• Listen to our special four part series “Inside the Taliban”
• BBC coverage
• Jeb’s weekly history podcast

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MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman and this is The World.  As the United States enters its ninth year in Afghanistan, President Obama and his national security advisors are debating strategy for the region.  Some of those advisors have been reading up on the Vietnam War to try to avoid the mistakes of the past.  There’s been a lot of talk about Afghanistan as the latest Vietnam, and that made us wonder in what ways the two are different.  The World’s Jeb Sharp reports.

JEB SHARP: You can’t avoid the analogy.  For a year or more it’s been tossed around by all manner of commentators. Marilyn Young, a historian at New York University, says the comparison is instructive, but you have to tread carefully.

MARILYN YOUNG: Afghanistan and Vietnam could not be more different, in terms of, well everything, history, the nature of the insurgencies, the history of the insurgencies, all of that. There’s really just no resemblance. Where there is an analogy and something maybe to be learned is on the American side. That is, how did the United States approach interventions of this type?

SHARP: Like Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, President Obama is having to make agonizing decisions about strategy in the context of rising casualties, murky goals and a lengthening conflict.   Amin Tarzi directs Middle East Studies at Marine Corps University.  He says the nature of the presidential decision-making is analogous but not the nature of the two wars.

AMIN TARZI: When you look at it Vietnam was …  If you go deep down into the type of warfare or the jungle warfare, here you have very much a different terrain. It was a country to which we had access from the sea. This is a landlocked country. I always caution for making comparisons because once you make comparisons we bring in preconceived ideas of a history path and then try to apply them to the current, and I think then we create our own realities and our own narratives which are not really Afghan-related.

SHARP: Terrorism expert Peter Bergen of the New America Foundation dismisses comparisons between the two wars. He says for a start the Vietnam War was orders of magnitude larger.

PETER BERGEN: Millions of civilians were killed. It was a  superpower proxy war between the Soviet Union, Maoist China and the United States. The North Vietnamese Army was half a million men strong with artillery; the Taliban is maybe 20,000 very lightly armed. I mean these wars are on such different scales. 155 American soldiers were killed last year in Afghanistan, 155 American soldiers were dying every 4 days in 1968.

SHARP: Vietnam expert Gareth Porter says Bergen’s argument makes sense to a point but he argues the better analogy is an early period in the Vietnam War.  Communists took over large areas of the country side without firing a shot because of what he calls the fecklessness of the South Vietnamese government.  That Gareth Porter says is not so different from the way the Taliban have expanded their influence because of the ineptitude of the Afghan government.  Still,  Peter Bergen says it’s important to focus on Afghanistan itself and not dwell on comparisons.

PETER BERGEN: You know, I don’t think this is going to be Obama’s Vietnam. It’s not going to be Obama’s Iraq.  It could be Obama’s Afghanistan, meaning it’s got its own set of problems.

SHARP: President Obama and his advisors are working on those problems right now.  The overall lesson they seem to be taking from Vietnam is the need to get the strategy right.   Marilyn Young of NYU says it’s striking though that in all the effort to completely re-think strategy, there’s one option that doesn’t seem to be coming up.

MARILYN YOUNG: What hasn’t been talked about is non-military approaches, by which I don’t mean compromising with various dastardly groups. I mean the possibility of a regional conference that takes into account all of the competing and conflicting interests, Russians, Chinese, Iranians, Indians, and Pakistanis.

SHARP: Young says that’s probably pie in the sky at this point, given that the debate now seems to  center on whether to stay the course or  add even more troops to the fight.   For The World, I’m Jeb Sharp

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• Law professor Mark Denbeaux on archiving Guantanamo cases
• Katy Clark’s Guantanamo coverage (2002-2009)

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MARCO WERMAN: Guantanamo’s detainee population is now down to 223. In the past few years, several hundred men have already been released.  A few more have been cleared for release, and are expected to be sent overseas soon for resettlement.  For some former detainees, life after Guantanamo is a huge challenge.  The World’s Katy Clark reports.

