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The Current Transcript for November 16, 2018

Host: Michelle Shephard

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: You know when you read the first part of the book, it's all factual, but don't feel sorry for me because it made me who I was and it made me driven and it made me want something better for my life.

MICHELLE SHEPHARD: That's a voice hockey fans will know well, Curtis Joseph or Cujo, former NHL superstar. But while the goalie's life in the net is well known, he's opening up now for the first time about how he got there. It's a childhood that's hard to fathom. My interview with Cujo in half an hour. Also.

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VOICE: In the press we have foolishly released hundreds and hundreds of dangerous terrorists only to meet them again on the battlefield. So today, I'm keeping another promise.

MS: Remember Gitmo, that notorious American prison set up after the 9/11 attacks, yes President Donald Trump kept his promise and he kept it open. But what has happened to the detainees who were released? Good question. And don't ask the Trump administration, as they don't seem to know. That story in an hour. But first up.

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VOICE: When we first launched, we were hoping for you know maybe 400, 500 people. Harvard didn't have a Facebook, so that's the gap we were trying to fill and now we're at 100,000 people. So who knows where we're going next.

MS: That was Mark Zuckerberg talking about Facebook's modest beginning. Today, it is a social media giant with more than 2 billion users. But with that success, comes giant headaches. You may "like" this next story or love it or share it or whatever else it is we do on Facebook these days. But at Facebook headquarters, they're just hoping it will go away. Delay, deny, deflect. That's the headline for an explosive New York Times story that goes behind the scenes where Facebook is once again in crisis mode. I'm Michelle Shephard and this is the Friday edition of The Current.

We should regulate Facebook just like we did cars, says professor

Guests: Cecilia Kang, Siva Vaidhyanathan

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VOICE: We didn't take a broad enough view of our responsibility and that was a big mistake. And it was my mistake and I'm sorry. I started Facebook. I run it and I'm responsible for what happens here.

MS: That's a contrite Mark Zuckerberg appearing before the U.S. Congress this spring. The CEO faced a grilling from lawmakers over Facebook's data and privacy policies. The wildly popular social network has had its reputation buffeted by crisis after crisis from data being sold to the proliferation of fake news stories and even accusations of influencing the outcome of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Now, a new report from the New York Times offers a look behind the scenes at how Mr. Zuckerberg and his team have sought to deal with these blows. And it's safe to say the report has become the latest crisis on Facebook's hands. Just to note that CBC has not independently verified the allegations in The Times report that you're about to hear. Cecilia Kang is a New York Times technology reporter and part of the team behind this investigation. She's in Washington. Hi Cecilia.

CECILIA KANG: Hi.

MS: Let's start with the headline of your story, Delay, Deny and Deflect. Before we get into the specifics, how do these three words sum up what you found?

CK: Well I think another way of putting it is they screwed up, they covered up and then they lawyered up. That was sort of the arc of what we are trying to explain. They made many mistakes. They tried to minimize disclosure of the mistakes that were made and there are discoveries and their not being able to look around corners and look out for abuse on their site and then Washington. And then we take our readers to Washington where they fought to silence critics. It's we this is an investigation that started about six months ago and actually even before that and we really tried to get inside the company. I think we have a lot, there's a lot of reporting already out there on the public statements and all the different actions that we've seen from the top executives in Washington, but it's been very hard for folks to understand what was happening behind the scenes and that's what we tried to accomplish with this story.

MS: And break it down a little bit more. What did you find out specifically about Facebook's knowledge of let's say the Russian election meddling on its platform?

CK: Yes what we found was that around the end of 2016, early 2017, when the intelligence officials in Washington had alerted the public that they had found Russian interference in then U.S. election. That Facebook was finally beginning to find evidence and that the security team, specifically within Facebook, led by Alex Stamos, he was the head of security and a longtime's security executive in the industry, was having a lot trouble raising a flag and getting attention to the project, to the discoveries. And over the course of a few months around the spring and early 2017, where the top executives were very reluctant to get the progression of information that was being collected about Russian interference disclosed to the public. They in two specific incidents I think really show this. They fought for the top executives argued that the word Russia should not be included in a cyber security report that would outline and this is very rare for a company like Facebook to release a white people on security threats, but specifically and other top executive said do not include the word Russia because it was a loaded word. It's in the middle of the period where the Trump administration that had just been elected was really pushing back on the idea that there was any sort of cooperation with Russian top leaders in the election and it became also a politically charged issue the role of Russia in the election. So in Washington there was a real big push back to put Russia in that first report. There was and they won, they prevailed. The security officials decided not to include the word Russia in their first report. And then further along in 2017, a good example of minimizing disclosures was when they did find Internet Research Agency pages, that's a Russian-backed sort of troll account you can say. The top officials at Facebook really wanted the most minimal amount of disclosure to come out in public. They knew they had to, they put out a public blog and they initially said just a small smattering of users might have been affected by this. Just two weeks after that, they had to realize that they had to disclose the full extent, which was many millions of people who might have been exposed to these IRA pages.

MS: And tell me about the Definers Public Affairs and what your investigation uncovered about the role that they played.

CK: Yeah this is when we turned to Washington in sort of the lobbying offensive to try to silence critics and to repair their image. There was really as you said in your intro, a series of crises that Facebook was pressuring in. What they did was they essentially turned to dark opposition arts in Washington, which is certainly not a new thing, but for a company like Facebook, it was new for a company like Facebook that espouses a more moral-based and values-based mission, which is to connect the world and make it more open. It's surprising to understand and it was illuminating for us to see what they were doing behind the scenes. Definers was founded by Republican operatives, one of the, somebody who worked actually, Tim Miller, who worked on Jeb Bush's campaign and other Republicans and what they did was at the most basic level, they researched information about opponents. Either Apple, Google, as well other and public interest groups that might be critical of Facebook and also they wanted to research about the tech companies that were their rivals because they wanted to, Facebook wants to spread the blame if you will, to deflect some of the pressure on them to encompass more big tech companies. But they went beyond that. What they did was they tried to plant stories and ideas about connections between public interest groups like Freedom from Facebook, which is a coalition of organisations that have been really really critical of Facebook and they tried to link, Definers this Republican-backed group, tried to link groups like Color of Change, which is a civil rights organization, as well as Freedom from Facebook to the global financier George Soros and his family, the Open Society Foundation. And the reason why that's significant is that is George Soros has become sort of a cudgel. He's become sort of this this figure that often times far right groups point to as part of a sort of a left wing conspiracy. He's become so politically charged in that way and very unfairly is what they would say, the Open Society Foundation. And that was very and he's also under the undercurrent, what's not said is his Jewish roots and a lot of anti-Semitism arises from that. So it's a very unsavory tactic to kind of play off the trope of George Soros as a Jewish influential financier of particular political causes.

