligence report produced in the field—which pretty much everyone would say is going to be imprecise, needs to be something that is open to questioning as to its reliability—they basically said that it should be trusted; that all government evidence should be presumptively regarded as accurate, unless the prisoners can prove that it isn’t.

Q: And also, presumably, some of those could have been extracted under coercive conditions.

Worthington: Well, the problem isn’t just with—this isn’t so much to do with the government’s intelligence report, although the intelligence reports produced in the field would be based on interrogations shortly after capture, when it’s extremely unlikely that people weren’t being treated coercively. Also, it would be based on information that could have been extracted from the Afghans or the Pakistanis, who were holding these men before they were handed over to U.S. custody.

So yes, it’s extremely unreliable. But it’s not the major problem with the evidence. That’s part of it. The other main problem with the evidence is that the statements that the U.S. government relies on that were produced by the prisoners themselves, or by their fellow prisoners in Guantánamo or by other prisoners in other facilities, run by or on behalf of the United States, where people were also being interrogated—there are profound problems with that evidence, either because people were tortured or otherwise coerced; because people were bribed, in some cases with better living conditions; and, in some cases, mentally ill people were bribed or coerced.

Q: And in many cases implicating, so there was a kind of proliferation of the naming of names.

Worthington: Yes. I think the key to how people were coming up with this information is to bear in mind that there was what was called the “family album.” There were albums of photographs of prisoners, or of people who were at-large and suspects. There were always these photo albums and people were shown the photo albums. “Who is this man? You know this man. When did you last see this man? When did you last have dinner with this man? When were you last buying surface-to-air missiles from this man?” All of this is going on.

Q: During the interrogation process.

Worthington: Everywhere. There was a man who was held in the Jordanian prison, where the Jordanians were holding prisoners for the United States government and torturing them. He said every day that’s what it was. Every day was photos—”Who’s this? Who’s that? Who’s this?” People he didn’t know. You have to invent a story, unless you’re one of those people who doesn’t crack, in which case terrible things happen to you.

Q: Well, we know that [John S.] McCain [III], when he was being tortured, gave the names of the Green Bay Packers, the football team.

Worthington: Well, all of it is unreliable.

Q: Right. Right.

Worthington: So the decision by the Supreme Court not to accept appeals by seven Guantánamo prisoners—it’s the second year that they haven’t accepted any appeals—

Q: This was last week, you mean.

Worthington: Yes. This was last week.

Q: June 11, was it?

Worthington: It was the day before the fourth anniversary of the Boumediene [Boumediene v. Bush, 2008] ruling, when the Supreme Court gave the prisoners constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights, which have now been shut down by the District Court—by the Circuit Court, rather.

In this particular ruling about giving the presumption of accuracy to intelligence reports produced in the field, there was a dissenting judge, Judge David Tatel—if that’s how you pronounce his surname—who said, “I don’t see why on earth we should be presumptively regarding this kind of report as accurate. And if we go ahead with this, the end result will be that no prisoners will get their habeas corpus petitions granted.” Now that’s the dissenting judge in the D.C. Circuit Court, who, as far as I can see, did what the Supreme Court should have done in that case, at least in that case, if not in the other cases. The other cases involved prisoners who were trying to challenge the basis of their detention on various other issues. Some of those, I think, had a great weight to them. One of them is Faiz [Fayiz] al Kandari, one of the last two Kuwaitis, who was trying to get the Supreme Court to say that some limit must be set on the extent to which the government can rely on hearsay evidence. He is a prisoner who has barely uttered a word that incriminates himself in his ten years in custody, and the entire case against him is constructed on the statements of unreliable witnesses.

But they didn’t take up any of this. They didn’t take up any of it. What they’ve done—they’ve done what Judge Tatel said was happening. They have negated their own ruling. Four years ago, a differently composed court—a pre-Obama court, ironically—gave habeas corpus to the prisoners. The Circuit Court took it away and the Supreme Court has decided not to reinstate it.

Q: Do you think there’s a political climate that has motivated that or do you think these are personal decisions made by individual judges?

Worthington: Yes, I think there’s a political climate. If we look at the person who is no longer the driver of these rulings in so many ways, it’s Justice [John Paul] Stevens, who retired two years ago. Justice Stevens was ninety. Justice Stevens grew up through huge periods of upheaval, through the rise of fascism; through the Second World War; through the Cold War. His knowledge of history, his long knowledge of history and his determination to treat the law as something that I think you should constantly be checking to make sure that you’re not being swayed politically—I think that was his role. Obama has two appointees. They don’t have that kind of long historical view or that political objectivity, frankly. Then the disappointment is—so appointments made by Obama are defending the disgraceful national security state that was implemented by George W. Bush. And, of course, the conservative judges are going to back that. Where are the liberals?

