The Fantasy world Of Clive Stafford-Smith…Hooman Rights Lawyer

This post combines the concerns of the last two posts….namely the BBC’s love-in with Islamist extremists and its so oft noted preference for loading a panel with those who have the same interests as the BBC.

The Reunion on R4 today brought together former inmates of Guantanamo Bay, the hooman rights lawyer Clive Stafford-Smith and, in sole opposition to them, Colonel Mike Bumgarner, guard commander at Guantanamo, whose diffident and brow beaten performance hardly merits the word ‘opposition’ as he caved in to the ‘evidence’ weighted against him and Guantanamo.

Moazzam Begg, the BBC’s Islamist poster boy, was back on the BBC, when isn’t he?  This time not as a representative of the Islamist group Cage but as a ‘victim’ of American injustices.  He rattled off a long list of abuses but failed to offer any evidence other than his own word that this was true.  Sue MacGregor asked him if he was a radical…he denied it and then went on to claim the Americans didn’t care anyway, they picked up anyone regardless…and suggested he was an innocent victim of bounty hunters.  Only much later in the programme did MacGregor remind him he had signed a confession that he had trained at terrorist camps….which of course he denied…the confession was beaten out of him!  MacGregor didn’t challenge that at all.

The tenor of the programme was set entirely against Guantanamo and every word was carefully chosen to create a negative perception of events.  Everyday events that would occur in many jurisdictions were described as if they were extreme and abnormal….for instance prisoners having had their heads shaved….reason?  Likely for their own health…de-lousing.  We heard that they were chained to their aircraft seats….well yeah….a good idea if you are at 20,000 feet in a plane full of potentially violent prisoners.  Finally we heard that one had been sedated….no explanation for that….could he have been violent?  Most likely.  But we’ll never know from the BBC.  All we got was a self-serving tone of reprimand and disapproval from the BBC journo, his own deliberately slanted take on events.

The ‘Reunion’ was an outright propaganda coup for the Islamists and they took every opportunity to spin their version of events with absolutely no proof that any of what they claimed happened in the way they said it did. The US guard’s immediate reaction team that dealt with unruly prisoners was presented as unnecessarily violent but there was no attempt to provide any undersatanding of why they were sent into action….no attempt to reveal what the prisoners were up to that forced such interventions…..interventions that are just as common in British prisons by officers in riot gear….and sometimes by military personnel drafted in for their expertise and perfection of the use of force in quelling disturbances and hostage rescue.

We were told of Korans being deliberately desecrated but there was no proof, we were told of other abuses and violence and again no proof, and we were told that inmates had committed suicide but were driven to it by their treatment at the hands of their captors.  Stafford-Smith told us that we must find out what drove them to their suicide as suicide is unIslamic and therefore their treatment must have been very terrible.  Has he never heard of 9/11 or 7/7 or the hundreds if not thousands of Muslim suicide attacks?

In the same way that Islamists were trained to lie about their treatment in captivity and to conduct ‘lawfare’ against their captors the suicides were thought to be a continuation of that, asymetric warfare….an attempt to get the world’s attention onto the camp and pile on the pressure to get it closed with as much scorn and opprobrium as possible pouring down upon the heads of the Americans.  Stafford-Smith, and the BBC, failed to mention that the Americans suspected he had himself helped organise the mass suicide as a political act.

Stafford-Smith has another pre-packaged tale to tell in order to illustrate the evils of Guantanamo, and this one is just as dubious as the last one….here his organisation ‘Reprieve’ spells it out just as he did on the programme…

‘I am working at the charity Reprieve at the moment whose lawyers were counsel in the infamous case of Mohammed el Gharani. He was just 14 years old when he was seized for a bounty in Pakistan. His US interrogators used a Yemeni translator, but Mohammed spoke Saudi Arabic. The word zalat meant ‘money’ to the interrogators; to Mohammed it meant ‘salad’. He could not understand why they wanted to know what zalat he had taken to Pakistan with him. He said he could get it anywhere he wanted. They got excited, and demanded to know where. He described various market stalls around Karachi. They thought he was an Al-Qaida financier and as a consequence, he then went on to spend seven years in Guantánamo before a conservative federal judge found the intelligence was so woeful that they could not even work out how old he was. Mohammed’s interrogators had heard what they expected — or wanted — to hear.’

Unfortunately the reason the boy was held was because the Americans believed he ‘ had stayed in an al Qaeda-affiliated guest house in Afghanistan, had fought in the battle of Tora Bora, had served as a courier for senior al Qaeda operatives and was a member of a London-based al Qaeda cell.’   The story about the salad and money is a nonsense spun by Stafford-Smith to try and mock the Americans and make them look foolish and as far as I can see he seems to be the originator of the story himself with no-one else deeming it news worthy.

The reason he was released…

‘On January 14, 2009, U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon ordered the release of Gharani because the evidence that he was an enemy combatant was mostly limited to statements from two other detainees whose credibility had been called into question by US government staff. Gharani’s attorney Zachary Katznelson said after the ruling “Judge Leon did justice today. This is an innocent kid when he was seized illegally in Pakistan and should never have been in prison in the first place.’

Nothing to do with salad.

Bumgarner said he felt that Guantanamo was a necessary facility…Sue MacGregor leapt in and suggested he thought it was a ‘necessary evil’….so in her opinion Guantanamo was ‘evil’.  Just so we’re clear where we stand.

Programmes like the BBC’s ‘Reunion’ are just another part of that assault on the West and its fight against the terrorists.  The BBC is siding with the enemy either by design or by naivety.