Medea Benjamin interrupts Obama 3 times during Gitmo speech
A speech by President Barack Obama was interrupted three times by a woman on Thursday demanding that he take immediate action to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Anti-war group Code Pink said that the heckler was its co-founder, Medea Benjamin.
As Obama outlined his stepped up efforts to close the facility, Benjamin yelled from the crowd that the problem was "not Congress, it's you, sir. ... You can close Gitmo today."
Flustered, Obama asked her to let him finish and to listen to what he had to say as he outlined efforts to transfer detainees to Yemen and elsewhere.
Noting rampant hunger strikes at the facility, Obama said, "I'm willing to cut the young woman who interrupted me some slack, because it's worth being passionate about."
"The voice of that woman is worth paying attention to. I don't agree with much of what she said," he added later. "But these are tough issues, and the suggestion that we can gloss over them is wrong."