MS: And Cecilia, Facebook as you know, is refuting some of the findings of your investigation and in a statement they say it's not true that they knew about the Russian interference. And here's a quote that they said. "The New York Times is wrong to suggest that we ever asked Definers to pay for or write articles on Facebook's behalf or to spread the misinformation." We're just running out of time here, but quickly how does this match up with your reporting?

MS: Yeah they're really threading a fine needle on this. If they're not disputing this specific, a specific assertions in our stories, so we stand very much by our reporting. I think it's clear that Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg who made this statement on her Facebook page last night are feeling a lot of heat and they've responded. They say that they did not have the idea that they tried to hide information is not true. But they have not addressed specific assertions and we stand by our reporting. We feel very solid.

MS: Cecilia, thanks so much for joining me today. We're going to continue this conversation.

CK: Thank you.

MS: Cecilia Kang is the New York Times technology reporter. We reached her in Washington. Deleting Facebook, regulating Facebook, holding the leadership of Facebook accountable in the wake of this bombshell report from the New York Times, there are a lot of suggestions about what should happen next. Facebook users are part of that picture. A recent Pew Research study showed that as many as 40 percent of U.S. users have already decided to take regular breaks from the platform, with many young people deleting the app entirely. But others say, it's up to politicians to take action to limit Facebook's influence and police the way it handles privacy and misinformation. For his thoughts on all of this, we're joined by Siva Vaidhyanathan. He's a professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia and the author of Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy. We reached him in Durham, New Hampshire. Hi, thanks for joining me.

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: Yeah, good morning. My pleasure.

MS: What stands out for you from this New York Times investigation?

SV: Yeah two things. Look, one of the reasons Facebook is in so much trouble in the United States and elsewhere is that it is the perfect platform for distributing the sort of information that disrupts and distracts the processes of democracy. All of this misinformation, all of this propaganda, all of this fake news, all of this conspiracy theory stuff that we see floating around, the kind of stuff that has sparked genocide in Myanmar, the kind of stuff that has sparked ethnic violence and religious violence in Sri Lanka or political violence in Kenya, all of the stuff that has undermined our faith in institutions here in the United States and introduced all sorts of paranoid conspiracy theories, including anti-Semitic theories, all of that finds a wonderful home on Facebook. Facebook is designed to propagate stuff that generates strong emotions like hateful propaganda. So if that's the basic problem, it's shocking that Facebook would turn to those bear tactics to undermine the reputations of its critics and to try to distract and disrupt the narrative of Facebook's responsibility. The fact that they employed a company which they fired last night after the Times report came out, right. So they fired a company, they hired and then fired a company that was devoted to doing just this sort of propaganda that pollutes Facebook and undermines democracy, that's so deeply shameful. So to me that was the big takeaway. There are about a dozen other important revelations in this very long story that was so deeply reported, but the other thing that was troubling is the Washington story. Chuck Schumer who is the senator from New York, the most powerful Democrat in the Senate, a leading Democrat in the Senate, told his colleague Mark Warner, who is from Virginia, to back off from investigating Facebook because Facebook is a political friend of the Democrat, specifically Sheryl Sandberg is a political friend of the Democrats. This is inexcusable as well, although not surprising, Chuck Schumer's long been a transactional politician, more concerned with political donations than the fate of [inaudible], but my Senator Mark Warner fortunately is ground and continues to investigate Facebook. What it does mean is we are unlikely to see meaningful regulation come out of the United States Congress in the next two to four years.

MS: Mark Zuckerberg held a conference call with reporters yesterday and in that he said he only learned about the company's work with this company called Definers, which you mentioned has since been fired, when he read the Times article. What does that say to you about Zuckerberg's role in the company?

SV: Yeah. You know it conforms with one of the subplots of that Times article, which is something we've sort of been teasing out over the last couple of years. For the last two to three years Mark Zuckerberg has largely been checked out from the turmoil of the moment. I sense that he has such cognitive dissonance, his vision of what he built and what he wanted to do in the world was so remarkably idealistic, naively idealistic. It's important to remember, Mark Zuckerberg is a deeply uneducated man. He really hasn't thought deeply about what he has built and how the variety of human cruelty could find a home on it, right. So the last two years has blown his mind and he really, I mean this is really clear, he is checked out from the day to day operations and the sort of reactions. Like the Dark Arts becomes someone else's job and he just doesn't want to know about it. So he is able to continue to make lofty statements about connecting the world and building community while his own company is doing just the opposite.

MS: Now you touched on this a little bit earlier, but the piece also talks a lot about Facebook's relationship with Washington. In addition to what you've already said, what really stands out for you the most from the revelations that they had in the piece?

SV: Yeah I mean first of all, Sheryl Sandberg is a veteran of the ways of Washington D.C. and she has tremendous power and contacts. She has tremendous power and contact in the American media establishment, as well as the political establishment.

MS: And she's Facebook COO

SV: Yeah Sheryl Sandberg is Facebook's COO and is a former undersecretary of the Treasury under Bill Clinton and a former official at Harvard University and she worked for Google too. She and you know she's written bestselling books and she's best friends with all sorts of television personalities and politicians and business leaders, so you know she is one of the most powerful people in the United States. And I think it's pretty clear that even though she is humiliated and embarrassed by these revelations, her power remains strong. I would be really surprised to see Facebook suffer any real damage in Washington. Our hope is that people in Ottawa, our meaning Americans like we're looking north saying maybe the leaders in Ottawa can take this more seriously because they're not as implicated in the political power. Maybe leaders in Brazil even, I mean Brazil's a mess of a government right now, but you know there's widespread concern about these issues in other parts of the world and other places that could instill stronger regulatory controls on Facebook.

MS: Now unfortunately we don't have anybody from Ottawa queued up, but perhaps for a future saying we'll look into that, but back quickly to the U.S., you don't seem optimistic that the New York Times story is going to lead to any regulation.

SV: No not in the United States and you know we still have hope that the European Union will continue to take these problems seriously and that's a healthy turn. I do think that in the long run, the very fact that we're having this conversation, a conversation that was impossible to have even 36 months ago is a good sign. People are aware of the fact that these companies are not magic, that these companies depend on massive surveillance and behavioral engineering to get what they want out of us. That they are not innocent and they're not flat plains of glass and that's a really important revelation. So as we roll forward, we will hopefully have a much healthier view of the role of technology in society.

MS: I want to ask you too about the role of Facebook users in all of this. Alexandra Samuel is a freelance writer and a researcher on technology issues and she told us that she has a very personal attachment to the platform.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: It often strikes me that the people who tell us to quit Facebook are overlooking the very profound structural reasons that many of us use Facebook. So for example in my own case, I have an artistic and Facebook is absolutely the premier source of support community and often information for people with special needs children. The most effective thing we can do with Facebook users is not to boycott Facebook or even tweak our privacy settings, although that's certainly useful. The more useful thing we can do as Facebook users is to raise our voices and share our concerns about Facebook with Facebook and with our representative.

MS: What do you think about what she has to say?

