Covering A Terrorism Hearing At Guantanamo Bay

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Covering A Terrorism Hearing At Guantanamo Bay

TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

The first military tribunal held during the Obama administration has
begun at Gitmo, but it's been getting very little attention. My guest,
Spencer Ackerman, says this hearing is very important because it will
likely reveal whether the Obama administration's reforms of the
tribunals will be substantive or cosmetic.

The trial is of Omar Khadr, the youngest of the detainees captured in
Afghanistan in 2002 and moved to Gitmo. He was 15 at the time. He's one
of the al-Qaida fighters the Bush administration designated as enemy
combatants who should be tried by military tribunals, not as soldiers
treated as prisoners of war.

Khadr's defense attorneys argue that the information he gave to
interrogators was a result of coercive interrogation techniques and
should therefore be inadmissible. This trial could reveal whether
military tribunals will allow prosecutors to admit evidence acquired
under abusive circumstances.

The pretrial hearing is currently in recess while the prosecution
conducts a mental health analysis of Khadr. The pretrial hearing is
expected to resume in about four weeks. The trial is expected to begin
in July.

Spencer Ackerman has been at Gitmo covering the pretrial and is now in
Washington during the recess. He's the national security correspondent
for the Washington Independent and has reported for Talking Points Memo,
the American Prospect and The New Republic.

Spencer Ackerman, welcome to FRESH AIR. Spencer, would you explain the
charges against Omar Khadr?

Mr. SPENCER ACKERMAN (National Security Correspondent, Washington
Independent): Certainly. He's facing one really major charge, which is a
murder charge, and that's for the death of an Army Special Forces
sergeant named Christopher Speer.

Speer was killed in a firefight in Khost Province, Afghanistan, that
lasted for five hours. It was really an epic battle and one of the first
real epic battles of the Afghanistan war in which Special Forces were
trying to take out a compound that they had ultimately very accurate
intelligence was populated by al-Qaida operatives who were linked to
planting mines and IEDs.

And ultimately, they destroyed the compound, their mission was
successful. And in the course of that battle, however, it was alleged
that one of the occupants of this compound, Omar Khadr, who was then 15
years old, threw a grenade that ultimately killed Sergeant Speer.

And that's the primary charge that he's facing. It's a murder charge.
What's very interesting and perhaps even unique about this case is that
this is a case in which Khadr is being brought up for a war crimes
charge in a war crimes court for a real, classic battlefield act.

He's not charged with killing any civilians. He's charged with throwing
a grenade that killed a uniformed American soldier. So that's something
that his lawyers have brought up as an issue in this case, that Khadr,
who does come from a family that's very connected, by all accounts, to
al-Qaida, has committed a battlefield act as a child soldier.

There are other more minor charges against him, perhaps most saliently
material support for terrorism. There's a tape out there that shows
Khadr in the same room as a group of militants who are putting together
some Italian anti-tank mines for use against positions and roads that
U.S. forces and, as we've seen subsequently, Afghan civilians may travel
down.

And that tape doesn't explicitly show Khadr putting the mines together.
It comes really close, though, in a couple cases. And he's clearly in
the same room as people who state on, on the course of this tape, that
they want to, you know, kill lots of Americans and kill lots of Jews and
cause damage to American forces in Afghanistan.

So those are the major charges that Khadr faces. It's the murder charge
against Sergeant Speer primarily, and then it's material support for
terrorism.

GROSS: Now, you mention that Omar Khadr's family is connected to al-
Qaida. What is his father's connection to al-Qaida?

Mr. ACKERMAN: His father was a financier who had set up, I believe, four
different charities in the 1990s in Canada and elsewhere to funnel money
to Osama bin Laden. By Khadr's admission, when he was a youth, when he
was about, you know, nine or 10 years old, his father had taken him to
bin Laden's compound in Jalalabad. He's played with Osama bin Laden's
children. And both his father and his mother are rather infamous figures
in Canada because of their connections to al-Qaida.

Canada has had a very fraught relationship with the entire Khadr family.
One source of enduring controversy in Canada is the Harper government's
decision not to seek extradition of Khadr. They basically don't want him
back. They want the United States to ultimately adjudicate his case,
unlike a lot of different nations that have sought – Britain and
Australia are two examples – express repatriation of their nationals at
Guantanamo Bay. Canada has not tried to get Omar Khadr back.

GROSS: Now, this is the first military tribunal during the Obama
administration. And it's being held at Gitmo, which he promised to have
closed down by now, but it's not closed. President Obama also rejected
military commissions for alleged terrorists before he became president,
but after he became president, he pledged to reform the military
commissions, as opposed to doing away with them.

