The Team House - Inside the World of GITMO Inmates | Mark Denbeaux | Ep. 188

Episode Date: January 30, 2023

Mark is best known for his reports on the Guantanamo Bay detention camp and its operations. Denbeaux has testified to Congress about the findings of the Center's reports. He and his son, Joshua Denbeaux, are the legal representatives of two Tunisian detainees at Guantanamo. He is also the lead Civilian Military Commission Counsel for two detainees who were tortured by the Central Intelligence Agency in black sites prior to their detainment. Denbeaux is an expert in forensics and has testified as an expert witness in cases across the country. Today's Sponsor: BUB's Naturals ⬇️ https://www.BUBSNATURALS.com/ Use the code "TEAMHOUSE" for 20% off your order! Pick up their collagen protein, MCT oil, and apple cider vinegar gummies today! BUBS Donates 10% of all profits to charity in Glens honor, starting with the Glen Doherty Memorial Foundation GO TO: https://www.BUBSNATURALS.com/?discount=TEAMHOUSE  or Use the code "TEAMHOUSE" at checkout for 20% off your order! FEEL GREAT. DO GOOD. Words that we live by. Battling Blades For 20% off your Battling Blades order, go to https://BATTLINGBLADES.com and enter code "TeamHouse" at check. Learn the way of the blade at https://BATTLINGBLADES.com and get 20% off with the promo code "TeamHouse" at checkout! Thank you for supporting the companies that support the show ! To help support the show and for all bonus content including: -AD FREE AUDIO -AD FREE VIDEO -Access to ALL bonus segments with our guests Subscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️ https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse Team House merch: ⬇️ https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963 Social Media: ⬇️ The Team House Instagram: https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_link The Team House Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePod Jack’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_link Jack’s Twitter:  https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21 Dave’s Twitter:  https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21 Team House Discord: ⬇️ https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6 SubReddit: ⬇️ https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/ Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:⬇️  https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241 The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️  https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/ Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSample Want to sponsor the show? Email: ⬇️ [e-mail] #guantanamobay #theteamhouseBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

Hey, folks, I just want to take a minute to ask you to go in rate this podcast, let the Teamhouse know how you think we're doing, go and rate us on whatever platform you're listening to this on, whether it's iTunes or Spotify or whatever else. Those ratings really help us out, and we really appreciate the feedback to let us know what you like and what you don't like. And if you do like the Team House and you'd like to support us, go check out our Patreon page and you can actually support the stream as well as get access to our team house. bonus segments and bonus episodes. Yeah, if you're going to give us a great review, please do. And if

you're going to give us a not-so-good review, why don't you just send us an email and we'll talk about it. Special Operations, Covert Ops, espionage, the Team House, with your host, Jack Murphy and David Park. Hey, guys, this is episode 189 of The Team House. I'm Jack Murphy here with David Park. Our guest on night show is Mark Denball. Mark is a civil rights lawyer. He's been working civil rights cases since the 1960s up until today, also teaches law, and worked on some important national security cases as well, including representing inmates down at Guantanamo Bay. So we're going to get into all of that and more on this show with Mark. So thank you for joining us tonight. So kick it off, Mark. Tell us about how you got into law and how you got into civil rights, specifically.

From college, the Vietnam War was going on. And just about everybody of my generation didn't really want to be marching through rice patties with strangers trying to kill them. And so my generation was trying to avoid the draft. Going on to school was a solution. I wasn't sure where to go, but I knew I had to go to school. And in my senior year in college, I got involved with a variety of things starting with the March on Washington. and I got involved in some of various demonstrations, and I ended up going to Selma, Alabama, for the final and not dangerous,

or at least it was not violent, March. And after that was over, I decided I was definitely going to go to law school. It seems something that could actually make a difference. I went to NYU Law School. As I was coming out of law school, I wasn't quite sure how you could find a law career that was interesting. And at that time, LBJ had set up the poverty program. And he set up civil legal services offices in basically ghettos around the country. And I was employed in the South Bronx for right as soon as I left law school. And what was the conditions of the South Bronx

when you landed there? Well, it was nothing, it was like nothing I had ever seen. But in the other hand, it wasn't so dramatically gruesome as people might have imagined. It was just a really poor, unhappy people with people sitting around, not much going on. And there were obviously issues. But I was there during the daytime when I was working as a lawyer. The nighttime, I think, was a more violent place. But I ended up being the kind of poverty law, you'd represent welfare recipients who there were trying to kick off welfare for various reasons.

I was certainly involved in family issues, child custody issues, but ultimately the core of our practice was landlord tenant court and keeping tenants from being evicted. And I spent two years doing that. And the real problem there was the housing sucked. And we were able to find a way landlords would want to evict people who couldn't pay money. our first winter, we realized that they couldn't pay the money often because they had spent so much money on using the gas oven, the range for whatever it would be to heat them and they didn't have the money.

And for me, the moment that changed a lot of things was when I went to court and a judge said, well, do you have the money? And I said, no. He said, well, then you would have to be evicted. And I said, well, actually, the reason we don't have the money is because of the uninhabitable nature of the place. and the judge says, I'm not sure that's a legal theory, and I said, I will prove it. And he adjourned the case, and it kind of interesting, because it was hard to prove that.

And the next time a case was brought in, I went in, and I got in some trouble because I said this court is nothing but a bank for the landlord. You come in, they come here, you take the money, you hold the money, until you give it to the landlord, or the tenant moves out. All they did was make the place even more uninhabitable people that move out and take the money. But the dramatic part of that practice for us was my colleagues and I discovered that there were no, the one essential requirement of any lawsuit is there has to be jurisdiction over the party. Well, that requires serving them. Well, it turned out they weren't serving anybody. We used to have what called sewer service.

You mail them a letter or not and then throw the original off someplace. And it occurred to us that we have a right to make them prove that they had jurisdiction. So we would come into court and say we don't believe they were served properly, bring in the process server. And of course the process servers were getting paid $2 a time to do it. And they were doing it all over the city. And so what ended up happening was we would bring them into court and the process server after a while we got very good at it. We could interrogate them, cross-examine them for a long time, fill up most of a court day. There'd be 300 cases there.

And whoever got the first case would start asking how many steps we want to make sure you've been to the building. What's how many steps? Are there steps to the building? Are they stone? What colors the door? When you go in, where's the elevator? And they, of course, knew nothing about the building because they'd never been there. And so we can end up proving they'd never been in the building, never gone up to it.

They didn't know what floor the apartment was. And ultimately, we could take one landlord-tenant case and only try whether they'd been served. And then if we lost the service, then they'd set it down for trial. And we got to be so good that we could take 11 months resisting. landlord tenant case by proving they hadn't been served and then the clients would say what should I do now I said keep the money and they'll start all over again so we ended up managing to be able to get people some money by hook or by crook and that's what it was and it was it was very interesting experience

dealing with a lot of welfare mothers in cold weather sitting in the rooms with their kid, the courtroom. It was remarkable. You're telling me that over time, the two years that you were there, you became quite angry and frustrated with the, quote unquote, justice system. Yeah. You're right. What got me realizing that was I didn't realize it. My wife did. My wife said to me, I didn't marry an angry man. We were gotten married quite young. And she said, and we had a little bit. baby and she kept saying I didn't marry an angry man. And I said, well, I'm not an angry man. And she said, what do you think of the judges? What do you think of the landlords? What do you think of the landlords? What do you think of your fellow workers? Are they doing as much as they could?

