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Will Obama's Guantánamo Plan Close the Prison or Just Relocate It to a New ZIP Code?
President Obama has submitted a plan to Congress to close Guantánamo Bay military prison. Despite Obama’s pledge to close the facility as one of his first acts after taking office in 2008, there are still 91 prisoners there, 35 of whom have been cleared for release. Republicans in Congress have repeatedly obstructed his attempts to close the prison. Obama wants to transfer all detainees to their home countries or to U.S. military or civilian prisons. We speak to Baher Azmy, legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, and Ken Gude, a senior fellow with the National Security Team at the Center for American Progress.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: President Obama has submitted a plan to Congress to close the Guantánamo Bay military prison. Despite Obama’s pledge to close the facility as one of his first acts after taking office in 2009, there are still 91 prisoners there, 35 of whom have been cleared for release. Republicans in Congress have repeatedly obstructed the president’s attempt to close the prison. On Tuesday, Obama announced plans to transfer all detainees to their home countries or to U.S. military or civilian prisons. During his address, the president explained why the prison must be shuttered.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: For many years, it’s been clear that the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay does not advance our national security. It undermines it. This is not just my opinion. This is the opinion of experts. This is the opinion of many in our military. It’s counterproductive to our fight against terrorists, because they use it as propaganda in their efforts to recruit. ... Keeping this facility open is contrary to our values. It undermines our standing in the world. It is viewed as a stain on our broader record of upholding the highest standards of rule of law.
AMY GOODMAN: Congress remains strongly opposed to Guantánamo prisoners being moved to U.S. soil and is expected to block Obama’s plan. President Obama said he hoped his plan would receive a fair hearing.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: In Congress, I recognize, in part because of some of the fears of the public that have been fanned oftentimes by misinformation, there continues to be a fair amount of opposition to closing Guantánamo. If it were easy, it would have happened years ago, as I wanted, as I have been working to try to get done. But there remains bipartisan support for closing it. And given the stakes involved for our security, this plan deserves a fair hearing.
AMY GOODMAN: To find out more about the significance of the move, we’re joined now by two guests. Baher Azmy is the legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has been representing Guantánamo prisoners since 2002. Ken Gude is a senior fellow with the National Security Team at the Center for American Progress.
Ken, let’s begin with you. Can you respond to President Obama’s proposal yesterday?
KEN GUDE: Well, first, I want to thank you very much for being on your program, Amy. I’ve long been an admirer, and it’s a great honor to be here.
I think President Obama’s plan that he put out represents the best and most secure way to close Guantánamo. It’s not particularly new from what he’s been trying to do over the course of the last seven years, but I am hopeful that, with about 11 months to go in his administration, this will be a renewed push to finally get the prison closed.
Now, I think we have to be realistic about the prospects of at least one element of his plan that he put forward yesterday, which was to try and bring some detainees into the United States to stand trial in federal court or to be held as law of war detainees. Congress is just not going to change the law to allow that to happen, especially given the amount of opposition that this Congress is throwing at the president on every issue. So, the notion that there are going to be detainees here in the United States from Guantánamo in anything like the near term is just not going to happen. So I’m hopeful that the Obama administration has some alternative plans for what to do with detainees that they were intending to bring to the United States, so that they can actually close the prison under his administration.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Baher Azmy of the Center for Constitutional Rights, you’ve been engaged with the administration now for years on this issue. What’s your reaction to the president’s latest plan?
BAHER AZMY: Well, we appreciate the vigor with which he—with which he delivered his condemnation about Guantánamo, but ultimately think the plan is both too late and too little. It is too late, because some of the most obvious features of the plan—transferring cleared detainees—could have been accomplished long ago. There are—the 35 detainees, including a number of our clients, have been cleared for release, some of whom—since 2009, yet they have languished.
And it’s too little, because in addition to the sort of political reality that Ken identified, the plan embraces a broken military commission system as a way to try—charge and try the 9/11 conspirators, as they are called, and simply transfers Guantánamo to U.S. soil. And the president’s condemnation of Guantánamo as being illegitimate doesn’t have to do with its physical space, it has to do with its legal and political space and its embrace of indefinite detention, which he would simply import into the United States and make it a more normalized feature of our legal landscape to be abused by future presidents.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, what about those detainees who have been cleared? What has been the difficulty in getting them—getting them moved out and into either home countries or other countries?
