Guantánamo: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

[Music] president obama a man so close to being able to smoke again he can almost taste those camels now his time in office is almost done and while he's achieved a great many things tonight we're gonna look at one of his in arguable failures i have ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed by early next year make no mistake we will close Guantanamo prison I still want to close Guantanamo as president I have tried to close Gitmo I will continue to push to close Gitmo it's time to close Gitmo today the department is submitting to Congress our plan for finally closing the facility at Guantanamo once and for all yes Guantanamo Bay it's Obama's one that got away which is a little odd considering it's a place where literally no one can get away so why has the president been unable to close Gitmo well for a start most people don't want him to according to a recent poll 52% of Americans believe it should remain open and there are others who believe we should actually be using it more in my opinion the only problem with Guantanamo Bay is there are too many empty beds and cells there right now we should be sending more terrorists there for further interrogation to keep this country safe as far as I'm concerned every last one of them can rot in hell but as long as they don't do that and they can rot in Guantanamo Bay now now he's basically saying there let's use Guantanamo Bay like hell's waiting room and that is problematic for two reasons first it's arguably unconstitutional and second hell's waiting room is already the slogan of Henry Kissinger's bedroom that's a fact that's just a fact and look I can see I can see the reasons that Guantanamo is appealing you get to keep potentially dangerous people locked up and far away but tonight I would like to argue that there are even better reasons for closing it forever and let's just start with the practical ones it's very expensive Guantanamo cost four hundred and forty five million dollars to run last year which means we're currently spending over seven million dollars per prisoner per year but the costs obviously go way beyond that last year a UN Human Rights Council conducted a review of the US and Gitmo was some a feature Iceland recommends the closure of the Guantanamo prison and illegal detentions in Guantanamo Bay immediately close the Guantanamo Bay facility and do all its best in order to close down the Guantanamo facilities improve living conditions in prisoners in particular in Guam or investigate torture allegation extrajudicial execution and other violations of human rights committed in Guantanamo yeah you got it right that is Iran Sudan Libya and others lecturing us about human rights abuses which is yeah a little hypocritical maybe don't tell us to eat healthy when you have a what perrito in your mouth but but it does seem like this is one of the few things the entire world agrees on it's basically Guantanamo is up and yeah you know what Kevin can wait let the man wait so how did we get here well Guantanamo's origins are basically a series of weird circumstances and ad hoc decisions for start we don't own it it's a rental in in 1903 we struck a deal with Cuba to lease the land for a naval base and ever since we have mailed them a check every year for four thousand and eighty five dollars in rent although as Fidel Castro once told a film crew they've just been accumulating in his desk I get it if you'd kiss those chi-chi's they'll go yeah no not them Anika no just think about that we've barely been talking to Cuba we disagree with their politics and yet every year we send them checks for hilariously small amounts of money we're basically Cuba's grandparents and this this unique arrangement means that Guantanamo where telephones Legally both America and not America or as one White House official once called it the legal equivalent of outer space which is a bit of an exaggeration to be honest some laws do apply up in space there's the law of physics for example and the law of attraction yes of course you didn't really think Neil and Buzz did not on the moon right oh they moved they moved my friends bill would deal with that this legal limbo has been useful to us in the past George HW Bush used Guantanamo to involuntarily detained Haitian refugees seeking asylum and Bill Clinton not only continued that for a while he later used it to hold Cuban refugees so the use of Gitmo to store people was one of those dicey legal workarounds in the 90s it was right up there with Vanilla Ice's explanation of why he didn't trip off no problem man now now stashing those refugees at Gitmo attracted significant criticism at the time but when the war on terror began we started doing the exact same thing with terror suspects even though right from the start donald rumsfeld admitted it was far from the perfect solution pastor told people further reasons why use it why is it the best place I Kylie characterized Montana MoBay Cuba as the least worst place we could have selected the least worst place that is a rousing endorsement from the worst worst Secretary of Defense of all time obvious problem with using Guantanamo in the war on terror and people were pointing it out at the time how do you avoid the prospect of the US military in fact being jailers for an indeterminate period of time of people who have not been charged what are you what are you gonna do about it it is certainly the the not the first choice of the Department of Defense to be in the business of detaining people for long periods of time yeah it might not have been his first choice but it was inevitable because at a war on terror isn't a traditional war where there's an exchange of prisoners at the end we were never going to accept a formal surrender from the president of terror who I can only assume is Willem Dafoe and now that brings us to here here right now nearly a decade and a half later and we are all so accustomed to the very existence of Guantanamo that news crews tore it like it's a million dollar listing this is a typical cell in camp five it meets all American Correctional Association