And by the time I got done pointing out the failures of every part of the system from the judges to the process service, to the landlords, to the landlord's lawyers, my wife looked at me and I realized that I really was just mad at everything. I still insist I was totally rightly mad at them. It did some little unfair to come home every night with a little baby and fuming away. So eventually I moved, I decided to go into law school teaching, and I joined the faculty at Seatmore Law School in 1972. I retired from there a year and a half ago.

now I'm an emeritus professor. So in between, you know, part A and part B, you know, these various phases of your life, you were telling me that one of the things that you have testified on is sort of pseudoscience in the courts, the introduction of pseudosciences. And I think a lot of us now have seen like sort of true crime documentaries and seeing these quote unquote expert testimonies where I remember seeing one where they brought in a hand bite ex or a bite. expert and they were they were showing how the um you know what the guy was doing was he was rolling the dentures on the on the skin to like and the skin has elasticity so like he can make the bite mark fit the the you know the mark on the skin right so we have a quote unquote match um but you

you went real deep into this subject and i'd love to hear your experience well the bite mark is interesting i mean i think that um um one of the problem of the problem problems with all pseudoscience is it testable? You know, if you can't find, determine whether somebody knows how to do it or not, or is good at it or not, then of course, they have nothing really to offer. One of the problems with bite marks was they couldn't figure out a way to test it. How many people are going to come in and say, bite my arm, bite my arm, bite my arm, bite my arm, and then have a lineup and figure out which teeth went, which, they couldn't do it.

So they'd come on and say, oh, I can tell. Well, I got involved with handwriting because I was approached by a private investigator, friend of mine who would refer me cases that were interesting but didn't have any ability to pay. And I'm being a law professor with a salary, that wasn't the same problem. And he was somebody who worked in the New York City Job Corps. And two years earlier, the city had concluded that somebody had been forging, some of the checks. And they went through and assumed that he did it.

I don't know how they managed to do that. So I was brought into representing. By this time, he was a freshman in Brooklyn College doing very well. And it was a very impressive kid. And so I went to talk to the prosecutor. And I said, you know, we didn't do it. The prosecutor said, well, that's fine. We'll have a trial.

But we need a handwriting exemplar in order to determine whether or not he wrote this. So I said, okay, I know you have a right to it. How are you going to do it? He said, well, have him write this down and we'll have our guy compare it. And I said, well, that sounds really sucky. Your handwriting guy is a cop. He works for you.

He's got the question document. You want my client to write a document, and you're going to ask the cop who works for you. Is this the same guy or different? And he said, well, how do you want to do it? I said the same way we do with lineups. Let's have a lineup, not a show up. You don't show one witness, one person, and say, is this the one? You give him a range to choose from.

So we ended up, as that went through, I came up. I said, look, he's about the age of my law students. I'll have five law students. Write out the same, whatever you want me to write. He'll write one. We'll number them, staple them together, and see if your guy can tell who wrote it. And I thought, you know, there's something, I didn't really think much of it. I just seemed like something worth trying.

Nothing happened. Four months later, the guy calls up and he said, well, my guy refuses to take the test. And I said, why? And he said, because he's afraid he'll fail it. And if he fails it, he won't be allowed to testify as a handwriting expert anymore. I said, well, how likely is he to fail it? The guy said, I don't know, but he's pretty scared. So I said, well, why don't you drop the case then?

He said, I can't. He said, I'll get back to you. Eight months later, he calls up. He said, what are we going to do with this case? And I said, you're going to drop it. And he said, I can't drop it. What about a lesser included offense? I said, this is the lowest possible offense.

It's a low, low offense. You can't go lower than this. You can't offer me anything. So why don't you drop the case? And by this time, he and I developed a bit of a relationship. And I said, I can't do that. He got back to me. Another eight months later.

He says, okay, I'm going to the U.S. attorney's office to be an assistant U.S. attorney. What are you going to do with this case? I said, why don't you drop it? He said, okay, and dropped it. That story made me say, well, wait a minute, I would have believed these guys would have no problem picking out from a range of people who was the handwriting it was. The fact that he couldn't and he thought he might not be able to in a way that was significant led a colleague of mine Michael Risinger teaches evidence as I did to start doing seeing about testing

handwriting experts and we found several handwriting associations, all of which we came to them and proposed the idea on the theory they could then propose show. they could do it. And then all that we spoke to, at least two, came back and said, no, we're not going to take the test. We said, why? They said, well, because we already can testify. It won't make it easier for us to testify, and it could make it harder.

Right. You know, all we can do is fail this test. We can't pass it. You know, it was a jarring moment, and it made me realize that there was something potentially weird here. So we decided to look into how it started. And handwriting experts began. Not they were around before, but what made them handwriting experts was the

Bruno Hauptmann prosecution for the Lindbergh kidnapping. Oh, wow. And they had a note, kidnapped note. And what happened was they couldn't figure out who wrote it, but they managed to pick up, arrest this guy, Hauptman, for totally different reasons and they made him do a handwriting exemplar

and they showed it to him and then they showed it to seven handwriting experts and every one of them testified we got the trial transcript looked at it and the significant thing about it was the handwriting question document spelled the word boat B-O-A-D

the Houtman was a German image and he had had a partner who was a German immigrant. But when the handwriting people testified, they didn't talk about similarities of shapes of writings. It was a spelling test. So he spelled both the same way in the knowns, as he wrote them out, as the question. And while the trial is going on, he says, it's on the record, they showed me the document and they told me to copy it.

Oh my God. I spoke to his wife who was still alive at the time. And she said, I have trouble sleeping. I said, every night I go to bed imagining what it's like for poor Richard to know he was innocent being executed. I said, maybe I'd have trouble sleeping that way also. Anyway, it turned out they've never had a proficiency test. So what we ended up doing was trying to find these tests, do these things. And the net result was we hired or hired.

Our co-author was a guy named Michael Sacks, a research methodologist and social scientist at BC. And Sacks then did some research, and he found some proficiency tests would have been given by the Forensic Science Foundation. I don't know if I'm going too fast. No. But the Forensic Science Foundation, and that was the proficiency testing arm of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, which is purportedly a big deal. less impressive to me now that I've looked into more of their fields. But, and we had five tests in the 70s and 80s. And if you looked at their own results from their own tests,

they varied some, they did better, some they did worse. If you looked at all of them, they were right, 57% of the time. And wrong, 43. Flip of the coin. Right. And we wrote an article about that, the University of Pennsylvania published. and that made other lawyers suddenly want us to testify. And over the years, I testify about that a lot.