BAHER AZMY: So, Congress has placed some barriers to transfer, which the administration cites repeatedly. But ultimately it’s been a lack of political will, because he has always had the authority he currently has to either repatriate individuals to home countries or resettle them in third countries. Since—between 2010 until about 2014, there was a blanket ban on repatriating anyone to Yemen—and the majority of prisoners were Yemeni—regardless of individual circumstances or family circumstances. And that was self-imposed. So, we’re really pleased to hear that he’s going to expedite a process of getting cleared detainees out, the 35 out immediately, but he has to speed up clearing others and consider a fair trial system in Article III courts.
AMY GOODMAN: Ken Gude, who are these prisoners? This morning on the networks, you see they’re talking about bringing terrorists to U.S. soil. More than a hundred, one network said, had gone back to fight when they were released. Who are the people who are held at Guantánamo?
KEN GUDE: Well, now, it is a much different group than the original about 700 that were brought to Guantánamo by the Bush administration. The Obama administration inherited about 240 detainees; now they’re down to just 91. There is a core group that are facing military commissions charges, only seven that are facing military commissions charges—the 9/11 co-conspirators and two others. There’s another group of detainees that the Obama administration does not want to release. And then there’s a larger group that is going to be transferred out of the base to their either home countries or third countries. Now, some of these guys are bad guys. I don’t think there’s any—any question about that. But a lot of them have been in Guantánamo for 15 years, and it’s high past time that they’re transferred or resettled to third countries. And I’m hopeful that the Obama administration can get that done at least before they leave office.
Now, I think it’s important for your viewers to realize that there is legitimate criticism of what—the pace that the Pentagon has been working through some of these cases to get them transferred and resettled. But it isn’t just a case of the Obama administration being slow or the Obama administration not being committed to closing Guantánamo. This is a difficult challenge, because a lot of these detainees simply can’t be sent back to their native countries, for a variety of reasons, some of which is related to international law prohibitions on sending individuals back to a country in which they face the likelihood of torture. So it is a process to try and find countries to accept them and resettle them. And it is a long bureaucratic process, one the Obama administration has not managed particularly well. But hopefully, in this last 11 months, the president and Secretary of Defense Carter will be able to light a fire under the people in the Pentagon who are responsible for doing this, and we can get it done.
AMY GOODMAN: Baher, the prisoners that you have represented, I mean, how they end up at Guantánamo—for example, those that were given money to bring in people?
BAHER AZMY: Yeah, well, as Ken identifies, the overwhelming majority of prisoners brought to Guantánamo Bay were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, fleeing the American-led bombing in Afghanistan, picked up in Pakistan through Pakistani government raids, sold to the Americans for bounties. A study done in 2006 revealed that even under the government’s own evidence, taking that as true, only 8 percent were Guantánamo—were al-Qaeda members or fighters of al-Qaeda. Now, some of the individuals currently detained there, like our client Ghaleb al-Bihani, was in the so-called too-dangerous-to-release category for a long time, even though the worst that could be said about him is that he was an assistant cook to a group that was affiliated with the Taliban, but that no longer exists.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to break and then come back to this discussion. We’re talking with Baher Azmy—he is legal director at Center for Constitutional Rights—and with Ken Gude, who’s with the Center for American Progress. This is Democracy Now! Back in a minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: Roger Waters performing "We Shall Overcome," accompanied by high school cellist Alexander Rohatyn, here in the Democracy Now! studio. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González, as we talk about President Obama’s announcement yesterday about his plans to close Guantánamo.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, I want to ask about some of the comments made about Guantánamo during this election season. Speaking Tuesday before the Nevada caucus, Republican presidential contender and Florida Senator Marco Rubio criticized Obama’s plan and repeated what he’s said on the campaign trail about Guantánamo.
SEN. MARCO RUBIO: Not only are we not going to close Guantánamo, when I’m president, if we capture a terrorist alive, they’re not getting a court hearing in Manhattan, they’re not going to be sent to Nevada. They’re going to Guantánamo, and we’re going to find out everything they know.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Rubio speaking Tuesday. At a GOP debate earlier this month, Rubio said he would put more people in Guantánamo.
SEN. MARCO RUBIO: Here’s the bigger part—problem with all this: We’re not interrogating anybody right now. Guantánamo is being emptied by this president. We should be putting people into Guantánamo, not emptying it out. And we shouldn’t be releasing these killers, who are rejoining the battlefield against the United States.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Meanwhile, speaking Tuesday, Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump vowed to load up Guantánamo with, quote, "some bad dudes."
DONALD TRUMP: This morning I watched President Obama talking about Gitmo, right? Guantánamo 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.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: So, I’d like to ask Baher Azmy, what do you think of these—the way the debate has gone in the Republican—among the Republican candidates about Guantánamo?