SV: Right on. I think she nailed it. I mean that's my argument exactly. Look we are not Facebook's customers, right. There are 2.2 billion people use Facebook regularly. We're not fools. We find value, right? We find personal value. Facebook is great for me. It's important to her. It's important to 2.2 billion people, it's just collectively a disaster. Just like my car is good to me and I like my car, but collectively our cars are a disaster, right? So in this case we really have to act as citizens. Just like we took on the negative externalities of cars, the pollution, the death toll on the highways and we insisted that our leaders appropriately regulate that technology in our lives. And by the way, we have a long way to go on that, nonetheless that's how we do these things. Facebook is important to many people around the world. The people who say they want to quit Facebook are so privileged to be able to do so. If you live in the Philippines, if you live in India, if you live in Kenya or you have an autistic child, it's a lot harder and perhaps impossible because you are severing yourself from the dominant communication platform in much of the world. Now again in North America we have choices. In much of the world where Facebook has worked its way into daily life in an almost totalising way and I'm not exaggerating, that is impossible. To sever yourself from Facebook is to sever yourself from modern daily life and commerce in much of the world.

MS: And do you have a Facebook account?

SV: Yeah I have to. I wrote a book about it, right. I mean like. Yeah plus you know, I like the puppy photos. I like to know that my cousin's kid graduated from high school, right. For all the reasons that Facebook is nice to us and by the way I don't think it's profoundly nice for most people or profoundly beneficial, I think there are really good reasons to take breaks, but I just think that we shouldn't. We are so important that signing off of Facebook is going to make a difference to a company with 2.2 billion users. I think it's much more important as the guest you just had say, that we organize politically and we demand that our leaders take these problems seriously. These are ecological problems, political problems.

MS: Thanks so much for joining me. Siva Vaidhyanathan is a professor of modern media studies and the author of Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy. We asked Facebook for comment and did not hear back. The CBC News is next. Then, to his fans, he'll always be Cujo. Curtis Joseph, the former NHL star, coming up. I'm Michelle Shephard and you're listening to the Friday edition of The Current.

'It made me who I was': How growing up adopted fuelled Curtis Joseph's NHL career

Guests: Curtis Joseph

MS: Hi. Michelle Shephard and you're listening to the Friday edition of The Current.

[Music: Theme]

MS: Still to come, former U.S. President Barack Obama vowed to close Guantanamo Bay and President Donald Trump vowed to do just the opposite. But when Trump moved to close down the office in charge of closing down the U.S. military prison, there were some unintended consequences, such as losing track of former prisoners. More on that story, coming up in half an hour. But first behind the goalie's mask.

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[Clips of NHL commentary of Curtis Joseph]

MS: Those are some highlights from the career of the NHL goalie, Curtis Joseph or Cujo, as fans know him. His hockey career started in St. Louis and took him to Edmonton, Calgary, Phoenix, Detroit and of course, Toronto, where he helped bring his hometown Maple Leafs close to the ever elusive Stanley Cup finals. Not bad for a kid who grew up in a group home for the mentally ill, who slept on a mattress soaked with cat urine and had little more than processed cheese sandwiches to eat. Forget all the hockey accolades, Cujo's greatest accomplishment may have simply been surviving his childhood. Now retired, Curtis Joseph has written an eye opening memoir with Kirstie McLellan Day called Cujo: The Untold Story of My Life On and Off the Ice. He joins me in our Toronto studio. Hi Curtis.

CURTIS JOSEPH: How are you?

MS: I'm good. Thanks.

CJ: Good.

MS: And before we get to your remarkable upbringing, I just wonder listening to those highlights of your career, does that ever get tiring?

CJ: No, actually you don't appreciate it when you're playing, you're in a little bubble, but I get a little excited when I hear it.

MS: You know an NHL career obviously is just a long shot for any Canadian kid, but when I read your memoir I realized what a longshot it was for you when it seems like growing up, you know getting a regular meal was a more pressing goal. So just to briefly summarize your memoir, you were adopted as a baby, raised in a group home for the mentally ill, where your mother lived and worked. Can you tell me a little bit about that place called Martin Acres?

CJ: Yes we moved there when I was probably under 5 and my parents' job was to look after that home and twenty mentally ill men and some severe, you know screaming and yelling and or writing on the walls and so it was different. You kept your distance and our apartment was right inside of it. So I would say needless to say I never had any kids over after school.

MS: I can imagine.

CJ: I didn't want anybody to see that.

MS: And describe what some of those men were like.

CJ: Yeah it was you'd get to know some of the guys who you know had a, weren't as mentally ill like Little George and Big George. That was their names you know and Big George actually did our dishes and helped out with the dishes and everything, he was part of the family. And we used to tease him, we'd wrestle or fight or if he saw something on TV that was violent, he would lose his mind you know just the way. You know, but he was a sweetheart of a gentle giant, but there was all kinds of different characters and the sad thing is that nobody ever came to see these people. So it wasn't ideal but you'd get to know them and all the people and personalities and who to stay away from and you know lock your door at night and just pay attention.

MS: Yeah cause there were a few residents that used to bend a bit worried about, I think you wrote one was actually a pedophile.

CJ: Yeah, Wellington. Yeah you'd have to know where he was. He flashed me one time and then after that I had to know where he was at all times in the house and I'd have to go down and get potatoes and that's where he cornered me the one time. So you know I'd always make sure I'd look around, make sure that I got in and out of there and take maybe the alternate path down in the basement to get there and out of there quickly.

MS: Must be surreal now thinking, obviously that was your upbringing, but it must be real thinking about that looking back. You're a dad yourself, seven children. What's that like as a kid facing all that?

CJ: Well you don't know any different. It's your life you know as long as you can remember. So it's a gradual thing, but you, the fact that you don't want anybody else to know about it, should tell you something probably and it's just a little different and you know Harold was African-American and Jan you know she was native descent I believe and she was hard core.

MS: Those are your parents.

CJ: Yes she was really hard core. I tried to avoid her at all, out of sight, out of mind type thing. I would say you know when you read the first part of the book, it's all factual, but don't feel sorry for me because it made me who I was and it made me driven and made me want something better for my life. So it's very important and it's very important to me that it was that way.

MS: You mentioned Jan and Harold and Jan was your adoptive mother and Harold was her second husband.

CJ: Correct.

MS: And was your father. Did you know you were adopted at first?

CJ: So Janet told me from as early as I can remember that you're adopted, you were chosen. And that's the best thing she could have ever done for me because I didn't even know what adopted meant. There was no finding out later, I think that would be traumatic for anybody, but everybody is different, right. So I I always tell people yeah tell them right away. You're chosen, you're adopted, we chose you.

MS: When you said earlier that you had sports, you had friends, you found ways to cope. In finding sport, did you know right away that you were a natural athlete or how did that come about?

