Eight O'Clock Ferry to the Windward Side
Clive Stafford Smith
307 pages including index
published in 2007

Lord knowns there have been a lot of depressing books published about America's war on terror; not to mention a metric shitload of blogs writing about it, including my own. So what good is yet another book decrying the injustices committed at Guantanamo Bay? After all, if you don't know about them by now, you'll never know. But when the author is one of the lawyer volunteers defending the victims of the war on terror, who has been coming to Guantanamo for years and who also manages to inject some humour in what's otherwise a bloody dreary subject.

Clive Stafford Smith is somebody who has a lot of experience with worthwhile but hopeless causes, as he spent years working on death penalty cases in the American Deep South. When the news about the establishment of the Guantanamo Bay prison camp became known he didn't hesitate, but immediately got involved. Eight O'Clock Ferry to the Windward Side is based on his personal experiences at Guantanamo. The title is a reference to the fact that all the lawyers have to stay on the leeward side of the bay and therefore have to take the morning ferry to get to their clients each day. Surprisingly for a book on such a dark subject matter, Eight O'Clock Ferry to the Windward Side is quite funny in places, due to the absurdity of some of the situations Clive Stafford Smith and his clients find themselves in.

It's this that makes Eight O'Clock Ferry to the Windward Side stand out from the mass of books about the Bushite War on Terror. Clive Stafford Smith is personally acquainted with the sharp end of this war and is still able to keep his sense of humour. It helps make the book so much easier to read, without losing its core of anger.If you've paid attention at all to what's being going on in Guantanamo and other fronts in the American War on Terror you'll know much if not everything Clive Stafford Smith mentions here; it's his personal involvement and the stories he tells of how his clients ended up at Guantanamo Bay that makes this book fresh.

These stories are not for the squemish. We know many of the people that ended up in Guantanamo Bay were tortured elsewhere before they ended up there, in one of those countries that the Americans won't admit their secret services have ties to. There's Binyan Mohamed for example, who has a starring role in Eight O'Clock Ferry to the Windward Side, who was tortured in Morocco, with his penis cut open multiple times with a scalpel. Binyan had been caught up in the War on Terror when he tried to leave Pakistan on a friend's passport, after having had his own stolen. Complicating matters, he was an Ethiopian refugee living in Britain without a right to a UK passport. The Americans, being clueless as ever, thought he was a top Al-Quida member, though they must've soon been disabused of that notion. Not that this stopped them from making him one of the first suspects to be brought for the kangeroo court, sorry "military tribunal" established at Guantanamoo, which is where most of the humour comes from.

Even for a showtrial, this tribunal is an incredible farce, with judge, prosecutor and defence council all being in the same chain of command, with no guarantee of freedom for those who are acquited and with a pre-determined script for all parties to follow. However, Binyan Mohamed, despite the horrific torture he has undergone and his isolation in Guantanamo and the daily harassement he undergoes there is not a meek victim, but is perfectly willing and able to use this showtrial for his own ends. He starts off by warning the judge that the name under which the Americans are prosecuting him isn't actually his name and goes on from there, stealing the show and totally ruining the carefully choreographed propaganda stunt this trial was supposed to be. It's funny, but funny with a bitter undertone, as for Binyan this is his one chance to get his story out, to tell what happened to him in the name of fighting terror.

Eight O'Clock Ferry to the Windward Side is a fair overview of the Gulag Archipelo the Americans set up in the name torture, of which Guantanamo Bay is just the most visible part, with hidden CIA prison facilities all over the world, extraordinary rendition to countries like Syria willing to torture themselves into America's good grace, offshore prison ships and who knows how many more undiscovered atrocities. What makes the book however are the stories of the people Clive Stafford Smith is involved with and his own experiences at Guantanamo Bay: the petyt bureaucracy, the daily absurdities and so on.

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Clive Stafford Smith, Eight O'Clock Ferry to the Windward Side, Guantanamo Bay, War on Terror, politics, book review