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Speaker 1

00:00

-♪ ♪ -♪ ♪ President Obama, a man so close to being able to smoke again, he can almost taste those cameras. -♪♪ Now, his time in office is almost done, and while he's achieved a great many things, tonight we're gonna look at 1 of his inarguable failures.

Speaker 2

00:20

I have ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed by early next year. Make no mistake, we will close Guantanamo Prison. I still want to close Guantanamo.

Speaker 2

00:30

As president, I have tried to close Gitmo. I will continue to push to close Gitmo. It's time to close Gitmo. Today, the department is submitting to Congress our plan for finally closing the facility at Guantanamo once and for all.

Speaker 1

00:42

Yes, Guantanamo Bay. It's Obama's 1 that got away, which is a little odd, considering it's a place where literally no 1 can get away. So, why has the president been unable to close Gitmo?

Speaker 1

00:54

Well, for a start, most people don't want him to. According to a recent poll, 52% of Americans believe it should remain open. And there are others who believe we should actually be using it more.

Speaker 3

01:05

In my opinion, the only problem with Guantanamo Bay is there are too many empty beds and cells there right now. We should be sending more terrorists there for further interrogation to keep this country safe. As far as I'm concerned, every last 1 of them can rot in hell.

Speaker 3

01:18

But as long as they don't do that, then they can rot in Guantanamo Bay.

Speaker 1

01:22

Now, he's basically saying there, let's use Guantanamo Bay like hell's waiting room. And that is problematic for 2 reasons. First, it's arguably unconstitutional.

Speaker 1

01:32

And second, hell's waiting room is already the slogan of Henry Kissinger's bedroom. That's a fact. That's just a fact. And look, I can see, I can see the reasons that Guantanamo is appealing.

Speaker 1

01:43

You get to keep potentially dangerous people locked up and far away. But tonight, I would like to argue that there are even better reasons for closing it forever. And let's just start with the practical ones. It's very expensive.

Speaker 1

01:56

Guantanamo cost 445 million dollars to run last year, which means we're currently spending over 7000000 dollars per prisoner per year. But the costs obviously go way beyond that. Last year, a UN Human Rights Council conducted a review of the U.S. And Gitmo was something of a feature.

Speaker 4

02:14

Iceland recommends the closure of the Guantanamo prison. And illegal detentions in Guantanamo Bay.

Speaker 5

02:19

Immediately close the Guantanamo Bay facility.

Speaker 6

02:21

And do all it's best in order to close down the Guantanamo, facilities.

Speaker 5

02:27

Improve living condition in prisoners, in particular, in Guantanamo. Investigate torture, allegation, extrajudicial execution and other violations of human rights committed in Guantanamo.

Speaker 1

02:38

Yeah, you heard right. That is Iran, Sudan, Libya, and others lecturing us about human rights abuses. Which is, yeah, a little hypocritical.

Speaker 1

02:47

Maybe don't tell us to eat healthy when you have a fucking Whopperito in your mouth. But, but, it does seem like this is 1 of the few things the entire world agrees on. It's basically, Guantanamo is fucked up, And yeah, you know what? Kevin can wait.

Speaker 1

03:03

Yeah. He can. Let the man wait. So, how did we get here?

Speaker 1

03:10

Well, Guantanamo's origins are basically a series of weird circumstances and ad hoc decisions. For a start, we don't own it, it's a rental. In 1903, we struck a deal with Cuba to lease the land for a naval base. And ever since, we have mailed them a cheque every year for $4,085 in rent.

Speaker 1

03:28

Although, as Fidel Castro once told a film crew, they've just been accumulating in his desk.

Speaker 7

03:34

¿Quiere decir que estos cheques del gobierno norteamericano...

Speaker 6

03:37

Sí, estos son cheques...

Speaker 7

03:39

¿Son por la renta de Guantanamo?

Speaker 8

03:41

Sí, por Guantanamo.

