Union Club Address February 17, 2011

Transcription

1 Union Club Address February 17, 2011 Most people think about the Star Spangled Banner at ball games. They noticed, recently, when a pop star mangled the lyrics at the Super Bowl. I think about the anthem when I visit Guantanamo Bay. Awal Gul died there, sixteen days ago. The Pentagon gave the cause of death as heart failure. The prison has reached its tenth year, when prisoners will begin to die of old age. When their hearts will give out. How do we feel about that? Most of us feel just fine. Certainly the Congress isn t troubled that Awal Gul spent twice as long in Guantanamo as any German or Japanese soldier ever spent in a US POW camp. If your son graduated from college last year, then Awal Gul was imprisoned since his first year -- not of college, not of high school -- his first year of junior high school. Awal Gul was not my client. I never met him. His death came and went on the news in an instant. Still, he merits our thoughts, if only to consider, for an hour, what his death in your prison -- my prison, our prison -- says about you and me. What shall we call him? Nouns are elusive. According to the government s account, he wasn t a criminal -- in nine years of prison, the government never accused him formally of any crime, never charged him, never tried him, never offered evidence.

2 Enemy combatant doesn t fit so well either, for he never fought in any battle against us, never took up arms against US forces or joined an enemy militia. He had been associated with the Taliban -- just how and when, we will take a look at. But the Taliban was the government. Many of us in this room associate with our own government, and we don t think of ourselves as soldiers. And it s complicated, because Awal Gul was also associated with another government. Our own. In the early 1980s, as a young man, Awal Gul joined a Mujahadin unit. He fought against Soviet forces. He used weapons smuggled into Afghanistan from Pakistan, under a program financed by the US Congress. He served under a unit commanded by Yunis Khalis. You can find, in the White House archives, photographs of Mr. Khalis. Shaking President Reagan s hand in the Oval Office. That Soviet war left Afghanistan a trove of weaponry, and after the Soviets were gone, Gul served in his Jalalabad neighborhood as a kind of police commander, managing the local weapons depot, years before the Taliban came in. In 1996, a new political force swept through Afghanistan, promising an end to government corruption, featuring students fervid with dangerous self-righteousness -- Talibs. The astonishing cruelty of this group soon became apparent. Many Afghans fled to Pakistan, but for Awal Gul, fleeing meant uprooting his family. We all make accommodations to governments we don t like. Some of us did so after the election of 08. Others in 04. Not too many of us moved to Canada. Awal Gul stayed in Afghanistan. Does that make him a terrorist? 2

3 Still, the brutality of the new regime dismayed him. There is an Afghan saying, which he would repeat to his lawyers in Guantanamo years later. You cannot wash blood with blood. In late 1999 or early 2000, according to a letter his lawyers obtained, he formally resigned his government post, ending his affiliation with the Taliban government. After the US invasion, Taliban forces fled from Jalalabad, but he stayed. He wasn t with them. Instead, he was serving under a man named Hazrat Ali, of the Northern Alliance, a US ally. The American bombardment began in October, 2001, and American and Northern Alliance forces routed Taliban forces in weeks. Awal Gul was not among that enemy. US allies secured key positions in the country by November. But -- it s complicated. Some people in Afghanistan who claimed Gul remained a Taliban commander. Learning of these rumors, on Christmas Day, 2001, Awal Gul went to see the American occupying forces in Nangahar province. Voluntarily. He wanted to explain that he was on their side. He never went home again. Until this month, when he went home in a casket. When a man dies in Guantanamo -- we know of at least six deaths now -- political forces kick into gear. Jihadists claim him as a martyr to their cause. The Pentagon issues a press release along not-so-different lines -- assuring the public that the decedent was a bad man. That s what happened here. Soon after his death, the Taliban was bawling about Guantanamo, and in America, we were told that Awal Gul had operated a safe house for Al-Qaeda, and that he had provided operational support to Osama bin Laden. 3

4 This was puzzling to lawyers at the Atlanta federal defenders office, who had represented him. When they went to court last year, the government never said anything about operational support to OBL, or an al Qaeda guest house. Those new allegations emerged only after there was no prisoner to deny them, or court to ask for evidence. They may come from the statements of other prisoners made under torture many years ago. Prisoners were kept awake, chained to the floor, in isolation, they were threatened, until they learned what their captors wanted them to say, and said it. Interrogators wrote it down. The government was too embarrassed to put that stuff in court filings. But after a man dies, you can put it in a press release. The lawyers tell me that Gul was an amiable man. His devotion to the Koran gave him a sense of peace. He was keen to learn English. When he met his lawyer, he told him that the name, Awal Gul, means, first flower in Pashto, and asked for his lawyer s name. Matthew. Ah, he said, Do you know that Matthew means, Gift of God? I have been going to that base since Awal Gul s case does not seem unusual to me. Eighteen of my former clients were freed, after years of imprisonment. None was ever charged with any wrongdoing. The government through three years of litigation avoided any inquiry into evidence; when at last the courts let us at the evidence, there was none. The government surrendered. 4