KATY CLARK: It was quite a sight.  Four former detainees frolicking in the Atlantic Ocean off the Coast of Bermuda this past summer.  It gave the impression that life post-detention might be pretty sweet, but that’s not necessarily the norm.  Take the case of Sami Al-Haj, who was on assignment as a cameraman with Al-Jazeera when he was captured in Pakistan in late 2001.  He was held for more than six years as an enemy combatant at Guantanamo.  During his detention he says he was beaten and sexually assaulted.  Then May 2008, Al-Haj was released and returned to his native Sudan.  He was never charged with a crime.  Yet Al-Haj told Iranian-based Press T.V. that more than a year after his release he remains “A misfit” at home.

AL-HAJ: Still, my son doesn’t deal with me as a normal father, and even my wife and our close family like sister, brother, and even our friend is keeping away from me because they doesn’t want to want to put themselves in trouble and I lost many friends.

CLARK: What Al-Haj is experiencing is part of what Eric Stover calls the Guantanamo Stigma, something that haunts some of the more than 500 freed detainees.   Stover is a Professor at the University of California at Berkeley.  He spent last year interviewing 62 men once held at Guantanamo.  He says many of them said they were ostracized by their own families and communities after their release.

ERIC STOVER: We heard of cases in many countries where former detainees were trying to find work but unable to do so.  You know, they were away, and a three or four years hole in resume, and if they said they were in US custody, they often didn’t get the jobs they were seeking.  We found that in fact six of the 62 former detainees only six had actually found meaningful employment.

CLARK: Without jobs and the proper support networks, Stover says there’s little to stop these men from turning or in some cases returning to Jihad against the United States.  Joshua Colangelo-Bryan is a New York based attorney who represented six detainees.   All of them are now free.  He would like to see the United States and other governments do more to keep these guys on track.

JOSHUA COLANGELO-BRYAN: It certainly is in the interest of all reasonable people to have the Guantanamo detainees who were released integrate themselves back into their societies.  Where home countries have the capacity to provide support, be it psychological or material, they certainly should.

CLARK: The State Department has the job of facilitating transfers of released detainees to their home countries or to third countries, but it won’t say whether it does any more than that to help these men readjust.  Often the mental wounds former Guantanamo detainees carry with them re-open after their release.  Berkeley’s Eric Stover says one man now living in the Middle East whom he tried to interview, went into hiding during the week they were scheduled to talk.  Stover describes him as “the worst case scenario” of any of the former detainees he met.

STOVER: The family said that he had left the house without shoes and that this was happening quite often.  He just was completely disoriented and was in clear need of psychiatric care.

MOAZZEM BEGG:  Where is the welfare for the people who have been tortured? Where is the support system for people who have endured cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment?

CLARK: This is Moazzem Begg speaking at the launch of the Guantanamo Justice Center in London.  Begg and other former detainees created the center to help men like themselves who’ve been left traumatized by their experiences at Guantanamo. It’s not the kind of organization that will win plaudits in Washington, but its goals may just coincide with Washington’s so long as those goals focus on former detainees moving past their time in captivity and living peaceful lives.   For The World this is Katy Clark.

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• BBC coverage
• Armenian genocide dispute

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MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman and this is The World.   Turkey and Armenia are about to sign an historic document.  It’s aimed at ending nearly a century of hostility.  The agreement would normalize relations and open the border between the neighbors, but it doesn’t tackle some of the toughest issues dividing them.  Right now, Armenia’s president is on the road to drum up support among Armenia’s powerful Diaspora.  It hasn’t been going that well.  In Lebanon, thousands of angry Armenians turned out last night to protest, and that’s only the latest show of disapproval for the plan.  The World’s Aaron Schachter reports from Beirut.

AARON SCHACHTER: It hasn’t been an especially pleasant few days for Armenian President Serge Sargysan.  That was his reception from Armenians in Paris on October 2nd.  The reaction in New York and Los Angeles was only marginally less hostile.   Armenians in Lebanon are also none too pleased with Sargysan.  Many of them hail from what they call Western Armenia, now Eastern Turkey, and they believe the agreement being signed this Saturday absolves Turkey of any responsibility for, as they say, “Stealing that land and for slaughtering more than a million Armenians in 1915.”   The Agreement calls for setting up a joint committee to look into events between 1915 and 1923, and it doesn’t address the land issue.  Hrayr Barsoumian is a student who organized a rally last night against the Turkey-Armenia detente.

