In this series, we delve into the incredible story of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who was detained at the notorious Guantánamo Bay detention camp without charge for over a decade. We hear Mohamedou’s story as extracts from an event hosted by the University of Bristol’s Human Rights Implementation Centre to mark the 20th anniversary of the facilities establishment – an event that also put the spotlight on the significant role Bristol researchers have played in reducing incidence of torture around the world. Mohammedou’s defence lawyer, Nancy Hollander and Professor Sir Malcolm Evans, joined Mohamedou on stage and continue the conversation here.
Have you ever wondered what representing someone detained in a facility synonymous with secrecy and deception would be like? In the second episode of this series, we delve into the realities of striving for truth as a Guantánamo lawyer. Professor Sir Malcolm Evans, former chair of the UNs Subcommittee for Prevention of Torture, joins Nancy Hollander, the Guantánamo lawyer who represented Mohamedou Ould Slahi whilst he was detained there for 14 years without charge.
For further reading: “Guantanamo, Torture and Mechanisms for Change.”
If you’re interested in related study or research, please have a look at our LLM Human Rights Law and PhD Law.
Image Credit: University of Bristol
Transcript:
00:00:05 Prof Malcolm Evans
Hello and welcome. My name is Malcolm Evans. I’m professor of international law at Bristol University and Co, director of the human Rights Implementation Center. In its law school. I’m also.
00:00:20 Prof Malcolm Evans
The former chair of the United Nations Subcommittee for the Prevention of Torture.
00:00:30 Prof Malcolm Evans
This is Guantanamo Bay, being a Guantanamo lawyer, it is episode two of a short series of podcasts calling for the closure of Guantanamo Bay detention camp. Guantanamo Bay was opened in.
00:00:49 Prof Malcolm Evans
00:00:51 Prof Malcolm Evans
Since its opening, 780 persons have been detained there.
00:00:57 Prof Malcolm Evans
733 have now been transferred, meaning that 37 are still held.
00:01:06 Prof Malcolm Evans
During those 20 years, nine people have died in custody. All those detained there have been held for indefinite periods without trial.
00:01:21 Prof Malcolm Evans
Mohammadu is a Mauritanian citizen who was detained at Guantanamo for 14 years without charge. Nancy Hollander, an internationally renowned criminal defense lawyer.
00:01:35 Prof Malcolm Evans
Represented him across much of that time.
00:01:40 Prof Malcolm Evans
Nancy Hollander will be joining me later. But first, let’s listen to an extract of the tour.
00:01:48 Prof Malcolm Evans
I started by asking Nancy how she got involved in Guantanamo.
00:01:55 Nancy Hollander
An organization I was in the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers when we found out about Guantanamo, we had some discussions about should we represent these people?
00:02:07 Nancy Hollander
And the rules at that time were even worse. The military anybody? There was no privilege. There was going to be no privilege, no confidentiality. And we thought, well, we can’t do this. It’s, you know, our bar requires we have confidentiality and maybe we shouldn’t be a part of any of this and give it any legitimacy.
00:02:28 Nancy Hollander
And then a friend of mine said if we don’t represent these people, they’re going to get bad law.
00:02:34 Nancy Hollander
Yours.
00:02:35 Nancy Hollander
That’s what’s going to happen. They’re going to get people who don’t care. And you know, that’s that’s really all it took. And I said, you’re right. And other people said you’re right. And we told the military lawyers that we would do it with them. The first case I wanted was a trial. I’m a trial lawyer, and I wanted a case. It was a trial, but that wasn’t happening.
00:02:56 Nancy Hollander
And then one day, out of the blue.
00:02:58 Nancy Hollander
I get an e-mail from a lawyer in France named Emmanuel Altit and he wrote me and he said that he had heard from a lawyer in Mauritania. You know, France used to own Mauritania. So they’re still connected. And he had heard that this family was looking for their son and they thought he was in Guantanamo. And could I find out.
00:03:18 Nancy Hollander
And it was very hard to find out in my associate at that time. She’s now a not my associate. She’s now a death penalty lawyer and a very good.
00:03:27 Nancy Hollander
Lawyer Teresa Duncan, I said.
00:03:30 Nancy Hollander
How are we going to find out? And ultimately we did through an organization called Cage prisoners at the time it’s called Cage now and they had managed to get a list of people and they had a picture I said.
00:03:44 Nancy Hollander
Sure. I’ll do it with you. And I said is is anyone paying for it? And he said that was a joke, right? I said, yeah, kind of a joke. And I went to my partners and I said I’m going to do this. I don’t know what it will cost. And in the movie they.
00:04:00 Nancy Hollander
Kind of pull back and I think maybe one of them said, do you really want to get involved in this? And I said yes. And another one said, you know, go and do it. That’s why we became lawyers. We became lawyers for cases like this and it did cost my firm. And I’m very thankful to them. I mean, we’re a small firm. There were seven or eight of us.