And all jurors pay attention when you say they're right, 57% of the time, wrong, 43% of the time. And I often add in, and as a professor, that's a D. Mark, what do you think then of the other types of handwriting experts, the ones who say that you can read or infer into people's handwriting, their person, based on, you know, the techniques or whatever of their handwriting? Graphologists. First of all, I'll say this. Even the people who claim to be handwriting experts don't accept as credible the graphologists. So now you've sunk to a level below forensic document examines. I think there's something to it in the sense that one of the ways

they used to diagnose whether people had various learning disabilities was the way they would write. And sometimes their fine motor skills weren't very good. Sometimes they would write invert letters. I mean, there were things that they used that for as tools to diagnose something. But they never did that in order to say, well, this person wrote it and that person wrote it. In fact, what ultimately got me really into this was my late wife. I came in and she was looking at the refrigerator and on the refrigerator was a note. It said, mom, dad, running late for dinner, I'll be home at seven.

It was unsigned. And my wife said, you know, I can't tell whether that's Josh, our oldest, or Abigail, our youngest. they're six years apart. And I'm looking at that saying, you know, actually handwriting experts have had this big advantage. Because it's sort of like swimming downstream. We all can tell some handwriting. You could tell your wife's handwriting.

You could tell your mother's handwriting. You can make all sorts of distinctions because you've seen it. But you don't need a handwriting expert to explain the details of things that are obvious. you know and what you really need is a handwriting expert to distinguish writing that's similar meaning the difference between Josh and Abigail's writing and if their own mother couldn't tell I'd be very interested to see how a handwriting expert could tell and of course they can't so we've testified about this over and over I got to give a quick shout out to our sponsors for tonight's show our first one is bubs naturals their health food company they may

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off. That's Team House for 20% off at battlingblades.com. All right. Mark, back to you. Sorry for the interruption. Oh, no problem. So before moving on from this topic, the one other thing I wanted to ask you about briefly was you also mentioned that there are other problems.

and other types of evidence. One of the ones that you brought up that surprised me is fingerprints, which is like a time-tested, true, as we're to believe, you know, the FBI has like, they're like the renowned experts on fingerprints. But you said there's even problems in fingerprinting sometimes. For a while, it seemed to be there are really serious problems. I think the problems are less significant now. But one of the problems with fingerprints is collection. You know, every thinks that how you collect a fingerprint may make a difference. And it sometimes smudges, sometimes it gets compared differently. Sometimes they get put in different places, which is also true with DNA, by the way.

It's not that DNA doesn't work. It gets miscategorized. Yeah. It really is something similar with fingerprints. But fingerprints still work on sort of a statistical premise that there can't be any two alike. And of course, it's probably true, but it depends on how alike they mean it. But that was a very controversial issue around 2000. And a judge actually excluded fingerprints in Philadelphia. And the DOJ and the FBI were kind of beside themselves. Yeah, I bet. Anyway, there's a lot of

stuff, but that's not the first one on the list. Let's talk for a moment about how you came to represent members of the Black Panthers? Okay. I'm not sure the lot of the audience even knows what Black Panthers were because they're all either dead or locked up now. But what happened was I was in Selma and in the South in the mid-60s. And when I went to law school, I came north. And one of the things that I realized was that, and that came about when I was in

landlord tenant court and other places because there were no whites in the Bronx landlord tenant court and was the problem of what is racism and when I was in the south it was scary and there were lynchings and stuff I don't mean I was involved in that but there was violence the first Selma demonstration was brutal by the time our group came down there were 3,000 of us and it was the press was there and it wasn't that way. But it was very violent and ugly. And somebody has since told me this, that the problem was that the difference in racism

then in the South was it's like the wolf at the door pounding away. And when you go north, it becomes the termites in the floor. You know, nobody's lynching you in the north. Nobody's doing that. Perhaps they're paying you less. You know, perhaps they are, in fact, giving you not such good jobs, harder to find housing, all sorts of things.

An example of it is that comes up. My wife's a sociologist. She said, you know, there are two things that are really significant. She teaches her students this. One is, if you look at the wealth your family has, we're talking about ordinary people when they retire. The biggest source of wealth is their home. And if you don't own a house, you haven't really, you've lost an opportunity to acquire a lot of wealth at retirement. And the other source of income has been Social Security.

And it turns out when Social Security was started in the 30s, Social Security was designed basically for people who were getting W2 salads. So anybody who was a maid or a servant or doing working around town, odd jobs, those people never got social security. And that actually, we know exactly who those people were, whether it was in St. Louis or New York or anywhere else. And it turned out a significant portion of the generation that started getting social security, that it almost exclusively was limited to whites. And that wasn't figured out for 20 years. So from 34 to 44 to 54, there were a whole lot of, of elderly people who weren't getting Social Security

because they hadn't paid into it. And they also hadn't bought homes. And even the GI Bill came out with money, the various redlining, it was very difficult for them to collect money. So that kind of racism is not like lynching, but it actually works out to have that same impact. And it's not an accident the way it works out.

So that was one part of the sort of my getting up represent the Black Panthers because the Black Panthers were the ones by the way there were very significant lawyers representing Black Panthers in very significant cases I was not one of them so I don't want to misunderstand my Ross a very young lawyer in those years but I did deal with them and have some clients and some sad stories and so I was they were very good about that people don't understand the thing that made the Black Panthers most powerful was the hot breakfast program. They set up a hot breakfast program in the ghettos. All the kids would come and start with a hot breakfast they would provide it. And that was very upsetting to establishment people because

they were becoming providing a service that was appreciated and valuable and useful. And so when they would go ahead and do that, that led to another reason why the Black Panthers were a problem for people. Obviously, they also carried guns. Ronald Reagan passed a gun law, prohibiting rifles being carried in the streets because black panthers were carrying them. There are all sorts of things like that. So anyway, I represented them. And some of their landlord tenants, some, I did some minor criminal cases. I still remember one person coming up to me and saying, look, you're a good guy. We thank you for all that you're doing. But you know, you go home at night. It's safe for you. It's not safe for us. Why don't you come up here and spend

a night? And I remember saying, you know, I don't want to do that. But it didn't seem unreasonable either. Why should a white person be so afraid? I say, well, I've got a little child, et cetera, and I humble fun, and I didn't do it. But I've often thought about the fact that I didn't want to do what my clients did every night. And, um, uh, uh, it's a little child. And, uh, it's a little child. And, uh, It was kind of interesting. Most of my Black Panther clients were young, small ones. I represented young lords who were really the poor reconversion in those days of the Black Panthers,

but they were younger. I did represent one person whom I cared about a lot named Abdul Majid. Abdul Majid was the investigator in the Legal Services Office that I was running in the late I came back for a year when there was a problem. And I liked him. He was nice. We talked, and I got a call from his wife about four years later.

He was locked up in jail. He had been in a gunfight with two policemen. The policemen were both killed. He was in a white man with another Black Panther. He was driving, and no one knew it. But in the back seat was a woman there. called Joanne Chesemar. And Joanne Chesimard was being driven by Abdul to JFK Airport so she could fly to Cuba.

She was being chased for a variety of reasons because of other things, crimes that she had been allegedly committed in New Jersey. And she was called the soul of the Black Panthers. There was sort of an emotional symbolism there. So when he got back, they arrested him. And I represented him briefly in Rikers Island and so on. And then Bill Kuntler came along and took over the case. And Abdul and the two guys were tried three times because their trials had to be redone because of mistakes. But he died in prison.

