Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 9/6/21 Clive Stafford Smith on Ahmed Rabbani and the Other Innocent Men Being Held at Guantanamo Bay

Episode Date: September 10, 2021

Scott interviews Clive Stafford Smith about a recent article written by his client Ahmed Rabbani. Rabbani has been in custody for 19 years without a single charge being brought against him. In 2002 he found himself in the hands of the CIA who allegedly believed he was a man named Hassan Ghul. But even after the real Ghul was captured and brought to the same prison Rabbani was being kept in, the CIA kept trying to extract information from Rabbani. Ghul cooperated and was freed. But Rabbani was sent to Guantanamo Bay where he remains today. Smith explains some of the difficulties facing him as he argues Rabbani’s case and sheds some light on how common his story really is. Discussed on the show: “The U.S. Has Held Me For 19 Years Without A Charge. I Have Just One Chance To Be Freed” (Huffington Post) The Senate Torture Report Clive Stafford Smith is founder of Reprieve, and is now director of his new non-profit the 3DCentre. He is the author of Bad Men: Guantánamo Bay and the Secret Prisons and Injustice: Life and Death in the Courtrooms of America. Follow him on Twitter @CliveSSmith. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: The War State and Why The Vietnam War?, by Mike Swanson; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; EasyShip; Thc Hemp Spot; Green Mill Supercritical; Bug-A-Salt; Lorenzotti Coffee and Listen and Think Audio. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjYu5tZiG. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPGGqQ_c12o Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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All right, you guys, introducing Clive Stafford Smith. He's a lawyer from Great Britain, from the outfit Reprieve, where they represent the most wretched of refuse, like those locked away at Guantanamo Bay Prison. Welcome back to the show, Clive. How are you doing, sir? Well, look, let me tell you first. When you say I represent the wretched of refuse, I don't represent you, so it can't be that wretched. Also, I've moved on from Retrieve, actually. I founded Retrieve many years ago, but all founders should piss off after a while. So I've moved on and set up a new charity now. I still work with Reprieve a lot, but the new charity is called the 3D Center,

where we help young people that come up with some passionate thing that they can spend the next 50 years during making the world a better place. Great. The 3D Center, you say? Yep, 3DC.org.org. And even though I am in England, I'm a true blue American.

I just want you to know. So that's where it is. Originally from the UK, you just still sound funny, that's all. But you're one of us now. Can I just point out, Scott? You're accusing me of having an accent. It's my language. It's you that has the accent.

I hate to break the news to you. That's probably right. We perfected it, though, like pizza, you know? Like Mexican food. Yeah, the poor Mexicans. and Italians, you know, really have nothing to boast about enough to you. All right. Well, we haven't come for the falafels and all of that stuff yet, but soon enough. So, yeah, and listen, by the way, we got to talk about this thing, which I'm sure you had a hand in getting published here by Ahmed Rabani, your client, published at the Huffington Post.

The U.S. has held me for 19 years without a charge. I have just one chance to be freed. It's funny because the first part of that headline there, it just sounds like, but that's impossible because this is America and everybody knows that that's not the way it works around here, right? Well, it's true. You know, I was just talking today with someone, you know, I just got back from Guantanamo last night.

And I saw Ahmed a couple of times while I was in Guantanamo. And I was just talking to someone today about, you know, When you look through the U.S. Constitution, it has a whole bunch of provisions that are in there, in the main body of the Constitution and in the Bill of Rights, that were all aimed at wicked things that Mad King George was doing to the colonial Americans before 1776 that just aggravated everyone in the U.S. And that's why there was a revolution, and that's why there was a Constitution, and that's why there was a Bill of Rights. And every single one of those rules is being violated in Ahmed's case.

You know, even bizarre things like a Bill of Attainter, which is something most people don't know what it is, but it's where the government announces that they're going to keep you locked up without bothering with giving you a trial. That was called the Bill of Attender. King George used to do it, went to people who annoyed him, and we put it in our constitution that couldn't do it, and we're doing it to our net, because that's exactly what's happening to me.

