E3W Literature | University of Texas

Clive Stafford Smith
Bad Men: Guantánamo Bay and the Secret Prisons/Eight O’Clock Ferry to the Windward Side: Seeking Justice in Guantánamo Bay
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2007/Nation Books, 2007
307 + x pages/336 pages
£16.99/$25.95

Reviewed by Barbara Harlow

In the prefatory acknowledgements to Bad Men: Guantánamo Bay and the Secret Prisons, Clive Stafford Smith describes his project, both apologetically and accusatorily: “This book,” he writes, “is a necessarily incomplete account of what I have seen and heard in the course of my representation of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay.” The imperfections that come of incompletion, Stafford Smith goes on, are twofold: “I am,” he says, noting the authorial conflicts inherent in such a project, “prevented from presenting a more complete picture by the US censorship rules, to which I have rigorously adhered, and by my obligations to my clients.”

Guantánamo Bay, the United States detention camp opened on 21 January 2002 to hold the “enemy combatants” captured over the course of the ongoing “war on terror,” has been variously described by its critics as a “legal black hole” and a “festering sore” on the US body politic. The facility has come to be notoriously if contradictorily known for both its secrecy (allegedly for “national security” reasons) and its “public relations” challenges (given its flagrant abuse of international human rights norms). How then does one, can one, begin to tell the story of the detention camp, the stories that it contains, and even the eventual story—when all is said and done—of its place in the post-9/ll era, the early 21st century world historical narrative?

Bad Men (published in the United States under the title Eight O’Clock Ferry to the Windward Side) is the contribution by attorney Clive Stafford Smith to the emerging sub-genre of a Guantánamo literary corpus, a body of writing that, besides the more political scientific renderings, includes the 2004 play Guantánamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom, by Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo based on first-hand accounts of released detainees and interviews with their families, Moazzam Begg’s personal memoir Enemy Combatant (2006), Michael Winterbottom’s award-winning film about the Tipton Three, The Road to Guantánamo (2006), journalist Dan Fesperman’s thriller The Prisoner of Guantánamo (2006), and The Detainees Speak: Poems from Guantánamo (2007), edited by attorney and law professor Mark Falkoff. Stafford Smith, who had spent the past several decades representing death row inmates in southern United States prisons and is the Legal Director of the UK charity Reprieve, has in turn represented more than fifty of the Guantánamo detainees, denounced by former Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld as the “worst of the worst.” Are these then the “bad men” in the title to the UK edition of Stafford Smith’s account?

The titles to the opening and closing chapters of Bad Men are purloined from Guantánamo’s own motto, “honor bound to defend freedom,” a slogan that welcomes all those who enter there and that provides the formula for meeting and greeting between the facility’s personnel: “honor bound,” salutes the first soldier, for example, who is responded to with “to defend freedom.” “Honour Bound,” however, the title to Chapter One, deforms, just slightly but nonetheless significantly, the US inflection with its British spelling. The chapter describes the trip on the “eight o’clock ferry to the windward side,” the journey taken by the attorneys who visit the southern tip of the island of Cuba in order to meet with their clients, and the topography, demography, and history of that isolated space, cordoned on three sides by water and on the fourth by a minefield that separates US treaty-held territory from Cuba itself. The attorney-author, however, is also “honour bound;” after all, as Stafford Smith apologizes, “I cannot write about the layout of the prison camp, as this would violate the security rules.” The title to the final chapter, “Defending Freedom,” is no less ironically nuanced, inquiring as the concluding observations do into the very conceptualization and implementation of the Guantánamo agenda—and by now implicating both the US and the UK administrations: “So why,” asks Stafford Smith, “did both the British and the American governments latch on to the idea that by dissolving human rights we could better protect a society that has been built to preserve the rule of law?”

Between “Honour Bound” and “Defending Freedom,” Bad Men rehearses the various narratives and scenarios that have grounded that question, “why?” As Stafford Smith learned (relearned?) in the course of his first meetings with the Guantánamo detainees that he would represent, the “lawyer is hard to distinguish from the interrogator,” but the intervening chapters nonetheless describe pressing experiments in the dialogics of question and answer. “Ticking Bomb,” for example, retells the attorney’s interviews with several experts—professors of philosophy and law Levin and Dershowitz, neocon pundit Perle, retired Marine Corps officer “Big Bill” Cowan—on the prototypical rationalization for the use of torture in extracting answers from questions, but, as it turns out, whatever their political position or posturing, “Nobody could identify one instance where a catastrophic bomb had been defused by torture.” In Chapters Three and Four, Stafford Smith re-presents the representations made to him by one of his clients, Binyam Ahmed Mohamed, who had been captured in Pakistan, tortured in Morocco, and is now detained in Guantánamo. “Human Resource Exploitation,” the title to Chapter Three is the official description for interrogation, whereas “Con-Mission,” Chapter Four’s title, is Binyam’s term for the military commissions set up by the Bush administration to simulate a “fair trial” for the Guantánamo detainees.

“Cover Stories” (Chapter Five) examines the verbal prevarications and legal inveigling that have become the hallmarks of Guantánamo Bay, from the “Gitmo-speak” of “lies, damned lies and semantics” to “good old-fashioned censorship.” For some critics whose works were donated to detainees, according to Stafford Smith, “An inverted snobbery began to develop: if your book slipped through the censors, perhaps that would cast doubt on the credibility of your opinions.” On the other hand, there were the career prosecutors, cross-examined in “Bad Men” (Chapter Six), who had a different way with words. And there was the “venom with which the Bush administration hated al-Jazeera,” the news agency whose words and images provided insights into the workings of Guantánamo that were neither synonymous nor homonymous with the public relations propaganda of the Bush administration. “Asymmetric Warfare” focuses on the hunger strikes waged by the Guantánamo detainees, adumbrated with provocative comparisons/contrasts with the Irish Republican hunger strikes of the 1980s. In Guantánamo, that is, hunger strikes were considered to be “asymmetric acts of war,” force-feeding was labeled as “intensified assisted feeding,” and the deaths that resulted were dismissed by administration spokespersons as no more (or less) than “good PR moves.” The deaths, however, did create a problem for the administration: what to do with the bodies. Habeas corpus all over again? The same problem haunts the “Gulag Archipelago,” described in Chapter Nine, that discusses the “other secret prisons and the ghost prisoners held there.” According to Stafford Smith, “the problem of prisoners in the War on Terror is not going to go away…If America continues along the Bush path, these prisoners will have to be taken somewhere.” As Chapter Ten describes, particularly with regard to Libyan UK asylum seeker become Guantánamo detainee, Omar Deghayes, “repatriation” is problematic. Indeed, Deghayes was released into UK custody in December 2007, where his fate is still pending. Will he be returned to Libya—and a precarious fate? Or…? As Stafford Smith, points out, “There have been many casualties in the War on Terror, and among the most tragic has been the Refugee Convention, which lies seriously injured, close to expiring.”

Bad Men/Eight O’Clock Ferry to the Windward Side concludes with three appendices: A. Time Line of Relevant Events, B. A Brief History of Guantánamo Bay, and C. What You Can Do. According to Stafford Smith, “There is always something you can do to protect powerless people from those who would do them harm.” Still an “incomplete account,” the writing generated by and from Guantánamo Bay is nonetheless itself an opportunity to think critically about narrative possibilities—eight o’clock ferries—and the redistribution of the dramatic roles of protagonists and antagonists—bad men.