BAHER AZMY: Well, I think they’re—it’s sort of the craven grandstanding that we’ve seen with a lot of issues from the Republican Party, including, you know, deportation of 11 million immigrants or the exclusion of Muslims. It’s all of a piece. And Donald Trump, also in embracing waterboarding, has basically admitted that he—made an admission of war crimes that he would commit.
AMY GOODMAN: He said he would bring back waterboarding and bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding.
BAHER AZMY: That’s right, which is a war crime. And so, he might need to get legal counsel, in addition to political counsel, to advise him about that. And, you know, it’s important to remember, as Obama first said, there was a political consensus around when Obama was elected, including from President Bush and John McCain, that the facility should be closed. And Obama, of course, is facing unreasonable obstruction and this really ugly political environment.
AMY GOODMAN: Ken Gude, I wanted to ask you about this letter that was signed by 40 sheriffs in Colorado who wrote to the White House to oppose any plan to move the detainees from Guantánamo to prisons in Colorado. I think there’s some speculation that most of the prisons used would be in Colorado.
KEN GUDE: Yeah, well, I think one thing that those sheriffs probably aren’t aware of is that there’s more than a dozen very high-profile international terrorists already in Colorado prisons, some of the most dangerous terrorists that the United States has ever captured—Ramzi Yousef, the man who was responsible for the first World Trade Center bombing attempt in 1993; one former Guantánamo detainee, Ahmed Ghailani, who was convicted in a New York courtroom of his role in the 1998 East Africa embassy bombings; four of Ghailani’s co-conspirators in that attack; Zacarias Moussaoui, who was captured before 9/11 and was—at the time, at least—thought to be the 20th hijacker; Richard Reid, who was—tried to blow up an inbound airliner into the United States with a bomb in his shoes. These guys are already in prisons in Colorado, or at least in one prison in Colorado, the penitentiary at Florence.
And so, the notion that bringing Guantánamo detainees into the United States and locating them in either maximum-security U.S. prisons or inside secure military bases is somehow a threat to the American people just doesn’t hold water. And it’s not—it’s not something that I’ve ever understood, and nobody who is a critic of this has ever actually explained why it is dangerous to have dangerous people in prison, because if that’s true, we’ve got a real problem, because there’s a lot of dangerous people in prison.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Ken, so the bottom line is that you—your sense is that no matter what the president said this week, that at the end of this year we’re still going to have prisoners in Guantánamo because of the continued obstruction of Congress or refusal of Congress to change the law.
KEN GUDE: Well, I don’t think that’s necessarily true. What I think is definitely true is Congress isn’t going to change the law, and the likelihood of anybody coming to the United States is extremely low. But that doesn’t mean that Guantánamo has to stay open, because I do think that there are other options than this preferred plan, than what the president has laid out for closing Guantánamo. And that is, using more of the process of trying to find other countries to take some of these detainees, either in resettlement or trying for third country prosecutions or looking at some of the detainees that were actually captured in connection with the Afghan War, which, as was said earlier, was certainly not the majority of the detainees, but there are some detainees that were captured in connection with that conflict. There were probably about a dozen that were connected—captured trying to flee the Tora Bora situation, and there were probably another 10 or so that are at Guantánamo there who were actually enemy fighters in that conflict. It’s possible that those detainees could be sent back to Afghanistan in a similar process to what the United States did when it turned over the Bagram detention facility to Afghan control. So what I’m saying is that going into the United States, detainees are probably not going there because of the legal and political restrictions right now, but that doesn’t mean that we have to give up. There are other options out there.
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, military tribunals, in the few—in the minute we have left. You mentioned military tribunals, but what is your problem with them?
BAHER AZMY: They are a second-class system of justice that has largely been created in a preordained way to secure convictions. And some proof of their—so that’s why they’re unjust. They’re also unworkable insofar as they’ve been in existence for—since the Bush administration in multiple forms, and because they’re so novel and because they’re kind of made up as they go along, are not a valid system of justice. And the system is toppling sort of year by year as courts are reviewing kind of non-international law charges that they’re trying to bring. And as the president said, it’s been 15 years, and there hasn’t been any trial of—
AMY GOODMAN: The president criticized them—
BAHER AZMY: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: —but also said they would continue.