Well, my understanding the Bill of Attainer was that that was a law that would apply to a specific person or group of persons rather than be equally applied to everyone. Is that different? Well, exactly, exactly. But it's either a law or an edict from, you know, the president. And when Donald Trump announced that everyone was going to, to stay in Guantanamo, who was in Guantanamo, that was a bill of a tender because he was the president, and he was saying, well, we're not going to give you a trial, but we're going to keep

you there forever. And, you know, that's exactly what the founders were trying to prevent when they created the constitution that some, you know, some populist politician could just screw over people that he didn't like. Yeah. Yeah. You know, so we're deep in the future here now where a of this stuff was happening when a good part of our audience were just kids and they don't really know about this stuff. So would it be fair for me to stipulate, correct me if I'm wrong, sir, that everybody who originally was thrown in Guantanamo was just some nobody, maybe somebody from the Taliban. But anyone who was actually a high-level al-Qaeda target in the terror war, they were abducted and taken off to CIA black sites and they weren't even brought to Guantanamo

until 2006. But at first, it was basically just full of a bunch of Uyghurs and a bunch of Taliban foot soldiers and goat herders and whoever had been kidnapped and ransomed by the Pakistani ISI because Bush needed a PR stunt to try to pretend that there were hundreds and hundreds of terrorists out there coming for us and look, they're posthunes. I mean, the real issue was that the Bush administration needed

to convince the American government. people, that they were being tough on these terrorists and that we had a bunch of bad guys. And you're right that so many of them ended up there from Pakistan. When I first got into Gitmo, you know, I brought, along with two friends, the very first case against Montanamo, Resoul versus Bush. And when we won in a conservative, conservative Supreme Court, you know, I finally got down to see the prisoners in late 2004. And to be honest with you, I thought I was going to meet a bunch of people and I was going to have a lot of explaining to do for them. You know, Donald Rumsfeld

said they were the worst of the worst terrorists in the world and you know it wasn't going to be true for everyone, but it never occurred to me that our government could get it so horribly wrong. And I got to Guantanamo, expecting to find a bunch of people who had been fighting on the battlefield of Afghanistan. And I found a slew of people like Muhammad al-Garani, who was a 14-year-old kid when he was seized in Karachi, which I looked it up. And it's just over a thousand miles from Kabul. It's never been to Afghanistan. He was from Saudi Arabia. And he'd gone to Pakistan to study English.

And he ended up in Guantanamo. And the thing that actually ultimately helped explain it all, and it took me a while to figure this out, was that we were offering money, bounties, for anyone who turned in some bad dude Arab who had to be a terrorist. And actually, you know, I found some of the flyers, the bounty flyers of, you know, a bearded guy here and then a big dollar sign and then a bearded guy behind bars. And then I read the rather dreadful autobiography of General Masharath, who was the president of Pakistan at the time, where he boasted that more than half of Guantanamo's prisoners had been sold to the Americans for millions of dollars in bounties that his people had collected. And, you know, ultimately, I wouldn't tar everyone with the same brush, but there's an awful lot of people. certainly in Karachi and sell their own granny for, you know, the amount of money we were giving them. And that explained why we got it so horribly wrong. You know, I had a really hard time finding anyone who had anything to do with terrorism when I first went there. And it was, you know,

that came as quite a surprise to me. Yeah. Well, I mean, I remember back in 2006 when they first brought college Sheikh Mohammed and Ramsey bin al-Shib and these other few guys from the CIA, prisons and turn them over to Guantanamo. And then, like, a week later, they're like, yeah, look, see, Guantanamo's full of these terrorists when it had been like that for five years already. And it was full of a bunch of people who, I guess there was that guy, Katani. Maybe there were a couple of guys, but I mean, there was a small number of people. But even the people in the CIA blackfights were not all, you know, even today, the people

they refer. I mean, look, let me tell you the story of Binion Mohammed. I don't know if you remember him, but Biniam. Yeah, and by the way, I just wanted to say that just when I said that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the guilty went to the CIA, I didn't mean to imply that everybody went to the CIA was guilty because you're right. That's a very important distinction to make there statistically. And I do remember the case of Binion, Mohammed.

Please tell them about it. Well, I would actually, let me move on. Well, we'll talk about Ahmed Rabbani in a minute. Sure. Because he was actually another people who went to the black sites, but Binion Mohamed. He was a British guy, right? And he was, again, detained. He was in Karachi when he was detained.

And the U.S. bought him for a bounty. And they start interrogating him. And Binyam said, look, I'm happy to talk to the British, but I'm not talking to you Americans because I got nothing to do with you. That made the U.S. folk think that he was trying to hide something. So instead of just inviting the British to come and talk to him, they started torturing him. And in the end, they took him to Morocco, because they thought that if he wasn't talking freely, you know, that meant he was guilty, therefore we should torture him.