00:04:20 Nancy Hollander
Never more than that, I’m thankful that everyone said go and do it and that’s how it happened. I said yes.
00:04:27 Prof Malcolm Evans
Being involved in in in this.
00:04:29 Prof Malcolm Evans
Case what impact has it had on you as a lawyer and not only your impact on you as a lawyer, but perhaps on your perception of of the legal system, the legal process?
00:04:41 Nancy Hollander
I’ve been a lawyer for over 40 years. I’ve seen a lot and heard a lot, but I had never I’d never been so close.
00:04:50 Nancy Hollander
Torture. And I didn’t really know. I knew that there were cases. There are cases in the case books about people who got tortured and confessed.
00:04:59 Nancy Hollander
But we didn’t.
00:04:59 Nancy Hollander
Know what was going on in Guantanamo? We had no idea. All we knew was that there were men there. They were all foreigners. They were all Muslim. None of this made any sense. None of it made any legal sense or political sense. What were they doing there?
00:05:15 Nancy Hollander
Then we found out that most of them were there because the US had dropped Leafly.
00:05:20 Nancy Hollander
And I’ve seen these leaflets all over southern Afghanistan and northern Pakistan and the leaflet says turn into terrorists for $5000, but you can imagine what $5000 means in a little Afghan village somewhere. And so 85% of the people in Guantanamo, that’s how they got there. They weren’t on any battlefield.
00:05:40 Nancy Hollander
They were turned in by someone else.
00:05:43 Nancy Hollander
But Muhammad’s story was so different. And if you seen the movie, you saw how he left his house and his mother. And that’s exactly how it happened. And that’s exactly where it happened, cause that was filmed at Mohammed.
00:05:57 Nancy Hollander
Whose family home wasn’t it? That part? And and tragically, his mother died and he never did see her again. She died and we were the ones who had to tell him that his mother had died in Guantanamo. When I first heard and read what Mohammed who wrote.
00:06:01
Simply.
00:06:16 Nancy Hollander
I just couldn’t believe it.
00:06:18 Nancy Hollander
And I thought, well, maybe he’s exaggerating.
00:06:21 Nancy Hollander
Maybe it, you know we don’t know him. We don’t know anything about him. We filed a motion.
00:06:29 Nancy Hollander
To get his. This was the the the cases weren’t happening. I mean, nothing was happening. They had the prisoners had filed petitions for writs of habeas corpus, which we have in the United States. But the government was not answering them. And they were not being required to answer them. And so I was there in 2000 and.
00:06:48 Nancy Hollander
Five and the government wasn’t required to answer the habeas cases until 2008.
00:06:54 Nancy Hollander
Through a case called Domitian, the Supreme Court said you you got to answer these, you know, they you got to move these forward. But for those that intro and what were we going to do? So we filed a Freedom of Information request and we asked for his medical records and all the evidence they had to torture and they gave us some medical records.
00:07:15 Nancy Hollander
Which?
00:07:16 Nancy Hollander
They didn’t read for they gave them to us. The medical records showed that he had had broken ribs after being on a boat, and he had talked to us about how they’ve taken him out on this boat. And there was some proof right there. And the medical records showed his preexisting condition, some sciatica.
00:07:37 Nancy Hollander
And some other issues and it was listed what was supposed to happen and then.
00:07:42 Nancy Hollander
It said in the medical records, but when he was taken to the reservation, they didn’t give him any of these medicines and in fact from that we learned that his torturers were reading the medical records or talking to the medical people and doing exactly what they said they should do, using them against him and.
00:08:02 Nancy Hollander
It was his medical records where we first learned this and then the government said, well, we can’t give you anything.
00:08:11 Nancy Hollander
And the judge was about to rule on behalf of the government that all we got were the medical records. None of the torture. And they had filed what we called a motion for summary judgment and the.
00:08:21 Nancy Hollander
Judge said. I’m.
00:08:22 Nancy Hollander
I’m going to rule, probably for the government, but let me think about it over the weekend.
00:08:27 Nancy Hollander
And it was that weekend 2 documents came out. One was from the FBI, their Inspector General on each, each organization in the US.
00:08:38 Nancy Hollander
You have similar things here. Has an Inspector General. It’s someone who makes sure they stay in line, basically. And they had learned that they were members of the military who had pretended to be the FBI so they wouldn’t get in trouble. And the FBI would get in trouble and at the same time, another.
00:08:57 Nancy Hollander
Report called the Senate Judiciary report, not the one that came out later that we don’t have, but an earlier.
00:09:03 Nancy Hollander
One and it.