Speaker 1

03:43

Just think about that. We've barely been talking to Cuba, we disagree with their politics, and yet every year we send them checks for hilariously small amounts of money. We're basically Cuba's grandparents.

Speaker 1

03:56

And this... This unique arrangement means that Guantanamo is legally both America and not America. Or as 1 White House official once called it, the legal equivalent of outer space. Which is a bit of an exaggeration, to be honest.

Speaker 1

04:12

Some laws do apply up in space. There's the law of physics, for example. And the law of attraction. Yes, of course, you didn't really think Neil and Buzz did not fuck on the moon, right?

Speaker 1

04:24

Oh, they moon-fucked! They moon-fucked, my friends! They moon-fucked good! Deal with it!

Speaker 1

04:31

Deal with that! And this legal limbo has been useful to us in the past. George H.W. Bush used Guantanamo to involuntarily detain Haitian refugees seeking asylum.

Speaker 1

04:43

And Bill Clinton not only continued that for a while, he later used it to hold Cuban refugees. So the use of Gitmo to store people was 1 of those dicey legal workarounds in the 90s. It was right up there with Vanilla Ice's explanation of why he didn't rip off Queen.

Speaker 9

04:58

It's not the same bass line. Like it goes... Ding, ding, ding, digga-ding, ding.

Speaker 9

05:04

Ding, ding, ding, digga-ding, ding. Ding, ding, ding, di... That's the way theirs goes. Ours goes...

Speaker 9

05:08

Ding, ding, ding, digga-ding, ding. Ding, ding, ding, ding, digga-ding, ding.

Speaker 1

05:12

That makes sense. You've got a rock-solid case there, Vanilla. No problem there.

Speaker 1

05:20

Now, stashing those refugees at Gitmo attracted significant criticism at the time. But when the war on terror began, we started doing the exact same thing with terror suspects, even though right from the start, Donald Rumsfeld admitted it was far from the perfect solution.

Speaker 5

05:36

Mr. Secretary,

Speaker 10

05:36

we've been into trouble every time we've tried to use Guantanamo Bay in the past, to hold people for other reasons. Why use it? Why is it the best place?

Speaker 11

05:45

I would characterize Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as the least worst place we could have selected.

Speaker 1

05:52

The least worst place. That is a rousing endorsement from the worst, worst Secretary of Defense of all time. But there was an obvious problem with using Guantanamo in the war on terror.

Speaker 1

06:06

And people were pointing it out at the time.

Speaker 12

06:09

How do you avoid the prospect of the U.S. Military, in fact, being jailers

Speaker 10

06:15

for an indeterminate period of time of people who have not been charged.

Speaker 12

06:18

What are you gonna do about it?

Speaker 11

06:20

It is certainly not the first choice of the Department of Defense to be in the business of detaining people for long periods of time.

Speaker 1

06:29

Yeah, It might not have been his first choice, but it was inevitable. Because a war on terror isn't a traditional war where there's an exchange of prisoners at the end. We were never going to accept a formal surrender from the president of terror, who I can only assume is Willem Dafoe.

Speaker 1

06:46

And... And now, that brings us to here. Here, right now, nearly a decade and a half later, and we're all so accustomed to the very existence of Guantanamo, that news crews tour it like it's a million-dollar listing.

Speaker 13

07:00

This is a typical cell in Camp 5. It meets all American Correctional Association standards. This is about 95 square feet of living space with about 80 feet of unencumbered space.

Speaker 14

07:11

1 of the other amenities available to the detainees is a library of books, magazines and video games.

Speaker 8

07:17

The book that we have the most in different languages would be the Harry Potter series.

Speaker 14

07:21

Inmates are also given art classes, the results of which are on display.

Speaker 1

07:25

He's making it sound like the world's least Jewish summer camp. Who's doing birthright next year? Nobody is.

Speaker 1

07:35

Although, even the current luxuries the prisoners get tend to carry a chilling reminder of where they are.