HRAYR BARSOUMIAN: Right now, to give them all that they wanted to achieve by the genocide by a simple signature is as the second genocide to the Armenians. We can’t discuss the genocide.  It’s a fact.  There are governments that have recognized it.  There are countries that have recognized it.

SCHACHTER: Signs hanging in the predominantly Armenian neighborhood of Bourj Hammoud near Beirut declare, “We remember.  We demand.  We refuse.”  And 2000 turned out to protest the Armenian President at a Beirut area hotel where he was meeting local Armenian leaders.  Sylvia Vartanian says it’s crazy that Armenians are being asked to forgive and forget for Turkey’s sake.

SYLVIA VARTANIAN: Is it acceptable we should not demand anything; we should not talk about the genocide?  Do you find it logical?  I mean, look at the German people.  They said, “Okay, what our ancestors did was wrong” and they compensated.

SCHACHTER: But some in the Armenian community here say the Diaspora’s all or nothing mentality doesn’t serve the interests of Armenians inside their country.

AGOP KASSARDJIAN: From their point of view they are right to do it, and it is very kind of the President to take this initiative.   He didn’t have the obligation.  His obligation was only moral.

SCHACHTER: Agop Kassardjian is a former Lebanese politician and a leader in Lebanon’s Armenian community. He says the Diaspora should get a chance to express its dissatisfaction, but the Armenian President has to engage in a much more delicate balancing act.

KASSARDJIAN: The development of Armenian economy necessitates that the borders be open between Armenia and Turkey.  But this must go in parallel taking into consideration our feelings and our thinking living in the Diaspora for the Armenian question for the Armenian genocide.

SCHACHTER: Kassardjian says he doesn’t believe that Armenia is giving away the store by signing the agreement.  He expects the pressure on Turkey to remain, and that’s exactly what Armenia’s President has been  trying to tell people on his trip.

PRESIDENT SARGSYAN: [In Armenian]

SCHACHTER: President Sargsyan said our main wish after nearly 100 years of hostility is to establish relations with Turkey without any precondition.  It’s also important for preventing further genocides, but he said the recognition of the genocide itself shouldn’t get in the way of establishing normal relations with Turkey.  Though many Armenians are offended by the idea of a committee of historians that would look into what they consider the cold, hard historical fact of genocide, Turks consider it a compromise.  That’s because Turkey  outright rejects the genocide label.  It  maintains that 300,000 to 500,000 Armenians and at least as many Turks died in civil strife  in 1915 when Armenians took up arms against their Ottoman rulers, and sided with invading Russian troops.  For The World, I’m Aaron Schachter in Beirut.

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• Daryl Cagle’s homepage
• Cagle’s daily cartoon picks
• More of our cartoon slideshows

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MARCO WERMAN: Before we take a break, the World’s Carol Hills to tell us about something she produces each week for the Web.  So Carol, what’s up?

CAROL HILLS: Well, each week I’ve been producing a cartoon slide show.  It’s political cartoons from around the world by non-American cartoonists.  The idea is to kind of see what other countries find funny or amusing or their take on the major issues, and this week I invited Daryl Cagle.  He’s an American cartoonist.  He’s MSNBC’s cartoonist and he’s syndicated around the country.  He also has a huge interest in international cartooning and travels all the time. So he walks through this week’s cartoons with me.

WERMAN: Which is very good because I tell you, there are few foreign political cartoons, no matter now long at them and study them, I don’t get them.  How do you pick your cartoons, Carol?

HILLS: Well, we subscribe to a couple different services.  One is Daryl Cagle’s.  He represents a lot of international cartoonists, and there’s a number of them and I collect them all week, and I use tough love at the end of the week.  And some of them are really funny and obvious, and others are very specific to the country.  And it’s all in the captioning.