So let's look at some of the precedents that might be set and what
military commissions will look like during the Obama administration.
What is one of the most important precedents you're looking for at this
pretrial hearing?

Mr. ACKERMAN: Probably the biggest thing that I was there to cover, the
reason why I went to a pretrial hearing, is because there's a crucial
issue underneath this hearing, which is about suppressing evidence
obtained coercively.

Omar Khadr's lawyers contend that from the very beginning of his
detention, first at Bagram in 2002, and then at Guantanamo, he was
subjected to harsh enough treatment that it rendered everything he told
his interrogators to ultimately be inadmissible before the commission.
And Khadr's attorneys are trying to get all of his statements made to
interrogators over his eight years in detention stricken from the
government's case.

And if that happens, it would open the door for every other detainee
who's going to be tried under the commissions to file a motion to
suppress similar evidence that the government is using collected from
interrogations of these detainees.

So, if Khadr ultimately wins this hearing, the government is first of
all going to have a much harder time presenting a case for conviction in
Khadr's murder trial before the commissions, but also potentially it
could find itself subjected to a floodgate opening of motions from
detainees about getting their own statements suppressed and thereby
potentially jeopardizing the viability of the military commissions as a
forum for prosecuting terrorism detainees in general.

GROSS: Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it would mean even if Khalid
Sheikh Mohammed was tried before a military tribunal, if the precedent
you're talking about it set, that everything that he said during
interrogations would be thrown out because he had been coerced.

Mr. ACKERMAN: It's possible. With Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, there were
some – you know, there is with Omar Khadr, as well – but with Khalid
Sheikh Mohammed and the 9/11 conspirators, there is more evidence in
that case against them than just what they told their interrogators. But
like with all potential military commission cases, the government is
relying significantly on statements made to interrogators. And this is
really the first case of that under the Obama administration and since
the Military Commissions Act of 2009 passed.

So it's a really serious hurdle that the government is going to have to
clear if this is going to ultimately be the viable – and I think
Attorney General Eric Holder likes to use the word flexible – format for
the government to present its cases against terrorism detainees.

GROSS: So this new rule from 2009 says that any evidence that was given
by a suspect during coerced interrogations is no longer admissible, but
then the question becomes if that's the case, what about statements that
the suspect made after those coerced interrogations stopped? Do they
count or are they still tainted?

Mr. ACKERMAN: That's entirely correct. And in civilian courts, this is
known as the doctrine of the fruit of the poison tree, where if at one
point an improper interview of a suspect who's going to be brought to
trial is conducted, that taints everything that he might subsequently
say to additional interrogators or interviewers or anyone who talks to
him playing by cleaner rules.

So, for instance, if you tell a guy that, you know, he's never going to
get out of jail and his family might be brought into jail unless he
confesses to a certain crime and in the course of that confession he
tells you a number of different things like, you know, where he might
have met people who are, you know, already in prison or part of a
conspiracy. And then his lawyers come back in afterwards and say, no,
you can't do that, that was an improper violation of his rights. And
then you bring in a different government interviewer who tries to use
some of the information from the stricken interview in establishing a
cleaner, fairer series of interrogations, that's still not considered
admissible in civilian courts.

And the military commissions, in large part because the rules have
changed so much over the years, don't really have a body of evidence in
the law establishing exactly how far this doctrine goes. So like you
say, explicitly, the products of coerced interrogations are barred,
particularly abusive and torturous interrogations. We've yet to
establish under this system whether that means everything someone said
after their abuse has been established is inadmissible before the
commissions. And that's what ultimately Khadr's pretrial hearing will
establish.

GROSS: And that's why this is such an important pretrial hearing?

Mr. ACKERMAN: Precisely.

GROSS: This pretrial hearing might also establish what is considered the
kind of cruel, inhuman or degrading interrogation methods that are no
longer allowed.

Mr. ACKERMAN: That's correct. And one of the things that we heard in
Omar Khadr's pretrial hearing was a parade of interrogators, most of
whom testified under a cloud of anonymity, that they did not subject
Khadr to that sort of abuse, particularly not at Guantanamo Bay.

All of his Guantanamo interrogators talked rather openly about how they
sought to build rapport with him, how they endeavored very strongly not
to abuse him and to establish that the statements that Khadr gave in an
affidavit that he had been abused at Guantanamo were not true.

