Wolosky, Lee - short clip - ConvincingCountriestoTakeDetainees
Loading the media player...
Transcript
Transcripts may contain inaccuracies.
- | You know, it wasn't always the easiest job | 0:03 |
to get foreign countries to take in people | 0:05 | |
who were labeled as terrorists, you know, | 0:08 | |
and labels are very potent. | 0:12 | |
And in fact a lot of the people | 0:15 | |
who we had detained | 0:18 | |
when I took my job were hardly hardcore terrorists. | 0:22 | |
They were in many cases, you know | 0:27 | |
people who were, you know | 0:30 | |
in Yemen one day, 19, 20 years old, or even younger. | 0:32 | |
And someone told them that if they went to Afghanistan | 0:37 | |
and this is all pre 9/11, | 0:41 | |
very few people who we had in Guantanamo | 0:43 | |
who were detained after, who went to Afghanistan | 0:47 | |
after 9/11, these are the low level people. | 0:52 | |
They generally ended up there | 0:56 | |
either because of religious conviction | 0:58 | |
or because of economic conviction, you know | 1:02 | |
they have no economic prospects in Yemen. | 1:04 | |
So they were told that if they went to Afghanistan | 1:06 | |
the Taliban would pay them, you know | 1:09 | |
a couple of hundred bucks and you can get a wife too. | 1:11 | |
So, you know, for a lot of people, | 1:14 | |
the attraction to end up in Afghanistan | 1:16 | |
was economic lack of prospects. | 1:20 | |
In some cases it was to make common cause with Taliban, | 1:27 | |
in very few cases it was actually | 1:30 | |
to take up arms against the United States. | 1:32 | |
Because as I said, a lot of these people who I ended | 1:34 | |
up helping to get out, almost all of them, | 1:38 | |
maybe all of them were people who went | 1:43 | |
to Afghanistan before the 9/11 attacks. | 1:46 | |
So I think that you asked about how to, | 1:49 | |
you know, the challenges and so the challenge | 1:53 | |
is explaining all that, when all that | 1:57 | |
our foreign partners might be reading about in the paper | 2:01 | |
is how Obama is releasing terrorists. | 2:05 | |
Now, some people who I talked to on the Hill | 2:08 | |
actually believe that if you went | 2:11 | |
and did exactly what I just said, | 2:13 | |
you went and you went to Afghanistan pre 9/11, and you pass | 2:15 | |
through an Al Qaeda training camp that you were a terrorist | 2:19 | |
and you were always going to be a terrorist. | 2:22 | |
And I understand that position | 2:24 | |
but then the question is, okay | 2:26 | |
if this person really never did much of anything | 2:29 | |
except pass through a training camp when he was 18 | 2:31 | |
does that mean he needs to be held in US custody | 2:36 | |
for decades without charging him with any crime? | 2:39 | |
And so these are the discussions that we had | 2:42 | |
with our foreign partners. | 2:45 | |
And, you know, it's always good to actually talk | 2:46 | |
about specific cases, you know, specific individuals | 2:48 | |
not just label everyone. | 2:51 | |
Oh, those are the baddest dudes. | 2:53 | |
You know, you know, they're a bunch | 2:55 | |
of terrorists, you know, there are some terrorists there | 2:57 | |
and there's some dangerous people. | 2:59 | |
And the Obama administration was never going to | 3:01 | |
release people who we thought fit into that category. | 3:03 | |
Then there were a lot of people who fit | 3:06 | |
into the category that I'm talking about | 3:08 | |
and it's in those people | 3:10 | |
where you really have to, you know, engage. | 3:12 | |
And I tried to do this consistently | 3:14 | |
with members of Congress. | 3:16 | |
I tried to do it with our foreign partners and say, okay | 3:17 | |
I know what you're reading. | 3:20 | |
I know what you're being told | 3:21 | |
but let's talk about a particular individual. | 3:23 |
Item Info
The preservation of the Duke University Libraries Digital Collections and the Duke Digital Repository programs are supported in part by the Lowell and Eileen Aptman Digital Preservation Fund