Speaker 14

07:41

All prisoners use toiletries which happen to have the brand name maximum security.

Speaker 1

07:46

Oh, come on! A prison calling its deodorant maximum security is a little on the nose. It'd be like a holiday Inn Express calling its complimentary lotion tearful masturbation.

Speaker 1

07:58

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Speaker 5

07:58

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Speaker 1

07:59

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Speaker 5

08:01

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Speaker 1

08:02

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Speaker 5

08:02

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Speaker 15

08:03

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Speaker 1

08:05

♪ -♪

Speaker 15

08:05

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Speaker 1

08:08

♪ -♪

Speaker 5

08:08

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Speaker 1

08:09

♪ That hit home a little too close to some of you. And before you think that those library books provided an escape for the inmates, just listen to Shokha Amar, who was released last October after being held without charge for nearly 14 years. He found 1 particular book less an escape and more a reminder of where he was.

Speaker 7

08:29

You know, they got an island in Harry Potter, it says Azbakan, where there's no happiness. They, you know, they just suck all your feelings out of you. And you don't have no feeling anymore.

Speaker 7

08:43

And truly, that's why I felt all the time, is this is Azbakan, this is not from this world, you know, because that's what they tried. You know? They want to make you feelingless.

Speaker 1

08:54

Wow. That is the saddest allusion to Harry Potter I have ever heard. And I say that as a man who is often described as Harry Potter if he aged like a president. And...

Speaker 1

09:07

And that's the point here. No amount of sugarcoating can cover up the reality of what we have done at Guantanamo Bay. Because in the early years, interrogation techniques included physical beatings, short shackling, where a prisoner's arms and legs are shackled together for long periods, and hours and sometimes days of repeated loud music, which is horrendous. Although sometimes, that last technique backfired, because that same Harry Potter-loving inmate grew up loving American rock music and would annoy the guards by singing along.

Speaker 1

09:37

And just listen to him describe the 1 song that gave him the most consolation.

Speaker 7

09:41

I mean, I'm sure everybody would laugh on here because I used to sing it a lot. Because the words, I thought the words fits me. The words makes me feel like, yeah, it's me again.

Speaker 7

09:51

Which is a white snake. It's here I go again. The words goes, here I go again on my own, going down the only road I never known. Like a drifter, I was born to walk alone.

Speaker 7

10:05

Because I know what it means to walk alone in only street of dreams. And here I go again. And it's true, because it's just dreams. Dreams that I will be home 1 day.

Speaker 7

10:16

Dreams that I will be free. Dreams that a containment will be closed.

Speaker 1

10:21

You know you are miserable when you are finding solace in a fucking white snake song. That is a group whose second most inspirational lyrics are probably, ♪ I know you ain't a bad girl, honey, no matter what the neighbors say. It's just you wear those skin-tight dresses with your G-string tuned to A.

Speaker 1

10:41

--Pure poetry. --Purist poetry. But we justified Gitmo and everything we did inside it because we were constantly reminded of 1 thing.

Speaker 4

10:51

These are not mere innocents. These are among the worst of the worst.

Speaker 8

10:55

They are bad guys. These are the worst of the worst.

Speaker 16

10:57

These are the people who are the bomb makers. The bodyguards of Osama bin Laden. The financers, the plotters, the people who have, been sent out to be assassins, to be suicide bombers.

Speaker 16

11:11

These are the worst of the worst.

Speaker 1

11:14

Now, The worst of the worst is a big claim. I can think of at least 1 person who fits that category and who is not in there, and that's because apparently, he still is working for the Today Show. But...

Speaker 1

11:25

Who knows? But while some detainees... Some detainees like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed have clearly earned that title. Others have not.

Speaker 1

11:34

Because think about it, if they were really all so terrible, it's a little shocking that we've released 710 detainees over the years. And leaked documents have since revealed that out of 212 Afghans who were there, almost half were in the assessments of U.S. Forces, either entirely innocent, mere Taliban conscripts, or had been transferred to Guantanamo with no reason for doing so on file. And some of the evidence against detainees was surprisingly flimsy.

