Vandeveld, Darrel - short clip - ReexaminingBasicBeliefs
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Transcript
Transcripts may contain inaccuracies.
| - | Jawad was a 16 year old Afghan. | 0:03 |
| What he was alleged to have done was throw a grenade | 0:06 | |
| into the back of a vehicle driven | 0:11 | |
| by a special forces soldier | 0:13 | |
| with another special forces soldier's passenger, | 0:16 | |
| and their Afghan interpreter, and he'd badly wounded them | 0:20 | |
| and had immediately been apprehended | 0:23 | |
| by the Afghan police and confessed. | 0:25 | |
| The perfect case to vindicate the commissions process. | 0:27 | |
| The military commissions act of 2006 and show America | 0:31 | |
| and the world that we were doing the right thing. | 0:35 | |
| But I made it a point because I sitting across from Jawad | 0:39 | |
| to glare at him, I was gonna to stare him down. | 0:41 | |
| Here's this kid, you know, and at the time | 0:45 | |
| I was 45 or whatever, you know. | 0:47 | |
| I look back at my behavior and I just am astonished | 0:52 | |
| that I could have been so brazen, | 0:57 | |
| so self-righteous and full of myself. | 1:01 | |
| And then something that has had a very dramatic impact | 1:05 | |
| on my life happened. | 1:09 | |
| And that is that a man named David Frakt, an Air Force | 1:10 | |
| Lieutenant Colonel reservist was assigned to the case. | 1:14 | |
| And I began to see that the arguments | 1:18 | |
| that he was making appealed to our highest aspirations | 1:21 | |
| not to be melodramatic about it | 1:25 | |
| but to what is right in an ethical sense. | 1:27 | |
| I began to re-examine my own basic beliefs. | 1:30 | |
| And I saw myself evolving. | 1:33 | |
| I became like someone who had been wearing a mask | 1:37 | |
| and suddenly I took it off. | 1:41 | |
| and there staring me in the mirror was not Darrel Vandeveld, | 1:43 | |
| this hard-charging soldier who was going to | 1:46 | |
| single-handedly win the war on terrorism. | 1:48 | |
| But somebody possessed of humanity who could extend | 1:52 | |
| that humanity to, yeah. | 1:55 | |
| Even someone who is an enemy, a dirty little terrorist | 1:58 | |
| from a dirty little crappy foreign land, you know, | 2:02 | |
| land that's a pile of rocks. | 2:05 | |
| I began to re-examine all the cases that I was handling. | 2:08 | |
| And I began more than that to re-examine what we're doing | 2:12 | |
| as a country with Guantanamo. | 2:15 |
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