They took him to Morocco where they took razor blades to his genitals. And he was asked about whether he knew anything about nuclear weapons. And he said, no, of course I don't. But then they tortured him some more. And he said, well, all right, I once read an article about how to make. make a nuclear bomb. And he told them how to do it. And Scott, I'm not sure about how your physics is, but you tell me what you think of this. He said, you take uranium, you put it in a bucket, and you have to swing it around your head for 45 minutes as fast as you can. And that

separates uranium 239 from uranium 235. And there you've got it, your weapons grade uranium, and you've got a nuclear bomb. So what do you reckon from your education as a physicist? Do you think that's true? You know, as somebody who's been studying the dispute over Iran's safeguarded civilian nuclear program all these years, I'd have to say that, yeah, he got that from a Rolling Stone magazine article that, in fact, was written.

Yeah, it was by Rosa Brooks's mother, whoever that is. Remember Rosa Brooks from the L.A. Times? Of course. And that I tracked Rosa down. because I've found that whole article. Oh, yeah. And it was a spoof, right? Yeah.

And the U.S. interrogators just weren't sure what to make of it. It sounded pretty silly to them because, you know, let's face it, Iran has been trying to get these centrifuges all this time. And if you could make a nuclear bomb by swinging it around in a bucket, surely that would be much simpler. And the whole nuclear bomb clock, the Attorney General of the United States interrupted his visit to Moscow. to announce that we had sold a nuclear bomb plot with this guy, Benjamin Mahmody, couldn't even get the name right, and said that, you know, this had been solved by good American work.

And it was this nonsense. I believe the legal term is total bullshit that Benyam had said when he was being tortured because he'd read some silly article in years before. Well, and then this was, when you mentioned the, you know, Ashcroft interrupted his trip to Moscow is to make this announcement from Times Square that they had handed over

Jose Padilla who had been arrested who was an American born American citizen arrested by FBI agents in Blue Parkas at O'Hare Airport in Chicago

who was then turned over to Donald Rumsfeld and the military and the CIA to be tortured and held without charge for two years at the brig in Charleston, South Carolina before he was

finally turned over to the Justice Department of prosecuted. And he was meant to be the co-conspirator with Binia Mohammed. Right, yeah, based on this story that they tortured out of this poor guy by cutting him with razor blades until he would make up something, you know? Well, and there's one of the things that there's a big distinction. I mean, if I torture you, Scott, and I get you to say that you're an evil like al-Qaeda terrorist,

that's one thing. It's not good. You go to prison because you have said that. But when I torture Benyam and get him to say this nuclear bomb plot nonsense and spread it around the United States, what I do is I put the entire country in fear that they're all going to die based on something that's just utter nonsense. And if there's one lesson that we've had from all the years since 9-11, it's the use of the politics of fear by people to frighten folk. You know, there was a very interesting thing I was just looking at the other day, which when they killed, you know, the Sam of bin Laden in the Badabad, they found a bunch of documents with him, one of which was a list of all the people that were the, you know,

major players in Al-Qaeda as of 9-11. And it was 170 names of whom a number had died, a number had been detained by other people, and then a whole bunch of them had just decided to go home. And in the end, there are only 120 names of which five were bin Laden's sons, you know, one of whom I'ma bin Laden lived in Normandy and was married to a British woman and was just minding his own business. That was al-Qaeda. And, you know, the idea that the United States would view this as an existential threat is just absurd. You know, You think about, it doesn't take many people to do something horrible. You think about Tim McVeigh blowing up the Oklahoma, you know, bomb and killing 168 people

and wounding 685 others and killing 23 children. You know, only took one mad, deranged guy who was in the case. He had a bunch of friends that helped him do that. Everybody knows that. You didn't have that many friends. And only one other person was prosecuted. And it wasn't a huge conspiracy, but on the other hand, it was part of that whole patriot nonsense, which has been a much greater threat in my view to the United States. Well, I understand your larger point. But in this case, it was actually the neo-Nazis, not the patriots who did it. And there were about, you know, eight or ten of them who helped McVeigh with that plot. And we're allowed to get away with it because they were all FBI informants who had double-crossed their agent handlers. And someone might have.

have been held accountable for failing to prevent the thing that they could have prevented. So in the end, one person was held accountable. And that was Tim McVeigh. But my only point is that, you know, you have people who do deranged things. And normally we prosecute them criminally. Yeah. In the case of 9-11, we wanted to turn it into a war, which was just utterly mad. Because, of course, that's what bin Laden wanted.

