Lietzau, William - short clip - ConstantlyinaLittleBitofWar
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| - | I have a problem with staying at war | 0:00 |
| and not having law of war detention. | 0:04 | |
| I don't think that's a morally responsible position | 0:06 | |
| for a country to have. | 0:08 | |
| Then what you end up with is an incentive to kill. | 0:10 | |
| I mean, imagine you hand a rifle to a 19-year-old soldier, | 0:14 | |
| and say, "You, here's some marksmanship training. | 0:17 | |
| "We're at war. | 0:20 | |
| "You have legal authority to kill another human being. | 0:21 | |
| "You can also capture that human being | 0:25 | |
| "in some circumstances, | 0:27 | |
| "but if you capture them, | 0:29 | |
| "if you wanna continue detaining them, | 0:30 | |
| "you better have proof beyond a reasonable doubt | 0:31 | |
| "that they committed some crime in the past." | 0:33 | |
| Well, you've just incentivized killing, | 0:35 | |
| and it should disturb us all that with the drawdown of, | 0:38 | |
| we don't have any new people going to Guantanamo, | 0:44 | |
| but we have a clear uptick | 0:47 | |
| in the number of drone strikes, for instance. | 0:48 | |
| I think that disparity is something that should concern us. | 0:52 | |
| My biggest concern is not so much | 0:56 | |
| that we don't close Guantanamo fast enough. | 0:59 | |
| I totally get why we need to do that | 1:00 | |
| from a foreign relations perspective. | 1:03 | |
| I totally get why. | 1:06 | |
| More important, I think, | 1:07 | |
| is having principled, credible detaining policies | 1:08 | |
| wherever we detain people, | 1:10 | |
| and I think we have and are doing that, | 1:12 | |
| and I would like to talk about | 1:14 | |
| some of the accomplishments, I think, | 1:16 | |
| but I think where I'm most concerned | 1:17 | |
| is that we enter into a state of quasi-war that's perpetual. | 1:20 | |
| Not perpetual detention, | 1:24 | |
| indefinite detention is part of any war, | 1:26 | |
| but it ends with the end of the war. | 1:28 | |
| My concern is that we become too comfortable | 1:30 | |
| with the war we're fighting, | 1:32 | |
| by minimizing the number of people in Guantanamo, | 1:34 | |
| and the competent criticism of it. | 1:38 | |
| By reducing the number of drone strikes, | 1:41 | |
| but still having them. | 1:43 | |
| And then we enter a state | 1:45 | |
| where we're constantly in a little bit of war. | 1:46 | |
| Where we can do a very sanitized drone strike | 1:49 | |
| in a far-off location, | 1:52 | |
| we don't feel the concept that war is hell, | 1:54 | |
| war becomes a little more like purgatory instead of hell. | 1:57 | |
| And we become too comfortable with it. | 2:00 |
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