But then we heard that before any of them had interviewed Khadr or
interrogated Khadr, we heard testimony that Omar Khadr was subject at
Bagram, shortly after his capture, in which he suffered nearly fatal
gunshot and shrapnel wounds, to a stress position in which his hands
were elevated to the height of his forehead and shackled to the outer
door of his cell for a prolonged period of time, in which one of his
medics found him crying underneath a hood that was placed over his head.

And then we also heard a story from the first person to ever interrogate
Omar Khadr, the person we are told to identify only as Interrogator
Number One, that part of Khadr's interrogations featured Interrogator
One telling the then-15-year-old detainee a, quote, fictional story
about a different young detainee who didn't cooperate with his
interrogators, who was taken to a prison in the United States and then
raped and ultimately killed.

GROSS: And is it against the military tribunal rules to allow into
evidence statements that were made after the suspect was threatened with
death?

Mr. ACKERMAN: This is what the pretrial hearing will ultimately
establish. The clearest thing I could tell you is that we don't really
know yet. Under the statutory language from the Military Commissions Act
of 2009 that you just read out, it would seem to be difficult to square
this sort of treatment with the inadmissibility standard of the statute,
but really this is what will be determined.

GROSS: My guest is Spencer Ackerman, who has been covering the first
military tribunal held during the Obama administration. More after a
break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Spencer Ackerman. He's a
national security correspondent for the Washington Independent, and he's
been reporting on the pretrial hearing on one of the suspects who has
been held at Gitmo for close to eight years. He was taken as – taken
into detention in 2002 in Afghanistan, after he was alleged to have
killed an American soldier with a grenade.

One of the kind of many interesting facets of this pretrial hearing is
that the government tried for a plea bargain. And there's a lot of
speculation about why the government wants a plea bargain, and I'd like
you to talk about what some of that speculation is.

Mr. ACKERMAN: That – it's a great question, and one of things that all
of us started chasing as soon as we got to Guantanamo about two weeks
ago was the prospect of a plea deal coming into effect even before Judge
Parrish had made a ruling on admissibility of the statements that Khadr
gave to his interrogators at trial.

That remains the biggest aspect of speculation for why a plea deal might
be reached, that the government might not want to face the prospect of
Judge Parrish ruling that everything Khadr told his interrogators, even
when he was not being abused, was subject to the fruit of the poison
tree standard and can't be used at trial.

Obviously, there's a larger issue at play here that's seen the United
States face international condemnation, and that's when Omar Khadr was
taken into detention in 2002, he was 15 years old. And the U.N.
rapporteur on the rights of the child and on child soldiering said at
the end of last week that she wanted to see the United States just
simply release Omar Khadr because for the last eight years he's been in
detention, most of that time has been as a minor. So the United States
may not want its first military commission of the Obama era to be of
someone who much of the world considers a child soldier.

It's interesting that within days of us being there, the spokesman for
the secretary of defense, Geoff Morrell, gave an on-the-record quote to
one of our colleagues, Peter Finn of the Washington Post, confirming
that the government was seeking a plea deal in this case. And Omar
Khadr's lawyers made a point of saying that whatever obligation they
have to find justice for the other detainees who may face military
commissions, their primary responsibility is to their client.

So negotiations are ongoing to find out what's the best deal the
government may be able to offer Omar Khadr, and the prospect from a kind
of broader questions, to those of us who are interested in military
commissions and what they'll look like during the Obama administration,
is just whether we have to wait for another case to determine how much
evidence is permissible or whether there's a sort of decent interval
after someone's abused before evidence they give to their interrogators
can be entered into their case against them.

GROSS: So one of the questions in this trial that you're, you know,
anxiously awaiting the answer to is whether statements that Omar Khadr
made under abusive, coercive interrogation techniques will be admissible
and also whether subsequent statements that he made will be considered
tainted because of the earlier coercive interrogation techniques.

Now, you mentioned that one of his interrogators had made up this
fictitious prisoner and said that this detainee had been raped and was
subsequently killed in prison. And he said that to scare Omar Khadr into
confessing. Are there other coercive techniques that are alleged to have
been used again Omar Khadr?

Mr. ACKERMAN: Well, it gets sort of into a question of whether – and we
saw this in Abu Ghraib, and we've seen this at Guantanamo previously –
whether the treatment by guards and not interrogators can be reasonably
said to be distinguished in a detainee's mind from his interrogations.

So, for instance, very early in his stint at Bagram, shortly after he
had underwent major invasive surgery to save his life, he was shot in
the back and the shoulder, he was interrogated while still strapped on a
stretcher because he couldn't move so shortly after the surgery.

Shortly after that, he was placed in a stress position with his hands
shackled together and then shackled to the outer door of his cell with a
hood placed over his head, not as part of an interrogation but as
punishment by the guards for some unspecified infraction.

