Lawfare Archive: Paul Lewis on Not Closing Guantanamo
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 23 October 2021
⏱️ 43 minutes
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Summary
From February 25, 2017: Under the oversight of Paul Lewis, the Department of Defense’s Special Envoy for Guantanamo Closure under the Obama administration, the detainee population at Guantanamo Bay went from 164 to 41. But Guantanamo remains open, and the Trump administration has promised not only to halt any further transfers or releases of detainees, but also to possibly bring in more detainees in the future. And that's aside from the fact that recent news reports indicate that a former Guantanamo detainee was responsible for an ISIS suicide bombing in Mosul.
With this in mind, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Paul to discuss his time as special envoy, President Obama's failure to close the detention center, and what’s next for Gitmo under President Trump.
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Transcript
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| 1:27.0 | I'm Emily Day, and this is an episode from the Lawfare Archives for October 23, 2021. Earlier this week, a federal |
| 1:28.8 | judge ruled that detention of a former Afghan militant at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp was |
| 1:33.6 | unlawful. This marks the first time in 10 years that a detainee at Guantanamo Bay has won |
| 1:39.1 | a habeas petition, despite a 2008 Supreme Court ruling affirming that Guantanamo Bay detainees had the right to habeas corpus. |
| 1:46.9 | For this week, I chose an episode from February 25, 2017, in which Benjamin Wittes sat down with Paul Lewis, |
| 1:53.6 | the Department of Defense's special envoy for Guantanamo closure under the Obama administration, |
| 1:58.4 | to discuss his experience in the position why Obama failed to close |
| 2:01.8 | Guantanamo and what will happen with Gitmo under Trump. |
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