Inside Guantanamo: Des Moines Attorney Advocates for Client’s Rights

Moments later, an air strike of unknown origin exploded outside the complex, rendering Muhibullah unconscious, temporarily blinded and with one of his knees shattered. Because there were no hospitals in the area, his father found a U.S. convoy and asked for help, showing them his outdated U.S government-issued identification card, which he received during the Soviet invasion.The soldiers took Muhibullah away on a stretcher and told his father they would take him to a hospital. The next time Mohammed heard news about his son’s welfare was one year later, when the Red Cross sent him news that his son was being held in Guantanamo Bay.

Over five years have passed since Muhibullah was taken into U.S. custody, and despite legal representation from Des Moines attorney Angela Campbell (pictured), he remains jailed, now in Afghanistan, and has yet to face charges. Campbell told her client’s story, including the journey she had to undergo, at an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) conference April 12 at the Iowa Memorial Union in Iowa City. Campbell first heard this story leading up to Muhibullah’s detainment from his father, and later corroborated the event’s details through interviews with Muhibullah in Guantamo Bay.

Having recently returned from her second visit to Afghanistan, Campbell’s new wait-and-see strategy is to step back and see if the Afghanistan government can sort out her client’s case. “If the United States can screw this up so badly, maybe Afghanistan can work this out on their own,” Campbell told the 50 attendees at her session, “Guantanamo Bay: An Insider’s Look.”

Campbell’s journey began just after the 2004 Supreme Court decision in Rasul v. Bush, which first allowed detainees in the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to have lawyers. Campbell, a federal public defender at the time, volunteered to represent four Afghanistan nationals who were arrested and detained as part of Pres. George W. Bush’s War on Terror.

Before Campbell could represent any of her clients, she had to go through a government approval process, which took nearly a month. Moreover, she had to apply for a security clearance and eventually had to procure a “protective order” that says she could not release any information obtained without prior approval for the government. The process took nearly eight months to complete, and in the meantime, three of her four clients had been released, leaving only Muhibullah.

The next part of the process involved a training session with a psychiatrist that prepared her and others for issues regarding post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), although the training was not for them to better understand their clients, but to prepare themselves. “It was to prepare us for coming back with PTSD,” Campbell said. “The initial lawyers sent down to Guantanamo came back exhibiting PTSD after dealing with torture victims.”

The next part of Campbell’s training involved a strategy session on how to get clients to trust them. “One of the problems the first wave of lawyers who went down to Guantanamo discovered was that the clients did not believe they were lawyers,” Campbell said. “Word started to come out that at least a few of them had been approached by interrogators after they had sent their letters of petition to the courts, and the interrogators pretended to be defense lawyers. Because of this, they had no reason to trust us.”

The plan they devised was to meet with family members prior to going down to Guantanamo as a means of connecting with their clients and building trust. This was the strategy that helped lead Campbell to Muhibullah’s father in Afghanistan. “Our plan was just go to Afghanistan and see if we could find them,” Campbell said. “Just show up and maybe they will come and find us.”

Campbell’s strategy received a boost in Kabul, which is about a two-hour drive north of Uruzgan, when her entourage met a man whose son was recently released from the same Afghan prison as her client. Word began to spread that American lawyers had arrived to help families and they were credited with helping the man’s son get released from prison. “We did not deny this,” Campbell said. “The next piece of luck we received was the first public release of Guantanamo detainees, so again, we were there and benefited from the news that we were there to help.”

In addition to obtaining Mohammed’s story, Campbell learned through interviews with several families how a number of detainees were arrested. “We came across these flyers that said if you turn in a member of al-Qaeda, the government will pay you $5,000,” Campbell said. “In U.S. dollars, that’s a great deal of money. My client’s father makes only $60 a year, so $5000 is a lot of money, especially in rural Afghanistan.”

“We found out after our trip that some of the leaders in Afghanistan had financed their election by capturing innocent Afghans, taking them across the border and selling them for the reward money,” Campbell added.

Campbell said her lawyer instincts telling her that most people aren’t telling all the story led her to Guantamo Bay, where, armed with Mohammed’s picture, she went to gain Muhibullah’s trust in an attempt to corroborate his father’s story. The picture and her firsthand knowledge of her client’s family did prove successful and Muhibullah eventually did open up to Campbell.

“One of the biggest questions I get is whether detainees are actually being tortured,” Campbell said. “I can’t answer that for everybody, but I can only tell you what my client told me.”

When asked about torture and mistreatment, Muhibullah, who is illiterate, didn’t answer Campbell the first day, knowing that her notes were classified and she would have to give a copy to the government. “As soon as you leave, there is not going to be anybody here to keep them from asking me what I told you,” he told Campbell. “There won’t be anyone here to protect me. These people try to turn you into an animal.”

Muhibullah did eventually open up to Campbell and told her that he had not been subject to torture. However, when asked what happened to him when he first got here, he said: “They would give us an orange and seven beans to eat for the day, and if you ate the orange peel, you got punished.”

Campbell asked her client to elaborate what he meant by punishment, which he had endured after getting caught eating an orange peel. He told her that he was put into a freezing room without any clothing, bright lights and loud music so he could not sleep for a few days.

Although he had never been physically beaten, Muhibullah confided in Campbell that he did see another person from his cell beaten for stealing a sugar packet off his tray. When a guard caught him, he sent in a group of guards to beat him up and in doing so, they ripped open his mouth from the jaw all the way across his face. He was unable to eat for a month.

In December 2006, Congress wiped out habeas corpus petitions and Muhibullah was no longer classified as an “enemy combatant.” However, he was not released from Guantanamo until April 2007 due to pending diplomatic negotiations. “What they were really doing was buying time, for the U.S. was building a prison in Afghanistan,” Campbell said. “The prison, Pul E Charki, was finished in April 2007.”

This prompted Campbell’s return to Afghanistan, where she embarked on yet another journey to find her client’s whereabouts and look into the status of his case. “Talking to the Department of Justice is like dealing with junior high kids,” Campbell said. “If they don’t want to tell you something, they won’t. They gave me no answers about my client’s whereabouts, so I called the Afghanistan government, and they said they don’t have control of Pul E Charki, the U.S. government does.”

While in Kabul, Campbell managed to obtain the prison’s phone number from a fellow detainee of her client’s, whose father also lived in Uruzgan. Mohammed wouldn’t come up to see them, saying that the last time he came up to Kabul, somebody stole his wooden leg, so he sent Muhibullah’s cousin, who brought Campbell a letter. “Afghanistan’s way to deal with criminal procedures is by asking community leaders if Muhibullah was a member of al-Qaeda or Taliban,” Campbell said. “The letter, signed by all the officials in the Uruzgan community, basically said `no’ and requested that Muhibullah be released.”

“We are anticipating that this letter will eventually get him out of prison,” Campbell said. “In the meantime, we do as Muhibullah has been doing the past five years: We wait.”