Guter, Donald - short clip - WhoseIdeaWasGuantanamo-review
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Transcript
Transcripts may contain inaccuracies.
| - | Once we knew that we would attack the training centers | 0:00 |
| but that it would be more than just a missile attack. | 0:05 | |
| We were actually gonna put boots on the ground | 0:07 | |
| and we would take any kind of captives that we could who | 0:10 | |
| and try and exploit them for intelligence purposes | 0:17 | |
| find out as much as we could. | 0:18 | |
| One day and I can't really pin it down, | 0:21 | |
| but I got a call from Jim Haynes, | 0:24 | |
| who was the DOD General Counsel. | 0:26 | |
| And he said, we're gonna be picking some people up | 0:29 | |
| and we need a place to take them where | 0:34 | |
| we'll be able to spend a lot of time, | 0:36 | |
| a significant amount of time, interrogating them, | 0:38 | |
| finding out what we can. | 0:41 | |
| And we want to be able to do that, not be interfered with | 0:42 | |
| and we don't want it to be someplace where | 0:48 | |
| our interrogators are subject to any kind of attack either. | 0:51 | |
| We wanna keep them safe. | 0:54 | |
| And we wanna be able to do this for some period of time. | 0:55 | |
| And he said, I want to know what your thoughts are on that. | 0:59 | |
| And I said, well, what are you thinking? | 1:02 | |
| And he said, he mentioned ships at sea. | 1:06 | |
| He mentioned Diego Garcia. | 1:09 | |
| And I said, well, you know, there's the ships at sea? | 1:12 | |
| How many are you talking about picking up? | 1:15 | |
| And I say, talking about a few, or a dozen? | 1:16 | |
| He said, Oh no it'll be dozens could be hundreds. | 1:19 | |
| And I said, well, you can't put them at ships at sea. | 1:22 | |
| And he said, well, don't we have brigs. | 1:24 | |
| And I explained, yeah we do but only on a few ships. | 1:26 | |
| And it's only a few people. | 1:28 | |
| I mean, and it's not for that. | 1:29 | |
| It's for tall people too | 1:31 | |
| that might've done something really bad. | 1:33 | |
| You hardly ever use them. | 1:34 | |
| I said that won't work. | 1:36 | |
| And he said, all right, what about Diego as well? | 1:37 | |
| Were gonna have to go through some negotiations, that's not. | 1:40 | |
| And finally | 1:44 | |
| - | Isn't there a naval base in Diego? | 1:45 |
| - | there there's Diego Garcia. | 1:46 |
| Yeah. There's a Naval base, but you know | 1:49 | |
| the islands British owned, I mean, and so I said, well | 1:51 | |
| we'd have to, we'd have to figure that out | 1:55 | |
| but I'm not sure that that's the place you want either. | 1:56 | |
| And I realized that what he was, I told people later | 2:00 | |
| I said, it was very interesting the way he sort | 2:05 | |
| of guided the conversation until I finally said, well | 2:08 | |
| you're talking about Guantanamo Bay. | 2:11 | |
| He said, well, that's a good idea. | 2:13 | |
| So it wasn't my idea, but it, but it came out of my mouth. | 2:15 | |
| I said, do you want someplace where there's no jurisdiction? | 2:18 | |
| He said, yeah, that would be good | 2:22 | |
| because I could tell you ships at sea Diego Garcia. | 2:24 | |
| And it just evolved to that. | 2:27 | |
| And he said, that would be good. | 2:29 | |
| And I said, well, I said | 2:30 | |
| because at that point, no, no court had ever | 2:31 | |
| said they were going to take jurisdiction over. | 2:33 | |
| What was going on at Guantanamo | 2:36 | |
| - | Do you think he had Guantanamo in his mind? | 2:38 |
| That's what you said | 2:39 | |
| - | I absolutely do. | 2:40 |
| I absolutely do. | 2:41 | |
| And everybody, the way I look at it is pretty much everybody | 2:42 | |
| in the Navy knows about Guantanamo | 2:45 | |
| but I think he did too. | 2:47 |
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