This basically, you know, forced him to have his hands about at forehead
level shortly after he had been shot through the back and the shoulder.
And one interrogation report of Omar Khadr indicated that – this was the
word used – he was sedated ahead of an interrogation, although his
interrogators dispute that he was on anything more consciousness-
altering than a heavy dose of Tylenol.

But these are all different aspects in Khadr's early treatment that the
defense contends would not be outside of Khadr's mind when sort of less
abusive treatment came into play from his interrogators. That once he
was initially threatened, when he was placed in a stress position, he
wouldn't be able, particularly as a 15-year-old, to distinguish nicer
interrogations or less coercive or less abusive interrogations from that
initial treatment. In other words that he might think and, you know,
reasonably so according to the defense, that if he declined to cooperate
again, that he would ultimately be placed back into the sort of bad old
days of Bagram.

GROSS: So is there some question of this, of whether if it's a guard
who's punishing the detainee in stress positions, does that count as an
interrogation conducted with coercive interrogation techniques?

Mr. ACKERMAN: Not precisely. What the defense argues is that a 15-year-
old who's been placed in this situation in which his life is now
entirely in the hands of foreign captors is not in a mental situation
where he can distinguish between guards who may be abusing him and
interrogators who may be abusing him, that you would just see, in that
situation, Americans, and that's how you would structure your decision-
making when it came to figuring out if you were going to cooperate.

And what we'll hear after the government conducts its own psych exam of
Khadr are witnesses for the defense, mental health experts, who will
testify to that decision-making capability that the 15-year-old Omar
Khadr would've undergone.

GROSS: My guest, Spencer Ackerman, has been at Gitmo covering the first
military tribunal held during the Obama administration. He's the
national security correspondent for the Washington Independent. He'll be
back in the second half of the show. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH
AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross, back with Spencer Ackerman.
He's been at Gitmo, covering the first military tribunal convened during
the Obama administration. Omar Khadr is being tried for allegedly
killing an American soldier in Afghanistan in 2002, when he was 15. His
defense attorneys are arguing that the information he gave to
interrogators should be inadmissible because it was given under coercive
and abusive circumstances. The trial may reveal whether future tribunals
will allow such evidence to be admitted.

Ackerman has been covering the pretrial hearing at Gitmo, but he's in
Washington while it's in recess. Four of the reporters who have covered
the story were informed last week they won't be allowed back in the
courtroom.

Let me ask you about the fact that four reporters who have been covering
this hearing were barred from returning. Why were they barred?

Mr. ACKERMAN: One of the witnesses in this case, an interrogator who was
the first to interview Omar Khadr at Bagram in 2002, was testifying
under a shield of anonymity. We were supposed to call him interrogator
one. But throughout the trial and even before the trial started, a
number of facts were introduced into the public record that several of
us decided to use to identify him, as it didn't seem like the easiest or
most intuitive decision to protect his anonymity. And so several of us
reported his name, and even though more than four of us did, those four
reporters were banned. It was a decision that let the air out of the
room for a lot of us in the press filing center at Guantanamo.

GROSS: So were the reporters who were banned?

Mr. ACKERMAN: Carol Rosenberg from the Miami Herald, who's the
institutional knowledge of Guantanamo, having reported more consistently
and more thoroughly from Guantanamo of, really, any reporter in the
world - the Toronto Star's Michelle Shephard, who's written a biography
of Omar Khadr, Paul Koring from the Globe and Mail and Steven Edwards
from Canwest.

GROSS: And those last two papers are Canadian papers.

Mr. ACKERMAN: That's correct.

GROSS: And Michelle Shephard is also from Canada. And Omar Khadr is a
Canadian.

Mr. ACKERMAN: Yes. And it became a rather surprising decision that
pretty much the entirety of the Canadian press corps that was left at
Guantanamo for the last week of the first two weeks of Omar Khadr's
pretrial hearing were told that they couldn't return.

GROSS: And are the newspapers that these reporters represent protesting
that decision?

Mr. ACKERMAN: They are. They're protesting it very strenuously, and they
started protesting it within, I think, maybe an hour or two after the
Defense Department issued the decision.

GROSS: Now had you reported the name of the interrogator?

Mr. ACKERMAN: I had. And I tried to sort of skirt a line to protect the
sort of strict rules of anonymity. After he had testified, I didn't
report the name, but I had referred back to my previous reporting that
had used his name. And I thought that was a way of both respecting the
ground rules, respecting the protective order, but respecting our
obligation to the public to report as transparently as we could.