He wanted to be a martyr to some, you know, ridiculous war. You know, I gave a speech one time where the guy introduced me, and I'm pretty sure he was the one who pointed this out, that, you know, at the time, to him, it seemed like the Pearl Harbor attack. You know, a surprise attack, 3,000 killed. And so even though, yeah, the Japanese were flying their own zeros, and in this case, these guys had to hijack our airliners to do it, that distinction was lost.

And the idea was that there is something like the Japanese Empire out there, and that must be defended from. And, you know, as Republican media, especially at the time put it, the Islamic Caliphate. And for those who don't know geography, as far as they know, it's like the Lost Continent of Atlantis out there. The Caliphate out there that's coming for us. And so we have to defend against it. And so it very superficially it made sense because they did get one hell of a one-off attack done. that but they did i mean it was awful obviously and it was both there were two factors it seems to me about that one was that it was so dramatic on television that you know i i remember

you remember watching that happening on the dead happening but the second is this that we as americans have actually been really lucky um that if you think about the the times the united states has actually been attacked itself you can name them you can give me the exact dates right What are the times the U.S. integrity has been attacked directly? There's 9-11, so, you know, the 11th of September, 2001. There is December the 7th, 1941, right? There is the time the British burned the White House down, which used to be gray, by the way, until the British burned it down.

That's right. What other times has the U.S. ever been invaded? Well, the North invaded the South. Yeah, you know, that's not another country. The truth is, we're very, very lucky. If you look at, you know, Russia, for example, they get invaded by everyone, every other week. Right. You know, including by the U.S., by the way, right, after World War I.

Yeah. And so, you know, Europeans have kind of sadly got used to this. And if you look around the world, so many other countries have got used to wars. They've been far, far too many. but this was so extraordinary for the U.S. It was like Pearl Harbor for the U.S. But of course it wasn't like Pearl Harbor because you were being attacked by a group of people

that was actually, you know, pretty petty until we imagined them into being this existential threat and then started various wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to try to counter this threat. And then we did all sorts of awful. things like torturing people and locking them up without trial, assassinating them, which have just exacerbated the problem. And, you know, you have to look at the war in Afghanistan 20 years. And within days, we're right back where we started. I mean, what a dreadfully

pointless thing to do. Yeah. All right. Now, as far as Guantanamo Bay, there were 748 or something like that, people there and Bush? 780 originally. 780, I'm sorry. And, and, and Bush sent the vast majority of them home before Obama ever came to town, and he sent a bunch of them home, and they changed the rules to give some of them Ritz of Habius Corpus for a little while until they then sabotaged that and stopped doing that. And so now, I believe there, is it 39 or 40 guys left? 39 left. I still have 7. And then now, this guy, Ahmed Rabbani, you've represented him for how long? Oh, for years. I first met.

I met Ahmed, I think, 14 years ago. And Ahmed told me his story. And, you know, I found him pretty credible when I met him, but, you know, you just don't know for a while. And what he told me was this, that on September the 10th, 2002, he was minding his own business in Karachi, again, a city that's 1,000 miles from Kabul.

And these people swooped in, Pakistani authorities swooped in, grabbed him and dragged him off and sold him off to the Americans, saying that he was a terrorist called Hassan Ghul. Well, Hassan Ghul was a real terrorist. He just wasn't Ahmed Rabbani. And so from the very beginning, Ahmed al-Assi says, look, I'm Ahmed Rabani.

I'm a taxi driver. I'm not Hassan Ghul. And they wouldn't believe him. And then they shipped him to the dark prison in Kabul, where for 540 days, a year, almost two years, they tortured him in pretty unspeakable ways. You know, they were using, and there are 60 different forms of torture we've identified that we used on him. You know, the most notorious being strepardo, where he was hung by

his wrists the way that the Spanish Inquisition used to do. And so on. Let me ask you here, Clive, do I have it right then? If he's at the salt pit there north of Kabul, that means he's under CIA control. This is different than if he had. had been shipped off to Boggham under the control of the military. Is that right? Exactly. Okay. Exactly. So go ahead. He was one of the, he was one of the 119 people who were put in the what was referred to as the enhanced interrogation process. Now, you know, he tells me this whole story and he tells me the great details. And as I say, I found him pretty credible. But you never know until we did know, which was when the Senate report came out in 2014. And they corroborate.

everything I had said, but they told a few things that we didn't know. One of which the first was that he was subjected to torture without authorization, which I've always wondered to myself, which is worse? Is it worse that the government authorized torture, or is it worse that they did it without authorization? I don't know. Well, for you, for you, Clive, his lawyer, it should be better that they did it without authorization. But then it turns out that it doesn't make any difference, There's still no accountability whatsoever. There isn't. There isn't.