And one of the things I've often thought about was there are the moments in history we're all involved in. And we all think our moments are important. And nobody's going to remember us 10 years later. And these Black Panthers who are either killed young or in jail for 25 years, they're up there saying, you know, I did this, I did that. And the water washes over them. And I kind of wish I could go talk to them. By the way, Joanne Chesimard is now known as Isada Shakur. name probably doesn't ring a bell but um in that office that i was at there was a secretary there

named um um kind of forget your name sure alfini Shakur and Afini Shakur would bring her five-year-old son I know into the office sometimes as other people did you see where this is going Jack the Tupac Shakur yeah yeah Fini Shakur was in fact, she was one of the Panther 19, accused of blowing up, the planning to blow up the Bronx Botanical Gardens and something else. And their long trial, 10-month trial, the jury acquitted all 19 of all charges. But she came out four months pregnant in a nine-month trial. And obviously there was a large room with lawyers and defendants would all get together.

And court reporters have told me several times later that they call that the room of the Immaculate Conception. And it would appear that Tupac was conceived in the room of the Immaculate Conception, Fini, who was the secretary in my office and who didn't like me very much. I was brought in. I was management. She was not interested. We had nothing in common.

So I would love to say she and I were friends and like that. We weren't. And I would love to say I knew who Tupac was, but of course I didn't. And I learned all this many years later. Yeah, I remember seeing this in a documentary. It was one of Adam Curtis's documentaries that he made, but that focus is pretty heavily on the Panthers and on Tupac. Yeah, in charting some of that. It's a fascinating story. Let's shift into, well, what the hell. Before we get to Guantanamo, I want to hear about the Mayflower Madame. You got to tell us about that story. Yes. Okay. Her name was Sidney Biddle Barrels. I'm still in touch with her. She was quite a classy lady, very impressive. She was, I'm tell you what the charge is again.

against her were. She was accused of running an escort service. And her name was Sydney Biddle Barrows. And the Biddle was for the Biddle family who went all the way back, I think probably, if not George Washington's. Shortly thereafter, they were bankers, secretaries of the Treasury, things like that, right up through FDR and other places. And so the press decided when they figured that out that they would call Sydney the Mayflower Madam. And that was the title of the United. And that was the title used for her book and they'd CBS did a movie about her and she was a very straightforward person and she um she had the the women who worked for her one i knew many of them spoke to them never considered themselves participating in sex for money not that there wasn't sex and not

that there wasn't money but it was not that way she would never let somebody go out on more than once a week. She says, I want them to think of themselves doing that. And she said, I tell them, if they don't like the guy, they can go home. They'll get, well, they're paid for the evening, not for what they do. In fact, one of them told me, she said, you know, sometimes you're going out to dinner with some guy who's from Spokane, Washington, and he's explaining in great detail how he cornered the market on shoelace tips. And she said, it's hard to pretend you're interested in shoelace tips. Some things you can fake better than others.

I'm very fond of Sidney. She was very protective of them. They couldn't prosecute her because, and this is where handwriting came in, the only thing they had were her handwriting records that were kept. And we were able to obviously, we were just getting into this at the time. And they had a hard time. If they couldn't prove the handwriting, the only people who could prove anything would be the young ladies or the men.

And Morgenthau, the prosecutor, wanted Sidney to plead. And we said, no, we're not pleading. And he was kind of shocked. He thought that would do it. And she had a couple more established blue blood lawyers call her up and say they could take care of her. And she stuck with me. And I said, you know, all they'll possibly do is have you plead guilty. I can get that.

And I said, so she said, what's the defense? And I said, well, I'm going to subpoena the 243 lawyers practicing law in Manhattan who used your service and deducted it as a business. I had the records. We told Morgan thought that. said, I've loved this life. You'll ruin their marriages. I said, I don't think so. And eventually, the real problem was whether we should go to trial, which still would have been no conviction of any significance or plead. And that's because there was a movie contract by maybe CBS,

and there was a book contract by Simon & Schuster. And here's the thing. Who do you think wants a trial. Simon and Schuster and the people making the movies. Right. But which of them wants it more and which doesn't want? The movie people want it, the people who are going to get dragged in front of subpoenaed

and dragged in front of the court to testify are not going to want it. Absolutely. But you know what else? The book publishers didn't want her to testify because if she went to trial, she would tell her whole story. It would be in the newspapers. Writing it down, writing it down. Right. And so many of

the details would already have been in the public domain and people were getting ready to write knockoff books about her anyway. So in the end, she pled guilty. No fine or anything else, no restitution, but she pled guilty to something less than a misdemeanor. And that was it. And we were asked by the press walking out what the sentence was. And we said it was a kiss on the wrist. So Martin's a lady. Yeah. The one. The War on terror, 9-11 happens. How do you get sucked into representing Guantanamo inmates? How does that come about?

Well, I'm objecting the word sucked into. I had no reluctance to represent them. But getting involved in them, I came about solely because my oldest son talked me into doing it. And I'm really grateful for him for that. I was in my early 60s, and it was an exciting project. I needed something. And Joshua said to me, you know, Dad, what do you think about Guantanamo?

I said, I don't think I've thought about Guantanamo much. And he said, do you think they have the right guys there? And I said, probably, you know, as with law enforcement, there are some of the right guys there and there are some of the wrong guys there. And I don't know what their batting average. And he said, well, would grandpa, my father, who was a combat, chaplain with General Patton in the Third Army who basically walked across Germany and they ended up liberating two different concentration camps, not the death camps, but concentration camp.

And I said, well, Josh, I think he said, could Patten have figured out who the good Germans were from the bad German? I said, Dad would have thought that there was no chance the Third Army could have figure out who the good Germans were from the bad Germans. And I said, in fact, all the Patton's army wanted to do is find Germans and kill them. And they were racing along to do that. They were trying to find out good Germans from bad Germans, and they wouldn't have had any training. Then, of course, really, everybody caught in Guantanamo was captured in some form by the American army wandering through Afghanistan. Nobody there speaking the languages, no informants, nobody who knew anything and somebody would come up and say al-Qaeda and we were giving five thousand

dollar bonuses to people so they were getting turned in there were some fathers who didn't like their how their daughters were being treated by their son their spouses and they got money for that guy it was a really grotesque kind of thing and so josh and i talked about it and he said look isn't that the whole point about guantanamo that we should be going down there and see what's happening. So he got me started, and we did go, and we were assigned two clients assigned. We were given, they had a few clients,

people came who were interested, we were given two clients, two Tunisians, which I still believe is the beginning of a great joke. I just don't have a punchline. There were two Tunisans, and I can't get to the next part. But anyway, so we had these two Tunisians. they were the people thought they were father and son so everybody thought it would be neat for Josh and I to be father and son they had nothing in common except they had been in the same

prison of darkness in Kabul when they were being tortured and but they didn't even tell us that for four years so we started in and then we realized they were we went in thinking they were scary you know when you go go to Guantanamo at the beginning, they've sent all sorts of rules. None of the people who you're dealing with, the military people and they're the only ones have their real, will give their names. They all have fake names. And they're told that if you let people know your names, when these people get out, Al-Qaeda will find your family and they'll go and hunt them down and rape and murder,

your wives, your girlfriends, and everything else. And they were soldiers who were all told that. So it didn't create a goodwill between the guards and the detainees. And of course, there was never any evidence of that. And so we're over there going through the various arrangements with them, and they ended up telling us the first time we went in to see our prisoner. They said, we've got to tell you something. They're very likely to give you a feces cocktail. I think Josh says feces, cocktail.

