The effects of torture don’t just go away, said Lisa Hajjar, sociologist and author of a recently published book on United States torture policy.

“Just because this wasn’t still happening doesn’t mean they were not still in a tortured state,” Hajjar told a UC Santa Barbara audience, referring to inmates at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. “So, the statements that they would make were fruit of the poisonous tree.” 

At a recent talk hosted by UCSB’s Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies, Hajjar and criminal defense lawyer David Nevin spoke on the legislative consequences of the Guantanamo Bay process and how torture ultimately delayed bringing terror suspects to trial.

“What was happening at Guantanamo?” Hajjar asked the audience. “It had been devised to be an interrogation laboratory. That people would be brutally interrogated, squeezed as hard as they could, and they would release information about terrorism that the United States could use to wage and win the War on Terror,” she said. 

Hajjar is a professor and chair of the Sociology Department at UC Santa Barbara and an interdisciplinary scholar who has made a major contribution to research into human rights, political violence and contemporary international affairs.

Hajjar has just released her book, The War in Court: Inside the Long Fight Against Torture. Over 14 visits to Guantanamo as a journalist, she witnessed the trials of detainees and interviewed their legal representatives. In her talk at UCSB, Hajjar explained why Guantanamo Bay was chosen as the site for detention.

“It’s close to the United States and far from the war zone of Afghanistan, but it was also that these right-winged lawyers in the Justice Department, the White House, and the Pentagon, believed that they could hold people at Guantanamo outside of the law,” she said. “People who were moved to Guantanamo would have no access to lawyers and United States courts would not have jurisdiction.”

Hajjar said the United States rejected the Geneva Conventions and she outlined the secret involvement of the Central Intelligence Agency in the torture program at Guantanamo Bay, which complicated efforts to bring the cases to trial. Even now, the government is plea bargaining with defense teams and it is not known when these cases will be resolved. Hajjar said that 32 detainees remain at Guantanamo today.

“The Constitution doesn’t just protect citizens, it protects people,” Nevin reminded the audience.

Nevin shared his experience as a lead defense counsel for a Guantanamo Bay detainee Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Nevin has been a criminal defense lawyer for 45 years and started working at Guantanamo in 2008. He said defense lawyers have to navigate confidentiality in the case, complicating legal process even further.

“The torture itself ended up, in many ways, controlling the progress of the military commissions. As a result of the torture program [being run by the C.I.A] everything that happened down there was classified,” Nevin said. “Everything that came out of my client’s mouth, for example, was treated as classified. I was required to treat what my client said to me as top secret, until I went through a process of getting declassified.”

He called Hajjar’s book a testament to the deeply caring, hard-working lawyers that work for the detainees of Guantanamo and genuinely make a difference.

Hannah O’Connell is a third-year Communication Studies and Psychological and Brain Sciences double major at UC Santa Barbara. She wrote this piece for her Writing Program class, Digital Journalism.