WERMAN: It’s all in the captioning and you can see this week’s cartoon slide show and their captions and also all the past slide shows we produced at theworld.org.  Carol Hills, thank you.

HILLS: Thanks, Marco.

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MARCO WERMAN: Another idea that’s thrown around as a potential resolution to the war in Afghanistan is talking to the Taliban, but what does that really mean?  Michael Semple has tried to think through that idea.  He’s worked in Afghanistan for more than 20 years in development, and is now a fellow at Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights.

MICHAEL SEMPLE: Broadly there are two sets of approaches to talking to the Taliban. One is within the realm of counterinsurgency, and the other is in the realm of politics. There is a lot of thinking going on in both of them.  I rather favor shifting towards doing it through politics.

WERMAN: When you say that, do you mean bringing the Taliban into Afghanistan’s political mainstream as perhaps a political party?

SEMPLE: It’s first of all recognizing that the Taliban are part of Afghanistan’s political reality, and at the moment their movement is the key force in the armed struggle against the government.  But they do include many people who have played a critical role in the past and as far as I can see it, the only way forward to stability in Afghanistan is when we get out of the armed struggle and into the political process.

WERMAN: How do you do this without selling out the existing Afghan allies, I mean if one can consider how many Hamid Karzai an existing ally.

SEMPLE: If you just first of all, it’s a step back a bit and look at the overall political logic about what everybody is talking about what everybody is talking about.  You know, what actually unites Harmid Karzai and other parts of the Afghan political elite, President Barack Obama and the leaders of the western countries who’ve got troops in Afghanistan, and Umar and the other leading insurgents.  What unites these three apparently very different sects is they all want an end the western combat mission in Afghanistan.  So you are not talking about a  zero sum gape.  We’re talking about ostensibly in terms of what they say they’re after, everybody being broadly after the same thing.  In terms of the broad picture and there is hope for coming up with some kind of accommodation between these and different protagonists without necessarily selling out on fundamental goals.

WERMAN: Is that kind of the theme that the U.S. would approach the Taliban with?  “Look, you guys know that you want us out of here.”  And so this is what you have in common.  You should unite over that, and that seems like a weird thing for the U.S. to be saying.

SEMPLE: Well, I don’t think the …  I don’t think the U.S. is going to, you know, whenever they do talk to the Taliban is going to put it quite that way.  I use this just to encourage people to say the actual engagement is not futile.  It serves a purpose.  I think that whenever there is some kind of engagement between the U.S. and the Taliban, the U.S. will first of all spell out its real bottom line, which is wanting to ensure that there are concrete guarantees that Al Qaeda or no other terrorist group should be able to use Afghanistan for subverting international security and that’s basically our bottom line.

WERMAN: How do you get the Taliban to agree to that bottom line?  How do you go about separating Al Qaeda from the Taliban when the ethical code of the Taliban says you must protect someone who’s asked you for protection?

SEMPLE: I think the top leadership of the Taliban while at the moment they clearly have a strong working relationship with al Qaeda, the political ones amongst them are well aware of the cost which they incur by the continued association with al Qaeda.  So the challenge of separating them is basically I’m giving them the chance and seeing if they take it.  Of course, they have to use rhetoric in Afghanistan.  They have this wonderful ability to come up with extremely convincing moral cases to justify the action that politically they’ve decided they have to take.  When the circumstances are right and the Taliban are ready for this decisive break with Al Qaeda, they will present a wonderful case which demonstrated their Jihadi duty to do so.

WERMAN: Why do you think the Taliban would want to talk now when it seems they’re doing pretty well?

SEMPLE: Unfortunately, there already has been a military escalation on all sides, and there are very different assessments as to where they will get to end this.  The alignment of the stars is not actually right for the full negotiated settlement to happen just now.  I think that we are some distance away from near a negotiated settlement with either a large and/or a chunk of the Taliban or if they had the whole movement.  That’s not to say … You know, it is still important to keep alive the prospect of achieving this, but I think that more things are going to play out on the battlefield before we actually see real progress in negotiations.