What's that? And of course, they had collected piss and feces in a bucket and thrown it on people when they came in. That was so the story went. So lawyers had to be prepared to duck that we were told when we went in. It sounded like a crock of shit, but it nonetheless had a deacher, a downer quality to it. And we went in there. Never happened to a single lawyer. Ultimately, there were six, seven hundred lawyers there.

various stages. And so again, but we went in, sat and talked with them. They were not very chatty. They were not very friendly. They didn't think we could help them at all. We of course believed we could help them, which they were right and we were wrong. No lawyers ever helped anybody did out of that was only the state department that was embarrassed and was getting more and more people out. And I did a study once on who was released from Guantanamo and what happened. They can only find one person who ever did anything. And that was a Kuwaiti who was released over the objections of the CIA and the military. He was released and he went back and he got, I think a gunfight with a Iraqi soldier.

was killed. But I thought the ODNI statistics were like 17% returned to that. In fact, like six Americans were killed by seven released detainees. Okay. I don't know when that was. Okay. I'm going to challenge some of that. Okay. First result, I actually testified for the Armed Services Committee, and the question came up, which is what's happening to these people? And they said, well, they're, they, when they get out, they returned to the fight. Senator Levin said, would you please give that data to

Presser Denbo and Seton Hall? They eventually gave us a press release of 36 people who had returned to the fight. Seven of them, the act of returning to the fight, was their lawyer, had written an editorial page, the New York Times, complaining about how they were innocent

and shouldn't have been detained. So they were returning to the fight. And then they went through a variety of other things. And they said, three Chechnians returned to the fight. Not a single person in the years that I was looking at ever alleged that they had killed any America.

What? I'm sorry, what year was that approximately? Oh, it was probably 2009, 2008. Okay, yeah, that was much earlier. Yeah, I get, okay. Because one of the things I, I'm not saying you're wrong, it's just I stopped looking. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is, I'm thinking like,

I think it was 2016 when the OD&I, you know, came out with those statistics. But either way, they all, one of their problems is how do they know? You know, first, how do they know the person was ever in Guantan? You know, if you kill somebody out in a terrorist attack, were they in Guantanamo or not? Not at all clear. They may spend the time or the effort even to figure it out and can tell if they'd been there. And the second thing is there's a lot of concerns because they may have done something, but there was no evidence to convict them.

There were no trials. It's all determined by the Defense Department, as I knew it. They would report it. And then they would also report people who had returned to the fight and who had been suspected of returning to the fight. A concept I don't even understand. And they can never explain. I think the data, I, you know, and I grew up at a deal with, with the Vietnam War, you know, the political battle describing the Vietnam War was to avoid saying we lost the war.

They wanted to say America lost the will to fight. And of course, both can be true. But I think that one of my big concerns was going to be that at some point people were going to write about Guantanamo, and I knew what one segment of the population would say. Guantanamo was a good thing. They caught a lot of bad guys there. After Guantanamo, there were no more attacks in the United States. It succeeded.

Yes, justice was slow, but justice was done. That's what they wanted. So I spent quite a bit of time trying to study who had been released and who hadn't and what their basis was. I did write a report on that early one on the New York Times editorial, and they had speeches they'd give places,

but they had no, actual acts. And of course, the idea that somebody's released from Guantanamo would be hostile to America is perhaps not shocking. Except one factor for me that has always been interesting is how angry my clients are not. Because I now still represent two people who are called high value detainees who were brought there in 2006. And they, one of them has been locked up since 2002. actually both of it and so that's 21 years ago and neither has had a trial one hasn't even been charged with the crime and they agree he will never be charged with the crime he'll stay there till he dies and guess the one thing he is not

that you'd expect he would be angry it's mind-numbing to say that but if you stop and think about it think of those instances when people have been convicted of crimes, spent 25 years in awful crimes, raping little girls or whatever it is. After 25 years in jail, ENA evidence comes out of total and completely exonerated in the release. And you know, the press is always there. And it's always the same. What are you going to do now? And their line always is, I just want to get on with my life. The past is the past. They've had to live it. They've endured it. It was an experience too. But the idea of the people who are still there being raging and angry, they're not. Nobody can live with anger for 20 years.

Mark, can you? I went in from a legal viewpoint or from a legal send a view? Because I think a lot of people don't understand like why Gitmo. Like in World War II, we didn't have a Gitmo. We had prisoner of war camps. You know, we, you know, why Gitmo and why? Why get mo? And why? Why is it so challenging? Why can't we send these people back to their countries or into the U.S. prison system? Like what makes how to get them come about and what makes it such a challenging puzzle, I guess? Yes. I think there's two things.

One is we have determined that there's a difference between a war between countries in uniforms where you catch them and they're prisoners of war. And a war of people who don't have a recognized country don't have uniforms, think they're fighting for their country, but nonetheless aren't. So we don't have an international arrangement to deal with these sort of free state actors. And that is an interesting problem. It doesn't justify what we're doing. but it gets us out of having to treat them as prisoners of war under the Geneva Accords. Getting them to U.S. prisons, first of all, they could get all of them out of Guantanamo on a flash. Look, there's only 39 people. There were 773 people in Guantanamo.

You know, when you talk about that, 730 of them are out. Nothing bad has happened. Nobody's talking about them. They've all been released. You know, they went back to being shepherds. One of my clients went back to Tunisia, Tunis, and was running a used appliance shop. And I would call him when he got out when he was there. Another one of my clients was moved ultimately to Kazakhstan and then Mauritania. And I would talk to him and what he's planning to do.

There's arranging to get married. He was trying to get back to Tunisia for health care. And he dropped dead of a heart attack two weeks before he got there. You know, the stories here have their sadness. It doesn't. Sadness doesn't just end with leaving Guantanamo. But that was, he had a rheumatic heart, so he did have heart from him. The reason they can't put them in the United States prisons is the U.S. Constitution.

People don't realize that the U.S. Constitution covers, vis-a-vis American government, every American citizen, everywhere in the world. And it recovers, applies to anybody. in the United States, whether a citizen or not. But it does not apply to non-citizens, not in the United States. So one of their reasons Guantanamo exists, and when you were there in early on, was because the government was trying, had two things.

They wanted to show some dramatic success in the global war and terror. So that's why they put them in the orange jumpsuits, shackle their feet and heads, hoods and everything. brought them in. And so they showed they were catching really bad people. By the way, every one of those people is out of the first ones who came in. And so they had a system to dramatically show how bad it was, the press could get there. The second problem was that they needed a place where the U.S. Constitution didn't apply.

If these people were brought to the United States, the Constitution applies. You have to have a speedy trial. You have to have a trial. You know, they have to produce evidence. The rules of evidence apply. Now in Guantanamo, the rule is evidence obtained by torture is not excluded necessarily. So if you're going to prosecute them, you have to do it where the Constitution doesn't apply. And if you take them to the U.S. and you're held there for 22 years, somebody's going to have to get you out.