BAHER AZMY: That’s right. That’s right. And he should just more fully embrace fair Article III trials.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’re going to leave it there, and we thank you so much for being with us, Baher Azmy of the Center for Constitutional Rights and Ken Gude, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. ... Read More →
MarShawn McCarrel: Remembering the Black Lives Matter Activist Who Shot Himself at Ohio Statehouse
We end today’s show remembering Black Lives Matter activist MarShawn McCarrel. On February 8, he shot himself to death at the entrance to the Ohio Statehouse in Columbus, Ohio. MarShawn McCarrel was just 23 years old. MarShawn organized against the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson and worked to aid the homeless. He launched the program Feed the Streets after he himself was homeless for three months. Hours before he shot himself, MarShawn wrote on Facebook, "My demons won today. I’m sorry." Just days before his death, MarShawn was honored as a Hometown Hero at the NAACP Image Awards for his community project, Pursuing Our Dreams. On Tuesday, Democracy Now! spoke to a group of students and a teacher who knew MarShawn.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We end today’s show remembering Black Lives Matter activist MarShawn McCarrel. On February 8th, he shot himself to death at the entrance to the Ohio Statehouse in Columbus, Ohio. He was just 23 years old. MarShawn organized against the police shooting of Michael Brown of Ferguson and worked to aid the homeless. He launched the program Feed the Streets after he himself was homeless for three months.
AMY GOODMAN: Hours before he shot himself, MarShawn wrote on his Facebook page, "My demons won today. I’m sorry." Just before his death, MarShawn was honored as a Hometown Hero at the NAACP Image Awards for his community project, Pursuing Our Dreams.
When I was in Ohio yesterday, in Columbus, I spoke to a group of high school students and their teacher, who knew MarShawn well. Steve Shapiro is the program director for Mosaic, a high school humanities program that draws students from across Columbus, Ohio.
STEVE SHAPIRO: Mosaic is a high school humanities program for creative young people from across Franklin County. And MarShawn was not only an amazing kid as a student, but he came back many years as a guest speaker for us. He spoke not only about activism and about strategies for making social change, but he also spoke about white privilege and about racial questions. And he was a brilliant, brilliant guy and someone that our kids fell in love with every time they saw him.
AMY GOODMAN: And you’re the head of the program?
STEVE SHAPIRO: Program director.
AMY GOODMAN: How did you meet MarShawn?
STEVE SHAPIRO: Like we meet all of our students—going out and recruiting and sharing information about this program. And I think MarShawn saw—as a creative and a socially conscious young man, saw this as a really unique opportunity, but also recognized himself as being not like many of the other kids who came from privileged suburbs. And I think he wondered, "Is this the right place for me? Am I outside of my comfort zone?" And I think it was an act of courage for him to choose to come to Mosaic, because, you know, as he said, "I’m one of the homies here," but there aren’t many, you know, and he stood out, and it was a risk. But he found very quickly that he was in a culture of people who really valued and cared about him.
AMY GOODMAN: He started a program with his brother?
STEVE SHAPIRO: Yeah, MarShawn and his brother, his twin brother MarQuan, started the program called Feed the Streets, which is basically a program on the West Side, in the Bottoms, near where they came up, and basically was a program where they were feeding people in their community, but it wasn’t a community service, it wasn’t a charity act. It was basically a building community act. MarShawn always believed you have to build community to move community. And so, what he and his brother did was organize people. Usually, as many as 40, 50 people would show up once a month to just pass out lunches, not so much as an act of charity, but as an act of connecting with neighbors. People would go door to door. People would say hello to people. People would just sort of build a positive relationship between strangers in the community, to make the notion that people could be safe, that people could be together, and that people, all different types of people, are welcome in the Bottoms.
AMY GOODMAN: It must have come as a terrible shock to you. How did you hear that MarShawn had died?
STEVE SHAPIRO: I mean, of course, on Facebook, like you hear everything, is the first time I saw it. And I think I was really in a pretty deep state of denial the night that it happened, and I thought maybe it’s a mistake, maybe it was misreported.
AMY GOODMAN: What did he say on his Facebook page?
STEVE SHAPIRO: Well, on his Facebook page, he said, "My demons won today. I’m sorry," which was ominous. But, you know, it was just the reality that—the reason it was so shocking to me is MarShawn was full of life. He had a bright smile, flash in his eyes. Everyone loved him. He could light up a room. And he always seemed to be positive and working. You know, he was a kid—a young man that could see all the oppression and injustice, commit himself to working for it and still just bring light and life. Like he never—he wasn’t—even if he was angry at the system, he managed to somehow bring a positive energy to the work that he did. He was remarkable.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you tell me your name and how you knew MarShawn?
JACOB SEITZ: I’m Jacob. I learned about MarShawn through the Mosaic program.
AMY GOODMAN: Are you in it?
JACOB SEITZ: Yes, I am. I’m a senior. It’s a two-year program, and this is my second year of it.
AMY GOODMAN: A senior in high school.