WERMAN: Michael Semple, a fellow at Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights.  Thank you very much for your time today.

SEMPLE: Okay.

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MARCO WERMAN: The dim prospects for talks with the Taliban in the short term are cause for concern not just for the Obama Administration, but for its partners in Afghanistan.  The U.S. and NATO Commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, has asked for up to 40,000 more soldiers to head to the region.   And he’s hoping many of those troops will come from outside the U.S., but as The World’s Laura Lynch reports,  Washington’s allies are concerned about the future of the military campaign.

LAURA LYNCH: Aside from the United States, 41 countries have troops in Afghanistan, including Jordan, Lithuania, Australia and Singapore to name a few.  Their contributions are dwarfed by America’s 65,000 soldiers. But for many of those other nations, the U.S. debate about the future of the mission matters a lot.  Italians are now struggling to make sense of the mission after six of their soldiers died in Kabul last month.

ITALIAN MAN: But I think that it probably is the right choice of being in Afghanistan.

ITALIAN WOMAN: I would like that they would come back for the family of the military.

ITALIAN MAN: I hope that they should come back to Italy.  I think there is a lot of confusion about this.

ITALIAN WOMAN: Italian people hope that the war must finish as soon as possible, but also that coming now it’s wrong.

LYNCH: As President Obama considers the American military commitment, he’s well aware other coalition countries are watching closely.  He needs their solidarity and support in order to move forward with any plan, and he appears to have a partner in the head of NATO, Anders Fogh Rasmussen. Today, Rasmussen urged NATO members to continue contributing equipment, money and personnel to train the Afghan army and police.

RASMUSSEN: This is an investment in a stronger, self-sustaining Afghanistan, which is in our shared interest.  We need to do more now so we can do less later.

LYNCH: The sales job is meant to appeal not just to politicians, but also to the public who may be wavering.  Just today, the BBC released a survey suggesting 56% of people in Britain oppose the country’s military operations in Afghanistan.  But that level of opposition pales in comparison to the Netherlands.  Just last night, the Dutch Parliament voted to pull its troops out of Afghanistan next year.  Dick Loowehdank of the Netherlands Institute for International Relations, isn’t surprised, based on what he saw when he visited Afghanistan last year.

DICK LOOWEHDANK: When I came back, my conclusion was the Dutch find themselves in an extremely difficult situation over there

LYNCH: Twenty-one Dutch soldiers have died in the three years they’ve served in the violent Ouruzgan region of Southern Afghanistan.  Dutch politician Martin Havercamp is urging President Obama to make a decision quickly, and Havercamp is hoping the White House will give the Dutch a break.

HAVERCAMP: Everybody is looking at the Netherlands for another tour in Ouruzgan.  And if the United States or some other country could say to our population yes you have done your share, we’ll take over the burden.  Please can you assist us in some way?  Then, we have a different debate in the Netherlands and I think it would be easier for us.

LYNCH: That’s a request that’s not likely to go down well in Washington where finding the right solution for Afghanistan seems to get harder every day.   For The World, I’m Laura Lynch.

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MARCO WERMAN: Let’s face it, with the world’s population closing in on seven billion, it’s just getting harder to come up with a new and creative name for a baby.  But that hasn’t stopped some parents in Sweden from trying.  One pair of parents just named their baby boy “Q”, just the letter “Q,” but they had to fight their government to do it.  Henrik Stahl writes for the Svenska Dagbladet newspaper.  He spoke with the parents about their legal victory and why they wanted the name their son Q in the first place.

HENRIK STAHL: They told me that he’s a unique baby and we felt that he must have a unique name and that the name Q simply popped up.

WERMAN: Was this surprising to a lot of Swedes who, you know, I mean, it’s a fairly progressive society that some government authority could say what you can and cannot name your child.

STAHL: The law states that only names that could give offense or is unsuitable or forbidden and the name Q cannot give offense in any way.  It’s just that it’s a single letter, and that’s the whole thing this has regarded.  Is it okay to give a baby a single letter as a name?  There were two other Swedish courts that denied the name before it reached the Supreme Court.  It was surprising but on the other hand, as you say, it is a progressive country.  So I would say that our readers a very divided by this.