But then the next thing actually was actually much more surprising that during the time that he was held in the dark prison in Kabul, who should the U.S. capture but Hassan go? And they brought him to the same prison at the same time that Ahmed was being held there, where Ahmed, remember, was still denying that he was Hassan al. And because Hassan Gould was cooperative and told the US all sorts of stuff, in the end, he only spent two days in the dark prison and he was held for longer. But in the end, he was returned to Pakistan, where the Pakistani's released him, he went back to his wicked ways, and he ended up getting killed in a drone strike in 2012. Ahmed Ravani was not released. He was given a one-way ticket to be rendered to Guantanamo Bay

on the torture plane in September 2004. The torture plane, because it was full of 10 people who had been taken to different torture sites, including Ben Yamaha'am. And so he ended up in Guantanamo Bay. And so, you know, it's just bizarre that the government learns that he's not Hassan Ghul. They get Hassan Ghul.

They set us Hesendgul free. And they take the guy who's not Hassemgul to Guantanamo, where, you know, where I ended up representing him. And, you know, there were very human consequences to this because he had just got married when he was kidnapped, I think is the only word for it by the Pakistanis and sold to the Americans. And his wife was pregnant.

He didn't even know she was pregnant. So his son, Jawad, was born about seven months later. I've met Joad. He's a nice kid. He's now 18 years old in Karachi. And Jawad has never touched his dad. And his dad has never touched Joad. And, you know, I've got a son who's 13. And the idea of that, I think, is one of the saddest, saddest things. Because for all, you know, if you ask down there about what he really cares about, for all the torture and all the rest of it, it's really that he's never touched his son and he's not been there as his son has grown up. Yeah. And now, just to be perfectly clear here, when you say the torture report, the Senate

torture report confirmed all this, you mean confirmed all this. It says in there, yes, we got the wrong guy. And we did eventually get the right guy, but then we let him go, but then we killed him with a drone strike. And the guy that's at Guantanamo now is not the one we were looking for. It says all that in there? It says all of us in there. more than that, it says from September the 11th, 2002, a day after they detained him, most of the people thought they had the wrong guy. But they were not willing to take a risk that they made a mistake. So that's why they shipped him to be tortured. Whereas, you know, the vast majority of them pretty much knew they had the wrong guy already. And so why did they do it? Why did they

not just say, well, you know, sorry, I set me free. And okay, we paid a bounty for you, but they gave us the wrong chat. Man. You know, I was still there. And, you know, I saw him last week. And he was, you know, what it was fascinating about human resilience is that Ahmed was pretty cheerful. You know, I've been working with him because what Ahmed really is, he's quite a good artist.

And he's done these amazing pictures of his torture. And one of the things he showed me last week, which I, you know, I can talk about what I saw, is a big, big picture about his whole voyage from one torture prison to the next. But that's not really his passion. His real passion is to be a chef. And so I've been getting his recipes out and I've got this wonderful chef in England

who's testing all his recipes so we can do a Guantanamo cookbook. And here I'm reading about his hunger strike and them feeding him by shoving this rubber tube up his nose and down his throat. force feeding him to keep him alive you know he's been on hunger strike how what's the longest scott you've ever gone without tough food a couple of days but yeah not too many right you know i did it for a week just to in sympathy just to see what it was like i med rabani was on has been

on hunger strike since february 2013 so that's now over eight years and they stick this tube up his nose and force feed him every day to keep him alive because they don't want the embarrassment of someone dying on a peaceful protest. And that's what you can just imagine. He was 160 some pounds when he was first detained. He's now, you know, the lowest he's been is 78 pounds. So one of the things he says, because you've got a nice sense of humor, he says, look, I'm just escaping from Guantanalo and more than 50% of me is escape.

already and whether the rest of the escape in a box or not that's one way to look at it i guess man i'll tell you what i'm sitting here trying to search my own website looking for this guy's name and i can't find it i'm sorry it's but it's a almost certain air force officer named silver something um who was a jag lawyer who represented a guy that i think he finally got freed after this interview when I talked to the guy but this was the guy and I'm sure you know

who I'm talking about this is the guy who the evidence against him for his preparation of chemical weapons for al-Qaeda was simply little Tupperware thing he's full of salt and sugar and I forgot what the third one was

maybe it was just salt and sugar and then after years of holding him down there they finally admitted that that was all that it was and more than a decade when I say years I mean yeah more than

10 years. Well, this is the thing. You know, when you talk about classified issues, you know, secret evidence and so forth, the thing I think that's, when you look at all the things we've done since 9-11, you know, there are all sorts of incredibly bad ideas that our government has had. You know, whether it be torture, whether it be detention without trial, whether it be assassination with drones, whatever. But you know, the thing that ultimately, I think, is the most pernicious is secrecy. And because we have so radically enhanced secrecy and evaporated transparency.