GROSS: And are you surprised that you were not banned along with the
other four reporters?

Mr. ACKERMAN: I really don't understand a lot of the decision to ban my
four colleagues, and I don't understand why it was applied as seemingly
arbitrarily as it was, if I wasn't banned.

GROSS: So I should say that Omar Khadr's defense lawyers, you know, as
well as the prosecutors, wanted the name of the interrogator to remain
anonymous. Do you know what their reasons are?

Mr. ACKERMAN: Their reasons are reasons beyond simply this interrogator.
They're worried that because they don't have the same sort of subpoena
power that the criminal justice system affords to defense lawyers, that
they'll have trouble convincing other interrogators who had talked with
Omar Khadr or other members of the intelligence community or really just
other witnesses to testify in a case that revolves very heavily around
the question of his treatment while in detention if anonymity, once
afforded from the bench, is not respected.

It's worth mentioning, though, that the judge who issued the protective
order, an Army colonel named Patrick Parrish, did not issue any finding
that any of us actually violated the protective order, even after the
name appeared publicly. He issued a general admonition that we shouldn't
use the name, but didn't find any of the four reporters who have now
been banned to have violated it. This was a decision made from the
office of the Secretary of Defense, not from the bench.

GROSS: So I guess I'm a little confused about why it's ambiguous about
whether they violated the rule or not. It seems like a pretty clear-cut
rule: you don't report the name of the interrogator who's testifying.
What's the ambiguity?

Mr. ACKERMAN: The ambiguity was that his name and lots of identifying
information about him - including the fact that he was court martialed,
the circumstances for which he was court martialed - had been public
record already. And it seemed like a very questionable decision to sort
of reclassify this, particularly in a hearing that the Defense
Department was trying to ensure was as public and as transparent as
possible.

There are some reasons why, legitimately, peoples names - particularly
with interrogators, having classified among them the prospect of
redeployment and retaliation that might occur if it came out that a
certain interrogator was associated with detainee abuse. But because
this individual was court martialed, that's not a circumstance that
he'll face. And so a number of us made the judgment call that because it
was so clear that this person's identity was already public, that the
interest of transparency merited printing his name.

And finally, this individual in question also gave an interview to
Michelle Shephard of the Toronto Star in 2008, expressing his
expectation that he would testify, and to testify in order to clear his
name in the detainee abuse of Omar Khadr.

GROSS: To clear his name and to say that he did not torture Omar Khadr.

Mr. ACKERMAN: As he testified, he believes that the treatment he
subjected Omar Khadr to did not constitute abuse, and he wished to
testify publicly about that, according to what he told Michelle.

GROSS: Are there other rules that you have to follow in covering this
pretrial hearing of an alleged enemy combatant?

Mr. ACKERMAN: We are obligated to cover, essentially, what the Defense
Department allows us to cover. There is an extensive series of rules
that we have to adhere to that can be unilaterally revoked. There's an
appeals process. It's cumbersome, and we'll see how effective it
ultimately is. The largest is among, you know, where we can go during
the hearing, what we can bring in, the ability for the Defense
Department to revoke certain aspects of the proceeding after they occur,
if it turns out that something classified has leaked.

And at one moment during the trial, one of the defense attorneys
accidentally spoke the last name of one of the witnesses who had been
placed under anonymity as well, a then-Army major and now-Army
lieutenant colonel, and we were asked after that leaked to not report
it. So there are a number of considerations that reporters covering the
military commissions have to adhere to as a condition of attending them.
And because Guantanamo Bay is, you know, generally difficult to get to
and is entirely a military property, if the Defense Department says you
can't go back to cover it, then the public just basically can't know
what's going on there.

GROSS: Well, Spencer Ackerman, you're in Washington, D.C. now, as
opposed to in Gitmo, and that's because the trial - the pretrial hearing
is in recess now. Why is it in recess?

Mr. ACKERMAN: So, bear with me for a moment, but one of the things that
the defense counsel for Omar Khadr - a Canadian citizen who's been held
in detention for about eight years now in U.S. custody - wants to do is
call two mental health experts to testify about the degree to which
Khadr was able to, free of coercion, tell his interrogators aspects of
his involvement with al-Qaida and (unintelligible) involvement with al-
Qaida starting in 2002, when he was captured. The government protested
that decision and said that it would only assent to such testimony if
they were also allowed to interview Khadr and provide their own
independent mental health screening.

Ultimately, Judge Parrish agreed with the government's motion and
ordered that the government can have about four weeks. The schedule will
be formalized sometime on Monday, I believe, in order to conduct this
psychological screening. And so the defense was faced with a choice:
either it could not have its mental health experts testify, or it could
agree to a more or less four-week delay for the government to finish its
screening before a pretrial hearing was to conclude.