WERMAN: What are some of the other names that have been denied in Sweden over the years?

STAHL: For example, the name “Metallica.”

WERMAN: Metallica?

STAHL: Yeah, it was first denied by the Swedish Tax Agency, but later it was okayed by the Supreme Court.  The parents wanted this girl to be named Metallica and the Swedish Tax Agency said no, no way and she’s just not going to have the name Metallica and they overruled.  And finally, they got the right to name their baby Metallica.

WERMAN: Yeah, it’s better than Brittany, isn’t it?

STAHL: Yeah, I think so because I like Metallica.

WERMAN: Is Sweden expecting a rush suddenly of requests for names like A, B, C, all the way to Z?

STAHL: I don’t think so. One other case regarded a single letter and that a woman in the [INDISCERNIBLE], she wanted to change her name to A.C. because her name was Anna Christine and her and her initials are A.C.  So she wanted to …  And she had always been called A.C. and she wanted to change her name to A.C. and the Swedish Tax Agency said no, it consists only of single letters.  But the Supreme Court said no it will be just fine to change her name to A.C.

WERMAN: It does seem like kind of a whole silly discussion.  I mean, why can’t people just name their kids what they want to name them?

STAHL: Yeah, of course.  I agree and a lot of our readers also agree, and they say, also the Supreme Court that the authorities should not decide what is or what is not a good name for a child like Q, which will not give offense, and Q is well unsuitable.  How do you define unsuitable?

WERMAN: I’ve got to say I kind of like Q as a name.  I mean, I think of Quincy Jones, you know, he’s pretty cool. Yo, Q, you know.  They might not actually get beat up in the school yard.

STAHL: No, no, of course not.  Q is cool.

WERMAN: Q is cool.

STAHL: Yes.

WERMAN: Henrik Stahl writes for the Stahl writes for the Svenska Dagbladet newspaper.  Thanks very much and what is Dagbladet mean, by the way?

STAHL: It means Daily Telegraph.

WERMAN: Oh, okay, great.

STAHL: Or daily paper.

WERMAN: Daily Paper, Daily Telegraph.  Well, thank you very much, Henrik.

STAHL: Thanks.

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MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman and this is The World a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI and WGBH in Boston.  President Obama promised on his second day in office to close the Guantanamo prison by January 2010, but that’s looking less and less likely.  Last week, the house passed a non-binding recommendation against bringing Guantanamo detainees here, and yesterday Attorney General Eric Holder said he’s concerned that that opposition will make it hard to meet the deadline. Cully Stimson is a fellow at the Heritage Foundation.  He was President Bush’s Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense in charge of all detainee policy in 2006 and 2007.   Stimson says closing Guantanamo won’t be easy.

CULLY STIMSON: The biggest challenge for this administration were the same ones that the Bush Administration had and they fall into four buckets.  I call it LLPD, Legal, Logistical, Political and Diplomatic.

WERMAN: Well, let’s kind of go through those four categories.  First of all, logistical hurdles it does seem like a headache but is it any more complicated than sending a plane down and finding places to put these detainees, and turning the key in the lock?

STIMSON: Quite honestly the logistical piece, Marco, is the easiest.  You’re right, there’s 223 or 4 detainees down there now.  A couple planes would take care of that problem.  You’d load them up, you’d get some U.S. Marshalls to secure them properly and then you’d fly them to X.  The question is where is X?  Is it here in the United States?  And that, of course, includes a whole host of other logistical problems like how do you identify the facility?  Where do you put them?  How do you harden that facility?  But that is quite honestly the easiest of the four.

WERMAN: Right, and I suppose logistical kind of feeds into legal, political and diplomatic buckets as you say.  Let’s talk about the elbow, legal hurdles.  What are the legal hurdles for shutting down Guantanamo?

