Clive Stafford Smith is a human-rights lawyer who has spent twenty-five years focusing on the issues of race and the death penalty in the United States. In 1993 he established the Louisiana Crisis Assistance Center, a non-profit law office. He has represented more than 200 people on death row, and several of the detainees held by the United States in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

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Clive Stafford Smith is a lawyer who represents many of the more than 500 prisoners in Guantánamo Bay. In an exclusive interview for openDemocracy, he describes the prison camp and the conditions that lawyers work under, tells us that his clients have been tortured and explains how false information extracted by torture is contaminating US intelligence. Listen to Guantánamo, the inside story.

(This was first published on 23 November 2005)

The renewed attempt to normalise and justify torture is ethically wrong and practically dangerous, says the leading human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith. He draws on his experience with Guantánamo prisoners to advocate a better way.