00:09:05 Nancy Hollander
Had 13 pages about Mohammed. Who’s?
00:09:08 Nancy Hollander
And I called the lawyer for the government and I said, you know, you said this is all classified and we can’t have it.
00:09:15 Nancy Hollander
Did you read this report? She read it and she called me back and she said, you know, I’m very embarrassed because they didn’t tell me they were going to release this and I’m withdrawing my motion. And that’s how we learned that everything Mohammadu had said was the truth.
00:09:33 Nancy Hollander
And I learned that we were doing that.
00:09:38 Nancy Hollander
To him, to others, to a man named Al Katani, who’s finally going to get out, who has serious mental health issues. The two of them, the secretary of the Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, specifically wrote what was to be done.
00:09:55 Nancy Hollander
To them. And that’s what they were doing. And frankly, it was all an experiment. The government knew they weren’t going to get the truth, but they wanted to see what this was like, what happens to people which is even worse than torturing, to try to get information.
00:10:12 Prof Malcolm Evans
Do you have any advice for other lawyers on how to keep going in the face of these constant obstacles and discoveries and revelations that one keeps running into? Cause it’s not easy.
00:10:26 Nancy Hollander
It’s not easy, and when I was reading the torture report about my other client, Ibrahim Al Masri.
00:10:33 Nancy Hollander
A Doctor Who was working with us called me and she said don’t read it all at once. You can’t. You have to take care of yourself. You can’t read that all at once. Read it. Go out.
00:10:44 Nancy Hollander
Go for a.
00:10:45 Nancy Hollander
Walk, then read some more and you do have to take care of yourself. But you also have to believe in miracles. I don’t mean miracles.
00:10:53 Nancy Hollander
Like the tooth fairy. I mean, you just have to believe that things will change in such a way that what you’re doing will finally win.
00:11:04 Nancy Hollander
And I had another client many years earlier, a woman named Precious Biddell, who finally got out after 19 years and at one point she had given up. And she said, Nancy, I’m just going to serve my time. And I said, well, you go serve your time. But I’m not going to give up. I just don’t know what to do. And the same thing was true with mohammadu.
00:11:23 Nancy Hollander
For years we went to visit him. I’d go and then the next month, Terry would go and then I’d go.
00:11:29 Nancy Hollander
And Terry would go.
00:11:31 Nancy Hollander
And we just went to make sure he was OK. They were social visits because we didn’t know that he would ever get out. But you just have to keep doing it. I mean, that’s what I tell young lawyers not to give up. Lawyers have tremendous.
00:11:48 Nancy Hollander
We have the power to affect change like other professions don’t doctors can fix something. A plumber can fix something, but lawyers have real power, and it’s that power that you have to embrace and use.
00:12:05 Prof Malcolm Evans
That was Nancy Hollander speaking at the University of Bristol’s human Rights Implementation Centre in March 2022.
00:12:16 Prof Malcolm Evans
The human Rights Implementation Centre is one of the world’s most prominent organisations working for the prevention of torture and ill treatment around the world. Please use bristol.ac.uk/research Guantanamo.
00:12:36 Prof Malcolm Evans
Or the link in the podcast description to find out more about this work.
00:12:42 Prof Malcolm Evans
And now we move into a discussion with Nancy. So you can hear more from her directly. And how did you feel when you discovered the true nature and extent of what was going on at Guantanamo Bay?
00:12:57 Nancy Hollander
You know mohammadu, when we first met him was an extraordinary experience. We walked in and he stood up and put his arms out as though to hug us. But he didn’t move and we didn’t know what was going on. And then we saw that he was shackled to the floor. He had a leg with an iron on it.
00:13:19 Nancy Hollander
And so we walked up to him and he he.
00:13:20 Nancy Hollander
Gus and said my lawyers later, I learned from him that he didn’t know whether to trust us or not, but he felt he had no choice. It is terrifying to think that the Secretary of Defense, Rumsfeld has specifically said, do this. Thanks. And I don’t believe.
00:13:40 Nancy Hollander
That the torturers really believed they were going to learn any.
00:13:44 Nancy Hollander
Thing I believe this was all somewhat of an experiment.
00:13:49 Nancy Hollander
Let’s see what happens when we torture these people so we can learn it. If our people get tortured, which is of course, even worse than torturing them to try to get a confession. Later, I learned about the black sites and with another client, and it still horrifies me to read about.
00:14:09 Nancy Hollander
Or talk about what the United States government did to these people.
00:14:14 Prof Malcolm Evans
Has it changed the way you think about your own government, your own country? Those that work within it? You know, how can this be? Does it change your way of thinking about those around you when you can see how such thing like this has been able to emerge overtime?
00:14:28 Nancy Hollander
Malcolm, I’ve always known that the history of the United States is not a good one. You know, it started with ethnic cleansing of Indians slaves. Everyone who is not white Protestant. But I never believed that in.
