UNLOCKED! Guantánamo Deep Dive

Current Affairs

Comedy, Government, News, Culture, Politics

4.4 • 645 Ratings

🗓️ 8 March 2021

⏱️ 85 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This episode was originally released on our Patreon feed, but we've decided to release it for all listeners. If you enjoyed it, consider subscribing to our Patreon feed at www.patreon.com/CurrentAffairs for more episodes like this! Eli and Oren speak to two experts who have each been working for twenty years to bring attention to what goes on at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp: Shayana Kadidal (@ShayanaKadidal), senior managing attorney of the Guantánamo Global Justice Initiative at the Center for Constitutional Rights (@theCCR), and Carol Rosenberg of the New York Times (@carolrosenberg), winner of the Robert F. Kennedy journalism award for her peerless work on the subject. Please be advised this episode contains discussion of suicide. This episode was edited by Dan Thorn of Pink Noise Studios in Somerville, MA.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, current affairs listeners. This is contributing editor Eli Massey, and I am joined by my colleague legal editor, Oran Nimni.
0:06.9	Hello, Oren.
0:08.0	Hi, everyone. Hi, Eli.
0:09.6	We have a very special show for you today. We will be discussing Guantanamo Bay. It's history, recent developments, and what everyone should know about it.
0:17.9	We are joined by two experts. We have Shane Coddal, who is a senior managing
0:23.0	attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, where he has worked on a number of significant
0:28.6	cases, including CCR's challenge to the indefinite detention of men at Guantanamo. Hello, Shane.
0:35.6	Hi, guys. How are you? We are also joined by New York Times journalist Carol Rosenberg, who is the foremost Guantanamo reporter in the world. She has covered the base and military prison since 2002, previously for the Miami Herald. We are thrilled to have both of you with us. Thanks for including me.
0:52.4	Yeah. Carol, I want to start at the very beginning before 2002, all the way back to 1898 and the
1:00.0	Spanish-American War and touch on how the United States first got Guantanamo Bay.
1:05.0	Now, I know it's not quite what you report on, but if you could, just explain briefly.
1:10.0	Boy, you're asking me to
1:11.5	go way outside my comfort zone. But I mean, we, the U.S. invaded Cuba during the Spanish-American
1:19.9	war at one point withdrew and then returned. So at various points, I think Shane could probably do better, signed sort of
1:30.0	in perpetuity leases that gave us this foothold. It was originally intended as a, what they
1:37.1	call a coaling center, meaning ships that use coal for fuel would stop there to refuel.
1:45.0	There's lots of stories that are told down there in terms of the history.
1:48.0	One of them is that they chose the site that is now where the base is
1:53.0	because it had something called the Kusko Wells, which was a natural spring and water source for the troops,
2:00.0	and that at some point when they withdrew, and correct
2:03.9	me if I'm wrong, they poisoned the well so that no one else could benefit from that water
2:08.4	source. So flash forward to today, all fresh water has to be made in a desalination plant.
	...

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