Shephard, Michelle - short clip - AnInternationalSymbol-newwm
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Transcript
Transcripts may contain inaccuracies.
| - | This is one of those things | 0:00 |
| that you have to keep yourself in check | 0:01 | |
| because you can become a real, you know, | 0:02 | |
| bore at dinner parties, I'm sure, | 0:04 | |
| lecturing about these issues. | 0:06 | |
| But I want to pull my hair out when people say, | 0:07 | |
| they think, Oh, didn't, you know, didn't Guantanamo close.. | 0:09 | |
| And I appreciate if you're not in the news business | 0:12 | |
| you're not keeping up on every twist, | 0:14 | |
| but it's a pretty big issue. | 0:16 | |
| And, you know, one of the unique things | 0:18 | |
| that I'm really lucky to have been able to do | 0:21 | |
| with, with the beat because it's a foreign beat. | 0:23 | |
| So while I'm based in Toronto, | 0:26 | |
| I get to go all over the world. | 0:27 | |
| One of the things I have seen as is Guantanamo's power | 0:29 | |
| around the world | 0:32 | |
| and definitely in Yemen, that was, I did some work there | 0:34 | |
| back in 2009. | 0:38 | |
| So this was before there was a ban | 0:40 | |
| to return Yemeni detainees | 0:42 | |
| that the Obama administration put in place | 0:44 | |
| and Guantanamo, the symbol was huge there. | 0:47 | |
| And so I was looking at the issue of, | 0:50 | |
| well, what do you do with these detainees | 0:52 | |
| that the Pentagon says are too dangerous to be released? | 0:54 | |
| And what I found was for every detainee | 0:57 | |
| who hadn't been released, there was their immediate family, | 1:01 | |
| then there was the extended family, | 1:05 | |
| then there was the tribe, then there was the town. | 1:06 | |
| All these people who are enraged about the detention | 1:09 | |
| that I thought any debate you have about returning | 1:13 | |
| these detainees, you've have to include that. | 1:15 | |
| That Guantanamo the symbol has this amazing ripple effect | 1:18 | |
| that might be more damaging, you know, years to come | 1:22 | |
| than the release of somebody who potentially is dangerous, | 1:25 | |
| could be monitored. | 1:29 | |
| And, and that's often a debate or a point that is dismissed | 1:31 | |
| but it's a re..., I've really seen that on the ground. | 1:36 | |
| It's a, it's a really powerful symbol. | 1:38 |
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