Wilner, Tom - short clip - GuantanamoTooPoliticalForMediaCoverage
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| - | Our strategy isn't on like, | 0:00 |
| I fought government policies before, | 0:03 | |
| it was a three-pronged policy or strategy. | 0:04 | |
| We went to the courts, | 0:08 | |
| but I always knew the courts would take a long time, | 0:10 | |
| So I didn't think that's where we'd get our relief. | 0:12 | |
| I thought we'd have the government change its mind. | 0:14 | |
| So the courts were one pressure point. | 0:16 | |
| The other was | 0:18 | |
| Press, because | 0:19 | |
| these people we're not being tried in court, | 0:21 | |
| they had no way, | 0:24 | |
| they were really being tried in the press. | 0:25 | |
| Everybody in the government saying these are | 0:27 | |
| the worst of the worst, these are horrible people. | 0:28 | |
| We had to get the other side out to the press to say | 0:31 | |
| there's another side to this. | 0:33 | |
| That was one. | 0:35 | |
| And the other was diplomatic. | 0:36 | |
| To try and apply diplomatic pressure. | 0:38 | |
| Well, I found on the diplomatic pressure | 0:40 | |
| it was very tough. | 0:43 | |
| The press was a fascinating sort of story. | 0:44 | |
| And getting | 0:49 | |
| to this day, | 0:50 | |
| to this day | 0:52 | |
| the public doesn't know about Guantanamo. | 0:53 | |
| You can blame that now on the Obama administration, | 0:56 | |
| I can't speak out anymore, nobody listens. | 0:59 | |
| But there was a set of facts out there. | 1:01 | |
| These are the worst of the worst to try to chip away | 1:04 | |
| at that was very tough. | 1:06 | |
| Remember what turn against the war public opinion | 1:08 | |
| against the war in Vietnam, | 1:12 | |
| it was that general shooting the guy and they said one | 1:13 | |
| picture is worth so many things. | 1:15 | |
| I still believe | 1:18 | |
| that the American people, | 1:19 | |
| if you get the facts before them | 1:20 | |
| have a great sense of fairness. | 1:22 | |
| But if they think you're holding all horrible | 1:24 | |
| murderers and killers in some way you can't do it. | 1:26 | |
| So that was tough. | 1:28 | |
| That was a continual fight. | 1:29 | |
| Eventually, 60 minutes did a piece on this, | 1:31 | |
| right about the time of Rasul, 60 minutes two. | 1:34 | |
| But early on, | 1:38 | |
| I was in contact with a producer of 60 minutes | 1:40 | |
| about it to say, here's the story about this | 1:43 | |
| based on the government article and thing, | 1:45 | |
| you need to do a story about this. | 1:47 | |
| She wanted to do a story, she was a producer there. | 1:49 | |
| She called me back and we went through the whole thing. | 1:53 | |
| She said, the network has killed it. | 1:56 | |
| It's too political. | 1:58 | |
| Too political. | 2:00 | |
| As issue of a fair hearings for captives. | 2:00 | |
| So the news media backed off | 2:04 | |
| and it was always extraordinary to me. | 2:08 | |
| You'd have one good article, like, Roy Gutman's | 2:10 | |
| Jane Marrow later on some other things, | 2:14 | |
| and then it would just sort of drop and | 2:18 | |
| and the next person wouldn't even know | 2:21 | |
| about the prior things. | 2:22 | |
| We could get no traction. | 2:23 |
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