CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH ’ 81
November 2004, Camp
Echo, Guantanamo Bay
Naval Base, Cuba. British
citizen Moazzam Begg
has been held as a prisoner of the U.S. for more than two years
and still doesn’t know why. As he tells it, he
was arrested by the CIA in Islamabad without cause and has since been abused, tortured and interrogated more than 300
times and witnessed the killing of two fellow prisoners at Bagram airbase, where he
was held before being transferred to Guantanamo last year.
Dressed in an orange jumpsuit, he
moves from solitary confinement to the
interrogation portion of his cell to meet
Clive Stafford Smith ’ 81. Begg has heard
about Smith; he’s that British lawyer who
represents guys on death row. That fact
alone makes Begg very nervous.
Stafford Smith quickly dispels his fears.
Affable, genuine and laid-back but meticulously prepared, the confident attorney
with a slightly adulterated English accent is
carrying an enormous stack of legal documents, which he dumps on the table.
“This crap’s not going to work,” he
announces. “We’ve got to embarrass these
bastards!”
‘Everyone thought we were traitors’
Shaming the U.S. government into freeing Guantanamo’s prisoners or ensuring
them a fair trial has been Stafford Smith’s
dogged objective since the prison opened
in 2002. By this time, the bright English
public schoolboy who’d stumbled into
Chapel Hill in 1978 on one of the most
prestigious scholarships in the country had
accumulated more than 20 years’ capital
punishment experience in the Deep South.
He’d defended, with staggering success,
more than 300 men who had faced life
sentences, many for crimes they had never
committed. He’d happily spent months of
his life in America’s grim penitentiaries and
earned the reputation, among friends as
well as adversaries, of being courageous,
optimistic, honorable, committed, relentless,
polite, a gentleman.
He’d been awarded an illustrious OBE
— Officer of the Order of the British
Empire — along with the Gandhi Peace
Award and a host of other honors. He’d
founded the Louisiana Crisis Assistance
Center and Reprieve U.K., charities dedi-
cated to opposing the death penalty. And as
a consequence of what a colleague
describes as “exceptional intelligence and
exceptional grace,” an often-vilified
Stafford Smith had consistently swayed
staunch jurors and judges: Only six of his
300-plus clients were executed.
Given this drive to defend the powerless, it didn’t take much to convince
Stafford Smith and a handful of like-minded lawyers to sue the U.S. government over its alleged violation of human
rights in Guantanamo.
“This was soon after 9/11, so everyone
thought we were traitors,” said Stafford
Smith, 47, who has visited the prison 17
times, more than any other attorney, “but it
made me so angry that Bush thought the
first step in preserving democracy in the
western world was by locking people up in
Cuba without any rights. It was obscenely
wrong, and obscenely stupid.”
Since then, persistent appeals to the
Supreme Court have gradually compelled a
reluctant U.S. to allow Guantanamo
internees access to legal counsel, but to this
date, Stafford Smith says, some 40 percent of
the prisoners have yet to see a lawyer. The
hundreds of lawyers now taking on cases say
the government is obstructing their efforts
with censorship, access restrictions, and confiscation and obscuring of evidence. Before
May 2006, defense lawyers didn’t even
know exactly who was in Guantanamo.
Stafford Smith recalls piecing together the
roll call by traipsing through the Middle
East, using French, broken Italian and occasional translators to speak to relatives of men
the Red Cross reported as missing.
It’s been a dangerous mission. The ordinarily unflappable lawyer was held once by
the secret police while gathering evidence
in Jordan and, on Aug. 5, 2005, after a
series of hunger strikes at Guantanamo, a
guard there took him to a cell and indicated it was for him.
“That was an exceptional, intimidating
situation,” he said. “Most of the people
there are trying to do an obscene job as
best they can.”
When asked about Stafford Smith’s role
in Guantanamo Bay litigation, Defense
Department spokesman Cmdr. J.D. Gordon
comments only that he has worked with
the attorney in a “professional and courteous” manner, that he shares his appreciation
for the arts “from Morrissey to Shake-
speare” and that “in a responsible democracy, the government has an obligation to
protect its citizens, including from further
terrorist attack. Defense attorneys, including detailed counsel who are military
lawyers defending Guantanamo detainees
at trial by military commission, have a duty
to zealously defend their clients.”
Stafford Smith’s longtime friend Joe
Margulies, a lawyer at the MacArthur Center for Justice at Chicago’s Northwestern
University who worked with him to file
the first Guantanamo case, Rasul v. Bush, in
2002, tells of Stafford Smith’s tactics:
“Although the government holds all the
cards, they gradually realize that Clive’s not
playing by conventional metrics, and they’re
frustrated by him. Clive is meticulous about
