Wilner, Tom - short clip - WhatHappenedWithObama
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| - | It's more difficult for me now than it was | 0:00 |
| in the Bush administration, | 0:03 | |
| because I saw something that we could fight clearly. | 0:05 | |
| And, you know, I felt it was a struggle | 0:10 | |
| and it would be over. | 0:12 | |
| I don't understand what's happened | 0:14 | |
| to the Obama administration. | 0:16 | |
| I mean, I can speculate, but I supported Obama early. | 0:17 | |
| And the reason I did was he was so firm | 0:22 | |
| in support of Habeas Corpus. | 0:27 | |
| You know, I, I also was very involved. | 0:29 | |
| Some would say led the fight in Congress on Habeas Corpus. | 0:33 | |
| And I was extraordinarily impressed by him. | 0:36 | |
| I met with him and some other lawyers from Chicago | 0:39 | |
| in his office and Obama looked at us and he said | 0:43 | |
| "This is wrong." | 0:45 | |
| "I'm your guy, I will work with you." | 0:48 | |
| "You can use my office as the lobby. | 0:49 | |
| And we did. | 0:52 | |
| He was absolutely behind us through the campaign. | 0:53 | |
| You know, as I said, I'm friendly with Tony Lake | 0:57 | |
| who was a chief foreign policy advisor. | 0:59 | |
| I wrote policy papers on Guantanamo, on detainee treatment. | 1:02 | |
| They adopted them all. | 1:07 | |
| I mean, he, the some of the lines | 1:08 | |
| that you'll see Obama made, | 1:10 | |
| you'll see from our briefs. | 1:12 | |
| You know, this line that we're different from other nations. | 1:14 | |
| We believe in, you know, these things, | 1:16 | |
| right from the initial briefs. | 1:19 | |
| The idea that we are stronger because of our principles. | 1:21 | |
| We sacrifice our principles, or, you know | 1:24 | |
| we sacrifice our strength in what we believe in. | 1:26 | |
| The idea of yes, we stand up for Habeas Corpus. | 1:30 | |
| The extraordinary thing to me is | 1:33 | |
| I think Obama believed in those things, | 1:35 | |
| probably does believe in them. | 1:38 | |
| The extraordinary thing is usually in campaigns, | 1:40 | |
| people are wimpy, | 1:43 | |
| and then they do things after the campaign. | 1:44 | |
| He was strong in the campaigns and won on those things, | 1:45 | |
| and now he's abandoned them. | 1:48 | |
| I mean, I can blame it on Rahm Emanuel, | 1:50 | |
| who, who has said, I mean, Greg Craig tells the story, | 1:52 | |
| that Rahm Emanuel said, | 1:57 | |
| "I have to bring down two 747s, | 1:59 | |
| "healthcare and the war in Afghanistan." | 2:02 | |
| "And Guantanamo and those things | 2:05 | |
| "are like a flock of geese that get in the way." | 2:06 | |
| "I'm not going to pass for those." | 2:09 | |
| You know, that's the view. | 2:11 | |
| That's in my view, little, small thinking. | 2:14 | |
| It's not that, you know, | 2:18 | |
| we're radical liberals on everything, or left wingers. | 2:18 | |
| But he was out to regenerate this country | 2:24 | |
| and what was wrong with it. | 2:28 | |
| This was an essential part of it. | 2:29 | |
| And I think he's given, it's so. | 2:30 | |
| It's stupid really, because he knows | 2:33 | |
| as a matter of foreign policy, | 2:36 | |
| Guantanamo continues to this day | 2:37 | |
| to hurt us very badly abroad, | 2:40 | |
| but he's boxed himself in now. | 2:42 | |
| He can't close it because he's given way | 2:43 | |
| to this Republican right, to compromise on other issues. | 2:46 | |
| So he's caught. | 2:49 | |
| I mean, you know, I'll give you another example. | 2:51 | |
| I mean, on day one they announced the closing of Guantanamo. | 2:52 | |
| Dick Cheney went to the airwaves. | 2:58 | |
| Do you remember right away? | 3:00 | |
| And he said, "This is crazy." | 3:01 | |
| "This is jeopardizing our security." | 3:02 | |
| "The people at Guantanamo, those remaining, | 3:04 | |
| "are the worst of the worst." | 3:06 | |
| "They're all trained killers." | 3:07 | |
| Now, nobody said anything. | 3:09 | |
| By the time, at the time Cheney left office, | 3:12 | |
| 60 of the people at Guantanamo had already been cleared | 3:15 | |
| by his administration as innocent people wronging out. | 3:18 | |
| Since that time, there had been what, | 3:22 | |
| now there are about 50 habeas cases | 3:23 | |
| 80%, the court said these people are innocent. | 3:25 | |
| Nobody said that publicly. | 3:28 | |
| I, you know, I tried to say it or tried to publish letters. | 3:30 | |
| Nobody said it. | 3:33 | |
| So as a result by leaving the airwaves free, | 3:35 | |
| by ceding the the facts to Cheney, | 3:38 | |
| people started believing it. | 3:42 | |
| Nobody took it on. | 3:45 | |
| And as a result now, you know | 3:47 | |
| the majority is not for closing Guantanamo. | 3:48 | |
| So we're boxed in and was. | 3:50 | |
| I don't know what the hell happened. | 3:52 |
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