You know, there's a guy named Rassam. who apparently tried to blow up LAX Airport in 1999. And it was captured, was convicted, and was had cooperated, and they were going to give him, I think, a 20-year sentence, which was pretty harsh then. And he's now been, but because he recanted, he said, look, what I said about those other guys was not true. And he recanted before he was sentenced.

Everybody recants after their sentenced. But you only get points for cooperating and sticking with it before your sentence. This guy took back all the things he said about a variety of people and cases had to be dropped because he wouldn't cooperate. But he's, if he hadn't changed his mind, he'd have been out of jail four years ago. Now he's still in Supermax in Colorado. My client was arrested in March 2002. He's now been locked up almost 21 years.

And he'll never get a trial. If they brought him there, they'd have to let him go. So what they were looking for, Guantanamo exists, because they tried to find a place nearby, near to the U.S., but not in U.S. territory. And the problem was that not in U.S. territory, they couldn't find many. And even Guantanamo was a little nerve-wracking for that because it's a perpetual lease, Guantanamo. So we own in perpetuity the lease to Guantanamo.

And while we don't own the land, it's Cuban soil, we've leased it. And there was a question where the Supreme Court would say, no, Constitution applies. So it's that kind of constitutional game that's being played. And why couldn't they just return a lot? There were a lot of these guys that they could not return to their country of origin. Because for what, like 500 of them, they were not, they were Arabs generally. They were not Afghanis. Why couldn't they send them back to their country?

I think they did. They did send most of them. Okay. Obviously, of the first 200 who were released, most of them were Afghanis. But you could send them back to their country of origin. You know, you can send them to any country you want. They'll have to take them. Whether it's Malaysia, if they're Malaysian, or whether it's a Saudi or it's Tunisia or anywhere else, they can do that.

The State Department can negotiate that easily. The problem is for some of them, and this is true. my client that I feel the worst about was named Abu Zubeda. Abu Zabeda was born in Saudi Arabia of a father who was born in Palestine. In Saudi, you can't be a Saudi if you're born in Saudi Arabia. You can only be a Saudi if your father was a Saudi. And his father couldn't be a Saudi because he was really a Palestinian. So his father in the eyes of Saudi Arabia say he's a Palestinian because he was born there.

And Abu Zabeda can't be a Saudi because his father isn't. This is the killer. Guess what you have to be to be a Palestinian citizen born there. So a son of a Palestinian is born in Saudi Arabia and can't be a Saudi, but he isn't a Palestinian because he wasn't born there. He has a brother in the United States now, they're trying to deport and they can't send him to a country. Ah, isn't it? All these crazy things. And, you know, he was the first person tortured.

And I don't want to repeat myself, but it's painful. He was the first person waterboarded. He apparently died twice during the waterboarding. They had revived him. and really terrible, terrible, terrible things to him. And if he were allowed to talk, he would say, it's so stupid. Because apparently the FBI had been interrogating it from the time he was captured in late March.

The way it worked, he was captured in late March. The FBI and the CIA were involved in his capture. The FBI was with him basically through mid-June with the CIA. sometimes. And during that time, they interrogated him. They did do modest torture, meaning make him be naked, no, more than modest. I'm so inured to the horribleness of it. They tortured him, but not in the way where you couldn't imagine somebody could resist in various ways. And they got everything on them. And in mid-June, the FBI wanted nothing more to do it. it. They bailed out. Their hands are bloody and dirty until mid-June. And they bailed out.

At that point, he was put in solitary confinement until August 2nd. Now think of it. At the time they told the Justice Department why they needed to torture him was because he had knowledge of imminent threats to the United States. Well, how do you find imminent threats from somebody you hold in isolation and don't talk to. Obviously bullshit. And what they were really doing was working out the mechanics of what kinds of torture they could get to be approved. The Department of Justice approved the various techniques. Waterboarding came a little later.

Then after the waterboarding was done, after that was done, then they needed somebody to torture. And he was the first person captured. So even though the CIA now, admits he was never a member of al-Qaeda, never, and that he ran a training camp, but the CIA also admits it was the only non-Alqaeda training camp. He believed his mission was to protect people from the faithful from being invaded and occupied by the heathen. So he was protecting people, for instance, in Chechnya. He was interested in Bosnia and Tajik And he was clearly fighting in Afghanistan after the Russians left, but before we invaded, against the communist imposed government that the Russians imposed.

And that was his enemy. He was fighting them. He never fought civilians. He believed the Koran was opposed to it. There's a debate among those in Camp 7 about that, and none of them will come forward at a time. the other ones because they don't want to betray their brothers. But there's a difference on that one. But he, when they made up the reasons, they sent a memo on July 24th to the Justice Department

saying this guy's the number two, Al-Qaeda. They also said in the same memo he was number three. Another time they say memo, they said he was a senior lieutenant. Another said he was equal to, but not superior. have been alive. They just made up stuff. Put it all in there. And they said that he'd been involved in 9-11. Totally untrue. They said that he had been involved with a variety of other people. He was supposedly coordinating terrorist operations around the world. This is a guy who lived in the mountains of Pakistan and never left. And he kept 12 years of diaries. They're quite

remarkable reading, starting in 1990 until this captured in 2002. Wow. He was 20. They're available. Now they were translated by the CIA or the FBI within 10 days of his capture. So there are various problems with it. But the government accepts it as accurate because they use things he put in there in cases against other people. So it's those are and those have no evidence of anything. And in fact, it comes to 9-11, 9-11 isn't even mentioned before or on 9-11 or for about 10 days or two weeks after when the rumors were coming out about it. And he was describing what people were saying happened.

I'm curious, though, because, I mean, Zveda was, like, on the government's radar, like, in the late 90s, early 2000, prior to 9-11. and he did like get rolled up with you know how many other 15 or whatever 17 other people in a Pakistani safe house I mean are we saying that he's 100% innocent of everything that he was just a like I don't know I mean he came up on their radar for a reason right or he didn't no he did clearly we know the reason I mentioned I was sort of anticipating that remember I mentioned the guy Rassam right and And Rizam accused. Rassam is the sole reason he was on anybody's radar. Okay. And Rassam was captured in December of 1999.

Okay. And he was interrogated extensively. And Rassam gave testimony against a whole lot of other people in Europe and elsewhere. He was interrogated, he was deposed and various other things. And throughout his period, he was. spoke and spoke and spoke and I've been through everything he said and first of all the recantation that I told you Rassam did cost him 10 years of his life included recanting everything that he had said uh-huh once Rassam was captured the FBI put out the equivalent of an all points bulletin

saying you should look for Abu Zubeda I got was sent out on December 29th 1999 And that turns out based only on Rassam. And he hadn't yet recanted, but Rassam is an unreliable person to begin with. And we'll happily get to that. But when Rassam was dealing with that, he was then mentioned, Abu Zabed was then mentioned again on that presidential daily briefing on August 6th, in which they said bin Laden is planning to attack America with airplanes. once again in one way it's a wildly significant tip you think people would have paid attention to

on the other hand i don't even understand how many people it would take to figure out how they were going to do it this way and prevent it but putting that aside but that even says it's based solely about absevay it's based solely on the word of one i think they said unconfirmed unconfirmed source, which was But see, I get why they wanted to catch Abbas evaded. It's not, I would, if no other reason, they'd won is Rolodex. You know, he doesn't have, if you're out there trying to find out

what's going on, this guy did know things. Right. He ran to him. He knew who people were. He didn't get along with bin Laden. They had, they did not get along. very fiercely in some ways. Bin Laden was mad because his camp, called the Caldan camp, was not an al-Qaeda camp. All the others were, bin Laden wanted Abbas Zabedha's camp to be under al-Qaeda.

