Berenson, Bradford - short clip - Obama Agrees with a Bush Policy
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Transcript
Transcripts may contain inaccuracies.
(marker scratching) | 0:00 | |
(keyboard keys clicking) | 0:04 | |
- | I wasn't surprised when he said it. | 0:18 |
It had been a cause celebre on the left for a long time. | 0:22 | |
Obama is a man of the left. | 0:25 | |
And so it was certainly no surprise | 0:27 | |
that he would be playing to that constituency | 0:31 | |
by stating that objective. | 0:34 | |
I was very impressed, | 0:37 | |
and at least mildly surprised, | 0:40 | |
when his review of the situation | 0:44 | |
early in his first year concluded that, | 0:47 | |
in fact, he really couldn't successfully close Guantanamo | 0:50 | |
without bringing some of these terrorists onto U.S. soil. | 0:57 | |
To me, that was a sign that he was taking | 1:02 | |
the weighty national security concerns here seriously, | 1:04 | |
because I knew from my work that there were people | 1:09 | |
among those detainees, maybe not everyone, | 1:13 | |
but plenty of people who were hardcore terrorists, | 1:16 | |
very dangerous, that you could not release, | 1:19 | |
and that you could not try, | 1:23 | |
certainly in a U.S. civilian court for a variety | 1:26 | |
of technical legal reasons having to do | 1:31 | |
with the type of evidence that's available | 1:34 | |
in a normal court versus in a military commission. | 1:36 | |
And so when his review agreed with that sentiment | 1:41 | |
and said, well, what we're gonna have to do | 1:48 | |
if we close Guantanamo is bring a bunch of these guys | 1:50 | |
into the U.S. and hold them here indefinitely without trial, | 1:53 | |
I was encouraged because I took it as a sign | 1:58 | |
that he and his team were not just playing politics | 2:01 | |
with these really life and death issues, | 2:04 | |
but were in fact serious | 2:06 | |
about trying to protect the country, | 2:08 | |
even where it risked some political damage to him | 2:11 | |
and forced him to, in effect, | 2:15 | |
agree with something President Bush had been doing. | 2:18 |
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