How did your work in Guantanamo Bay start?
To me, Guantanamo Bay is exactly the same as the death penalty, except it is exponentially worse. And it's for this reason in the death penalty, you take someone, and you hate them horribly and the DA says that they're so despicable, they should die. In Guantanamo, George Bush says they're the worst of the worst, and they're all awful and we should take them to Guantanamo and every single prisoner in Guantanamo, some people don't realize this, face the death penalty if they're put on trial. But, then in Mississippi or wherever, you give someone a terrible lawyer to represent them and you give them no lawyer on appeal. In Guantanamo, they don't give you any lawyer in the first place. In Mississippi, they give you a legal process that puts you in a prison miles away from anywhere in hopes that no one will go see you. In Guantanamo, they take you to Cuba, for goodness sake, where no one can go see you. In Mississippi, the client's family so often can't get to see them because they are poor. Sometimes they can, they can go every two weeks. In Guantanamo, they can't go at all. So, what I saw when I saw Guantanamo being set up in January 2002, just made me very annoyed because here's George Bush being as hypocritical as a hypocrite can be, saying that in the name of the war on terror and the rule of law and democracy, we're going to set up a prison that has no rule of law and we're going to hold people there and just announce that they are “evil doers.” And that's just so wrong and it's not just wrong, it's stupid. Because if there's one thing you know, it's that hypocrisy breeds hatred. And at a place like Guantanamo, when Americans going around the world preaching democracy and rule of law and then doing Guantanamo, we're absolutely bound to get in trouble.