And the reason we do that is what we say is all this stuff is secret. You know, when my clients talk to me now 20 years after they were first detained, every word they say is classified secret until they let it out. Now, you know, there cannot be anything that's any threat to the United States

that Ahmed Ravani knows. But there are things that he knows that are just monumentally embarrassing to the United States. And that's what the government's done. They've started conflating classification and secrecy with political embarrassment. And so, you know, all these things I learn, as I'm in Guantanamo, that are just awful, that they're just embarrassing. They're not a threat to the U.S. They're just a threat to a bunch of politicians who made very bad judgments.

You know, this is very worrying because our government is increasingly using secrecy to hide their pretty wicked ways. Yeah. All right. Now, so, you know, as I was mentioning earlier, because of the Supreme Court rulings, they started giving these guys a rid of habeas corpus. But then they found, I forgot exactly the loophole, but they found a way to shut that down. And it seems like... Yeah, but there are two ways they did it. The first way was they just changed the rules.

And they said that instead, you know, no longer, it used to be that you're presumed innocent, the government has to prove stuff and whatever. Now the rule is that everything the government says is presumed to be true and presumed to be reliable and you have to prove otherwise. But actually the far worst thing in the end is the D.C. Circuit held that if the...

even if, you know, we win, and if we show that this person was illegally detained 20 years ago and has been illegally detained for 20 years, the courts have no power to order the release. So they can grant the red of baby's corpus, but it doesn't mean to go home. And it is, it's sort of like the whole process, you know, right now there are nine. And then the Supremes have refused to review that decision. Is that it? Yeah, they have. And, you know, right now there are nine people who are cleared for, released, but they're still there. And I don't know if you're going to hum me Hotel California, but it really is, you know, you can check out that you can never leave.

No, I hate the Eagles, man, but I get you. Well, now, so what are you going to do with this guy? Oh, you can't say you hate the Eagles, Scott. So that's an American of you. I'm like that guy in the robe from that movie. Anyway, listen, the egos, that's what I call. way, Scott. I'm going to give you another, you know, let's pretend. If you can't deal with the Eagles, Scott, let's talk about Roach Motel. You remember Roach Motel? The slogan was, they check in, but they don't check out.

There you go. So we can use that if you don't like this. Listen, we're on the same page eye to eye now. I totally read you. Listen, but so now this is one of the guys that was, you know, in the category of will never be charged and will never be released. guess. And so then what are you going to do about it? It's 2021 already. It's almost over, in fact. We're like coming up on 22. Yeah. I know. Well, look, you know, I'm glad to say that on May the 18th, we cleared his brother, who's also got locked up, Abdul Rubani, and Sir Philip

Pratcha, the 74-year-old Pakistani guy. So two of the three Pakistanis are cleared. And we had a hearing with for Ahmed on the 17th of August and you know when I was headed down there and I'd be very surprised if he's not cleared I think he will be I think Biden actually wants to get rid of these guys so we'll have three Pakistanis who are cleared for release now I hope at that point we get to flam home because you know I've I've talked to Imran Khan the prime minister of Pakistan about it I know him pretty well and he wants the guys home they've said made that very clear to the United States, they want them hand. And I hope to goodness, they'll just put them on a flight. Now, one thing I can guarantee you, though, is that they won't say those

difficult words, I'm sorry. So I'll never say that. The U.S. won't. And that's very sad because they should. They should be part of that. Yeah, absolutely right. Yeah, absolutely right about that. All right, well, listen, I'm so sorry we're out of time here. I've got to go on to my next one, but thank you so much for all your efforts on behalf of these people, Clive, and for your time on the show. I really appreciate a lot. Thanks, Scott. Nice to talk to you. All right, you guys. That is Clive Stafford-Smith. Now with the 3D Center.

And please check out this article. As I says on Twitter there, and this was appealing to people, I think. I don't know. It'll only take you a couple of minutes to read this. The U.S. has held me for 19 years without a charge. I have just one chance to be freed by Ahmed Rabani.