00:14:45 Nancy Hollander
2000 2002 3/4.
00:14:50 Nancy Hollander
The torture that was done was almost the same as the torture that was done in the Tower of London 5 centuries earlier, and that we know other countries do. But I never believed that it would be as bad as I learned that it was and that people’s lives would be.
00:15:10 Nancy Hollander
Utterly destroyed, physically and mentally, that people would be left to die in the cold.
00:15:16 Nancy Hollander
That people would be tortured the way Muhammadu was and another man in Guantanamo, El Catani, who was just released this year because the government finally admitted it did not have facilities to treat his mental illness. Yet they have known that he was mentally ill from the day he got there.
00:15:37 Nancy Hollander
And they tortured him, just like they tortured mohammadu without any care. Someday I would like to find a Doctor Who stood by.
00:15:48 Nancy Hollander
Eye in the black sites and watched while people were being waterboarded because the instructions were that a doctor had to be there, not a corpsman.
00:16:00 Nancy Hollander
But a doctor with a trait kit, in case they had to revive someone, and these are doctors. There were doctors in Guantanamo who stood by and allowed this to.
00:16:14 Nancy Hollander
It’s frightening.
00:16:14 Prof Malcolm Evans
And this, of course is in clear breach of medical ethics, isn’t it?
00:16:18 Nancy Hollander
Medical ethics. Yes, in clear breach of every treaty in the United States has ever signed. And of course, we have to talk about Colonel Couch here because he was the prosecutor assigned to prosecute Mohammadu. He was a Marine Colonel, retired Lieutenant Colonel. And he.
00:16:38 Nancy Hollander
He went at it. I want to give this guy the death penalty until he saw the torture and saw that Muhammadu had denied everything until they started torturing him and was horrified and said this isn’t what we do in this country and yet it is what we do in this country with the United States.
00:16:58 Nancy Hollander
Us in this country.
00:17:00 Prof Malcolm Evans
How do you think it was possible for the US to get away with it? If it has, then?
00:17:07 Nancy Hollander
Probably money. I don’t know how else the US when they first opened Guantanamo, they thought these people will never have lawyers. They’ll never know they’re here. We can do whatever we want with them. The Geneva Convention doesn’t apply. As you recall, it was considered, quote, quaint. And yet it leaked out.
00:17:27 Nancy Hollander
That they were there, the same thing in the black sites.
00:17:30 Nancy Hollander
But they had the government and the CIA and the military who did the torturing had no end game. And I heard someone say recently, if you’re gonna start a war, you have to know how it’s gonna end. You have to have an end game. They had none. I don’t believe they’d ever considered.
00:17:50 Nancy Hollander
What would happen if this was discovered and the countries it’s now still classified what countries other people were in?
00:17:59 Nancy Hollander
On the theory that the government, our government may deals with them, that they would never.
00:18:05 Nancy Hollander
Disclosed but in a couple of cases, the countries have themselves admitted it. It’s still classified, which also makes no sense. But with my other client we received €200,000 in damages for him from the European Court of Human Rights and MOHAMMADU is now seeking.
00:18:26 Nancy Hollander
Damages from the Canadian government. It’s hopeless to ever try to get any damages from the United States.
00:18:33 Prof Malcolm Evans
On that, I talked about getting away with it, but even if it’s going to be difficult to get damages, do you think that, shall we say, the United States has paid a price in some way for what has actually happened now that so much is now?
00:18:48 Prof Malcolm Evans
Known about this.
00:18:50 Nancy Hollander
I do think the US has paid a price, although other countries kowtow to the US so.
00:18:56 Nancy Hollander
Much that it’s hard to know, but there were Americans killed by others saying you can do it in Guantanamo, we can do it too. There are other countries have said if the US can torture, we can too. And what’s the response to that? There is none.
00:19:13 Prof Malcolm Evans
We’ll come back to further aspects.
00:19:16 Prof Malcolm Evans
Of the book the film Guantanamo Bay and the question of torture in subsequent podcasts. Thank you, Nancy.
00:19:25 Nancy Hollander
Thank you, Malcolm.
00:19:29 Prof Malcolm Evans
If you’ve been.
00:19:29 Prof Malcolm Evans
Inspired by the conversations in this podcast.
00:19:33 Prof Malcolm Evans
And want to find.
00:19:34 Prof Malcolm Evans
Out more about the torture prevention work at the University of Bristol’s Human Rights Implementation Centre and the role you could play as a researcher.
00:19:45 Prof Malcolm Evans
As a student or as a potential partner.
00:19:49 Prof Malcolm Evans
Please use bristol.ac.uk/research Guantanamo or the link in the podcast description to find out more about this world.
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