So Abba Zabedah refused. Bin Laden got the, I forget which Afghan group to close the camp. So he lost his camp because he wouldn't cooperate with bin Laden. So that was part of it. But let me tell you a little bit about the Rassam part. Because up until this point, the only reason they have to be interested in Abu Zabeda, look, I've posted the evidence they've relying on.

It's Rassam. And after 9-11, they then went to the UN and said that they should freeze his assets because he was a terrorist, etc. Well, three years ago, I got the UN Security Council to unfreeze his assets because the UN Security Council found that he was not a terrorist in any way. I actually claimed that I've got a better batting average in the UN Security Council than the U.S. does. They've lost a few. I'm a thousand percent. But it's kind of amazing that this guy, years later, released his assets. And that's important because Poland had to pay him and Lithuania several hundred thousand euros because they allowed the U.S. to torture him in those places.

So, but getting to him after the first step, you know, after Rassam and the presidential daily briefing, and then 9-11, they were clearly after him. And I don't think anybody would object to that. And they went to the U.N. No, they didn't have much evidence, except for Assam, they did that. But then they were looking for him. And two things happened. Whatever evidence they had against him ended the day he was captured. Right?

There was nothing else he was doing. There was nobody spoke to or anything else. So you're right. Who he was captured with is a significant piece of evidence. But the other piece of evidence against him is a video he made after we came in to Afghanistan. And then, as one soldier told me, that sort of soldier talk against the enemy, he was talking about how we'd be protecting the heathen were coming in,

the U.S. would brew this day, he'd be protecting the faithful. He would join with bin Laden to protect the faithful, do all of this stuff. And he said lots of aggressive, hostile things. He believed he was at war with people invading the, his Muslim Brotherhood, or whatever you want to call it. So that's the second piece of evidence that got. Other than Rassam, it's that piece of evidence. And that was shown, in fact, he had set up his own news service.

You guys might like this. It was called the Global News Network, because he liked the idea of being G&N. So he thought CNN might like that. So he gave this interview. I forget to whoever it was. They gave him some money and so forth. But putting that aside, and all that was, and by the way, everything we're talking about now happened after the U.S. invaded Afghanistan.

After the U.S. armed forces were there, and it really was war in combat. And they may not have been in uniform, but they clearly were the enemy, and they viewed the U.S. as the enemy also. And what happened was when he got captured, he was clearly on the run because he knew they were after him. And they did catch him. However, the capture was a little different. First of all, they captured a whole lot of people in two countries, I think Afghanistan and Pakistan, multi-city raids in nine houses. One of the houses in Fasalabad, I think that's where he was captured, had they arrested about,

18 students, but they were literally were students going to one of the mosque universities. In his, where he was captured, there were several people, maybe six, who ended up in Guantanamo, at least five of which were released very soon thereafter and have been released. And there may be one still there. But one of my problems with, counting the people he was with is that we arrested them, but we let him go. And we don't know what they have said. Apparently he arrived. My understanding, this is not from him.

I couldn't tell you what he tells me anyway, but specifically he's not from that. He was on the run and was being chased and he was being chased, and he went someplace to get into a safe house. and either the next day or two, it was raided. And that's how we got caught. And so that's it. How, you know, now we're sort of looking at near-peer conflicts, you know, Russia, China, where, you know, like in World War II, your father, like, there were Germans. They were wearing German uniforms.

We go into a place like Afghanistan where we have the Afghans, and then we also have Arabs amongst the Afghan culture, who, you know, we conducted as a war operation. So there's not like a, we don't have, you know, we got better at it, I think, as the war progressed, but we didn't understand chain of custody. These soldiers were not police officers, right? Right.

And a lot of the Arabs that were rolled up, were rolled up by the warlords like Dostom and, you know, all them. So how does the U.S. address this in the future where we roll up people who we either do or don't have intel on, but obviously the Arabs in Afghanistan were not generally natives to Afghanistan. By definition, right? Right. I spoke Arabic.

They weren't Afghanis. Right. But when we don't have the chain of evidence, we don't, you know, we don't have. have these things. Like, how do we prosecute this in a way that respects civil liberties but also protects the United States? Well, first of all, remember this. When you respect civil liberties and protect the United States, that doesn't mean you can do both. Everybody always says, I want to protect civil liberties and I want to protect the United States.

Well, fuck it. If you want to protect civil liberties, you're going to lose some cases that you might be able to do if you took away. civil liberties. Look, they tortured everybody. You know, I mean, one thing you could start with is telling the CIA not to torture people. One, it's stupid. It doesn't work. It ruins whatever evidence is valid there. It corrupts America, and it's counterproductive. And it was just, see, I think every country in America is no exception. When we're scared, we violate ourselves. We don't think clearly, we don't make good judgments, and we panic. Because that's really what the Afghan invasion was.

It wasn't thought out. I mean, what were they trying to do? All of Afghan was our enemies? There was a bunch of people in the mountains that they should have gone after, and they basically knew that. But so I don't have an answer to how you put those balances together, but I do think when you say civil liberties on one side protect America and the other, it's like a scale, right?

civil liberty here and protect America here because that's how it always works out. Haven't in subsequent years we've captured terrorists like in Libya and also Somaliant pirates and brought them to the United States and put them through the U.S. legal system? Well, I think we could do that fine if we go do it right. We prosecute people for crimes committed in a variety of places. Our problem is the panic of. of the war and the politics of insisting that they were all evil, ugly people,

instead of dealing with them as a fairly small group of odd people. And when I grew up in the 60s, we might have said that they were sort of like people who dropped out, drifted off. I went back to Selma once, 25 years later, and there's some guy with a white ponytail hanging down saying, Yeah, yeah. Come the revolution, we're really going to do it. And I said, oh, Jesus. I said, we've been five, we've missed five revolutions already. Yeah, but to be fair, the revolution didn't bring down the Twin Towers either. Like the beatneck or hippie revolution, you know, like there was a real consequence there, right?

Oh, I'm only saying people exaggerate and make more significant some things sometimes. No, the hippies were, they were just sad. And I was a hippie. I mean, the house of a friend of mine, we were together in the 60s, in late 60s. Yes, they're clearly a different group. I think it's, but the problem was it was also a fairly small group who brought down the Twin Towers. I've spoken to FBI agents. The original al-Qaeda was never more than 80 people.

And the original creation of it when the Russians were driven out was a lot. was about five people. And they always had quality control. They didn't want a whole lot of people. Yeah. We've sometimes confused Ben Laden with various rages and wars in Afghanistan. Afghanistan's always got a problem.