STIMSON: Well, in no particular order there’s a lot of them.  There are for instance court orders that prevent detainees from being transferred off the island to a third country or their home country because they lawyers representing them have to be given at least 30 days notice so they can protest that, and stop the movement.  There are almost 200 Habeas Corpus cases before the courts here in Washington, D.C., the Federal District Court and then there are potential military commissions and potential federal trials for some number of detainees.  So there is a thicket of legal issues that have to be sorted through detainee by detainee.  And they just now have finished or almost finished their legal review of which categories each detainee will fall in, federal trial, military trial or transfer.  And so, this is one of the most complicated and time consuming aspects.

WERMAN: Then there is the political aspect.  Congress has just passed a Pentagon budget of $626 billion, but rather the Senate has, and it would ban outright transfer of accused enemy combatants from Guantanamo to the United States.  Is that just the tip of the political iceberg?

STIMSON: It is.  This spring the Administration asked the Congress for several hundred million dollars to authorize and spend on the closure of Guantanamo and the Democratically controlled Congress denied them the money.  That was a huge setback and, in fact, caused a lot of angst in the White House.  And so, their time table for closure won’t be met simply because they’re not given the money that they need to close it properly.  Of course, then Marco, there’s the NIMBY problem, the Not In My Backyard Problem.  No congressman or senator has jumped up and down and said, “Oh, please, I want them to come to my district because my constituents would love it.”

WERMAN: Then, of course, there is the diplomatic problem.  I guess we can sum it up by saying it’s about other country’s expectations of where the detainees should go kind of another NIMBY issue, and what Guantanamo actually does for U.S. reputation overseas.  I’d like you to tell us whether you think that the January deadline, January 2010 deadline was ever realistic.

STIMSON: No.  It wasn’t realistic but quite honestly having worked within the bureaucracy of the Pentagon, it did take the signing of an executive order in a public way to goose the bureaucratic monolith into action to try to force this issue because anything you think is going to happen in Guantanamo in a week will take ten weeks.  Anything you think takes two months will take many months.  And so it was a necessary condition precedent to start the process, but the one-year time frame was aggressive especially since they didn’t have a plan in place, and so it won’t be met. It may not even be closed next calendar year.

WERMAN: Cully Stimson was in charge of detainee policy for the Defense Department in 2006 and 2007.  He’s a sitting military trial judge in the Navy JAG Reserve.  Thanks very much for your time.

STIMSON: Any time.  Thank you.

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MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman, this is The World. Thomas Cromwell, you might remember from your British history, was the right-hand man of King Henry VIII. Cromwell oversaw England’s break with the Vatican and the establishment of the Church of England. In the new church, Henry VIII could get a divorce. Cromwell was key to making that happen. In Hilary Mantel’s latest novel, Wolf Hall, Cromwell is a likeable jack of all trades. “He can,” she writes, “draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house, and fix a jury.” Last night, Mantel’s Wolf Hall was honored with the Man Booker Prize, Britain’s most prestigious literary honor. The BBC’s Rebecca Jones was at the awards ceremony in London. She spoke to Mantel about how it felt to win.

HILARY MANTEL: Well, it’s been really strange. I’ve always been a fairly low key sort of author, you know. Respected by the critics but hardly known to the general public. So it was a very strange turn of events.

REBECCA JONES: Let’s talk about the book. The Tudor period is one of the most talked about written about periods of English history.  What drew you to that period?

MANTEL: Actually, the figure of Thomas Cromwell himself. Cromwell wasn’t the center of events, but his viewpoint is hardly ever taken. He’s been a kind of pantomime villain in fiction and history.

JONES: You’ve received a check for fifty two and a half thousand pounds.  Any idea what you’re going to spend it on?

MANTEL: Sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

JONES: [LAUGHS] Hilary Mantel, you deserve it! That’s Hilary Mantel who’s won the Man Booker prize for fiction with her eleventh novel, Wolf Hall.

WERMAN: Of course, if the drugs come, the sex and rock and roll usually follows. That was the BBC’s Rebecca Jones speaking with Man Booker Prize winner Hilary Mantel for her novel, Wolf Hall.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.