standards this is about 95 square feet of living space with about 80 feet of unencumbered space one of the other amenities available to the detainees is a library of books magazines and videogames the book that we have the most in different languages would be the Harry Potter series inmates are also given art classes the results of which are on display he's making it sound like the world's least Jewish summer camp nobody is although even the current luxuries the prisoners get tend to carry a chilling reminder of where they are all prisoners use toiletries which happen to have the brand names maximum security oh come on a prison calling its deodorants maximum security is a little on the nose it'd be like a Holiday Inn Express calling its complimentary lotion tearful masturbation that hit home a little too close to some of you and before you think that those library books provided an escape for the inmates just listen to shocker Armour who was released last October after being held without charge for nearly 14 years he found one particular book less an escape and more a reminder of where he was in a beggarly they got an island in Harry Potter he says as become where there's no happiness they do you know they just suck all your feelings out of you and you don't you don't have no feeling anymore and truly that's what I felt all the time is this is as back on this is not from this world you know because that's what they tried you know they want to make you feel English Wow that is the saddest allusion to Harry Potter I have ever heard and I say that as a man who is often described as Harry Potter if he aged like a president and that's the point here no amount of sugarcoating can cover up the reality of what we have done at Guantanamo Bay because in the early years interrogation techniques included physical beatings short shackling where are prisoners arms and legs are shackled together for long periods and hours and sometimes days of repeated loud music which is horrendous although sometimes that last technique backfired because that same Harry Potter loving inmate grew up loving American rock music and would annoy the guards by singing along and just listen to him describe the one song that gave him the most consolation I mean I'm sure everybody would love one here because I used to sing here al I used to because the words I thought the words are fits me the words makes me feel like yeah it's me again which is the Whitesnake it's here I go again the go the worst goes here I go again on my own going down the only Road I never known like a drifter I was born to walk alone because I know what it means to walk alone in only street of dreams and here I go again and it's too because it's just dreams dreams that I will be home one day dreams that I'll be free dreams that content will be closed you know you are miserable when you are finding solace in a Whitesnake song that is a group whose second most inspirational lyrics are probably I know you ain't a bad girl honey no matter what the neighbors say it's just you wear those skin tight dresses with your g-string tunes to a pure poetry purest poetry but we justify Gitmo and everything we did inside it because we were constantly reminded of one thing these are not mere innocence these are among the worst of the worst they are bad guys these are the worst of the worst these are the people who are the bomb makers the bodyguards of Asama bin Laden the financers that the plotters the people who have been sent out to be assassins to be a suicide bombers these are the worst of the worst now the worst of the worst is a big claim I can think of at least one person who fits that category and who is not in there and that's because apparently he stills working for the Today Show but who knows but but what but while some detainees some detainees like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed have clearly earned that title others have not because think about it if they were really also terrible it's a little shocking that we've released seven hundred and ten detainees over the years and leaked documents have since revealed four out of 212 Afghans who were there almost half were in the assessments of US forces either entirely innocent mere Taliban conscripts or had been transferred to Guantanamo with no reason for doing so on file and some of the evidence against detainees was surprisingly flimsy one I guess piece of evidence that they would use to determine I thought this was fascinating Casio watches well it it's kind of a little bit arbitrary but anybody who was wearing this particular brand of Casio watch which was handed out by al-qaeda to their fighters because it was used as a timer for setting off devices so anybody who happened to have this very popular watch on was immediately picked up and a lot of them ended up in Guantanamo Bay that's true if someone was caught wearing this Casio watch that could be used as crucial evidence and incidentally that makes this the only time in history anyone has actively sought out a man wearing a Casio watch look this is not to say that everyone in Guantanamo is or was innocent and there is justifiable concern that whenever we release someone they might go on to fight against us in fact the government claims that nearly six percent of those released under President Obama have been confirmed to have read in insurgent or terrorist activities and for those released by the Bush administration it's been 21% and while some argue those numbers are inflated even if they are they are not zero and that is why politicians like Dick Cheney have taken a hard-line position that we should not let anyone go I'm more concerned with bad guys who got out and released than I am with a few that in fact were innocent you're okay with that margin for I have no problem as long as we achieve our objective yeah but that is not reassuring the only objectives Dick Cheney has ever achieved have been somehow serving as president unofficially and managing to exist without the need for a working heart so so there are clearly sharp divisions about what we should do with the remaining population and you should