By: Stephanie Shapiro


The professor and the prisoner: Chuck Schmitz, a scholar of Yemeni studies at Towson University, served as translator and cultural interpreter for Guantánamo Bay detainee Salim Ahmed Hamdan, tried in 2008 for war crimes. | photo by Leo Howard Lubow


Before fate tossed them together, Chuck Schmitz and Salim Ahmed Hamdan might have brushed past one another along an ancient alley in Sanaa, the capital of Yemen. Back in the early 1990s, Schmitz was a Fulbright scholar from Berkeley researching the political economy of the Middle East and polishing his Arabic. Hamdan was a street-smart survivor, an orphan with a fourth-grade education who got by on odd jobs. They wouldn’t meet until January 2004, thousands of miles from Yemen, inside a cinderblock cell at Guantánamo Bay Naval Base. 

“It was kind of weird,” says Schmitz, now an associate professor of geography at Towson University and the president of the American Institute for Yemeni Studies. “You put together a career, and all of a sudden you’re in this surreal world. This skill I had was needed in the eye of a contentious moment in history. It was a ‘just happened to be standing there’ kind of thing.”

A fit guy with tossed chestnut hair and a slightly absent-minded air, Schmitz, 51, was a reluctant draftee to the war on terror. In early 2004, he got a phone call from Charlie Swift, the Navy lawyer appointed to represent Hamdan. Would Schmitz be willing to serve as Arabic translator and cultural interpreter for Hamdan and his defense team? Having infamously found work as Osama bin Laden’s driver and bodyguard in Afghanistan, Hamdan, who was captured in November 2001, was facing a military commission trial crafted to prosecute “illegal combatants,” a new class of prisoners authorized by President George W. Bush.

As chronicled in Jonathan Mahler’s 2008 book, The Challenge: Hamdan V. Rumsfeld and the Fight over Presidential Power, the case led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling and gave Schmitz a front-row seat for a constitutional crisis—along with an intimate look inside the controversial military prison that President Barack Obama has promised to close within the year.

At first, Schmitz wanted no part of the Hamdan case: He thought that any trial would be a kangaroo court. But the charismatic Swift was persistent. “I think eventually he just talked my ear off,” Schmitz says. “‘What the hell, I’ll sign the papers,’” he figured. On the plane to Guantánamo later that month, Swift spent the eight-hour trip convincing his new translator that “his agenda [was] to destroy the system,” Schmitz says. “If anybody is going to do it, it’s going to be somebody like Swift. He just thrives on controversy.”

For nearly five years, Schmitz shuttled twice monthly between his Roland Park home to Guantánamo Bay, with each stay on base lasting four or five days at a time. “I was living parallel lives,” he says. “I was teaching most of the time, and then I had my life on the base. I felt very much at home there eventually. It’s a very nice place to run, work out, hang out. It’s the tropics. It’s fantastic.”

In between beach forays, Schmitz worked sixteen-hour days as Swift and his team maneuvered the case through the courts. Immersed in Yemeni politics and culture, conversant in its dialects, and flush with local contacts, Schmitz served the lawyers well. He accompanied Swift as they gathered key evidence from Hamdan’s extended family in Yemen, and, in Gitmo, debriefed the prisoner for hours at a time. “Hamdan would turn to me and say, ‘Will you explain Yemen to him?’ when [Swift] asked questions that didn’t make any sense in the context of Yemen,” he says. “For example, [Swift would ask,] ‘Do you have any pay receipts?’ Yeah, right.” (Yemen is primarily a cash economy.)

The case traveled a tangled path to resolution. In 2006, the Supreme Court ruled that the military tribunal process established by the Bush administration violated Hamdan’s constitutional rights. The president and Congress quickly defied the landmark decision with the 2006 Military Commissions Act, returning Hamdan’s case to Guantánamo, where last summer he stood trial for war crimes. In August, a military jury convicted Hamdan of material support for terrorism but acquitted him of conspiracy, the more serious charge, and sentenced him to five and a half years in prison, including time already served. He returned to Yemen late last year to complete his sentence and was released in January.