CJ: Yeah I played baseball, fast ball and I always played shortstop and you know I was a good athlete at everything that I did, triple jump, high jump, I could do everything. So I knew that, but I was small, so it was hard to compete at a younger age. Once I got bigger then that's where I started to advance. I had all those hand skills and knowledge of sport and how to play. Yeah I was never a prospect or anything because I started late, but I always knew I had I could play every sport well. That's something that you're born with.

MS: So why pick hockey then?

CJ: Well it picked me and hockey is our great pastime in Canada. So played road hockey three times a day. Any time anybody was playing road hockey at school, I'd play before first recess, lunch hour recess, second recess and then after school as much as I could. And I was a forward, I was never a goalie. I wanted to be in the action, running, being aggressive. You know as a really shy person, that was my personality coming out in sport.

MS: How'd you end up in goal then?

CJ: Well so Karen Eakins is Jan's real daughter. She was probably 30-years-old and she had a son that was playing and she had already paid the fee. So she said I paid this money and we're leaving, you know just let him play. And of course I get out on the ice and I couldn't do all the things that I could do in road hockey, you know score at will. I got out there and I was tripod, I had the stick and my skates and I just turned basically in a circle. It was so frustrating and disappointing to say the least.

MS: So you became a goalie because you failed as a forward basically.

CJ: No question. Couldn't skate. So what they threw me in net, lied to me, said oh you're good good, stay in there. So I went in and we won the house league championship the next year I played single A hockey in East Gwillimbury, so rep hockey. But there was no other goalie, so again you're playing all the games, but it's at a single A level. So I always say the position chose me and when I got you know to the NHL, guys would go, wow you're such a normal guy for a goalie. Most goalies are real quirky and I'm like well, I never wanted to be a goalie.

MS: Your coach was trying to get you a US scholarship and no one was biting. So the only offer that I read you got was a walk-on invitation to a Junior A team in rural Saskatchewan. What were those years like in Wilcox, Saskatchewan?

CJ: So even to get out there, you know I was playing in the Ontario Junior Hockey League and that's where you get scholarships from and I would see other kids get scholarships from that league and my last year at 19 there, I was MVP of the league. And you know I still didn't get one at all and I had a man named Paul Saunders. He drove the fruit truck for Vince's fruit market and he would occasionally do things nice for me. I don't know what his connection was, but he was a guardian angel. That's what I always say. And he said my boys go to Notre Dame and they play football there, but you should go out there. It's a great school, great people and you know I think you should go. So he paid for my flight. I went out there and I don't know if you've ever been to Wilcox, Saskatchewan. It's a town of 200 people in the middle of nowhere and I remember standing at the end of town, one stop sign in the town and tumbleweeds were literally blowing by in front of me and I'm like where am I?

MS: What have I done?

CJ: What am I doing? Sure enough, we played the whole year. We won the Centennial cup. We're the best team in Canada and we all got scholarships. So it was the best move and I would have never made it to the NHL, if I didn't go to Notre Dame.

MS: I just want to take you back just for a couple of minutes, back to your teenage years. We have a clip from someone from your past, who has a vivid memory of meeting you for the first time. So have a listen.

CJ: Who?

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: First time I ever saw the guy I was pitching against him. He was in the batter's box for Park Avenue Public School. I was pitching for Meadowbrook Public School. I think we're in about grade seven or so. I had a huge afro that stuck out the sides of my hat. And he was the skinniest little kid I'd ever pitched against, but my coach had warned me, he said watch out for this guy. He's leading the whole school league in home runs and I was like yeah okay whatever, I'll freak him out with heat. And I came in, I just wired some crazy wild pitches, in around his head and he sort of backed off, and then as soon as I put one anywhere near the plate, bang homer. Like the guy was just the best athlete I'd ever seen.

MS: So you're grinning wildly here. I take it you recognize that voice. It was Tyler Stewart and he's not only your old high school friend, but he's also drummer for the Bare Naked Ladies and actually Curtis, as a surprise, we had arranged for him to join us this morning, but unfortunately his flight was delayed. So he couldn't make it, but you did, you do write about him in the book quite a bit. And you wrote about that meeting at the baseball game.

CJ: Yeah, you know it's a good thing he didn't show up because we would have been reminiscing the whole time, taking up all your airtime. He makes me laugh. Everything he says, he could say the sky is blue and I would laugh. He's just a funny human being, so creative, so funny and yeah I do remember back then, I always admired Tyler because he was so out going. And I was so impressed with his personality and so I always admired him. He was the president of the student council. He just had a lot going for him. He's a good athlete. He played third base, I played shortstop for the school team in high and you know he just had it all going and we'd always joke around that he's going to play in a band and you know I'll be in the NHL one day. And sure enough it happened. I think he even wrote that in his book. So he's a good man. He's been a good friend and those runs we had with the Maple Leafs in the playoffs, Tyler would always be like hey I got tickets, I'm coming to the game. I'll see you after. Good luck. You know so we always had that in common, all those playoff runs.

MS: We actually do have a few more clips from him. So it's almost as good as him being here, but he had some interesting insights into why he thinks you guys became such good friends.

CJ: Oh, okay.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: I think that stems from both of us being unsure about our identities. You know I mean I came from this incredibly white household, but I was this kind of brown kid with a big afro and I was struggling with who I actually really was. At the time I hadn't found out from my mom who my actual biological dad was. And you know he was a black man and I lived with my stepfather and my sister and my mom, who were all very white. My little sister Melanie had blonde hair and blue eyes and I had a pretty big afro and brown skin. So it was very interesting for me to know that Curtis grew up in a family, essentially a black family. You know his step brother Victor and you know his dad Harold and occasionally you know we would joke like we should swap families. You come over here and live with Bob and Sandy and I'll go over there and live with Harold and everything will be fine. You know we used to make like kind of gallows humour like that and I think honestly that kind of thing brought us together.

MS: Where do you think your bond came from?

CJ: Lots of things with Tyler. I should have known my own family's situation, not to be embarrassed right there because I didn't look at him any differently. You know I looked at him for who he was and I like funny, like I like to be around people that are upbeat and make me laugh. So he does still, like I wait for him to say something. So there's a lot to it, plus he was extremely talented at what he did and very driven and just a lot of things about him and then obviously to be able to connect when I played in Toronto and him to be a Leaf fan and for us to converse about the game and what I saw and what he saw and different stories. It was priceless.

MS: He says that he always knew you were going to go far as a goalie and he actually told us about one game in particular.

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VOICE: I remember once going to one of his games. I think it was the Sharon team, I can't remember the exact day, maybe Mel's Express or something like that. I don't know. Single A, final series and the arena was packed, cowbells ringing, everybody going crazy. All our high school buddies were there, all the parents were there, people from town were there. It's a small little arena in Sharon, Ontario and they were probably outshot 50 to 20 or 60 to 10 or something like ridiculous like that. And they ended up winning the game like 2-1 or 3-1 or something and like Curtis stopped everything. It was absolutely insane the number of shots that he faced. He was just flying all over the place, making ridiculous TV save after ridiculous TV save. And I like honestly like then I kind of went wow this is, that's real.