GROSS: The psychological testing that is holding up the pretrial hearing
now, what is the defense and what is the prosecution trying to
establish?

Mr. ACKERMAN: What the defense wants to establish is that Khadr, as a
15-year-old, would not have been in a frame of mind to speak freely to
his captors because, you know, here he is in a scary and unfamiliar
circumstance that adults might be able to cope with, but the mind of a
15-year-old would not be. And the government wants to establish that
because the defense has made Khadr's psychological state an issue in the
case, that they'll ultimately try and find him in right and fit frame of
mind, that he didn't undergo psychological abuse, that he's not
experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder. The government wants to
establish that Omar Khadr is and was mentally fit to be interrogated,
and subsequently, to have statements given to his interrogators used
against him at trial.

GROSS: My guest is Spencer Ackerman, the national security correspondent
for the Washington Independent.

We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: My guest is Spencer Ackerman, who has been covering the first
military tribunal held during the Obama administration. It's now in the
pretrial phase. Omar Khadr is accused of killing an American soldier in
Afghanistan. He's the youngest of the detainees taken to Gitmo.

Khadr was 15 when he was detained by Americans. But let's face it, in
the world today, a lot of terrorist groups are using teenagers, even
boys to commit acts of terrorism, to lay bombs, to run checkpoints with,
you know, with high-powered weapons. So, you know, it's such a
complicated issue.

Mr. ACKERMAN: That's correct. And, you know, we've seen that behavior in
Iraq, in particular, with al-Qaida's affiliate there. They relied on
very young boys, and increasingly over the last two years, very young
girls, as well.

One of the points that the chief prosecutor in the military commissions
- a Navy captain named John Murphy - made in a press conference right
before we adjourned for the next couple of weeks was that if,
ultimately, the United States was to not try Omar Khadr, he mused that
that might have an encouraging effect on al-Qaida to then recruit 15 and
16 and 17-year-olds, people that we would consider minors otherwise, for
use in terrorist activities. And he asked the public if they were
prepared for such a circumstance.

GROSS: You and other reporters who are covering this pretrial hearing at
Gitmo were given a tour of Gitmo. This was your second tour. Your first
was, I believe, in 2005. How - does it look different?

Mr. ACKERMAN: That's correct. It does look somewhat different. I didn't
really get to see everywhere that I went during my first tour, so I
don't really feel I have the greatest base of comparison to make a
responsible assessment. I did see Camp 4 both times, and I'd be more
comfortable talking about that. Well, I should back up and say Camp 4 is
a communal living facility. There are six camps - I'm sorry. There are
seven camps at Guantanamo Bay. Some of them feature detainees who live
individually. Some feature them - live in kind of dormitory or communal
setting. Camp 4 is one of those.

It's for detainees who are the most compliant with the guards there.
Omar Khadr, interestingly, is one of them. He lives in Camp 4. And both
times, I was able to see detainees exercising, people who looked like
they were decently well-fed. I'm not a, you know, a human rights, NGO
monitor, so I'd be very cautious about, you know, issuing any firm
judgments about detainee treatment just from the glimpses I got. But I
certainly didn't witness any abuse. I didn't witness anyone who appeared
to be in pain or in poor health or undergoing poor treatment.

One of the most striking things that I did see in Camp 4 the second
time, that I didn't see the first time, was a big room that was being
retrofitted as a classroom. There was a big, flat-screen TV that was
being used to show DVDs that I was told were both instructional and
educational. Apparently, at Camp 4 now, there are life skills classes
taught, including resume-building courses. I'm not entirely sure how...

(Soundbite of laughter)

GROSS: That's interesting.

Mr. ACKERMAN: ...you would tell a detainee what, you know, how to
explain the last, you know, how ever many years of absence on his resume
that he's undergone while he was at Guantanamo Bay, but, you know,
that's happening. Language skill courses are being taught, art classes.
Apparently detainees at Guantanamo in Camp 4 are fans of the TV show
"Deadliest Catch," about Alaska fishermen. But then you look down at the
floor where benches are set up for these classrooms, and you see these
kind of iron, circular bolts in the floor that are known as eye bolts,
and detainees are shackled to those as someone who might instruct a
class comes in, supposedly for the safety of instructor. And you're
struck with the sense of how even at the most lenient security-wise
still features, during life skill courses, detainees being shackled to
the floor.

I'm not saying that they're shackled in any kind of painful position,
but it is a reminder that these are not people who are, in any sense,
free to move about. These are very much people under detention.