Do we have questions for Mark at all? Let me see here. Okay. Mark, what do you think then as you look back? I mean, well, first off, What is the status of your client, Abu Zabede, I can't pronounce his name. Buba. Zabeda, thank you.

What is his current status? I mean, what does his future look like potentially? Well, he's described as a forever prisoner for whom they can't prosecute. And so there's no recourse, really, to get him out of there? I'd like to think so. I was 64 when I started representing him. I'll be 80 this summer. So when they, and they didn't admit this for a long.

long time. One of our great successes is making them admit the fact that they will never prosecute him and they will never let him out. Nobody pays attention to that statement by the United States. Even if

they didn't have to recognize torture of it. And by the way, the reason they won't let him out is because they were wrong about his torture. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in their report said, Every single thing that the CIA claimed they got from him, the FBI had already gotten in the four months before.

They got nothing from him. Do you ever see the movie, the report with Adam Driver? No, I haven't. You should see it. I mean, it's a commercial film, but it describes the way the CIA tried to break into the Senate skiff to find out what they were finding about it. Oh, that's about the RDI network. Yeah, no, I've covered that, you know, in some of my journalistic work, but they didn't break into the Senate skiff. That whole story is from Diane Feinstein's Senate staffers who claimed that the CIA hacked into that terminal.

What really happened was the staffers found a, they found like a link they could click that brought them to a part of the Panetta report that had not been cleared for the Senate to see. And so when the CIA discovered that, they closed the loophole, and the Senate staffers went nuts and said that they hacked their computer, Feinstein ran with that. She even went on television and said the CIA should be disbanded, which is wild enough. But there's a reason why that whole story kind of fizzled out and disappeared. It's the there were, like the idea that there were CIA people that broke into a Senate skiff. Like that absolutely did not happen. Like that's. Well, that's interesting because I've heard that story, and of course, I was happy to believe. Yeah, I mean, there's definitely a lot that went on with the Panetta report, and there's things that can be argued back and forth. But I don't, based on, you know, what my reporting at the time, I don't believe that they hacked into the Senate terminal or anything like that. But I wanted to ask you, you know, I do appreciate all these cases you've worked over the years. and holding the government's feet to the fire and making them prove the guilt of some of the people

that they were trying to prosecute. I was wondering if you could talk a little, a slight retrospective on your career from the 1965 in Alabama to today and working some of these civil rights cases. You have the benefit of hindsight and having some wisdom from this long experience in law. And I was wondering if you could tell us,

you know, any conclusions, any lessons learned, anything that you know you think young people out there today need to know well i think the greatest part of my career the good fortune of my career was law um you know my wife's the sociologist i'm i'm sort of theory and she's a theoretician much more than i am i think probably my life is mostly step by step by step this case you try to win it you go to the next case Maybe it's a bigger kid. You win some, Jesus, I've lost some. And you keep going up. And I feel like all we are is incrementalists. I once asked my law students, and they were sneering at the case the law in 1910, how primitive it was. I said, how do you think? We got there. In 2110 are going to look at this stuff. Right.

And I said, you know, I'm not a great believer in the law as a result. process of reaching fundamental change because my own view of the law is that it's mostly designed to prevent dueling and to accomplish some things along the way. I tell my students it's the only profession that can never have better than a 500 bad income. For every winning lawyer there's a loser. It doesn't mean the loser's not as good lawyer or anything else. So you're starting off in a field where even if you're really good you can easily lose a lot. And I said, you know, if you also think how many disputes people have in the world, if you imagine it from little kids fighting over blocks, working up to the grade school and the bicycle and who wants time on the swings and who should be the starting catcher in high school, and they're all of those things. You go through all that.

And then you realize that as grown up, somebody's really mad about somebody having done something. All of those disputes never get to court to resolve. But there's millions and millions of. But then you get to the cases that do. And I find interesting to think about how many lawsuits there could be. Somebody says, oh, yeah, and I'm going to get a lawyer. Well, they don't usually. But if they do, it's a small number of people who get a lawyer.

And usually if one gets a lawyer, the other one says, gee, this isn't worth it. How can we work this out? Or they get, and then they both get lawyers and they can't work it out. And they go to trial. One wins, one loses. the loser appeals, you go up all the way, and you get to the very top of all this huge pile of disputes, and you say, I say to my students, okay,

how likely is it that when the Supreme Court gets that case, they get it right? And so I think to me, all it is is you're trying to fight against inappropriate abusive behavior. Whether it's domestic abuse or governmental abuse. Obviously, the governmental abuse, look, the law is really good at trying to limit power people from abusing power. It's not great, but it's really the only place you can go. If somebody comes to the problem, and I can see how I can do it legally, I can help them.

I may not win, but we can do that. So, I mean, I think law is the purest form of trying to do good, but you better not pretend that you're making society is going to remember the major changes you make. All you're doing is step by step by step. You know, the idea of memory of yourself, all we are is little stones being dropped in a pond. We make a little ripple and it fades out, but there's other stones coming and other people and things happen. And I think lawyers have a lot to be proud of it. And even though landlord's landlords law. Maybe I wouldn't admit that.

So, yeah, I think I've dealt with a lot of dramatic things. I don't know that being in dramatic areas doesn't make me and I've been more significant in my impact. You know, family lawyers who keep families together or work things out may be more important. But it is true emotionally, the abuse of power by the government

has to be treated serious. Mark, thank you so much for spending some time with us tonight and talking about your career and all these different cases you've worked on and some of these things that continue to go on. Two quick things. Oms, thank you very much. He said cheers and Scott Cheese. Thank you. What area of law are you currently practicing? Well, I consider myself to be both as an evidence professor and as a trial lawyer. I view with myself as dealing with the problems of proof. How do you prove things? And it really, with the real question is, how do you prove it, whether it's a criminal defense case when they're trying to show your client did or didn't do something? I do unemployment, I do civil employment rights cases.

I've certainly dealt with, I've also done ordinary cases. Divorces, it's just that those are sort of, a lot of the cases I do are no harder and no better, but they're more. interest to people because of the politics of the times. Yeah. I do criminal defense work. It's a part of it, but not a lot of it. And I think I work with my son Joshua's firm and he does a great deal of work dealing with banks and preventing home foreclosures. That's one of the things that I always amused me. I kept poor tenants in the South Bronx and their apartments longer. He's elevated. He's now keeping people from being evicted from their homes by banks foreclosing on mortgages.

So maybe we all, things keep growing and adding up along the way. Mark, where can, if people want to retain your services, your son services and that wall firm, where can they come and find you guys? Well, I think, I think I mentioned I'm about to be 80, right? They shouldn't come in any long term. My son, Joshua, if you just, Joshua Denbo, look up his name, he does all sorts of work. It's, he, he doesn't do it quite as for, he, he charges money, not enough.

I didn't teach him well enough to be an entrepreneur, but he, he will take cases for people who have problems of a variety. Certainly, people dealing with being screwed by banks and finance companies. Mark, thank you, thank you so much, man. And next week, we're going to have a combat Air Force. combat controller on the show. So we will see all of you on Friday. Mark, again. Mark, thanks for joining us. We really appreciate it. You're welcome. All right. We'll see you guys next Friday. Take care of everyone. Thanks, everybody.