Q: So you have judicial bankrupting of habeas corpus, but you have the executive bankrupting, as well. And Congress?

Worthington: Oh, yes. And Congress, as well. Yes. Obama, separate to his judicial appointments—I do think that’s extraordinary that, on certain issues, I would imagine that maybe on gender issues, or immigration issues, or certain traditional liberal issues, those two appointments, those two women, will be making liberal decisions, but not on national security. We’ve got the right wing national security state that was introduced by George W. Bush.

Obama issued the executive order on his second day in office, promising to close Guantánamo within the year, and then didn’t. When challenged, he has repeatedly capitulated, particularly on—his White House counsel, Greg [Gregory B.] Craig, had this plan to bring some of the Uighurs, the Chinese guys who couldn’t be safely repatriated but who were innocent men wrongly detained, who had won their habeas corpus petition, and had planned to bring two of these guys initially to live in the United States. That would have been a huge, huge development in puncturing the myth of Guantánamo and the dangerous terrorists held there. But once Representative [Peter T.] King got a hold of that story and threatened to cause a big fuss [and Rep. Frank Wolf “took to the floor of the House to accuse the Obama administration of wanting to let terrorists run free in American cities”], Obama capitulated.

Now at that stage, his excuse was that he was trying to preserve the need for consensus on his healthcare reforms. But he showed weakness. It was the first sign of weakness which led to his opponents realizing that he would crack under pressure.

So on the Yemeni issue, after the capture of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the underpants bomber—it does seem like, from what we can understand, this was the moment that he took this personally as a threat. But however much that affected his approach to aggressively pursuing terrorists, that that may have been the genesis of his wishing to preside personally over his “kill list” for the drone program, that’s got nothing to do with Guantánamo. What he capitulated on swiftly was criticism by mainly Republicans again, by members of his own party, that he must respond to the capture of a Nigerian man trying to blow up an airplane, who was apparently recruited in Yemen—that he must respond to that by refusing to release any Yemeni prisoners from Guantánamo. Which he did. Even though, at that point, twenty-nine of the prisoners in Guantánamo had been cleared for release by his own task force, and another thirty had been put into a category the task force called conditional detention, whereby they would be released if somebody—and no opinion was given as to what godlike figure would make this decision—but that if at some point if it was regarded that the situation, the security situation in Yemen had improved, these thirty would be released.

Q: Were these thirty Yemenis?

Worthington: Yes. The task force primarily decided that twenty-nine of these Yemenis should be released. Now, in fact, [six] Yemenis, [seven] Yemenis, in total, were released, before Abdulmutallab was captured. [Six] were released just days before and one was released a few months before that because he had won his habeas corpus petition, and the government decided not to appeal it. But the twenty-nine who should have been released haven’t been.

Q: Andy, you probably know better than anybody the context of the situations. When you say they should have been released—if you were to argue with somebody who didn’t know what was going on, how would you convince them that these were men who were not masterminds, who were not terrorists, should have been released?

Worthington: Well, first of all, I would say that the majority of people in Guantánamo were never associated with any kind of terrorist activity whatsoever, or even plotting any terrorist activity, or even of sitting down in a room and for five minutes even considering thinking about talking about the possibility of engaging in any terrorist activity. They’re not terrorists.

Q: That’s extraordinarily important. I want to come back to what I asked you, but just in terms of that, because I think it’s so important, is there a number that you can give me of men who, to some degree, approximated—somebody who had been engaged in some kinds of hostilities?

Worthington: Well, when 517 files were analyzed by researchers at the Seton Hall Law School in New Jersey, in 2006, so that’s two-thirds of the prisoners, they discovered that only eight percent were alleged to have been involved in any kind of activities.

Q: I think the administration even admitted that—that they conceded that that was the case.

Worthington: Well, I think the best analysis, really, is that officials spoke to the New York Times in 2004 and said that no more than a few dozen of these people ever had any involvement with anything. Larry Wilkerson told me, and he said this on a few occasions, when they brought the high-value detainees into Guantánamo in September 2006, they did that so that they could say that they actually had somebody dangerous in Guantánamo. Everybody knows that there was nobody above any kind of mid-level operative and a few Taliban leaders in Guantánamo before September 2006. The operatives who spoke to the New York Times said a few dozen maximum.