MS: You write in your book that you really liked facing lots of shots. That's when you were sharpest, when you were super busy and that was for some personal reasons too. Why do you think that was?

CJ: Oh you know, in my 40s, I was discovering myself, life after hockey and how I am and I always say to my wife Stephanie, I met her 11 years ago and she made me grow by 400 percent. It's amazing. You know I talked about my childhood and got me to talk about it and got me to write a book. But you know, as recently as five years ago, she goes you need to be needed. And I'm like what? She goes you need to be needed. I see your eyes light up when one of your kids asks you for something. And I'm like, I'm not like that. I'm not like that. So and then I look back at my career and I'm like those teams that I got lots of shots against and they needed me to be good, that's when I was at my best. So when I went to Detroit and they didn't need me as much, 17 shots, they didn't need me as much as you know the other teams like St. Louis, Edmonton, Toronto I faced tons of shots and that's when I was at my best, first 13 years of my career. So I do need to be needed.

MS: And back to Tyler for a moment. You both had these, as you say these, outsized dreams as teenagers and you both actually realized them.

CJ: Yeah very strange and I know I was a dreamer and I'm sure Tyler is, but the NHL oddly enough because of my small stature and dislocating shoulder, it put things in perspective. So the goal was to get a US scholarship and I tell parents that now, you shouldn't be dreaming about the NHL. It's a miniscule percentage of guys who make it. You should hope that your child goes to college and as a student athlete and gets the most out of it. If they're good enough, they'll make the NHL.

MS: You already mentioned that Tyler was extremely excited when you went to the Maple Leafs and you actually write about that as well in your book. Here's how he put it.

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VOICE: So I'm a huge Toronto Maple Leafs fan, for better or worse, I've lived and died with the team and when my good buddy from high school was not only on the team, but you know one of the reasons why they were doing so great and almost made it a couple of times to the Stanley Cup Final because of him and I was always there at the game, in the room. We were really in touch in those days. It was really, it was so awesome to be like that connected. The Leafs are a part of every Torontonian hockey fan. They live and die by the Leafs, but when your buddy was a huge part of that, it was just like the greatest thing ever.

MS: What was it like for you singing on with the Maple Leafs?

CJ: Yeah it was a little scary at first. If you were going to bomb, it was going to be a big time bomb. But it added a new level of intensity to your focus and to your game. There was never, you couldn't take a practice off, you couldn't take a shift off, you couldn't take a day off. I remember those four years I was all in and like I always was, but just the magnitude of media coverage, especially in the playoffs, it was 100 times what the regular season was, but it was just intense pressure and you know to hear Tyler talk now about it, yeah it was a great time and I felt very important and he made me feel important. But I was always guarded, definitely I was guarded in my life, my personal life, my questions, my answers, everything. I probably was the most boring interview you could possibly listen to, which is fine because you don't want to give anything away. You know that's just you, never show weakness, never give anything away and that's how I lived, especially those Toronto years.

MS: And to be fair, I think most hockey players give the most boring interviews ever when they come out during the game.

CJ: Talk to them when they're retired. They're real humans.

MS: Exactly we have to wait for this. But being in the NHL, there are a lot of peaks obviously, but there are some valleys too. And we'll just bring in Tyler one more time because he felt he could relate. The music business is similar.

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VOICE: Tremendous highs of the sporting world and professional sports. It's very similar in music where you know there's years where we won tons of Junos or we're nominated for Grammys and we had number one singles and sold out tours all over the place. And then there's other years where you release two albums and don't even get invited to the Junos. The ups and downs, that kind of thing and you know Curtis has been through them too, getting traded and going out to Phoenix and you know having his career come to an end without winning the Stanley Cup. You know there's those disappointments as well, but what you realize is it's the ride is so exciting.

MS: What's it like on that ride as a professional athlete when you start getting closer to the end of your career than the beginning? So you're transitioning now to the backup role when you were once the rising star?

CJ: You have to adopt an attitude that's going to work. If you don't, you're just going to be miserable. So when I, when the league stop calling for a number one goalie, which made sense, who wants a number one goalie that's 38-39 years old? Nobody. It doesn't make sense. So I adopted an attitude that works and I became a backup for my last couple of years and you know I embraced that role. And I think I was a good back up. I tried to be a good friend and a good teammate to the number one goalie.

MS: And you've been retired now for almost a decade?

CJ: Yeah.

MS: And what's it been like now stepping away from the game?

CJ: Certainly the first few years are always tough and I've talked to other guys in other sports and they'll tell you the same thing. I think part of that is that you think you can still play. Those are still your friends out there and you're important to them, but you know father time like they say and I love this quote is undefeated and so true. But after you get by that first three or four years you understand that life goes on and you're going to be retired a lot longer than when you were playing. So you better get on with life and you better adopt an attitude that's going to work. And I always told myself, I tried to prepare myself, I said I'm never going to find another job that's as good as this one. Just get used to it. Just get used to it. So as much as you could tell yourself that, it's hard, you get up in the morning, you're like OK what am I supposed to do? Like before your mind was always focused on being better, being better, being better or how do I feel? I remember getting up in the morning that first year and I'm like you know feeling my knees and my legs and getting out of bed, how do I feel and then I thought to myself, I'm just taking the kids to school. It doesn't matter how I feel.

MS: You don't need to stretch before that.

CJ: Yeah doesn't matter if my hamstrings are a little tight. It really doesn't work.

MS: Well Curtis we just have a few minutes left. So I want to go back to your upbringing briefly. You said that you knew you were adopted when you were growing up, but it wasn't until you were already in the NHL that you finally found your birth mother. What was that meeting like?

CJ: It was great. She's extremely shy. I could feel it when I met her. And the joy of her seeing me, I knew what I was going to say. If she felt anything like me, she may feel you know a little guilt and so I told her, Wendy you know you made the best decision you could ever make was to have me. Thank you for having me. And that was important, I feel like the first time we met and it's the truth. She gave me up, she wanted somebody to give me the life that she couldn't, felt that she couldn't give me at 16-years-old and sure I had some trials and tribulations, but like I said, I wouldn't change a thing. I would not change a thing. It was it made me who I was, it made me hungry, it made me pursue what I wanted to pursue and so she made the greatest decision and I always thank her for that.

MS: And you said earlier that one of the things you hoped maybe in writing this book that people would take was your experience with adoption and knowing very early on that you were adopted. In general, why did you decide to write this? What else would you like people to take away?

CJ: So yeah that's a great question. My youngest son Luke is 17 and we're in the car a lot. That's one of the great things about being a hockey parent is you're in the car a lot with your son or daughter and you get to hear things they normally wouldn't talk about, but Luke would tell me, he said dad if you can help one kid make it to the NHL or you know help his life then you've done your job and that means a lot to me.