Speaker 10

12:02

1, I guess, piece of evidence that they would use to determine, I thought this was fascinating, Casio watches.

Speaker 4

12:07

Well, it's kind of a little bit arbitrary, but anybody who was wearing this particular brand of Casio watch, which was handed out by Al-Qaeda to their fighters because it was used as a timer for setting off devices. So anybody who happened to have this very popular watch on was immediately picked up, and a lot of them ended up in Guantanamo Bay.

Speaker 1

12:27

That's true. If someone was caught wearing this Casio watch, that could be used as crucial evidence. And incidentally, that makes this the only time in history anyone has actively sought out a man wearing a Casio watch.

Speaker 1

12:42

And look, this is not to say that everyone in Guantanamo is or was innocent. And there is justifiable concern that whenever we release someone, they might go on to fight against us. In fact, the government claims that nearly 6 percent of those released under President Obama have been confirmed to have re-engaged in insurgent or terrorist activities, and for those released by the Bush administration, it's been 21 percent. And while some argue those numbers are inflated, even if they are, they are not 0.

Speaker 1

13:10

And that is why politicians like Dick Cheney have taken a hard-line position that we should not let anyone go.

Speaker 17

13:17

I'm more concerned with bad guys who got out and were leased than I am with a few, that, in fact were innocent.

Speaker 16

13:24

You're okay with that margin for error?

Speaker 17

13:25

I have no problem as long as we achieve our objective.

Speaker 1

13:29

Yeah, But that is not reassuring. The only objectives Dick Cheney has ever achieved have been somehow serving as president unofficially, and managing to exist without the need for a working heart. So...

Speaker 1

13:42

So, there are clearly sharp divisions about what we should do with the remaining population. And you should know, there's actually not that many left. There are currently just 61 detainees down there. That's less than the number of people in our audience right now.

Speaker 1

13:56

Some of whom are arguably worse people than some of the detainees at Gimel. They know it. They know it. Deep down, they know it.

Speaker 15

14:06

And... And...

Speaker 1

14:09

It's an odd thing to clap. And... And you might think, well, why doesn't the president just put them on trial, figure out which ones are guilty, and then he can decide whether or not to close it.

Speaker 1

14:20

Well, it's just not that simple. Because the 61 detainees fall into 3 groups. 10 of them, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, are having their cases handled by a military commission. That is a legal process that we've basically invented from scratch, and it's so flawed that of its 8 convictions so far, 4 have been fully reversed on appeal.

Speaker 1

14:38

Now, another 20 of them are actually slated for release, but are waiting for the State Department, the intelligence agencies, and the Department of Defense to agree on a country to send them to. And that leaves us with the trickiest group, the remaining 31 detainees who have not been charged with a crime, but who are also not cleared to be released. And they are the real problem here. Because even the president doesn't quite know what to do with them.

Speaker 2

15:03

There's gonna be a certain irreducible number that are gonna be really hard cases, because, you know, we know they've done something wrong and they are still dangerous, but It's difficult to mount the evidence in a traditional Article III court, so we're gonna have to wrestle with that.

Speaker 1

15:19

Now, think about what he just said. That is the president, a man who has taught constitutional law, suggesting that for some detainees, there is no clear path toward a trial or an exit. Now, it's a group that the administration has called the Irreducible Minimum, which sounds like the name of a band that was going to call itself Absolute 0, but got into a fight about it with their pretentious theremin player.

Speaker 1

15:40

-♪ Theremin music playing ♪ -And if you're wondering why the president says it's difficult to mount the evidence, What he means there is, in some cases, there's not enough of it, and in others, it was obtained through torture. And there is a good reason that that is inadmissible, because people often say anything to make torture stop. If you gave me a purple nurple for just 10 seconds, I would look you in the eye and swear that my favorite cereal is Grape Nuts. And I'm fairly sure that that cereal's original name was, Good Morning, Idiot, Eat Some Cat Litter.