know there's actually not that many left there are currently just 61 detainees down there that's less than the number of people in our audience right now some of whom are arguably worse people than some of the detainees you know they know they they know it it's an odd thing to clap and and you might think well why doesn't the president just put them on trial figure out which ones are guilty and then he can decide whether or not to close it well it's just not that simple because the 61 detainees fall into three groups ten of them including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed are having their cases handled by a military commission that is a legal process that we've basically invented from scratch and it's so flawed that of its eight convictions so far four have been fully reversed on appeal now another 20 of them are actually slated for release but are waiting for the State Department the intelligence agencies and the Department of Defense to agree on a country to send them to and that leaves us with the trickiest group the remaining 31 detainees who have not been charged with a crime but who are also not cleared to be released and they are the real problem here because even the president doesn't quite know what to do with them there's gonna be a certain irreducible number that are gonna be really hard cases because you know we know they've done something wrong and they are still dangerous but it's difficult to mount the evidence than a traditional article 3 court more so we're gonna have to wrestle a bit now think about what he just said that is the president a man who has taught constitutional law suggesting that for some detainees there is no clear path toward a trial or an exit now it's a group that the administration is called the irreducible minimum which sounds like the name of a band that was going to call itself absolute zero but got into a fight about it with their pretentious theremin player and if you're wondering why the president says it's difficult to announce the evidence what it means there is in some cases there's not enough of its and in others it was obtained through torture and there is a good reason that that is inadmissible because people often say anything to make torture stop if you gave me a purple nurple for just 10 seconds I would look you in the eye and swear that my favorite cereal is grape nuts and and I'm fairly sure that that cereals original name was good-morning idiot eat some cat litter so the point is how does the president who has spent nearly a decade promising to close Gitmo plan to do that well it turns out it all depends on what your definition of the word close is closing Guantanamo at this stage in the Obama administration view is really moving Guantanamo to US soil the idea is to pick up the last detainees and move them to military detention in the United States what we call Guantanamo North yes Guantanamo North or as I'm sure it will be called once they build a wholefoods their Gitmo no and look moving Guantanamo is not closing it but even that is not going to happen there's been relentless congressional opposition to moving any detainees to US soil and the people in charge of Gitmo seem to be settling in for the long haul and the reason we know that is because a legal document from last month showed the commander the current commander there proposes renovating their infirmary as it will be beneficial to the continued care of the aging population so there might well be detainees that we scooped up as young men who we think are guilty but who will never get a trial and they will be there until they die and at this point we all have to ask ourselves are we okay with that and remember it does seem that more than half of us are but I would argue that any potential risk in putting detainees on trial losing that case and having to release them is worth it for a few important reasons first as it stands we are ceding so much moral high-ground that Vladimir Putin feels comfortable saying things like this but then you they once said that they would close Guantanamo and what is it closed no today there's still people there walking in shackles that is just medieval without a trial these people stay in prison well just imagine can you imagine if we did that here I can't wrap my head around it luckily here in Russia the people I do not like just disappear for reasons well supporters of Guantanamo argue that closing it would be a sign of weakness I would argue it's an act of strength just listen to Lawrence Wilkins Wilkerson : Powell's former chief of staff what do we do with them do we leave them there forever as an American citizen who is not a coward I'd be willing to release every one of them tomorrow morning and face them on the battlefield again if necessary but we got a lot of cowards in this country these days exactly when you see a bumper sticker that says freedom isn't free this is what that means standing up for our highest ideals even when it requires accepting a certain amount of risk and when that bumper sticker was displayed above a pair of red white and blue truck nuts it's a good reminder that doing something like that takes balls and and there is actually one final thing to consider here the concept of Guantanamo represents an opportunity to operate outside the boundaries of the law and that is way too tempting a proposition to have at the government's disposal because well you might be someone who trusts President Obama's judgment remember he's on his way out now meaning that the keys to Azkaban will be handed over to whoever succeeds him and there is still a possibility it's going to be this guy we're going to keep as you know Gitmo we're keeping that open and we're gonna load it up with bad dudes we're gonna load it up a lot of bad dudes out there that's the point if we don't shut it down future President Trump could theoretically throw anyone he doesn't like into Guantanamo and you might say well come on he'd have to come up with some pretext and it couldn't be an American citizen but I would like to put it to you that I've been talking this guy for the better part of a year [Applause] you you

