Padmanabhan, Vijay - short clip - DetaineeIdentificationProblems-review
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Transcript
Transcripts may contain inaccuracies.
| - | I think that the administration may have | 0:00 |
| been on solid ground in sort of generally deciding | 0:01 | |
| that this group of people | 0:05 | |
| are unlawful enemy combatants; | 0:06 | |
| 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, they target civilians. | 0:13 | |
| They do things that we don't think | 0:16 | |
| of lawful combatants as doing, right? | 0:17 | |
| But, | 0:20 | |
| so I don't think that was the problem. | 0:21 | |
| I don't think it was that there was more process | 0:23 | |
| that was needed to distinguish | 0:24 | |
| between lawful and unlawful combatants. | 0:25 | |
| And the problem was, | 0:27 | |
| some were not combatants, | 0:28 | |
| and some were combatants. | 0:30 | |
| And so we had to figure out, | 0:31 | |
| who are the people here that actually took up arms, | 0:32 | |
| and were fighting, or organizing, financing for Al-Qaeda, | 0:34 | |
| whatever it was that these people were up to, | 0:37 | |
| and who were people | 0:39 | |
| who were 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. | 0:45 | |
| And two, once we made the decision | 0:46 | |
| not to grant them POW status, | 0:48 | |
| which I think is legally defensible, | 0:50 | |
| but it has a pernicious policy effect, | 0:52 | |
| which is that these people aren't going to say, | 0:54 | |
| admit, "I'm a combatant." | 0:57 | |
| Now, traditionally part of the reason | 0:58 | |
| why there's no identification problem | 1:00 | |
| is because people say "I'm a combatant!" | 1:02 | |
| because they want to get the POW privilege | 1:04 | |
| and they don't want to be prosecuted | 1:06 | |
| for shooting on the battlefield. | 1:08 | |
| We're not giving these people POW privileges, | 1:10 | |
| their incentive to be honest | 1:12 | |
| about who they are is reduced. | 1:14 | |
| So everybody says "I was a farmer." | 1:17 | |
| "I was a sheep herder, I was..." | 1:19 | |
| You know, they're now all gonna say that, right? | 1:20 | |
| And so we have to have a process | 1:22 | |
| to be able to determine | 1:24 | |
| who was really the sheep herder, | 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 blow 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 | |
| was subsequently, was involved in the cartridge bomber, | 1:53 | |
| cartridge printer bomber plot, | 1:56 | |
| 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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