Eight o'clock ferry to the windward side : seeking justice in Guantánamo Bay /

A lawyer seeks to report what the prisoners being held at Guantánamo have actually endured. THERE'S something about the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba - soon to enter its seventh year in operation - that has Americans perennially looking through the wrong end of a telescope. It is an issue that strongly informs world opinion of this country, and Americans remain clueless about it. Sign up for daily news alerts about Guantánamo and you learn that the foreign papers regularly publish articles on hunger strikes, silent prisoner releases and legal wrangling at the camp. Major American papers rarely cover these things, and most of us would be hard pressed to name a detainee held there. The American blind spot when it comes to Guantánamo is complicated. It's due in part to our tacit recognition that it was probably a mistake and to a general sense that the 300-plus men detained there are still probably bad guys - even if not "the worst of the worst," as once trumpeted by the Bush administration. A further complication is that the story of Gitmo has no narrative: nameless, invisible men languishing for years without trials are not a story; they're a vacuum. Clive Stafford Smith, legal director of the British charity Reprieve, represents more than 40 prisoners at Guantánamo, and in "Eight O'Clock Ferry to the Windward Side" he seeks to fill in that narrative. Stafford Smith - who gained some notoriety when the authorities at Gitmo accused him of sneaking contraband Speedos to his clients - has been fighting to make the detainees real for years. His efforts to convey who these men are and what they have endured have been stymied by a labyrinth of security demands and gag rules, and abetted by our own apathy. One need not believe that all of Stafford Smith's clients are saintly medical aid workers to be disgusted by what they have experienced at Guantánamo and, in some cases, at "black sites" before that. Binyam Mohamed says his chest and penis were cut with a scalpel in a Moroccan prison; Yusuf el-Gharani, who was 14 when he was seized in Pakistan (although guards at Guantánamo think he's in his mid-20s), tells Stafford Smith he was burned with cigarettes; Shaker Aamer was force-fed with a nasal tube because a hopeless prisoner's hunger strike or suicide is deemed by American authorities to be both an "asymmetrical act of war" and "a good P.R. move to draw attention." Only one of these allegations of abuse should be enough to sicken us. One also needn't believe that every man at Guantánamo is entitled to the host of procedural protections we afford Americans to be aghast at the kangaroo "tribunals" established for the detainees. In the most gripping section of the book, Stafford Smith details the topsy-turvy legal procedures his client Binyam Mohamed faced in a single pretrial hearing. The rules said that evidence obtained from detainees who'd undergone waterboarding could be admitted. They also provided that even if a prisoner was acquitted, he might not be set free. Mohamed's counsel was presented with a "script" - conveniently called that by the military - listing "virtually every word that either side was meant to say in the tribunal." Three of the prosecutors hand-picked to try this case resigned, declining, as one wrote, to participate in "a halfhearted and disorganized effort by a skeleton group of relatively inexperienced attorneys to prosecute fairly low-level accused in a process that appears to be rigged." This is not about federal constitutional protections or arcane Warren court "loopholes" for enemy combatants. What Stafford Smith describes here should shock anyone who believes that those we hold in shackles for five years should have a chance to test the evidence against them. Nor need one be a free-speech zealot to despair about the government secrecy, shape-shifting and cover-ups that occur at Guantánamo Bay. Allegations of prisoner abuse are censored. Evidence against the detainees is classified. Copies of Runner's World (and, evidently, Speedos) are confiscated. Suicide attempts are reclassified as "manipulative self-injurious behavior" to keep them off the books. Anything that can't be hidden is brazenly denied or redefined. No one expects perfect transparency at Guantánamo. Years of dishonesty, however, should not go unremarked. Stafford Smith can wobble when he tries to discuss broad policy. There is, for instance, an awkward chapter about the efficacy of torture that reads like a set of staged kitchen-table debates against Dopey Americans. Nor do his reasonable conclusions - about the extent to which Guantánamo and the rendition program have boosted Al Qaeda's recruitment efforts - really answer lingering legal questions after 9/11: Low-level thugs in undetectable cells are not Nazis at Nuremberg. Such men may prove either "terrorists" or "innocents" only after the attack. While Stafford Smith is surely correct that information gathered by torturing prisoners for years on end is useless, at times he papers over the urgency of forestalling future attacks. But what the author does offer is a bracing opening statement from the defense team at Guantánamo, years overdue. We don't have to believe every last claim he makes. It's enough to be incensed that we are hearing some of it for the first time. Guantánamo has no narrative: invisible men languishing for years are not a story; they're a vacuum. Dahlia Lithwick is a senior editor at Slate.

The title of this provocative book refers to the means of gaining access to the prison in Cuba where hundreds of prisoners have been held as a result of their alleged involvement in terrorism. Smith (legal director, Reprieve), a lawyer with experience defending "death cases," has represented many such suspected terrorists. Although the account he wished to render of his involvement in representing these individuals is not possible under current security concerns limiting the dissemination of such information, what Smith did have access to and offers here, if factually correct, represents a damning indictment of the entire process, notably the apparently widespread use of torture by interrogators. The heart of the book consists of detailed accounts of many entirely ordinary individuals who claim to be wholly innocent of any wrongdoing, from a news agency cameraperson to a successful chef. One hopes that the truth behind Smith's accusations will be known one day; the authorities will then have to respond to this author's claims. A fascinating and detailed account of interest to all concerned with liberty, human rights, and constitutional checks and balances.-Gilles Renaud, Ontario Court of Justice, Cornwall (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

A British human-rights lawyer offers a chilling, evenhanded eyewitness account of his penetration inside one of America's most notorious military bases. Guantánamo Bay has been an American naval base since the Spanish-American War and became America's offshore gulag for prisoners from Afghanistan in January of 2002. Smith is one of 500 lawyers now working on behalf of several thousand prisoners, many held into their fifth year at the base. Only since the author--who has worked with Death Row inmates in New Orleans--and others challenged the prisoners's basic human rights in a court case brought before the Supreme Court in June 2004 were lawyers even allowed to see the prisoners. The author takes the reader inside the facility, reached by special military plane and divided into two unequal parts, windward and leeward. The main base and prison are situated on the windward side (hence the title). As a lawyer for the "bad men," Smith is deemed "the enemy" by the military, and has to gain the trust of the men he represents, such as Binyam Mohamed, indicted in the wake of Jos Padilla's "dirty bomb plot" of 2002, and Sami al-Haj, a cameraman for the Arab TV station al-Jazeera, which has been systematically targeted by the Bush administration for its terrorist coverage. Most interesting is Smith's exploration of the camp's chronic use of deception, from censorship to Orwellian semantics. He exposes the continued holding of minors and the military's inability to assess the guilt of the inmates, offering a pertinent look into the current "politics of hatred" and the ineffectual response of this dreaded garrison. A well-wrought, timely work of personal and political commitment that should garner a great deal of deserved attention. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.