Required listening

Becoming an iPod person has turned me into a podcast junkie. (I'm so with you, Ms. No-H!)

My main addiction has been This American Life which has perhaps the best story hooks in the world.

Like this one:

"I've got involved with this very canny group of investors, and it seems that they have located this snowman that can bench press four hundred pounds."
-The Super 1/8/2007

or this-

"My compactor room, a woman could give birth - no infection would set in. Come, I will show you..."
-The Super 1/8/2007

or this-

"I told you guys we shouldn't try to make this into a story and now look, I'm a lesbian in Japan"
-My Reputation 4/16/2007

All of these are marvelous episodes, but the one I keep going back to is more than a bit of a downer- but a totally worthwhile experience.

Habeus Schmabeus - it's about Gitmo and what it really is, as opposed to what we've been told.

It was originally done in last year, but was updated in April. I've been listening to it over and over again and I still can't stop listening to it.

There's also a transcript and a free MP3.

Here's the hook:
(Hitt is the interviewer, Jack Hitt; Amzy is Baher Amzy, a lawyer representing a detainee named Murat Kurnaz)

HITT: And as for confronting the evidence, consider the case of Azmy’s client, Murat Kurnaz, a Turkish citizen raised in Germany. The Pentagon accidentally declassified the file with all the secret evidence against him. And here’s what’s in it: nothing.

AZMY: The classified file contains – the Washington Post wrote about it – six statements from military intelligence. That’s really what the classified file is. Memos saying “this person was here” or “so-and-so witnessed him…” In Kurnaz’s case, there are five or six statements saying, “There’s no evidence of any connection to Al Qaeda, the Taliban or a threat to the United States. The Germans have concluded he has got no connection to Al Qaeda. There’s no evidence linking him to the Taliban.” Over and over and over again.

HITT: But here’s the thing: At the hearing, nobody talks about any of that. His personal representative doesn’t bring it up. The tribunal doesn’t consider it. And Kurnaz himself doesn’t even know about it. He’s declared an enemy combatant; he’s still at Guantanamo today.

But wait. There’s more. The reason they give for holding him? A friend of his named Selcuk Bilgin blew himself up as a suicide bomber in Turkey in 2003. That’s 2 years after Kurnaz got picked up.

AZMY: So, setting aside the sort of remarkable legal proposition that one could be detained indefinitely for what one’s friend does, it’s actually preposterous in that a simple Google search or a call to the Germans would have revealed that his friend is alive and well, and under no suspicion of any such thing.

HITT: You heard that right. Kurnaz is in Guantanamo because two year after he got picked up, a guy he knows became a suicide bomber. Except that he didn’t become a suicide bomber and is currently living in Germany.

AZMY: Yeah, he’s walking around in Germany; I’ve met him.

Mind blowing. Simply mind blowing.