Channel: LastWeekTonight

Views: 10,566,230

Keywords: last week tonight with john oliver, john oliver, last week tonight, guantanamo bay

Id: KEbFtMgGhPY

Length: 20min 41sec (1241 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 09 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/NoMoreLurkingToo]

That retired Colonel spoke some truth. Too bad most people in power apparently have less than 1% of the courage and integrity needed for the job they do.

[u/EaseofUse]

Guantanamo always seemed like a plausible deniability thing to me. Like, you know the US is holding/detaining people without trial, probably in a bunch of different areas, but as long as we designate this one extrajudicial location as "the legally gray area", we can pretend we're not holding whomever in underground bunkers in New Hampshire or whatever.

[u/Pompsy]

That Maximum Security brand toiletries are also used in Wisconsin State Prisons. The toothpaste has no flavor but foams up incredibly well.

[u/[deleted]]

He missed an opportunity to say, 'Voldemort could soon be in charge of Guantanamo'

[u/BoogsterSU2]

Fuck Billy Bush.

Oh, and some good news: John Oliver found Chechnya leader Kadyrov's missing cat shown at the end of this week's episode.

[u/kingguy459]

This episode just makes me sad. We don't even have a Guantanamo-esque jail here in my country yet everyone's just being "tried" by other people even if they are innocent.

[u/iminthinkermode]

According to the most recent report, released Sept. 2016, 693 detainees had been released. Of that group, 208 had been confirmed (122) or suspected (86) of returning to jihadist activity upon their release. (https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/FINAL%20-%20GTMO%20Unclass%20CDA%20Response%20-%20September%202016.pdf) These are not just low-level individuals as Oliver claims. The U.S. government—under George W. Bush and Barack Obama—has released dozens of veteran jihadists whose terror résumés include senior positions in al Qaeda and like-minded groups. And of course Obama had himself transferred five senior Taliban officials to Qatar in order to secure the release of Bowe Bergdahl.

I'm surprised by the lack of any empirical evidence to substantiate Oliver's argument. Anyone even casually familiar with jihadist propaganda knows that Guantánamo is infrequently mentioned and is not part of any significant recruiting theme. Ayman al Zawahiri, the head of al Qaeda, has released five messages since early August. He didn't mention Guantánamo once.

Obama has also claimed has claimed that Guantánamo "was an explicit rationale for the formation of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula," or AQAP.

At no point in time did AQAP's leaders, some of whom were once held at Guantánamo, say that the facility was the reason they launched their organization. If anything, AQAP's history shows the dangers of releasing known al Qaeda operatives from Guantánamo. One current AQAP leader is Ibrahim al Qosi, who was transferred in 2012. Qosi was a trusted associate of Osama bin Laden before he was captured. JTF-GTMO's assessment of Qosi described him as "an admitted al Qaeda operative and one of Usama bin Laden's (UBL) most trusted associates and veteran bodyguard."