JACOB SEITZ: Mm-hmm, yes.
AMY GOODMAN: How did you know MarShawn?
JACOB SEITZ: Well, MarShawn had come in multiple times to talk to the Mosaic program about the importance of activism and the importance of kind of getting out in your community. And I kind of learned about him through that. And he personally, at least for me, inspired me to be an activist. You know, I’ve held, personally, rallies at local Planned Parenthoods for—against like anti-choice groups. And he just inspired me to really go out and kind of help my community. One of my favorite quotes he said—he said he always wished he had a gun that shot hope, because he would light up the hood, which I just think is—like epitomizes him, for me.
AMY GOODMAN: There was an unfortunate incident, after he died, with a police officer. Can you explain what happened?
JACOB SEITZ: Well, yeah. A police officer—I believe it was near Dayton—reposted an article that he found about MarShawn and with a comment, you’ve got to "Love a happy ending," which just set a lot of people off. And it was just really upsetting to see law enforcement treat someone who was so afraid—he was so afraid of law enforcement because of where he grew up. You know, he grew up in the West Side of Columbus, which has been notorious for not very good treatment of people by the police. And so, I think that it was just—it was really sad for a lot of people to see mistreatment like that.
AMY GOODMAN: The police officer wrote, you’ve got to "Love a happy ending," after MarShawn had committed suicide.
JACOB SEITZ: Yeah, yes, he reposted one of the articles on Facebook that was talking about MarShawn, who had committed suicide on the Statehouse steps.
AMY GOODMAN: Who—what happened to him?
JACOB SEITZ: He was put on paid leave, because—I would like to think that if he wasn’t unionized, there would have been stricter actions. But he was put on paid leave by the police department of that city.
AMY GOODMAN: Have there been protests?
JACOB SEITZ: There have not. I think MarShawn’s family is asking people to kind of focus on how he lived his life rather than how he died. So...
AMY GOODMAN: Can you tell me your name and how you knew MarShawn?
MASHAL AHMED: I’m Mashal Ahmed. I’m a senior in Mosaic, and I knew him from him coming in and speaking to us multiple times, and going after class and speaking to him one on one, and actually going to one of his Feed the Streets events and going and passing out food to people.
AMY GOODMAN: What is Feed the Streets, the program he started with his twin brother?
MASHAL AHMED: Well, basically, it’s a program that, once a month, people come together, and they have—they have brown paper bags filled with sandwiches, water, snacks. And they go around in the West Side and just offer people a meal. And if people decline it, we let them be. And if they accept it, we give it to them. And one of the things that MarShawn would say before I went out there, that really spoke to me, was, "The hood doesn’t need heroes. They need neighbors." And so, he would always talk about how we’re not above these people, we’re not their saviors, we’re not like better than them; we’re just here trying to build a community. That’s what we’re trying to do. We’re supposed to come together as one. And I think I’ve tried to do many charity events, and nothing that I’ve been through—gone to has been anything like that and what MarShawn had said.
AMY GOODMAN: MarShawn was being honored by the NAACP as a Hometown Hero?
STEVE SHAPIRO: Yeah, in fact, just days before MarShawn’s passing, he was in Los Angeles to be recognized as a Hometown Hero. And so, again, that was part of the surprise of the whole thing, is his work was so impactful, he was making such a difference, he was being recognized. But I think MarShawn just cared so much that I don’t know if it was—anything he could do was ever enough to solve the things that were so important to him.
AMY GOODMAN: And what’s your name? And are you part of the high school program?
CASSIDY BOYUK: I’m Cassidy. Yeah, I’m a first-year student in Mosaic.
AMY GOODMAN: And how did you know MarShawn?
CASSIDY BOYUK: Like they said, MarShawn came in, and he would talk to us about privileges—white privilege, male privilege. And I think he taught me more about privilege than anyone I’ve ever met. I met him originally at a Black Trans Lives Matter protest, and he spoke there, but only after he had been asked. And then later, when I met him in Mosaic, he was speaking on privilege. And he said, "Show up and shut up." And that was like a main thing—everyone in Mosaic talks about it now—that you show up to these things, and you’re a number, and you’re there, and you’re part of the movement, but if it’s not your place, you don’t speak on it. You speak to people of your privilege, but you don’t speak to people who are running the movement, because they’re the leaders of the movement. You know what I mean? And I think that was like a main thing that I really have held onto. I’ve been protesting more lately, and I think things like Feed the Streets—Chloe and I went to Feed the Streets, and it was just amazing to see what he did for our community, the people that he helped, everyone who remembered him. He had such an impact on everyone who met him.
