![\"\"](\"http:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/commons\/5\/5c\/Guantanamo%2C_Camp_6_sign.jpg\")
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Jonathan Hansen is Senior Lecturer on Social Studies and History at Harvard University. Sabin Willett is a partner at Bingham McCutcheon and has represented numerous Guantanamo detainees. On April 1 the historian and the lawyer shared their thoughts on Guantanamo Bay. CR-CL reports. <\/p>\n
1.\tSabin Willett:<\/strong> Nine Guantanamo detainees have been convicted, and six more trials are underway. <\/p>\n 2.\tWhat put an end to the worst stuff, the waterboarding, was scrutiny. But what came in its wake was something that is worse in my opinion, but that nobody cared about. And that\u2019s solitary confinement. 3.\tLecturer Jonathan Hansen:<\/strong> In 2006, there were suicides, and there was an in my opinion problematic Harper\u2019s<\/em> article saying that these weren\u2019t suicides, that they were murders by the CIA.<\/p>\n 4.\tWillett: <\/strong>My view is that the longer an injustice continues, ironically, the more tolerable it becomes. The public is okay with it. If it\u2019s all right for Obama, how bad can it be? And politicians have figured out you can get elected by being tough on terror. And that\u2019s why it goes on and on.<\/p>\n 5.\tHansen:<\/strong> 70% of the American people support the prison. <\/p>\n 6.\t There were experts in the military who said that they shouldn\u2019t do it [torture and Guantanamo detention]. <\/p>\n 7.\tThere was no accountability for the crimes that were going on, and they were crimes. <\/p>\n 8.\tFor me, this wasn\u2019t a partisan issue, because there were people in the Bush administration who said don\u2019t do this.<\/p>\n 9.\tWillett:<\/strong> In 2009, Congress passed statutes restricting the President\u2019s ability to take prisoners out of Guantanamo.<\/p>\n 10.\tI saw a list that said that a certain prisoner had returned to the battlefield. That was my client! That surprised me. The guy was Albanian. So I looked into it, and it turned out he had given a very hostile interview to the New York Times.<\/p>\n 11.\tHansen: <\/strong>The damage that has been done, part of the damage, is that we don\u2019t believe intelligence any more because we\u2019ve seen it evaporate under scrutiny.<\/p>\n 12.\tWillett:<\/strong> I\u2019ll tell you a happy story. I was in Bermuda where four of my former clients live with their wives and kids. Abdallah works for a hotel, and he told me to visit him at the job site. Abdallah was every inch the contractor. He\u2019s fist-bumping the masons and the carpenters. He\u2019s showing me how the 20-year coconut palms are preserved. This guy was in solitary confinement, and he\u2019s coming back to life, and he\u2019s immensely popular. He said he actually enjoyed solitary confinement because he was able to memorize the Koran.<\/p>\n 13.\tThe legacy is that 70% of people support this. We like to say we believe in liberty, but really we believe in security. <\/p>\n 14.\tHansen:<\/strong> The thing that worries me so much is that it is a reaction against expertise in this country. It doesn\u2019t work. If you compare the justice done in the military tribunals in Guantanamo to the justice done in the courts in New York City, it does not work. It does not make us safer. And also we lose all credibility, when other countries are torturing people and acting coercively, we can\u2019t say anything. And it galvanizes our enemies.<\/p>\n 15.\tWillett: <\/strong>Yes, it galvanizes other countries.<\/p>\n 16.\t [The FBI] knows that beating you up doesn\u2019t get good information. But they didn\u2019t have control of Guantanamo, either. It might be that the political classes will have learned from that so they won\u2019t try this silly interrogation facility again, but I don\u2019t think we can look to the public for outrage on this.<\/p>\n 17.\tIn South Boston during World War II, there was a POW camp, and they were brought to Mass in church on Sundays. And I have to ask, could this have come out any worse if we had tried this? That may be na\u00efve. <\/p>\n 18.\tHansen:<\/strong> I don\u2019t think that all Americans care only about security and not liberty. I think in fact that there is [sic] both there all the time.<\/p>\n 19.\tIn 1741, Americans were looking at Guantanamo as the Promised Land. It\u2019s on the Windward Passage into the Caribbean. If you wanted to harvest the resources of the breadbasket, you had to control the port of New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico. In the 18th century and even a little bit of the 20th century, to control that thing, you had to control the Windward Channel. 20.\tWillett:<\/strong> (On surveillance of counsel conversations): We always assumed we were being listened to.<\/p>\n 21.\tIt took us a year to get a translator, because it had to be someone fluent in Uyghur who was a U.S. citizen with a secret-level clearance. We had to have a Department of Defense minder at our client meetings. You can\u2019t have a private conversation with your client.<\/p>\n 22.\tAnd it was hard because how was your client supposed to know that you really represented them? The client couldn\u2019t just make a telephone call and check you out.<\/p>\n 23.\t Hansen:<\/strong> In the U.S., we\u2019ve tortured people, but as a tactic, not a strategy. [Historically,] it wasn\u2019t top-down like it was in Guantanamo. <\/p>\n 24.\tWillett: <\/strong>The so-called SuperMax in Colorado is the model for Camp Six. [\u2026] There\u2019s an old Supreme Court case that admonishes solitary confinement as an Eighth Amendment violation. <\/p>\n 25.\tWhen we are comparing someone who has been convicted of the worst crimes with people who didn\u2019t even commit any crimes, we have lost the war.<\/p>\n 26.\tI visited Camp Six, and they told me I was the first lawyer to enter it. The clients referred to it [Camp Six] as the \u201cdungeon above the ground.\u201d And I understood what they meant by that; you felt entombed. I felt a little creeped out after about 8 minutes in there. I wondered if they forgot about me. <\/p>\n This event was sponsored by the Harvard Law School-ACLU.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Jonathan Hansen is Senior Lecturer on Social Studies and History at Harvard University. Sabin Willett is a partner at Bingham […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":79,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3,45,47,49],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-7830","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-amicus","category-criminal-justice","category-events","category-human-rights"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/peZrWS-22i","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/crcl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7830","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/crcl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/crcl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/crcl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/79"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/crcl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7830"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/crcl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7830\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/crcl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7830"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/crcl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7830"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/crcl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7830"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/crcl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=7830"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nAt Camp Six, they built a $35M facility. It meant for 23 hours a day you were completely alone.<\/p>\n
\nIt\u2019s a complicated place that has much more to it than the last ten years. One reason the camp was so abusive was because it was constructed on the last camp that was there. It was bad for the camp, it was bad for the guards. There was no infrastructure, no sewers. You all heard about detainees throwing feces on the guard. There was bad policy, bad strategy, there was bad tactics.<\/p>\n