In fact, in May, AQAP's Inspire magazine directly rebuked Obama on his claim that the facility is a key recruitment tool, arguing that al Qaeda talks about many issues and Guantánamo wasn't nearly at the top of their list. Inspire cited the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as well as other issues, as far more important from a recruiting standpoint and chastised Obama for being pro-Israeli.

The fifteenth issue of the Islamic State's Dabiq magazine, released earlier this year, carried an article aptly titled "Why We Hate You & Why We Fight You." For starters: "We hate you, first and foremost, because you are disbelievers; you reject the oneness of Allah—whether you realize it or not—by making partners for Him in worship, you blaspheme against Him, claiming that He has a son, you fabricate lies against His prophets and messengers, and you indulge in all manner of devilish practices." Dabiq's editors listed many other reasons, including our "secularism and nationalism," our "perverted liberal values," and our "Christianity and atheism." They did include a generic mention of the imprisonment and "torture" of Muslims around the world, but only after listing Obama's drones and many other reasons, and even then there was nothing—not a word—about Guantánamo.

There hasn't been a single attack that was rationalized or justified on the basis of Guantánamo. If there has please point me to it.

President Obama created two different entities to evaluate Guantánamo detainees and the risks they present to the United States. Both bodies—first Obama's task force and later the Periodic Review Board—were conceived to further the president's oft-expressed objective of closing the detention facility. As the end of Obama's presidency draws near, and the urgency of closing Guantánamo increases, Obama's PRB is finding ways to transfer many of the same detainees that Obama's own task force previously said were too dangerous to transfer.

The PRB's web page describes the body as "a discretionary, administrative interagency process" that was established "to review whether continued detention of particular individuals held at Guantánamo remains necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States."

To date, according to a review of government filings conducted by The Weekly Standard, the PRB has issued a ruling in 52 cases. Thirty-three detainees have been approved for transfer by the PRB. The PRB determined that continued detention of 19 Guantánamo detainees "remains necessary" to protect the "security of the United States." This means that the PRB has approved Guantánamo detainees for transfer in nearly two-thirds of the cases it has heard.

This is a stunning success rate for these particular detainees. To put it in perspective, keep in mind that Obama's own Guantánamo Review Task Force previously assessed all 52 of these detainees and determined that none of them—not one of them—should be transferred or released. Twenty-eight of the 33 detainees approved for transfer by the PRB had been deemed "too dangerous to transfer but not feasible for prosecution" by Obama's task force. The remaining five approved for transfer by the PRB were referred for prosecution by Obama's task force. But instead of being prosecuted, they have either already been transferred or will be.

To add some additional perspective, keep in mind that Obama's task force decided that nearly two-thirds of the 240 detainees remaining at Guantánamo as of January 2009 could be transferred. The task force made it clear that the detainees approved for transfer were not deemed innocent. Nor were they considered non-threats. Instead, Obama's task force concluded that the security risks they posed could be adequately mitigated. In many of these cases, Obama's task force decided to transfer detainees who had been deemed "high" risks by the military and intelligence professionals at JTF-GTMO. That is, Obama's task force was willing to accept the dangers these detainees' presented to further the president's desire to close Guantánamo.

Regardless, even Obama's task force drew the line at transferring the detainees who have been evaluated by the PRB. But roughly two out of every three of them have won transfer under the PRB process.

Simply put: The Obama administration is transferring many of the detainees the administration itself previously deemed to be the worst of the worst—including at least five members of the Karachi Six and the man long suspected of recruiting some of the 9/11 hijackers.

I cannot disagree more with this video, despite agreeing with much of his other videos. I simply will not accept criticism's about human rights abuses from countries who treat their civilians like we treat terrorist. We should not be willing to free dangerous terrorists and endanger the American people and our diplomatic partners in order to gain moral clarity.

I hope to get some responses.

[u/[deleted]]

anyone have a mirror for us non-us folk

[u/peon47]

Obama should have had someone rush a bill through the house forbidding the transfer of any US funds to Cuba. The GOP would have voted for it (without reading it, of course) and this would have resulted in the rent being defaulted and the land being handed back.