Padmanabhan, Vijay - short clip - DetaineeIdentificationProblems
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Transcript
Transcripts may contain inaccuracies.
| - | I think that the administration may have been | 0:00 |
| on solid ground in sort of generally deciding | 0:02 | |
| this group of people are unlawful enemy combatants | 0:05 | |
| because they don't fight for a state. | 0:07 | |
| They don't follow the laws and customs of war. | 0:10 | |
| They don't carry their arms openly. | 0:12 | |
| They engage in perfidy. | 0:13 | |
| They target civilians. | 0:15 | |
| They do things that we don't think | 0:16 | |
| of lawful combatants as doing, right? | 0:17 | |
| But so I don't think that | 0:20 | |
| that was the problem. | 0:21 | |
| I don't think it was that | 0:23 | |
| there was more process that was needed | 0:24 | |
| to distinguish between lawful and unlawful combatant. | 0:25 | |
| The problem was some were not combatants | 0:27 | |
| and some were combatants. | 0:30 | |
| So we had to figure out | 0:31 | |
| who are the people here that actually took | 0:32 | |
| up arms and were fighting | 0:34 | |
| or were organizing financing for Al-Qaeda, | 0:35 | |
| whatever it was that these people were up to, | 0:37 | |
| and who were people who were | 0:39 | |
| in the wrong place at the wrong time. | 0:40 | |
| There's a greater risk of misidentification | 0:42 | |
| with respect to these people, | 0:44 | |
| one. | 0:46 | |
| And two, once we made the decision not to grant them | 0:46 | |
| POW status, which I think is legally defensible, | 0:49 | |
| but it has a pernicious policy effect, which is | 0:52 | |
| that these people aren't going to say, admit | 0:54 | |
| I'm a combatant. | 0:58 | |
| No, traditionally part of the reason why there's no | 0:58 | |
| identification problem is because people | 1:01 | |
| say I'm a combatant because they want to get | 1:03 | |
| the POW privilege and they don't want to be prosecuted | 1:05 | |
| for shooting on the battlefield. | 1:08 | |
| When we're not giving these people POW privileges, | 1:10 | |
| their incentive to be honest about who they are is reduced. | 1:12 | |
| So everybody says I was a farmer. | 1:17 | |
| I was a sheepherder. | 1:19 | |
| I was, you know, they're not all gonna say that, right? | 1:20 | |
| And so, we have to have a process to be able | 1:22 | |
| to determine who was really the sheepherder | 1:25 | |
| and who was really the soldier. | 1:28 | |
| And last thing I'll say is, you know, | 1:30 | |
| process is not perfect. | 1:32 | |
| You know, the government during the Bush administration, | 1:34 | |
| we had our process in place. | 1:36 | |
| And that process resulted in releasing people | 1:38 | |
| who turned out to be dangerous terrorists. | 1:40 | |
| Somebody blew himself, | 1:42 | |
| two people blew themselves up in a market in Mosul | 1:43 | |
| after being returned to Kuwait. | 1:45 | |
| An individual who got a very high position | 1:48 | |
| in Al-Qaeda in Yemen, | 1:50 | |
| who subsequently was involved | 1:53 | |
| in the cartridge bomber, cartridge printer bomber plot, | 1:55 | |
| was at Guantanamo Bay at one point. | 2:00 | |
| And federal courts have made mistakes as well. | 2:02 | |
| It's just, you know, it's a human process. | 2:04 | |
| So, there are going to be mistakes made, | 2:06 | |
| but there's no way of avoiding process. | 2:08 |
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