MS: Well thank you, Curtis Joseph, for sharing your story and for coming in today.

CJ: Thank you very much. It's been, it's been great.

MS: Curtis Joseph played in the NHL for 19 seasons, including for the Toronto Maple Leafs, Edmonton Oilers and Calgary Flames. He's the author with Kirstie McLennan Day of the memoir titled, Cujo: The Untold Story of My Life On and Off the Ice. He was with me in our Toronto studio. Coming up in our next half hour, why some former Guantanamo Bay prisoners have gone off the radar and where in the world they might be. I'm Michelle Shephard and you're listening to the Friday edition of The Current.

[Music: Theme]

Missing former Guantanamo inmates are 'worst nightmare' for U.S. officials: reporter

Guests: Carol Rosenberg, Ramzi Kassem, Daniel Fried

MS: Hi. I'm Michelle Shephard and you're listening to the Friday edition of The Current.

[Music]

MS: No it's not dinner time yet, but that is of course the As It Happens theme music. The CBC radio show is marking a major milestone tonight. For 50 years, As It Happens has been informing and entertaining Canadians. The show has become synonymous with great interviews from the serious to the seriously quirky and you can hear some of their most memorable moments on tonight's edition. For example, here's former host, the late Barbara Frum speaking with Terry Fox. It was 1980, right after the 22-year-old Fox had stopped his crossed Canada run and just months before he died.

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BARBARA FRUM: How has your chemotherapy gone, Terry?

TERRY FOX: Well I had six treatments so far and nothing's changed from the last report that we had.

BARBARA FRUM: What's been keeping you going, Terry?

TERRY FOX: I can't pinpoint one thing because there's been so many things. Things like the telethon, I'll never forget that night when I was watching it. Everyday I got all kinds of mail, the kinds of things that people say and encourage me. You know I have a belief in God that no matter what happens to me, things are going to be okay because you know it doesn't matter because I'm going to turn out a winner. I'm going to go to heaven. I'm going to continue doing what I'm right now and not dwelling on the fact that you know there isn't certainty. Take the positive where you got to take it.

BARBARA FRUM: Terry, I'm glad that there's so much support for you and that's of some help to you.

TERRY FOX: Thank you very much.

BARBARA FRUM: And thanks for talking to us. Bye bye.

TERRY FOX: Bye.

MS: Carol Off is the host today and she has interviewed many political figures. Here is part of her interview with the late Rob Ford in 2010, the day after he won the municipal election to become mayor of Toronto.

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CAROL OFF: Mr. Ford, congratulations.

ROB FORD: Thank you, I appreciate it.

CAROL OFF: People are saying it's a, calling it a stunning win. What do you think that.

ROB FORD: Things are going really well.

CAROL OFF: What do so much. [interrupted] Hello, Mr. Ford are you there?

ROB FORD: Yeah, yeah, I'm here yeah.

CAROL OFF: Oh you're at some event or?

ROB FORD: I'm a coach, I'm a football coach.

CAROL OFF: Okay so you're at football practice then?

ROB FORD: Yes.

CAROL OFF: OK we'll continue then. What is it that you think drew so much support to your campaign?

ROB FORD: People are just fed up with politicians squandering hard earned tax dollars and they know that I'm going to get rid of the carbon administration tax and the land transfer tax. I just know that taxpayers want the gravy train to come to an end and that Rob Ford's the guy to do it. Well that's pretty well it. Anyway I got to let you go here.

CAROL OFF: Well can I ask you about public transportation before you go?

ROB FORD: Really nice talking to you. All the best. Bye bye.

MS: Now it's not all serious politics as, As It Happens, sometimes things get downright silly. Here's Carol Off again. This time she's interviewing Dallas attorney, Gregory Shamoun, who brought his donkey to court as evidence of its good behaviour.

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CAROL OFF: Buddy is of course, the name of your donkey?

GREGORY SHAMOUN: Buddy is my ass, that's correct.

CAROL OFF: Can you describe your ass for us, please?

GREGORY SHAMOUN: My ass is about 300 pounds and it's three and a half feet tall. And my ass is kind of furry and very well-trained, very well groomed and he's housebroken.

CAROL OFF: Was he court broken? Was he fairly well behaved in court?

GREGORY SHAMOUN: He was a gem. He made, he was one of the best witnesses I've ever had in 18 years as a lawyer.

CAROL OFF: Now what was the point of bringing him in?

GREGORY SHAMOUN: That best evidence of my ass' behaviour is looking at my ass face to face.

MS: Listen tonight to As It Happens, as it airs its fiftieth anniversary special program, as usual at 6:30pm, 7 in Newfoundland and parts of Labrador. You're listening to the Friday edition of The Current on CBC Radio One. I'm Michelle Shephard.

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VOICE: This morning I watched President Obama talking about Gitmo, right, Guantanamo Bay, which by the way, which by the way, we are keeping open, which we are keeping open. And we're going to load it up with some bad dudes, believe me. We're going to load it up.

MS: That was Donald Trump on the campaign trail in 2016 and treu to his word, once he became president, he quickly shut down an office in the State Department that was charged with closing the facility. But it turns out that move had some unintended consequences. The office was called the Special Envoy for Guantanamo Closure and part of its job was to find countries that would accept detainees. But it was also responsible for tracking them after they left the prison and now it seems several of those former detainees are missing or at least the U.S. has lost track of them. That's according to a new investigation by Carol Rosenberg. She's a reporter with McClatchy, owner of The Miami Herald and she's been covering Guantanamo since 2002. That's where we've reached her. Hi Carol.

CAROL ROSENBERG: Hi Michelle.

MS: Can you tell us who these detainees are, who are now missing?

CR: There's a number of them, but I think possibly the most important ones that come up in our research is a Syrian man, a hunger striker and thorn in the side to the president here who was resettled in Uruguay, during the Obama administration, ran away and my Syrian sources tell me he's now in south central Turkey going in and out of Al-Nusra-controlled Syria, Idlib province. Two other cases involve two Libyan men who were sent to Senegal, they were afraid to go home. After two years in Senegal something went wrong apparently with US-Senegalese relations and the Senegalese put those two men on a plane, one of them against his will, in what appears to be a diplomatic and sent him back to Libya, even though he said he thought he'd be killed there.

MS: And in that first case that you described, this seems like it would be the U.S. administration's worst nightmare, that somebody who's been detained by U.S. forces is now possibly in a country where there are U.S. troops. Given that, why was he or other detainees released in the first place?