CHLOE CHALLACOMBE: My name is Chloe Challacombe.
AMY GOODMAN: And how did you know MarShawn?
CHLOE CHALLACOMBE: I first met MarShawn when he came into a white privilege panel to speak at a Mosaic event for class.
AMY GOODMAN: And what did he teach you?
CHLOE CHALLACOMBE: Well, he told this story about—that really, really opened my eyes to white privilege. He talked about how he was at a football game one night. And it was really relatable; I remember like running around football games myself. But he talked about how he was causing some trouble, and a police officer pulled him aside, and he kind of called him out on it, and then he drove him home. And he had to tell his mom. And his mom just started crying, like she wasn’t mad at him or anything. She just was crying and sobbing. And she said to him, "Son, these white people will kill you." And that was something that just really resonated with the group, and like people are still repeating it to this day. And like, I can just hear it, like I can just hear it in his voice. And it was just like—it silenced the room.
AMY GOODMAN: Tell me your name.
JESS FLOWERS: Jess. I’m a junior in high school with the Mosaic program.
AMY GOODMAN: How old are you?
JESS FLOWERS: Seventeen.
AMY GOODMAN: And when did you meet MarShawn?
JESS FLOWERS: I met MarShawn at our first privilege panel in our very first project, which was white privilege. And he spoke about everything he had been through, just as Chloe had mentioned. And what really struck me was, at the very end, I had gone up to him to talk to him about being white passing, because I am biracial, and how I never really went to Black Lives Matter events because I felt as if I didn’t belong there, I wasn’t valid in my identity, you know, that people would look at me weird and just think, "Oh, why is this white girl here?" And my favorite memory is just how he looked me in the eye, and he was like grinning ear to ear, and he said, "You’re just as valid as me. It doesn’t matter about the color of your skin." And to have someone say that to me for the first time in my life, it meant a lot to me.
AMY GOODMAN: And what about this issue of MarShawn’s suicide? How are you dealing with this? All of you knew him. He went through your program. He was your age. Can you talk about his death, the steps of the Statehouse in Columbus, Ohio? Maybe I’ll turn to the teacher, Steve Shapiro.
STEVE SHAPIRO: I mean, obviously, choosing the steps of the Statehouse was a political statement. But I think most people are remembering MarShawn for what he did and what his work was. And in all of the memorials afterwards, everyone’s commitment was to carry on MarShawn’s work, to take what he was passionate about and what he was committed to, and each of us rededicate ourselves to creating a more just and more fair, more equitable world. And so, I think that’s what we’ve all taken, is how do we live MarShawn’s passions in his absence.
CASSIDY BOYUK: I think our teacher Kim, our other teacher, said that—everyone was saying "rest in power," which is something that people typically say when activists die, but she said, "Don’t let his power rest. Let it live in you, and continue his movements." And I think that’s something that everyone is trying to do, because he meant so much to everyone.
AMY GOODMAN: High school students in Columbus, Ohio, remembering their mentor and friend, Black Lives Matter activist MarShawn McCarrel, who committed suicide on the steps of the Statehouse February 8th. Special thanks to Professor Jeffrey Demas of Otterbein TV.
That does it for our broadcast. We have three job openings. Check our website at democracynow.org.
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Is Donald Trump Heading to the GOP Nomination? Billionaire Wins Nevada Caucus with 46% of Vote
In his third consecutive victory, billionaire businessman Donald Trump has easily won the Nevada caucus. Trump received 46 percent of the vote, winning most key demographic groups. Florida Senator Marco Rubio placed second with 24 percent. Texas Senator Ted Cruz came in third with 21 percent. "We won the evangelicals. We won with young. We won with old. We won with highly educated. We won with poorly educated—I love the poorly educated—with the smartest people, with the most loyal people," Trump said. "And you know what I really am happy about? Because I’ve been saying it for a long time—46 percent with the Hispanics, 46 percent, number one with Hispanics. I’m really happy about that." We speak to Nicky Woolf, a reporter for The Guardian who covered the Republican caucus.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: We move on right now to, well, the 2016 elections. Juan?
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, in a third consecutive victory, billionaire businessman Donald Trump easily won the Nevada caucus last night, capturing 46 percent of the vote. Florida Senator Marco Rubio placed second with 24 percent. Texas Senator Ted Cruz came in third with 21 percent. Record turnouts were reported across the state, causing long lines and, at times, chaotic scenes at the caucus sites. After four contests, Donald Trump has become the clear front-runner for the Republican nomination, having secured 79 delegates while Cruz has 16 and Rubio has 15. Now the focus turns to Super Tuesday on March 1st, when 13 states across the country will vote in nine primaries and four caucuses. In a victory speech, Trump thanked his supporters in Nevada.