GROSS: Just one more thing. On Sunday, Attorney General Eric Holder said
on the Sunday morning news shows that he thinks that the Miranda law
needs to be amended to take into account terrorism, to take into account
that a lot has changed since the Miranda law was written.

And I want to know what reaction you've heard from prosecutors, law
enforcement people, as well as civil liberties people. If you could just
tell us briefly what you've been hearing.

Mr. ACKERMAN: I would say from a civil liberties community, it's been
rather surprise and disappointment. A lot of people in civil libertarian
circles had thought that the Faisal Shahzad case had demonstrated that
you can Mirandize an American citizen who's suspected of an act of
terrorism and not have that jeopardize an investigation, as by all
accounts, he was cooperating with FBI interrogators, even after he was
Mirandized and after the emergency provisions of Miranda allowed for
about three hours, I believe, of interrogation before Miranda was read
to Shahzad. So it came as a surprise that after that occurred, the
attorney general would then propose expanding those emergency
exceptions.

Interestingly and somewhat ironically, the military commissions - after
they were reformed by the Obama administration and Congress last year -
had a lot of added process rights compared to previous years,
particularly about totality of evidence and on the fruit of the poison
tree question. And that was because some senior Obama administration
officials were afraid that unless greater process rights were afforded
to detainees before the commissions, that the courts would just strike
them down.

And they had to look, ultimately, more like civilian trials if the
viability of the commissions was to be established and maintained. And
so it comes as a kind of surprise and irony that right as that's a
consideration for the military commissions to look more like civilian
trials, to at least some degree, civilian trials for terrorists may look
at least somewhat more like military commissions - at least with the
proposed Miranda exemptions being expanded.

GROSS: So there's just one more thing. Where do you stay when you're at
Gitmo? Is there like a hotel?

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. ACKERMAN: It's interesting. There's - on the side of the military
base, there is something called a CBQ, or a combined bachelors'
quarters. That's a kind of bungalow structure for visiting reporters or
for human rights experts or for lawyers.

This time, because there was so much press internationally, we stayed in
five-to-a-tent tents that were nice and air conditioned, but reminded me
more of times that I've been in combat zones than the last time I was at
Guantanamo Bay, in which I had sort of a bungalow to myself.

GROSS: Interesting. Well, thank you so much for talking with us about
the pretrial hearing at Gitmo. Thank you very much.

Mr. ACKERMAN: Thank you so much, Terry, for having me.

GROSS: Spencer Ackerman is the national security correspondent for The
Washington Independent. You can find links to his articles about the
trial of Omar Khadr on our website: freshair.npr.org.

Coming up, rock historian Ed Ward tells the story of Jimmy Donley, a
rockabilly singer and songwriter whose career was derailed by alcohol,
bad decisions and mental problems.

This is FRESH AIR.
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Jimmy Donley: A 'Born Loser' Finally Gets His Due

TERRY GROSS, host:

The music business sometimes provides a living for people who might
otherwise be in jail or a psychiatric institution, but they're rarely as
successful as their more stable peers. Jimmy Donley has long been held
up as a prime example of this, and with the release of most of his
recordings by Bear Family, we can hear that there was more to Donley
than his tormented biography.

Rock historian Ed Ward tells the story.

(Soundbite of song, "Kicking My Hound Around")

Mr. JIMMY DONLEY (Musician): Come here, Blue. I wonder where that old
hound is. I keep saying I'm going to town. He don't like town, and I
don't blame him.

(Singing) Every time I go to town, boys all kicking my hound around.
Makes no difference if he's in the house, got no business to kicking him
around. Got no business to kicking him around.

ED WARD: The first time I'd ever heard of Jimmy Donley was when a friend
put on an album of his songs, and I noted that the cover had his
tombstone on it. If I'd known more about Donley, that tombstone would
have come as something of a relief because, from all accounts, this was
a man you didn't ever want to come into contact with.

He was born in Gulf Port, Mississippi in 1929, and by his early 20s was
playing bars around Biloxi, where he came to the attention of another
musician, Ernie Chaffin, who'd already started to record for Sun Records
in Memphis.

Donley's star might have risen earlier, but just as he was making a name
for himself, Uncle Sam came calling and he went into the Army, which
stationed him in Panama.

Around Biloxi, they thought the Army was a good idea. When Donley and
Chaffin performed, sometimes Jimmy would hear someone in the audience
say something he didn't like and put down his guitar and attack them.
But not even the Armed Services could help, and before too long, Donley
was back in Mississippi with a psychiatric discharge.