Speaker 1

16:13

So, The point is, how does the president, who has spent nearly a decade promising to close Gitmo, plan to do that? Well, it turns out it all depends on what your definition of the word close is.

Speaker 18

16:28

Closing Guantanamo at this stage, in the Obama administration view, is really moving Guantanamo to U.S. Soil. The idea is to pick up the last detainees and move them to military detention in the United States.

Speaker 18

16:42

What we call Guantanamo North.

Speaker 1

16:45

Yes, Guantanamo North. Or as I'm sure it will be called once they build a Whole Foods there, Gitmo No. And look, moving Guantanamo is not closing it.

Speaker 1

16:56

But even that is not going to happen. There's been relentless congressional opposition to moving any detainees to U.S. Soil. And the people in charge of Gitmo seem to be settling in for the long haul.

Speaker 1

17:06

And the reason we know that is because a legal document from last month showed the commander, the current commander there, proposes renovating their infirmary as it will be beneficial to the continued care of the aging population. So there might well be detainees that we scooped up as young men who we think are guilty, but who will never get a trial, and they will be there until they die. And at this point, we all have to ask ourselves, are we okay with that? And remember, it does seem that more than half of us are.

Speaker 1

17:36

But I would argue that any potential risk in putting detainees on trial, losing that case, and having to release them is worth it for a few important reasons. First, as it stands, we are ceding so much moral high ground that Vladimir Putin feels comfortable saying things like this.

Speaker 19

17:54

They once said that they would close Guantanamo. And what? Is it closed?

Speaker 19

17:59

No. Today, there's still people there walking in shackles. That is just medieval. Without a trial, these people stay in prison.

Speaker 19

18:08

Well, just imagine. It's incredible. Can you imagine if we did that here? I can't wrap my head around it.

Speaker 1

18:15

Yes, I am befuddled by their behavior. Luckily, here in Russia, the people I do not like just disappear for reasons nobody will ever know and nobody needs to worry about. But Guantanamo, it blows my mind.

Speaker 1

18:31

Blows my mind. -... And while supporters of Guantanamo argue that closing it would be a sign of weakness, I would argue it's an act of strength. Just listen to Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff.

Speaker 8

18:46

What do we do with them? Do we leave them there forever? As an American citizen who is not a coward, I'd be willing to release every 1 of them tomorrow morning.

Speaker 8

18:58

And face them on the battlefield again if necessary. But we got a lot of cowards in this country these days.

Speaker 1

19:05

Exactly. When you see a bumper sticker that says, freedom isn't free, this is what that means. Standing up for our highest ideals, even when it requires accepting a certain amount of risk. And when that bumper sticker is displayed above a pair of red, white, and blue truck nuts, it's a good reminder that doing something like that takes balls.

Speaker 1

19:27

And there is actually 1 final thing to consider here. The concept of Guantanamo represents an opportunity to operate outside the boundaries of the law. And that is way too tempting a proposition to have at the government's disposal. Because while you might be someone who trusts President Obama's judgment, remember, he's on his way out now.

Speaker 1

19:47

Meaning that the keys to Azkaban will be handed over to whoever succeeds him, and there is still a possibility it's going to be this guy.

Speaker 20

19:54

We're going to keep, as you know, Gitmo, we're keeping that open, and we're gonna load it up with bad dudes. We're gonna load it up with a lot of bad dudes out there.

Speaker 1

20:03

That's the point. If we don't shut it down, future President Trump could theoretically throw anyone he doesn't like into Guantanamo. And you might say, well, come on, he'd have to come up with some pretext, and it couldn't be an American citizen, but I would like to put it to you that I've been shit-talking this guy for the better part of a year, and I own a f**king Casio watch.

Speaker 1

20:26

So we need to shut this shit down now. Thank you.