After that, ten prisoners were brought to Guantánamo from secret prisons who were not high-value detainees, but medium-value detainees. Now if we take the administration at its word, which is difficult to do, then we can add ten to this. Fourteen arrive in September 2006 from the CIA’s torture prisons, and two more who arrived after that are also regarded as high-value detainees. That’s twenty-six, twenty-four to fifty, maximum. Fifty maximum, out of 779, who were of any significance. The rest of the people at Guantánamo are innocent people seized by mistake or low-level Taliban foot soldiers. The privates, the people who—

Q: And, as we know, the Taliban had nothing to do with 9/11 anyway.

Just to round out the question on figures—at any given time, how many people have passed through Guantánamo, up from the very beginning to this current point?

Worthington: Seven-hundred-seventy-nine. What we don’t know is how many other people were held, if any were held, in the CIA secret prison within Guantánamo called Strawberry Fields, which existed in 2003, from September-October 2003 to March 2004.

Q: I want to come back to that question about the CIA, the internal CIA dark site. But just to interrupt—you were talking about the Yemeni prisoners, and I was asking you, of those, would you say that those are in the same category of people who had nothing to do with 9/11?

Worthington: Absolutely, they had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. No. The problem with the way that people have been categorized is that, first of all, you have to say that hardly any of these people were allegedly involved in terrorism. So what you’re looking at is people who are completely innocent. Obviously, supporters of Guantánamo don’t regard innocence as being an even conceivable explanation. But anybody who isn’t that rigidly fixed understands that, yes, this was so incompetent—money was involved, money was changing hands, bounties were being paid, intelligence was so poor—

Q: Were bounties involved in Yemen? I know they were, very significantly, in Pakistan and Afghanistan, but were bounties—

Worthington: Nobody was seized in Yemen. No. I mean, a few Yemenis may have been held in secret prisons, but not in Guantánamo.

There are, however, many hundreds of innocent people who were held, and there still are some. It’s just that the government claims that it’s got a case, so, like Faiz [Fayiz] al Kandari, that I was talking about, the Kuwaiti—all the evidence comes from unreliable witnesses, all of it.

Q: And haven’t a number of men been cleared for release, even under Bush, and have been there for what, eight years? Even though they’ve been cleared already?

Worthington: Well, there are about sixty-five prisoners who had been cleared for release, approved for transfer, when Obama took over. Most of those people are still there.

The problem is related to the problem of rounding people up who are innocent, or soldiers, or terror suspects, and claiming that they’re all one category of human being who has no rights— enemy combatants. So the basis of understanding the threat level of people at Guantánamo is based on what the military perceives their threat to be, and not just what threat they think they pose, but what intelligence value they have. Guantánamo is primarily set up as an intelligence-harvesting center, an illegal, offshore, intelligence-harvesting center, whereby these people would produce evidence that fitted this notion, this intelligence notion, of a mosaic, so that potentially insignificant pieces of information, when all put together, might add up to a bigger picture. The logic behind that, essentially, actually, was that if the Bush administration could have rounded up hundreds of thousands, or millions of Muslim men, and imprisoned them for the rest of their lives, and kept this mosaic building up, they would have been happy. It’s such an insane basis for what their notion of intelligence gathering was. It was so much the opposite of the precise intelligence gathered from somebody that they know has detailed information, and how do they unlock that? A completely crazy setup.

So the Yemenis who were held, for the most part, were low-level foot soldiers, and not necessarily—although some of them had been—not necessarily people who had traveled to Afghanistan for humanitarian aid, for example.

So there is an issue there. Like I’ve said, if there is an issue there that involves them being soldiers, then they should have been held as soldiers. Then we could all be asking how long does the war in which they were detained last? Because you can only legitimately hold soldiers, enemy prisoners of war, until the end of hostilities.

When did that end? Some people would say it ended in 2002; some people would say it ended in 2004 when Hamid Karzai became the president. The United States government will presumably argue that it will end when hell freezes over because this war on terror is infinite. But, you know, I’d like to [litigate] that one. I’d like to see people [litigate] that one because we could find out whether they could possibly sustain that argument. But we’re not doing that.

So the basis on which these people are cleared for release—that’s not the wording that’s used; the wording that’s used is “approved for transfer,” and the basis on which is that they are no longer regarded as a threat to the United States or of having sufficient intelligence value to justify their ongoing detention—what it really is is a recognition that the system whereby a whole bunch of people were thrown into a legal black hole for the rest of their lives wasn’t actually justifiable, and that seeing as it was based around a threat, or the end, or the intelligence value that these people posed, then there was a process of letting them go.