At this point, Pee Wee Maddux, a local songwriter, arranged for Jimmy to
audition for Decca Records in Nashville. And not only did they sign him,
they recorded four songs immediately in February, 1957.

(Soundbite of song, "Come Along")

Mr. DONLEY: (Singing) Well, I'm going to town next Saturday, get a new
pair of kicks with some of my pay. Going to jump with a check book and
head forth to the north down rhythm of honky-tonk. Come along. Yeah,
baby, come along. Well, now, come along. Baby, come along with me.

I got to quit that gal, my (unintelligible) to be. She tells the whole
town what she won't tell me. And that's the reason why for the
(unintelligible) rolled over just to get around me. Come along. Yeah,
baby, come along. Well, now, come along. Baby, come along with me.

WARD: Of course, there were loads of rockabilly singers out there at
this point, and Decca had more than their fair share of them, but since
- like most major labels at the time - they had no idea what would sell,
they just threw the records out there. They probably didn't even care
that Donley's accent is sometimes impenetrable, although they figured it
out six months later when they had him record some country standards.
After that, they left him to his own stuff, including the song he's best
known for.

(Soundbite of song, "Born to be a Loser")

Mr. DONLEY: (Singing) There's a pain inside my heart, yeah, and a
burning deep within. If I can't be your lover, won't you let me be your
friend? I guess I took too much for granted, oh, that you would love me,
too. Our romance should've never started. Little girl, I can't blame
you. Should have seen...

WARD: "Born to be a Loser" would have been called autobiographical, if
Donley had had the insights others had into him. The song's relentless
self-pity has made it a swamp-pop classic, covered by others, but Donley
never saw a penny. He was deeply suspicious of the contracts he signed,
and preferred to get paid in cash for everything he recorded. This would
have meant the loss of a few thousand dollars if Donley hadn't done
something that, for the times, was astonishing: one day he walked up to
Fats Domino, whose voice resembled his, and auditioned a couple of his
new tunes. Fats, a very smart man, bought them on the spot. In fact,
Donley and Pee Wee Maddux got close enough to Fats that they appear in
the chorus on his recording of one of Donley's songs.

(Soundbite of "What a Party")

(Soundbite of crowd chatter)

FATS DOMINO (Singer): (Singing) Where was Jody when the lights went out?
Standing in the corner, shout, shout sissy, shout. What a party. Lordy,
Lordy.

Unidentified Group: (Singing) Big fat piano man, he sure can wail away.

FATS DOMINO: (Singing) What a party. Lordy, Lordy.

Unidentified Group: (Singing) Big fat piano man, he sure could play.

FATS DOMINO: (Singing) The girl was dressed in...

WARD: It's hard to tell how many songs Donley sold outright to Fats and
his bandleader Dave Bartholomew and others, including Jerry Lee Lewis,
but some, with the songwriting credit "Jessup," point to Reverend J.
Charles Jessup, a media-savvy preacher from the Gulf Coast to whom
Donley sold the rights to his output.

It goes without saying that Donley's personal life was chaotic. He was
married six times, and engaged to another woman he didn't marry, but for
whom he wrote one of his most beautiful melodies,

(Soundbite of song, "Arleeta")

Unidentified Group: (Singing) Arleeta. Arleeta.

Mr. DONLEY: (Singing) I want me somebody, someone to love, someone to
share with the pleasures of love. It's you I desire. You set me on fire.
Arleeta, it's you. It's got to be you. Arleeta, my love. Arleeta, my
love. Oh, I want...

WARD: Donley's violence towards his wives and girlfriends is horrifying
to read about. It was fuelled, unsurprisingly, by his near-constant
consumption of alcohol. Yet the women kept on coming, and kept on
leaving.

In 1961, Donley did some leaving of his own: He demanded a release from
his contract with Decca at gunpoint and signed with Huey P. Meaux's Tear
Drop Records in Houston. These, too, failed to sell, and finally, on
March 21st, 1963, Donley got into his car, turned on the engine, and
asphyxiated himself.

Next to his body was a Bible, his mother's obituary, a picture of his
wife Lillie Mae, and Ernie Chaffin's phone number. It was Donley's
second suicide attempt. The first time, he hadn't been able to afford
enough gas to succeed. And his last request, that his friend Cozy Corley
sing at his funeral, was denied. Corley was black.

GROSS: Ed Ward lives in the South of France. He reviewed a collection of
the music of Jimmy Donley called "The Shape You Left Me In." You can
hear the song "Born to be a Loser" on our website, freshair.npr.org,
where you can also download podcasts of our show.
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