Prosper, Pierre-Richard - short clip - NoOneWantstoMaketheCall
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| - | It was hard to tell who you had. | 0:00 |
| Because you had people who, | 0:02 | |
| what we knew is they were on the battlefield. | 0:04 | |
| They were fighting, they were fighting back. | 0:07 | |
| They had no or minimal pocket litter, no identification. | 0:10 | |
| And when we would confront them, | 0:14 | |
| they would mislead, misrepresent, lie, whatever it may be. | 0:16 | |
| You know, whether they're innocent or not, you know, | 0:22 | |
| is a different story. | 0:24 | |
| But that, that's what would happen. | 0:24 | |
| So you have to look at the, the, the, the mindset of, | 0:26 | |
| of we, as, as Americans, 911 is only a few months away. | 0:29 | |
| The tower is still burning, anthrax attacks, shoe bomber. | 0:34 | |
| You know, it was right around Christmas time. | 0:40 | |
| You have all these things happening. | 0:42 | |
| And then you have these, | 0:43 | |
| and then we're still getting threats. | 0:44 | |
| Remember, bin Laden was putting out videos | 0:46 | |
| celebrating the attack and saying more is coming. | 0:48 | |
| And you have the, all of a sudden | 0:50 | |
| you have these people that were, that were there fighting, | 0:51 | |
| or they're in a battlefield. | 0:55 | |
| And what are you going to assume? | 0:56 | |
| But you have to ask yourself this question. | 0:59 | |
| Particularly when you're dealing with a European. | 1:01 | |
| You know we had 10 Brits, seven French, | 1:04 | |
| couple, you know a couple of Belgians, some Danes, | 1:07 | |
| some Swedes, some Spaniards, you know, the list goes on. | 1:10 | |
| What are they doing in Afghanistan in 2001? | 1:14 | |
| What, what are they doing there in October, November, | 1:20 | |
| December of 2001? | 1:22 | |
| Other than to be part of the, to be part of the conflict. | 1:24 | |
| So that, that's part of the mindset. | 1:29 | |
| So you realize that they, they are there. | 1:31 | |
| They're jihadists. | 1:34 | |
| They're, they're there to fight. | 1:35 | |
| You know? | 1:39 | |
| So then when you get them, | 1:40 | |
| and you start, and you start getting this visual, | 1:41 | |
| of course, you're assuming, you're assuming the worst. | 1:43 | |
| They're the worst of the worst. | 1:46 | |
| Now, ultimately, when we start vetting some of these people, | 1:47 | |
| you start realizing that there's a generalization. | 1:53 | |
| But if you're the 18, 19 year old kid | 1:57 | |
| and you've just got into a firefight with a house, | 2:00 | |
| and your colleagues been killed, | 2:03 | |
| and you walk in, you capture 10 people. | 2:06 | |
| Are you going to sit there? | 2:09 | |
| "Are you the cook or the driver?" | 2:10 | |
| No, you're going to say, look, | 2:13 | |
| "All of you are coming." | 2:15 | |
| "I'm bringing you to Bagram." | 2:17 | |
| "Let them figure it out." | 2:19 | |
| "All I know is this house, they're shooting at me." | 2:20 | |
| "You know, there's, there's, they're, | 2:23 | |
| "they're terrorists or whatever, Taliban in there." | 2:25 | |
| "You know, you're all being detained." | 2:28 | |
| Bagram was supposed to be a vetting place. | 2:31 | |
| They were supposed to be vetted. | 2:34 | |
| And those that didn't need to be detained were to be let go, | 2:35 | |
| and the bad ones to go to Guantanamo. | 2:39 | |
| But you can see what would happen. | 2:42 | |
| Is just that people, they'd reach their capacity and like | 2:43 | |
| "I'm not going to make this call." | 2:46 | |
| You know, "I'm not going to say, I'm 22 years old." | 2:48 | |
| "I'm not going to put my name on the line and say, | 2:53 | |
| this guy is a cook." | 2:55 | |
| "And all of a sudden it's bin Laden's Lieutenant." | 2:56 | |
| You know? | 3:00 | |
| Boom, they go to Guantanamo. | 3:02 | |
| And then ultimately you're getting into the White House, | 3:04 | |
| the Situation Room where we would sit | 3:07 | |
| with the President and others. | 3:08 | |
| And we're sitting like, we've got to make a call. | 3:10 | |
| You've, you've got to make a call. | 3:13 | |
| You know, this person is, is on the fence. | 3:16 | |
| So that's when we came up with the triage | 3:19 | |
| of low, mid-level, and high-level threat people. | 3:22 | |
| The low level, of course, let them go. | 3:27 | |
| We came up with policy for mid-level people | 3:31 | |
| that we said, they still pose a threat. | 3:33 | |
| They need to be detained, investigated or prosecuted, | 3:36 | |
| but we the United States do not have to do it. | 3:39 | |
| And that's when the whole transfer policy began. | 3:42 |
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