Q: Do you think, to some degree, the whole extraordinarily labyrinthine legal process of keeping them there—do you think that, to some degree, it might be fair to say that, in a way, Guantánamo needs to exist for the reasons that you gave when you said that some of the high-value detainees were brought in order to indicate that there are some bad guys? That if we were to close Guantánamo, does it perhaps remove a kind of geography of legitimacy? That this is the place where men in orange suits can be seen to visibly embody a threat which legitimizes the global war?

Worthington: I think the men were brought to Guantánamo from the secret prisons because of the ruling in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. The ruling in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld [in June 2006] was the one that said, “Look, by the way, did you remember that when you hold prisoners they have to be held with minimum standards of decency, and that everybody is covered by Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which prohibits ill treatment and torture?” Three months after that ruling, less than three months after that ruling, George Bush has a press conference in which he says, “You know, I always told you that we didn’t have any secret prisons. Well, now I’m telling you that we did. But we just closed them and we’ve moved all these people to Guantánamo.”

So it was associated with that. It was about the humane treatment of prisoners. The game was up.

Q: So it’s kind of a performance of legitimacy, in a sense; that we’re playing by the rules.

Worthington: Well, the thing is, as well—I almost have to say, frankly, that everything that the Bush administration embarked on, embarked on with no thought whatsoever about how it was going to end. So setting up a global network of torture sites appeared to make sense to them at the beginning. Then, after a while, what on earth use is it? You can’t keep torturing somebody. In intelligence, they’ll tell you twenty-four hours. They were torturing people for years.

Q: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a hundred and how many times was he waterboarded?

Worthington: Yes, well, you know. He was held for four and a half years in secret prisons before they moved him into Guantánamo, where he remains completely isolated. None of it really made sense. So I think they were ready to give up on their big project of holding people for years and torturing them because that’s idiotic.

Q: It’s irrational at best.

You mentioned earlier the secret site, Strawberry Fields, inside Guantánamo. Could you say something about that?

Worthington: Well, that story was rumored for many years, and it finally, I think, was confirmed by the Associated Press in the summer of 2010, I believe. The AP ran a number of really good reports, actually, about the movement of prisoners between the sites that existed in—so after Thailand, which was used for three prisoners at the very beginning, then people were moved to Poland, and then there was a network that involved Poland and Romania and Lithuania and Morocco. Now when Poland closed in September 2003, or October, some prisoners were then flown to the secret prison within Guantánamo that was identified as Strawberry Fields—what a terrible use of that song. Then in March of 2004, when the writing was on the wall that the Supreme Court were going to grant the prisoners’ habeas corpus rights in Rasul, then they were moved out.

Q: Where to?

Worthington: Either to Romania or Lithuania or Morocco. There seemed to be quite a lot of shuttling about.

Q: So these are ghost prisoners that have simply appeared and disappeared, but left a kind of ghostly trace.

Worthington: Well, I think, on record, in a memo that was unclassified in April 2009, [Steven G.] Bradbury, who was in the OLC—was he in the OLC? No, I can’t remember his exact role now. Yes, he was in the OLC, the Office of Legal Counsel, in the Justice Department. He spoke about the high-value detainee program and said that there were ninety-four people all together in the program, and that twenty-eight of them were subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques. Those twenty-eight, I am presuming, are the ones who were moved around this network of the secret prisons. Though the other people were almost certainly held in Afghanistan, possibly in Iraq—

Q: In Bagram and Kandahar?

Worthington: In Bagram, not in Kandahar. That closed.

Q: And Ghazni? And Bagram?

Worthington: Well, nobody knows quite how many secret facilities there were, but there were a number of them.

Q: So in a sense, conceivably, if the number 779 is what we know passed through, conceivably there were other—we don’t really know the full total of people who were passing through Guantánamo.

Worthington: No. But I don’t think many were held in that facility within Guantánamo. But no actual evidence has surfaced to say there were X-number of individuals, and they included Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah, whoever. We don’t know.

Q: I want to ask one back question pertaining to last week, and then I would like to talk about the high-value detainee program.

Just in brief, then, do you think habeas corpus is extinct at the moment, given what happened last week for the prisoners who remain in Guantánamo?

Worthington: Yes.

Q: So what’s the next step for them? Is there another step for them?

Worthington: Well, the next step is that those of us who care have to persuade the United States government that its present course of action is unacceptable and that history will not look favorably on people who, for reasons of political expediency, decided to maintain the most monstrous legal aberration of the twenty-first century.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer and film-maker. He is the co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).

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