DONALD TRUMP: So, we won the evangelicals. We won with young. We won with old. We won with highly educated. We won with poorly educated—I love the poorly educated—with the smartest people, with the most loyal people. And you know what I really am happy about? Because I’ve been saying it for a long time—46 percent with the Hispanics, 46 percent, number one with Hispanics. I’m really happy about that. So—
TRUMP SUPPORTERS: Trump! Trump! Trump! Trump! Trump! Trump! Trump!
AMY GOODMAN: We go now to Reno, Nevada, where we’re joined by Nicky Woolf, a reporter for The Guardian who covered the Republican and the Democratic caucus.
We welcome you to Democracy Now! Talk about what happened last night. Trump particularly called out his Latino support. When you do the math, though the tremendous number of people came out for the Republicans—right?—in terms of their record number of people who came out, the numbers of Hispanics—he said that he got something like 46 percent of the vote—it came to under 3,000—is that right?—voters, because Hispanics make up something like 8 percent of the Republicans in Nevada who vote?
NICKY WOOLF: Yeah. Good morning, and thank you for having me. So, my understanding of that statistic is that it comes from an NBC exit poll of 139 total Hispanics. So it’s actually—it’s got a margin of error of 10 points on that. So it’s—he still, even within the margin of error, still won a majority of Hispanics in the state, which is, however way you slice it, pretty incredible, considering that his two major rivals are both Hispanic. But it’s worth taking that stat with a pinch of salt, I think.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Nick Woolf, what about the situation in the caucuses? There were record turnouts, but these are still, obviously, caucuses. They’re not actual primaries, so people have to have a higher level of participation than normally would in a selection process.
NICKY WOOLF: Yeah, exactly. And the difference between this one and the Democratic caucuses on Saturday, previous Saturday, is that the Democratic caucuses—they both have the meetings in the local precincts, and then the Democrat caucuses have an open, visible vote, so people essentially stand in corners on behalf of the candidate they choose. For the Republican one, it was a secret ballot, which—during the Democrat one, a lot of people said that the open nature of the vote made it slightly less democratic. So that’s one interesting difference. But certainly, despite that, the Republican ones were very chaotic—huge lines at polling stations. People weren’t ready for the enormous turnout. And there was a lot of kind of slightly shady stuff going on—a lot of precinct volunteers, the people who were counting the votes, wearing Donald Trump paraphernalia. Now, the party, the state GOP—
AMY GOODMAN: Wait, wait, wait. Can you explain that? What do you—
NICKY WOOLF: —tweeted that this wasn’t technically against the rules, but—
AMY GOODMAN: Nicky, can you explain what you mean when you said people counting the vote who were wearing Donald Trump paraphernalia?
NICKY WOOLF: So, at each precinct, there are some volunteers, the people who give out the ballots, the people who take in the ballots and count them. They’re supposed to be nonpartisan. They’re supposed to not show a preference for one candidate or the other. But there was a lot of people, in sort of dozens of precincts, who were tweeting pictures of them wearing the sort of famous "Make America Great Again" hats or sort of Trump T-shirts, and sort of showing a visible preference. And a lot of people, from especially the Rubio campaign, were complaining that this was against the rules. It turned out it’s not technically against the rules. Obviously, caucuses are governed by party bylaw rather than any kind of federal laws. But certainly, it sort of—it wasn’t a great look.
And there were sort of lots of people who were counted twice, lots of times when ballots were sort of slipping to the floor. The way that the results get sent in—and this is, I found, completely unbelievable—they count the ballots at each precinct, write down the numbers on the back of an envelope, take a picture of the back of that envelope and then email that picture in to the GOP, which seems like an immensely cumbersome way of doing it and risks all kinds of issues—maybe some emails got lost. Again, Donald Trump won the state with such an enormous margin that I’m not sure any of that really matters that much. But it sort of—it made for a bit of a crazy evening.
AMY GOODMAN: The entrance polling from ABC News shows 61 percent of caucusgoers want the next president to be from outside the political establishment. Donald Trump took those voters by 70 percent. Six in 10 also described themselves as angry [at] the way the federal government is working, and Trump won half of those angry voters in Nevada. Also, can you talk about the pronunciation of the word? I think a lot of people are surprised. I mean, do you say "Nevahda," or do you say "Nevada"?
NICKY WOOLF: So, I’ve been corrected on this a lot since getting into the state. I think it’s my accent. I say "Nevahda." It is technically "Nevada." That’s the way it’s supposed to be. I keep slipping and saying it the wrong way.