5 My own clients had a unique problem. Uighurs, they had fled from Chinese tyranny, and could not go home again. The defense department agreed they were not the enemy. But because xenophobia reigns in America, they could not come here. So they sat in prison for years, until at last most were relocated, to Albania, Sweden, Palau, Switzerland, and Bermuda. Today my client Abdullah lives today a few hours from Washington. In Bermuda. He worked as a groundskeeper at the Port Royal Golf Club. They have PGA tournaments there. Now he works construction. Plays a little soccer. He fell in love with a nice girl. President Obama was about to bring Uighurs to Virginia, in 2009, when Congress became hysterical. Senator John Thune went to the floor of the Senate to call Abdullah a hardened killer bent on the destruction of the United States, and Congressman Wolf, and Senators McCain and McConnell all rushed down there with similarly-antic lunacies. It didn t matter that for years the State Department had been telling our allies precisely the opposite about Abdullah -- that he s innocent, and perfectly nice. The President lost his nerve, cut a deal, and now Abdullah is in Bermuda. A couple of months later, my wife and I went sailing with Abdullah. He didn t seem to her like a hardened killer bent on our destruction. We rode scooters to the marina, and Marta said, these men are the most law abiding in Bermuda -- they re the only ones who signal a lane change! 5

6 Abdullah s old friend Hammad remains at the prison today. He wasn t offered Bermuda. But he was offered Palau, in the Pacific Ocean. More than twenty nations in the world have Uighur expatriate communities -- including the US, Canada, Germany, Norway, Finland, Turkey. Palau has none. Hammad had never heard of Palau. He spent the last nine years on what to him is a desolate island. Palau sounded too much like another. So he turned it down. In 2008, the Supreme Court gave a brave essay, in a case called Boumediene v. Bush, deciding, at long last, that the men at Guantanamo had access to the ancient writ of habeas corpus, by which any man could put any government to the test, and win his freedom from an unjust imprisonment. But the Congress has been in open revolt ever since, and the DC Circuit has busily stripped any meaning from that ruling, including the most central meaning of all -- that a habeas court can force the actual release of the prisoner. The court took that right away in the Uighur cases in We have asked the Supreme Court to review Hammad s case. Some court watchers say the odds are against us. After all, he rejected Palau. I sometimes wonder if Hammad, who is in his thirties now, will die in Guantanamo. 6

7 Something deeper is at issue here than Congress or the courts, or even President Obama. President Obama is our mirror-in-chief. He reflects the national mood. When he came into office, he reflected our concern about Guantanamo. Today he reflects our concern about jobs. Has he decided that the Guantanamo prison, like the poor, will always be with us? Then so has Congress, and so have we. For in truth America discovered, like Winston Smith in Orwell s 1984, that deep down, in the frightened corner of her heart, she loved Guantanamo. So long as the men there are Muslim, and talk funny languages, and are brown, and at least some of them are people like Khaled Sheik Mohammed, then we won t trouble ourselves too much about the others. We prefer a one-size-fits-all Guantanamo, and a one-size-fits-all word, terrorist, and to think no more about the matter. We like to say in this country that we care about freedom, that we prize it above all else. We say our soldiers in Afghanistan are fighting for freedom. It is a commonplace, but Awul Gul teaches us it is not true. What we care about is security, not freedom. Awul Gul once had affiliations with the Taliban government. So far as security is concerned, that s enough. He looked for justice in heaven, finding little on earth. Through nine years in prison, he did hold out hope that he might go home and see children and grandchildren again. He only got half of that wish. 7

8 A few days ago a pop star mangled the anthem, and it struck people. There s something else about the anthem that always strikes me. That crescendo at the end, the bit before the crowd starts to cheer -- have you noticed? It s a question. Not a statement. I like that. Because when it comes to things like freedom and bravery, talk is cheap. It s wiser just to ask the question. Of each successive generation. The flag flies above the Guantanamo prison today. Say -- that star spangled banner -- does it still wave over a land of the free? When I think about Abdullah, bundled off to Bermuda because our politicians were small and frightened, and Hammad, soon to begin his tenth year at the base, and Awal Gul, who died there -- that seems to me a good question to ask. 8