Padmanabhan, Vijay - short clip - MovingBeyondGuantanamosEarlyDays-review
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Transcript
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| - | One of the things that happened in the second term | 0:00 |
| of the Bush administration was it was a realization | 0:03 | |
| that there wasn't, that the first term had failed in terms | 0:05 | |
| of explaining to the world what's the legal framework. | 0:08 | |
| Why are we holding these people? | 0:11 | |
| Why do we think, why do we, why are there detainees | 0:12 | |
| at Guantanamo? | 0:15 | |
| What's the future of the policy? | 0:16 | |
| And so, during the second term, there was a real effort | 0:18 | |
| in the State Department and in the Defense Department | 0:21 | |
| to get our message across globally and use | 0:24 | |
| all of our public diplomacy officers stationed globally | 0:27 | |
| and surrogates to go out and explain to allies | 0:30 | |
| what it is we're doing and why we're doing it. | 0:33 | |
| Interviewer | - What, what was the message? | 0:36 |
| - | Well, the message is that, | 0:38 |
| and it's a message I feel very comfortable in | 0:39 | |
| and continue to share today, which is that, you know, | 0:41 | |
| when people talk about the problem of Guantanamo Bay, | 0:43 | |
| I think there are two very distinct issues | 0:47 | |
| that unfortunately got conflated. | 0:49 | |
| On one hand, there's the issue of treatment of detainees | 0:51 | |
| where there is very clear international law. | 0:54 | |
| And from publicly available reports, | 0:57 | |
| it appears that those standards | 0:59 | |
| that are set in international law and domestic law | 1:02 | |
| were exceeded at Guantanamo Bay. | 1:04 | |
| There were violations with respect to treatment. | 1:06 | |
| Now, by the time I was working on the policy in 2006, | 1:08 | |
| those treatment issues had actually already | 1:11 | |
| been resolved at Guantanamo. | 1:14 | |
| And, and so, what we were working on | 1:16 | |
| was a second set of issues | 1:18 | |
| which I think people conflated with the first set of issues | 1:20 | |
| which is: what do you do when you pick somebody up | 1:22 | |
| who you think has connections | 1:26 | |
| to an enemy organization with which you're at war | 1:27 | |
| like Al-Qaeda or the Taliban | 1:30 | |
| and the appropriateness of detaining those individuals | 1:33 | |
| as enemy combatants. | 1:36 | |
| And, I think that the frustration or difficulty is that | 1:37 | |
| people have conflated those two issues. They've said: | 1:41 | |
| Well, because we treated people badly at Guantanamo Bay, | 1:43 | |
| that must mean that holding them there at all is illegal. | 1:46 | |
| And a lot of what we would do is explain, in fact, | 1:49 | |
| that's actually not correct. | 1:51 | |
| That, you know, we can posit that there were some mistakes | 1:53 | |
| that were made with respect to treatment; | 1:57 | |
| but, at the same time, even taking that as true, | 1:58 | |
| it doesn't change the fact that a government | 2:01 | |
| has to deal with very dangerous people | 2:03 | |
| that are being picked up that intend to harm Americans. | 2:06 | |
| And, what do we do with those people? | 2:09 | |
| And, I think that, and as we go into the discussion, | 2:11 | |
| we'll talk a little bit more about the Obama administration, | 2:13 | |
| but I think that's a significant part | 2:15 | |
| of why Guantanamo is still open. | 2:16 | |
| Because there's a common shared understanding | 2:18 | |
| between President Bush and President Obama | 2:20 | |
| across Republican and Democratic administrations. | 2:22 | |
| And in Congress. | 2:25 | |
| That there is a need | 2:26 | |
| to be able to detain individuals indefinitely | 2:27 | |
| without criminal trial | 2:30 | |
| because of the threat that they pose. | 2:31 |
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