Then the Secret Service, and the FBI, and the
Army's own folks started surrounding me to tell me to be quiet; and at that
moment, I realized I had to buy more time, and get a chance to wait till the
audience quieted down to really try to have an interaction with the
President. What was funny was what was
happening behind the scenes: all these people trying to tell me that I had to
leave, that I was going to be arrested, start grabbing my arms. And I was saying to them in a low voice, "I'm
having a dialogue with the President.
You really don't want to pull me out, because I will scream, and that
will be very, very bad for everybody," and I kept saying things like that to
allow them to let me stay and have more time to get some more points out. That's when I got a chance to get out more on
Guantanamo, like even say the name of Shaker Aamer, mention the fifty-seven
(57) Yemenis who have been cleared for release.
You know, one of the significant things the
President said is he was going to lift the ban on Yemenis from Guantanamo going
back to Yemen. And yet, that was his own
self-imposed ban! So he was just lifting
something, a restriction that he had put in place. So it was nice, but it wasn't as nice as if
he would've said, "I lifted the ban on people returning to Yemen, and starting
next week, we will see those prisoners start to leave Guantanamo, and be
reunited with their families."
I mean, all he said was, "And we're going to start
reviewing these cases one by one." Well hell, it's been eleven years! How many times do we have to review these
cases? And if 86 of them have been
cleared after eleven years, that means they've been cleared by Department of
Justice, Department of Defense, FBI, CIA, Homeland Security. You don't have to announce more bureaucratic
measures like the appointment of somebody else now in the State Department to
oversee this. He should have appointed
somebody in the White House right next to him to make sure it really
happened. Anyway, those were some of the
things happening in my head while I was trying to buy some more time to get
some more of these points out.
Rob Kall: The
cameras (at least what I was watching) stayed on President Obama. Was it a single feed that was going that was
showing Obama, or were there multiple cameras there? And did anybody show you as the speech was
going on?
Medea Benjamin: I don't know that, because I didn't really
look at a lot of the press afterward. I
know that there weren't all that many cameras in the room. It was obviously a press pool in terms of the
cameras, and there were a lot of still-camera people who turned around and
immediately started focusing on the interaction between me and all the security
people, but I don't remember if there was a video camera that was going. I would think so, but I haven't seen it.
Rob Kall: To the
best of my knowledge it didn't happen, even when Obama acknowledged that what
you were saying was important.
Medea Benjamin: There were cameras that were following me
when I was actually going out, because I did see a video stream of me walking
along the middle path as I was leaving.
Rob Kall: The
escorted you, right?
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