CR: The Obama administration was trying to close Guantanamo. The Obama administration was trying to mitigate the anger and problems they had with these war on terror detainees who could never be charged with a crime, who were no longer of any use to the Americans, but who weren't convicted of anything. So they searched the world and tried to find places, far flying places, far from the battlefield, to send these men to start new lives in new countries. And so yes, this is their worst nightmare potentially. This man should never have been allowed to get anywhere near Syria. That's what the former Obama administration ambassador who made the deal and kept track of it told me. The Obama administration went out of their way to make sure that man never got near Syria. They kept ties with the Uruguayan. When he would run away they made use of all of the resources of Americans, including the intelligence community to get him back. The Trump administration comes in, dismantles the office that tracks these people and he vanished, apparently to turn up in Syria. And the problem Michelle is that they went out of their way to make sure these men didn't return, they say to the battlefield, but really to places where there are American forces, US soldiers because this man for example, he was a hunger striker and he came to hate the Americans. Hate the American troops because they put him through these you know forced feedings and so he was going to be angry. So they tried to find like the farthest place, safest place possible for him to start a new life in Uruguay. They wanted to make sure these guys didn't go near the places where the U.S. continues to be at war.

MS: And you mentioned, Uruguay, Senegal, what other countries accepted these former detainees?

CR: It was a pretty amazing effort. They found 30 different countries to resettle them. As you know, they went to Palau. They went to El Salvador. They went all across Europe, including places like Slovakia, Hungary, Serbia. They sent many men to resettlement in the UAE, the United Arab Emirates, which turned out to be less of a resettlement plan because they're now, as we've learned, are in more like Guantanamo East. They're in another prison setting and haven't been given the opportunity to leave that and start the new lives as the Obama administration intended.

MS: And that office that has now been closed, would they try and diplomatically arrange those deals as well to ensure say that they don't go into another prison? Was that also part of their mandate?

CR: For sure they weren't supposed to be, they were supposed to be trying to figure out a way so that there wasn't a continuing problem. You know it was called the Office of the Special Envoy for the Closure of Guantanamo, but in addition to closing Guantanamo, they tended very closely to these transfer deals because while Obama sent about 200 men away, George Bush sent about 550 Guantanamo detainees from that prison and what they found out is that if they didn't keep an eye on these deals, if they didn't fashion very individual almost like social service remedies for them, some of them did return to the battlefield during the Bush administration. So the Obama administration looked for small far flung countries, to take just a few with the hopes that they would settle there.

MS: So we've requested comment from the U.S. State Department, but so far we've not heard back. I understand that's perhaps not uncommon, you've faced the same problem when you were doing your story. Now that the office for the closure of Guantanamo has itself been shut down, who is responsible for tracking former detainees or answering these questions even?

CR: They moved it to the office of ambassador Nathan Sales. His office is the counter-terrorism office of the Department of State. So he's supposed to be working on you know building relations with countries over counterterrorism joint activities and as need be you know reaching out to countries that are violators. It's not that it doesn't make perfect sense, but what happened when they dismantled that office is they took the lawyers and the diplomats who had experience making the deals in the first place and they sent them to other offices. So what it is is they now have brand new staffers, Trump appointees, trying to catch up and manage these deal that when untended for at least a year.

MS: And Carol you're there this week, you continue to cover Guantanamo, but it really feels as if it had fallen out of the headlines elsewhere. Why is this still an important story?

CR: My editor made the decision back in 2002 that if the U.S. government and the U.S. military was going to build a prison and courthouse out of reach of the American people, it would not be out of reach of American journalism. My editor decided that somebody had to come down here and tell the story of Guantanamo because otherwise it would be forgotten. It is forgotten mostly, but we keep covering it for those who still want to know that it's still here.

MS: Carol, thanks for joining us this morning.

CR: Thank you, Michelle.

MS: Carol Rosenberg is a reporter with McClatchy, owner of the Miami Herald. We reached her in Guantanamo Bay. We also requested comment from the Republican chairs of the House and Senate committees with responsibility for Guantanamo. They declined comment or did not reply. So now that the State Department has closed an office that was tracking former Guantanamo detainees, there's concern about the threat some may pose in the world, but in other cases, the detainees themselves are the ones at risk. Ramzi Kassem is a lawyer for one of Bill Libyan's who is resettled in Senegal. He's also a professor of law at the City University of New York, where he co-directs the Immigrant and Non-citizen Rights Clinic. We've reached him in New York City. Hi Ramzi.

RAMZI KASSEM: Hi Michelle, how are you?

MS: Good. Thanks for joining us today. Your client Awad Khalifa was held at Guantanamo for over 14 years. First, how did he find himself there in the first place?

RK: Well a lot of like many Guantanamo prisoners, Mr. Khalifa was brought to Guantanamo because he was a you know "Muslim out of place." He was he was a non-Afghan, non-Pakistani Muslim who was in the sort of Afghanistan-Pakistan region in the wake of 9/11 and at that time, the U.S. military and various intelligence services were offering considerable bounties to the Pakistani military, to Afghan armed factions and militias and tribes to turn in men like him. And so it wasn't in connection with the 9/11 plot or anything like that, it was through that kind of process in exchange for a bounty that Mr. Khalifa found himself in U.S. custody in Guantanamo.

MS: And after 14 years it was determined that he would not be one of the few detainees that would be charged. Why did the U.S. decide to release him from Guantanamo and send him to Senegal, instead of back home to Libya?

RK: Well you know Mr. Khalifa was eventually cleared by a parole like process called the periodic review board that includes every U.S. government agency with a stake in national security affairs. And before that body had deemed him not to constitute a threat, a federal district judge had actually weighed in on his case and the court held that "the U.S. government concedes that there is absolutely no evidence, no evidence that Khalifa personally lifted a hand against the United States." So at that point the U.S. government cleared him for release. There was no allegation even by the government that he was a threat to the U.S. or its allies and they were looking for a country to send him. In 2015-2016 U.S. government's position was that Libya was not a safe place to resettle him because of the likelihood that he would face torture, persecution, possibly death.

MS: And he was scared. He was scared himself of going back.

RK: And he was scared.

MS: Right. So Senegal decided that they would accept him. Did he have trouble adjusting to the culture when he was there?

RK: He actually really embraced it. I mean he was learning the local languages, I mean some of the local languages well off in French. He even got engaged to a Senegalese woman and he was fully embraced by his society, his immediate community, his neighbors and he loved it. He wanted to make his life there.

MS: Then what happened?

RK: Unfortunately it isn't entirely clear what happened, Michelle. What we know is that as the two year mark approached on his resettlement, the Senegalese government started sending these signals that it intended to forcibly repatriate him to Libya, against his will, in violation of its own international legal obligations, the Convention Against Torture all of that. Because Mr. Khalifa made it clear that he knew he would, well he knew that what ultimately happened would happen, which is that he would be disappeared in Libya and that he would face torture and possibly worse. So it's not really clear what happened between the U.S. government and the Senegalese government. We tried to get you know as these messages were being sent, I tried to reach out to the Senegalese government and to the U.S. government to get some kind of reaction. Now all of that was to no avail. And so at best it looks like the U.S. government was deliberately silent and deliberately negligent as to what might happen to Mr. Khalifa. At worst, they gave a green light behind closed doors and encouraged this outcome.

