Why closing Gitmo isn't an open-and-shut case
Angry Planet
Matthew Gault
4.2 • 898 Ratings
🗓️ 25 February 2016
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
President Barack Obama laid out a plan to close the notorious Guantanamo Bay prison this week. Even if it were to close by the time Obama leaves office, it will have been open for 15 years. So, why is the prison still open, and what would it take to close it? And how important is it, really, to close it?
This week on War College, we talk to Reuters' own David Rohde. He's written extensively about Guantanamo and he also knows captivity from the other side, as a prisoner of the Taliban for seven months.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Love this podcast. |
| 0:02.0 | Support this show through the A-Cast supporter feature. |
| 0:05.0 | It's up to you how much you give and there's no regular commitment. |
| 0:09.0 | Just click the link in the show description to support now. |
| 0:19.0 | The opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the participants, not of Reuters News. Yeah, when I was held in captivity by the Taliban, they would cite Guantanamo as an example of sort of American hypocrisy. |
| 0:27.0 | The commanders in particular that were holding me were sort of delusional. |
| 0:30.0 | They believed all these conspiracy theories. They trained younger guards to be suicide bombers. |
| 0:34.5 | I don't have any sympathy towards my captors, but it was true that they cited Guantanamo |
| 0:42.2 | as one justification for why they were fighting the United States. I know we promised you an episode on the state of NATO this week, but sometimes news overtakes a weekly podcast, |
| 1:00.4 | with President Obama announcing a new plan to empty the prison at Guantanamo Bay, |
| 1:05.0 | it seemed like the perfect time to talk to Reuters' own David Road. |
| 1:09.0 | David has written about Guantanamo, and he was also held by the Taliban for seven months in |
| 1:16.3 | 2008. This week on war college we'll be looking at who's left at the prison and |
| 1:21.1 | if the military trials are moving forward at all and we'll also |
| 1:24.9 | talk about how Guantanamo affects everything the United States is trying to accomplish |
| 1:30.3 | around the world. You're listening to War College, a weekly discussion of a world in conflict focusing on the stories behind the front lines. |
| 1:43.6 | Here's your host, Jason Fields. |
| 1:47.0 | Hello and welcome to War College. |
| 1:52.2 | I'm Reuters Opinion Editor Jason Fields. And I'm Matthew Gault, contributing editor at War is Boring. |
| 1:57.0 | Today we have David Road with us. |
| 2:00.0 | David is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winning reporter. |
| 2:03.6 | There's actually not a lot of people in journalism who can say that. |
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