Throughout the lengthy proceedings, Hamdan, familiar with the mental tricks played by interrogators, remained skeptical of Swift and Schmitz’s intentions. “What it really took was for him to see us in trial fighting for him,” Schmitz says. “Then he realized we really did mean to defend him.” Speaking to one another in a Yemeni dialect, the professor and the prisoner did form a friendship not available to Swift and others on his legal team. Hamdan’s nickname for Schmitz was “shathir”—“wise guy.”

“I think he trusted me more than anyone else,” Schmitz says, puffing on a cigar (a habit picked up from Swift) on his screened-in, second-floor deck, golden retriever Suki by his side. “He didn’t see me as part of the legal team. I was his right hand. I was a piece of him.”

The defense portrayed Hamdan as a low-level jihad washout, not a terrorist mastermind—unlike many of the other detainees in the prison, which since 2002 has warehoused suspected al-Qaeda operatives captured in Afghanistan. When Abdullah Tabarak—a close bin Laden aide and “bad-ass dude,” according to Schmitz—was inexplicably released and returned to Morocco, Hamdan became despondent. “He didn’t understand,” Schmitz says. “He wanted to know, ‘Why does somebody like that get released and I’m still sitting here?’” 

Schmitz draws a more textured portrait of Hamdan than Challenge author Mahler, who depicts the detainee as an exasperating and slightly oafish figure. “Hamdan was a keen observer,” Schmitz says, one who was adept at sizing up his attorneys and all too aware of the seriousness of his predicament. “My real job in that whole thing was trying to keep him in the system and to keep him with us.” Hamdan spent months in isolation for various outbursts; a feeding tube kept him alive during a prolonged hunger strike. “[He] was going nuts. He knew he was going nuts.” At times he “would go into a rage and just couldn’t handle it. What he really needed at that point was relief from Guantánamo, which we could not do anything about.”

That sense of helplessness, combined with his fraught relationship with Hamdan and the punishing hours, “caused a crisis with me as well,” Schmitz says. “It’s excruciating to be in a situation like that where someone is basically dying inside and you’re there to help him, but you really can’t do anything.”

To cope, he sought therapy. “It was very, very difficult,” says Amy Urdang of her husband’s experience. Working in Guantánamo took Schmitz “to a whole other level of looking at and understanding something,” she says. 

The translation assignment provided Schmitz with fodder for journal articles and stimulated his interest in international law and the war on terror. He’s particularly struck by the guise of normalcy that the military managed to create at Gitmo. “People saw themselves as doing their job, fighting the war on terror, and not questioning what they were doing and not being able to see what they were doing. That was most disturbing, not being able to see the human being there. That seems to be so against American principles of justice.” He now fears the detention center may not close as quickly as the new administration has suggested. “Obama has given himself lots of ways to justify continuing the use of Gitmo and even the commission system,” he says in an e-mail message. “The initial signs are not encouraging. We may see a sorry case of massive liberal waffling.”

Last summer, George Clooney bought the rights to Mahler’s book. Rumor has it that Clooney will play Swift. “We’re all going to enjoy the movie knowing that it has little to do with what happens,” says Schmitz. Who should play him? “People have suggested Richard Gere. I suggest myself; I’ll take the salary.” Schmitz has considered weighing in with another account, co-writing Hamdan’s memoir of his five-year legal journey. But “he doesn’t understand why anybody would be interested,” Schmitz says.

Toward the end, Hamdan managed to be philosophical about his detention, Schmitz says. “I remember him saying, ‘This place has changed my life, not all bad.’”     

The same might be said for Schmitz, who can’t say that he misses his improbable buddy. “It will be good to see him when I see him again,” he says. “But a break is good. We had to go through some tough stuff.”

—Stephanie Shapiro



On the air: On March 4, tune in to the Marc Steiner Show on WEAA 88.9 FM to hear an interview with Chuck Schmitz.






EMAIL TO EDITOR // SEND TO A FRIEND // PRINT