MS: Do you think there's a connection between his disappearance now and the fact that office was shut that used to track these detainees?

RK: I mean I think there is a connection between the office being shut and generally the infrastructure of Guantanamo closure being systematically dismantled by the Trump administration. We certainly had interlocutors in the U.S. government, in the State Department, under the Obama administration, that would have been in a position to intervene. But really the larger problem, I think there's a share of the blame here that should appropriately be laid at the feet of the Obama administration, is that the Obama administration didn't go far enough in its efforts to roll back the Guantanamo narrative. The Obama administration never came out and said look, these men have never actually been charged or convicted of anything approaching a threat to the United States. And if the Obama administration had undercut that narrative more powerfully, I think the men who got resettled or repatriated, wouldn't have to live with the stigma of being former Guantanamo prisoners as much. I mean even Carol, whom I respect a great deal, you know said things like a prisoner who was a former hunger striker, necessarily came to hate the US because of the forced feelings. Now I represented the longest running hunger striker in Guantanamo. He never harbored any ill will towards the United States, even after his release. And I've represented a number of hunger strikers who in Guantanamo, who are still in Guantanamo, who are now home and don't bear any ill will towards us.

MS: Ramzi, we're going to have to leave it there. Our next guest may be able to answer some of the questions you've posed. Thanks for joining us.

RK: Thank you so much, Michelle.

MS: Ramzi Kassem is professor of law at the City University of New York, where he co-directs the Immigrant and Non-citizens Right Clinic. We reached him in New York City.

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VOICE: This first executive order that we are signing by the authority vested in me as President and by the constitution and the laws of the United States of America in order to affect the appropriate disposition of individuals currently detained by the Department of Defense at Guantanamo and promptly to close the detention facility at Guantanamo consistent with the national security and the foreign policy interest of the United States in the interest of justice, I herby order. And we then provide the process whereby Guantanamo will be closed no later than one year from now.

MS: Well of course Guantanamo did not close as ordered, but the fate of Ramzi Kassem's client is tied to that moment on the third day of Barack Obama's presidency. And that process Obama talks about is something my next guest was responsible for. Daniel Fried was the special, the very first special envoy for the closure of Guantanamo. He was instrumental in negotiating many of the detainees transfers we've been hearing about. We've reached him in Washington D.C. Hi Dan.

DANIEL FRIED: Hi. Good morning, Michelle.

MS: Morning. Let me first start with your reaction to what we've just heard from Ramzi Kassem.

DF: Well closing Guantanamo and transferring the detainees there was going to be a labor intensive exercise, including the issue of making sure that the countries which received those detainees lived up to their obligations to give them a decent shot at a new life. When the, when my old office was abolished and the follow up given to the counter-terrorism people, well an inevitable fall off of bureaucratic attention resulted and that may have been a contributing factor to the problem you and your last guest were just discussing. I don't know that because I don't know the case, but in general, if you don't pay attention to a problem, it doesn't get resolved on its own.

MS: And Dan, what kind of negotiations in general terms, did you have to have with countries to persuade them to take the detainees?

DF: Well there are two parts to all of us. One was convincing a government to take a Guantanamo detainee, which was particularly challenging because the U.S., even under Obama, was not willing to take any itself. And then was prevented by law very quickly in to the Obama administration from doing so. So there was a challenge to convincing governments that this was a good thing. Governments agreed to accept Guantanamo detainees had a variety of motives. In some cases, West European governments that opposed Guantanamo, its existence at all, so they felt an obligation to help us close it. Other governments wanted to do a favor to the new U.S. President, Barack Obama, variety of motives. So first we had to get a country ready to accept a detainee and then we had discuss the country, what happens next. We had to make sure that the detainee would be decently treated, have a chance at a new life and whatever degree of potential threat might exist from the detainee that that threat would be mitigated in some way. Your last caller suggested that his person was picked up entirely by accident or happenstance. In my experience, this usually was not the case. The average Guantanamo detainee was not a terrorist mastermind, that was kind of a fever dream of some in the Bush administration. Neither was the typical detainee an innocent shepherd picked up by the wicked Americans. That was a kind of fevered dream of the left. The typical detainee, if you can say there's such a thing, sort of the height of the bell curve, was a low-level recruit, somebody who came from somewhere in the Middle East to join with the Taliban or associate himself with Osama bin Laden's group and was usually in some kind of a training camp or a safe house when picked up.

MS: But Daniel, there is the distinction between, I mean there were nearly 800 men that were taken there, but as you know, many people will say why not be better safe than sorry. Why release any of them if we're going to have cases, such as what the one that Carol cited that could be a potential risk now in Syria.

DF: Sure I dealt with that argument all the time. If you want zero risk, you can say let's not let anybody out. However, there's going to be another kind of a risk, the existence of Guantanamo itself damaged U.S. foreign policy. It made it harder for us to for example convince allies to send troops to fight alongside of us in Afghanistan. You know before I became the Guantanamo closure Special Envoy, I was assistant secretary for Europe and one of my jobs included talking to European governments about their contribution to the common fight in Afghanistan. The existence of Guantanamo was a problem politically. It made governments either unable or in some cases unwilling to do what we wanted to do. So the existence of Guantanamo is not cost-free, it had a price and it wasn't just something ephemeral like energy, was a price paid in the American weakening of the American ability to organize a coalition for the fight in Afghanistan. This is, every policy maker wants risk-free options. The secret is they don't exist. You want zero risk? You're living in a dream world. The risk could be mitigated and our record, the Obama administration's record for safety, following transfer of detainees, was actually pretty good. Not perfect, but actually by all the measures I know, better than the Bush administration's. Wasn't their fault, they sent a lot of people back to Afghanistan, thinking the fight was over and that turned out not to be the case. But you got to make choices in policy. That's the real world.

MS: And Dan, just very briefly before we go, when you hear that the U.S. has now lost track of some of the detainees, what was your immediate response?

DF: I rolled my eyes. You know you're not going to be at 100 percent, but if you dismantle the office whose job it was to keep track of the progress of resettlements, what do you think's going to happen? The expertise, the personal connections are all gone. You know we, I negotiated these agreements with foreign governments personally. I knew with who, I sat across from people, we had understandings. I knew who to call. I had gotten our embassies mobilized to stay in touch with the receiving government. If that vanishes, it's not easy to pick up the threads. Somebody just can't walk in and do it. That's the price we paid.

MS: Thank you so much, Dan. Dan, I appreciate you coming on. Thanks for your time.

DF: My pleasure, take care. Bye.

MS: Daniel Fried was the first Special Envoy for the closure of Guantanamo. He was in Washington. Just to note, we did put in a request for an interview with the U.S. State Department and with members of the U.S. House subcommittee on national security. Those requests were denied. And that's our program for today. Thanks for joining me. I'm Michelle Shephard and thank you for listening to the Friday edition of The Current.

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Nov. 16, 2018 episode transcript

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