Hi folks, Ken Wayne's team here. Lisa Monaco was out again this week, so I sat down for a conversation with an old friend Matt Olson.

Matt served as the director of the National Mechanical Terrorism Center from 2011 to 2014. Before that he held a number of roles within the Justice Department, including serving as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Department's National Security Division. Matt joined me to discuss how he got started in National Security Law.

His time leading the Guantanamo Review Task Force and what it's like to be part of a presidential transition.

Every other week Lisa Monaco and I break down national security issues on the United Security Podcast.

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One of the biggest issues on the on the plate for President Obama and the new team was Guantanamo and what to do with the detainees there in the detention facility.

In fact, if you recall, Ken, it was a day one executive order for President Obama to close Guantanamo detention facility in one year.

So in sort of indeed of a good job. I put my hand up to help work on that.

And I was asked by the new attorney general Eric holder to sort be his representative and to lead a task force and interagency task force to review all of the cases of that time 240 detainees who were detained at Guantanamo and figure out what we're going to do with them.

You know, what's the what's the next step or next with the disposition for those individuals given that the options were not great, you know, at that point. And can you know this better than anyone because you worked on this at the end of the bush years, you know, how hard it was because there were hundreds of detainees who had been at Guantanamo by the time President Obama came into office who had been released transferred home.

We were down to 240 who you at that point that the government had struggled really to figure out if we're going to keep them detained or release them.

Yeah, just just a preview of what you ended up getting in your lap, you know, toward the end of the 2008.

And a lot of my time was home and screwdriver working with the authorities in Saudi Arabia and Yemen to try to repatriate the 90 odd Yemenis that were in Guantanamo. That was the biggest ethnic group that we had where all the Yemenis and the problem was the Yemeni government didn't have the facilities to house them.

And so I was trying to broker something with the Saudis thought we had had something arranged and then of course it fell apart the last minute. And so you ended up getting was a 240 or inheriting 240 detainees with the transition from the Bush to the Obama administration.

And so it was a tough not to crack to try to find a place where those people could go where we could ensure that they wouldn't return to terrorism and pose a threat to us. But at the same time, try to deal with this situation in Guantanamo which everybody recognized was not sustainable.

Yeah, that's exactly right. And you know, I they're one of the, you know, at the time that I took on this role, there had been a pretty strong consensus political consensus and just sort of, you know, within the government within the executive branch that as you said, can it was not sustainable to continue to just to hold individuals at Guantanamo indefinitely that there needed to be some solution that would involve prosecuting some of them transferring some number.

And so this is to countries that were not their home countries and then maybe there may be some number that would have to be continued to be held under the laws of war, which was the legal basis for detention for some period of time, but there was a general, I think, as I say, consensus that this was a path that we needed to take as a country.

So you undertook to review the files of all the 240 detainees that were still there and then came up with dispositions for each of them. And then by the end of the year time on that project, you got the number down significantly didn't you?

Yeah, yeah, I mean, by, you know, the, it's funny. Let me just take a step back as you said, you know, take the files and review the files. There were no real files like there were, there was information spread out across the government on the detainees generally like a lot of it was at the defense department, but the lot of it was in the intelligence agencies, the justice department, other, you know, state department.

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