AMY GOODMAN: And, Juan, you had some thoughts on this.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, well, since "Nevada" actually means a "snowfall" in Spanish, and that’s the name of the state—
NICKY WOOLF: Ah, I see.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: —that it should be "Nevahda." But I guess the Anglos who settled Nevada decided to change the pronunciation. But, Nick, I’d like to ask you about—as we head into now Super Tuesday, and obviously while Trump is a front-runner, the states that he has been winning in, with the exception of South Carolina, are small states. Now we’re going to get into some really big states. Ted Cruz obviously is expecting to rack up a whole bunch of delegates in his home state of Texas, and I think Marco Rubio is expecting the same in Florida, so that Super Tuesday could shift some of this, even though it’s clear that Trump has won the—has fired the imagination of many of the disenchanted members of the Republican Party.
NICKY WOOLF: I think there’s a chance of that. I think there’s also a lot of wish fulfillment in the Republican establishment that’s hoping against hope that something—that the Trump phenomenon is a small state phenomenon. I actually don’t think that’s the case. First of all, he’s ahead in the polls in almost all of these states. But also, if we think about what Trump really means, it’s the obsolescence of the kind of big money advertising politics and the—in a lot of ways, the obsolescence of TV advertising by social media, because Trump has barely had to spend any money in any of these states on any advertising. And that’s because he’s got such an enormous following on Twitter, on social media, and because everything he says gets—is so inflammatory that it gets reported by the media pretty much for free, that he just doesn’t need to be spending the kind of money that usually stops insurgent candidates in the larger states. And I think that’s what—that’s what really tripped up the Jeb campaign, who found that however much money they threw at advertising, it just wasn’t making a dent. And also, there’s—you know, there’s a hunger for something different in the Republican Party and in the Republican primaries, and I don’t think that’s just necessarily a small, retail-politics state phenomenon.
AMY GOODMAN: You also covered the Democrats—Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton.
NICKY WOOLF: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: And explain what happened there with Hillary Clinton winning.
NICKY WOOLF: So, I mean, it was extremely close. The margin—the thing I found interesting was that the margin on Saturday in the Democrat caucuses was almost exactly the same as it was in 2008 between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Now, after that, Obama went into South Carolina and won a large percentage of the black vote there. And the question is: Can Bernie Sanders pull off the same thing? That remains to be seen.
In a lot of ways now, the Democratic primary is looking a lot more like an ordinary primary would be expected to at this point. I think, in that particular case, Bernie Sanders does not have the kind of Donald Trump level of TV coverage which will allow him to kind of power through in South Carolina and beyond. Maybe I’m wrong about that; that sort of remains to be seen. But that was the establishment of the Democratic Party reasserting itself, in some ways, although not by as much as a comfortable margin as I think Hillary Clinton would have liked.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Nicky, I’d like to go back to this whole issue of what’s driving the Trump phenomenon, because you mentioned that this is basically the Republican voters rejecting the big money advertising campaigns, but we’ve had, in American history, numerous examples of similar-type candidacies. A lot of us remember Jesse Ventura, who became—who won a governorship as a supposed independent, riding the wave of angry voters. A lot of us remember Arnold Schwarzenegger. And these folks had become major celebrity figures before they ran for office, and then actually rode that wave of their being celebrities to actually then capture office, and neither of which—neither Ventura nor Schwarzenegger will go down as memorable political leaders of their states. So, it it—how much is the Trump celebrity affecting his ability to garner support?
NICKY WOOLF: I think Trump—there’s definitely comparisons to be made with those two, and—in terms of the practice you get in creating a media persona for yourself by having been a celebrity first. You could also argue that even Ronald Reagan might have been an example of that. But I think Trump is also a uniquely 21st century social media phenomenon, too. He’s huge, to paraphrase him, on Twitter. He’s got this enormous following. He can reach more people with a tweet than almost every TV ad market in the country. Now, that’s something that Schwarzenegger never had and that Jesse Ventura never had, that Reagan never had. I think that changes the arithmetic of stuff a bit here. And he’s just so able to build this brand. It’s difficult to not see him as a pretty unique phenomenon now. And it’s amazing to watch. I mean, it’s just absolutely spectacular how he’s playing with the Republican Party like a cat with a mouse. It’s fantastic.
AMY GOODMAN: Nicky Woolf, we’re going to leave it there. I want to thank you for being with us, joining us from Reno, Nevada, The Guardian, has been covering the Republican primary and caucuses, and Democrats, as well, for the paper.
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